Axe Murder at the DMZ!

My growing interest in trees, especially in oak trees, reminded me of something I read a few years back concerning a very dangerous moment at the DMZ.

On August 18, 1976, about a mile from where I live, near the Bridge of No Return – a ruined bridge that became famous during the Korean War because it was a key route south -  the infamous ‘axe murder incident’ occurred. The reason it’s come to mind recently is because it involved a poplar tree.

This tree limited visibility for the United Nations Command checkpoints, and so on that fateful day in mid-August five South Korean civilian workers accompanied by UNC guards were dispatched to prune it.   As they were at work, two North Korean officers and a dozen soldiers suddenly appeared demanding the workers stop. When they ignored the request and continued working, more North Korean soldiers arrived in a truck and set upon the workers and their military escort with clubs and axes.  The JSA Company Commander, an American, Captain Arthur Bonifas, and his First Platoon Leader, First Lieutenant Mark Barrett, were killed. Here’a a photograph:

Immediately after the incident, the United States and South Korea announced ‘DEFCON 3 ’ and the United States dispatched F-4 and F-111 fighter-bomber to South Korea and sent the aircraft carrier ‘Midway’ to the west sea. The act of tree prunning pushed the Korean Peninsula to the brink of war. But the crisis was defused when Kim Il-sung expressed his regret, sending a letter of apology to the UNC. Later, the UNC carried out Operation ‘Paul Bunyan’ – named after the giant lumberjack and folk hero in American and Canadian folklore - and cut the offending  tree down to an ugly stump. That’s what’s happening in the photograph at the top of this post. Here’s what it looked a couple of decades after the Operation:

Later, this stump was cut down and replaced by a plaque where the tree once stood, which is what you can see today:

What was going on in the minds of the North Koreans that day? What made them over-react so violently? Were they especially fond of this particular tree? Perhaps they saw the dismemberment of a tree as subliminally mirroring the dismemberment of Korea, of the Korean people. It’s sad that the UNC decided to take it out on the poor tree. It was of course entirely blameless. It just had the terrible misfortune to be growing in a very dangerous place – well, dangerous for humans. From the look of the photographs, the tree was in its fifties, or thereabouts. It definitely predated the division of the Korean peninsula and the Korean War.

I was at school doing ‘A’ levels in 1976,  and we studied the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins as part of the course. By coincidence, he wrote a moving poem about some beloved poplar trees being cut down next to the River Thames. Here’s the Hopkin’s poem. I suppose it could also serve as a memorial for the DMZ poplar, too:

felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, 

  Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, 

  All felled, felled, are all felled; 

    Of a fresh and following folded rank 

                Not spared, not one 

                That dandled a sandalled 

         Shadow that swam or sank 

On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank. 

  O if we but knew what we do 

         When we delve or hew — 

     Hack and rack the growing green! 

          Since country is so tender 

     To touch, her being só slender, 

     That, like this sleek and seeing ball 

     But a prick will make no eye at all, 

     Where we, even where we mean 

                 To mend her we end her, 

            When we hew or delve: 

After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. 

  Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve 

     Strokes of havoc unselve 

           The sweet especial scene, 

     Rural scene, a rural scene, 

     Sweet especial rural scene.

But when I was 17-18 years old it never even  occurred to me to find out what a poplar tree actually looks like!  They are indeed lovely-looking trees. They grow very tall and straight, and the leaves are oval to heart shaped. There’s a fine mature specimen standing next to the lake beside the university where I teach, and as I’m just getting started as a tree-lover, it took me a while to identify it.

On re-reading Hopkins’ poem, I’m struck by how it seems to have taken on a renewed poignancy in the light of the potential planetary catastrophe that is looming. Especially the lines: ‘even where we mean / To mend her we end her/ When we hew or delve’.

Image sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_axe_murder_incident

https://twitter.com/korean_dmz_vets/status/1364922717707845635