Global Courant 2023-04-28 17:52:44
Lieutenant Cmdr. DE McShane held on to his plane ticket home to begin his 2019 retirement when President Donald J. Trump announced he would fly to the border between the two Koreas to meet North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un.
Dan-o McShane, as the former US Navy officer is called, was stationed for six years in the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, between North and South Korea. Like the rest of the world, he learned of Mr Trump’s plans to meet Mr Kim in the DMZ on Twitter – just a day before the meeting was due to take place.
Suddenly the lieutenant commander was forced to make frantic preparations, his retirement plans failed.
“That began a 24-hour communication event that would result in multiple messages being relayed overnight,” said Commander McShane, then the senior military officer of the U.S.-led UN Command at the border in the village of Panmunjom.
“I would lie down on the couch for a bit and then North Korea would call at 4am because they are working just as hard on their side because Kim Jong-un is coming to them and that is probably a bigger cult of personality. than the personality cult of Donald Trump.”
The Armistice of the Korean War was signed in Panmunjom in 1953, creating the DMZ as a buffer between the two Koreas. The UN command and North Korea opened the joint security zone in Panmunjom as the only point of contact between the two enemies.
Each side has since appointed a joint officer in Panmunjom to help enforce the ceasefire. On the UN side, a US naval officer has typically served a year or two under the UN flag. Commander McShane served a record eight years, from 2013 to 2021, becoming the longest-serving joint UN officer in Panmunjom in history. He now teaches guitar to wounded American veterans at Camp Humphreys, south of Seoul, as part of a program sponsored by the American Red Cross and the Wounded Warrior Project.
During that time, he took on North Korean forces, prepared for the Trump-Kim summit, watched tensions ebb and flow with the political mood, and witnessed some of the most hair-raising — and bizarre — events. moments at the DMZ, the most heavily armed border in the world.
His first night on the job, a landmine exploded nearby. The next night two went off. Soon he stopped recording it; the DMZ is riddled with two million landmines. Animals step on it all the time. It was “a bit of a culture shock,” recalled Commander McShane.
Twice a day — at 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. — he called his North Korean counterpart on a peach-colored phone the UN command used to make sure the hotline was open. The messages were mostly mundane: “We’re trimming the grass over here. Don’t shoot us!” he said.
Some American soldiers in Panmunjom liked to call themselves the “Merry Mad Monks of the DMZ” because serving in such a remote, forbidden place was like living in a monastery. They hosted cookouts and tee off at “the most dangerous golf course in the world”: a one-hole par 3, surrounded on three sides by land mines.
Unfamiliar with Navy abbreviations such as LCDR, for Lieutenant Commander, Army soldiers stationed at the DMZ nicknamed Commander McShane “the Lord Commander,” a reference to the HBO series “Game of Thrones.”
He remembered seeing a white dog wandering around Panmunjom once. He fed and played with it for two weeks until it trotted across the demarcation line, “like he’d done it 1,000 times already.”
The dog went up the stairs of the gray Stalinist building on the North Korean side. A soldier opened the door and the dog walked right in, never to be seen again. “The joke, of course, was that he’s a spy,” Commander McShane said.
In Panmunjom, North Korean and American officers occasionally meet face-to-face, even discussing baseball. The North Koreans loved Doritos and South Korean Choco Pies, Commander McShane said. The UN officers also brought Marlboro cigarettes and Johnnie Walker whiskey as gifts.
But things can also get ugly.
As inter-Korean relations deteriorated in 2015 after two South Korean soldiers were mutilated by North Korean booby traps, loudspeakers around Panmunjom blared with North Korean propaganda 20 hours a day – and with South Korean pop music.
Sitting in his office one afternoon in 2017, Commander McShane recalled, he heard bursts of gunfire. Outside, a hail of bullets ran a North Korean soldier across the border before reaching the south, shot but alive. By this time the hotline stopped working; the North Koreans had shut it down to protest UN sanctions imposed on the country after its third nuclear test in 2013.
After the soldier defected, Commander McShane and his young translator were ordered by his superiors to go outside with a megaphone to deliver a message, standing at the border.
It was dark and it was raining. Earlier that day he had heard a single shot from the north, probably the sound of an officer committing suicide, knowing his fate for failing to stop the defector, Commander McShane recalled.
Commander McShane used the megaphone to invite the North to a joint investigation into the defection. Back in his office, he saw a North Korean flashlight flashing at him, and he was instructed to go back outside and repeat the message. His interpreter hid behind a brick wall until she had to repeat the message in Korean.
“They never responded to that series of messages, but that was the only time I felt super unsafe to give a message,” said the commander.
The Navy continued to extend Commander McShane’s tour as it struggled to find a qualified replacement. A joint duty officer in Panmunjom must be a lieutenant commander with a master’s degree in East Asian studies and in-depth Korean language training. On the day of the Trump-Kim summit, the Navy extended its tour for the fifth time.
“Unpack,” his boss texted that day. “No selfies with the president.”
North Korean officers showed up hours later with three crates full of dozens of North Korean flags. Commander McShane had only three American flags at his disposal. The North Korean “guys are just furious with me,” he recalls. They wondered, “‘How can you not have all that American stuff here?'”
“I’m like, dude, I’m the American thing here,” he said. “Everything is UN”
A Marine Corps helicopter was supposed to bring more US flags from the US Embassy in Seoul. He used clothes hangers for a flag spreader.
Daniel Edward McShane III speaks with a slight Southern accent and describes himself as “a little talkative.” Born in Charlotte, NC, in 1970, he joined the Navy in 1999 and flew over Afghanistan and Iraq before becoming selected for the Blue Angels, the Navy’s aerobatics team.
He said his most awkward moment at the DMZ was when Mr. Kim’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, came to Panmunjom in 2018 to prepare for her brother’s summit with Moon Jae-in, the then president of South -Korea. During one meeting, Ms. Kim, who has served as both a charming emissary and foul-mouthed spokeswoman for her brother’s regime, sat next to the commander, smiling and even lightly touching his arm.
Soldiers in Panmunjom later teased him, calling Mrs. Kim his “girlfriend.”
Unfortunately, Commander McShane said, the inter-Korean détente he witnessed during his time at the DMZ was “too short”. Relations between the two Koreas are at their lowest point in years, with North Korea conducting a record number of missile tests in recent months.
Mr Kim and Mr Moon jointly planted the “peace and prosperity tree” in Panmunjom to mark their 2018 summit, but the pine tree started turning brown soon after it was planted. Commander McShane’s top boss, US Army General Robert B. Abrams, told him, “Don’t let that tree die.” (He added that the General was “a little more powerful than that.”)
For a few months, Commander McShane used a garden hose to water the tree itself. “In the DMZ, there are very few things that you can point to as sort of a visual containment of hope,” he said. “I think it’s important to keep that thing running.”
The tree was alive.
