The Korea Times

MORNING CALM TALES The day I crashed a Korean War commemorative event

Seoul was already sweltering by midmorning on June 25, 2000. Heat rose in wavering sheets above the broad plaza outside the War Memorial of Korea as buses pulled up one after another, unloading elderly veterans of the Korean War (1950-53) alongside family members and foreign dignitaries arriving for the ceremony. Inside the memorial grounds, ushers guided guests toward rows of reserved seats while security personnel moved briskly through the growing crowd. Everywhere there were flags, cameras, police, military officers and the low murmur of Korean, English and a dozen other languages blending together in the heavy summer air. I was not supposed to be there. A month earlier, I had interviewed Gen. Paik Sun-yup for an article accompanying my review of his autobiography, "From Pusan to Panmunjom." After the interview, I met several members of the 50th anniversary committee organizing the Korean War commemorative ceremony at the War Memorial in Seoul. President Kim Dae-jung was scheduled to speak, along with military dignitaries, diplomats and veterans from around the world. And somehow, the

2d agoBy Jeffrey Miller

Morning Calm Tales

MORNING CALM TALES The ride of a lifetime

The runway blurred beneath us. A second later, the afterburner ignited, and the F-16 surged forward with a force that pushed me deep into the seat. Rain streaked across the canopy as the jet roared down the runway at Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province. Then the nose lifted and the ground dropped away. Within moments, we were climbing through the clouds. Strapped into the back seat, helmet on and oxygen mask tight against my face, I had a sudden thought that still seemed slightly unreal: Just days earlier, it was a classroom at Yonsei University, teaching English. Now it was the back seat of an F-16, one of the most advanced fighter jets ever built, punching through the clouds over the Korean Peninsula. The path that led to that cockpit began with a newspaper story. At the time, I was also working as a feature writer for The Korea Times, covering a variety of stories about the United States Forces Korea (USFK). One of them involved a dramatic rescue mission in the West Sea. Late one foggy night in February 2001, a pregnant Korean woman living on a small island near the Northern

Jun 6, 2026By Jeffrey Miller

Morning Calm Tales

MORNING CALM TALES Adventures on Seoul Metro’s Green Line

One of the quiet joys of my first two years in Seoul in the early 1990s was riding the subway to work each morning — a small ritual that became a kind of meditation. Back home in America, I’d always driven everywhere, cocooned in my car, my own music filling the air, convinced that the steering wheel offered some illusion of control. But in Seoul, I surrendered to the rhythm of the city. I was just another passenger in the great underground artery, moving in step with thousands of strangers whose lives brushed briefly against mine. Every morning, I rode Line 2 — the Green Line — which looped underneath this great city, surfacing twice to cross the Han River in brief shimmers of daylight before diving back underground. It was my first real acquaintance with Seoul, an introduction not through its streets or skyline but through its pulse belowground. Back then, there were only a few lines crisscrossing the city — including Line 1 (red, now dark blue), Line 3 (orange) and Line 4 (blue) — but the Green Line was mine. It carried me to work, through new neighborhoods, and deeper i

May 16, 2026By Jeffrey Miller

Morning Calm Tales

MORNING CALM TALES Half-dreaming through early-morning English in 1990s

Throughout the 1990s, the insatiable thirst of Koreans for mastering English was unmatched, eclipsed only by the frustration that accompanied their quest for fluency. It manifested in the vast sea of language institutions, academies and university programs, and in the staggering multimillion-won industry of English books, cassette tapes and glossy self-study materials. At the time, I was teaching at ELS, one of Seoul’s top English academies, a place where that national obsession played out day after day in packed classrooms. In the late summer of 1991, ELS management hatched an audacious plan — to introduce early morning classes. The rationale was simple: Certain language learners, particularly salarymen, would welcome the opportunity to study English before work. After 12 hours at the office, evenings were an exhausted blur, so why not shift the burden forward, into the still-dark dawn? Instead of dragging themselves through conversation drills at 9 p.m., students could arrive fresh — at least in theory — at 6:30 a.m. and leave at 8:10 a.m., just in time to catch the subway to

May 2, 2026By Jeffrey Miller

Morning Calm Tales

MORNING CALM TALES Random acts of kindness in Korea

There I was, my second week in Korea, sailing right along. My conversation classes at the language institute were going well. The split shift — 10 a.m. to noon and 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. — wasn’t nearly as brutal as I’d been warned. I’d even picked up enough Korean to get by day to day and had learned, through a bit of trial and error, that those bottles I thought were milk actually contained makgeolli, a traditional fermented Korean rice wine. As I said — it was smooth sailing. Until one fateful morning at Sincheon Station, now Jamsilsaenae Station on Seoul Metro Line 2. In 1990, subway stations in Seoul operated with a system that felt both mechanical and reassuringly straightforward. The turnstiles consisted of an electronic ticket reader mounted on the right side and a set of waist-high steel bars that revolved when unlocked. Subway tickets were made of thin yellow cardboard, about the size of a stick of chewing gum — just a little shorter and flimsier. You’d insert the ticket into a narrow slot on the right side of the turnstile, and with a mechanical clunk, the bars woul

Apr 18, 2026By Jeffrey Miller

Morning Calm Tales

MORNING CALM TALES How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

In the spring of 1994, a crisis erupted when a North Korean official declared, during a meeting with his South Korean counterpart at Panmunjeom, “Seoul is not far from here. If there is a war, it will become a sea of fire.” Ah, diplomacy. Always so subtle. It was a chilling statement, especially for those of us living just 35 miles south of the DMZ, going about our daily lives with more concern for lesson plans and lunch menus than worrying about North Korea. For me, the remark barely registered at first. If ignorance is bliss, I must have been somewhere between blissfully unaware and just plain uninformed about the threat posed by North Korea. North Korea had, for the most part, been off my radar. Aside from the night I arrived in Seoul in 1990 and witnessed armed soldiers patrolling the airport, the North Korean threat only crossed my mind during military checkpoints for visits to Ganghwa Island and Mount Seorak and during the monthly civil defense drills. If I had been more informed about modern Korean history, I might have been surprised at the extent of the threat posed by Nort

Apr 4, 2026By Jeffrey Miller

Morning Calm Tales

MORNING CALM TALES Colorful hues of springtime in Korea

My first spring in Korea, way back in 1991, began with a sky that looked wrong. The daylight had turned a dull yellow, as if someone had drawn a thin veil across the sun. Seoul seemed muted, the distant buildings fading into haze. “Yellow spring,” someone told me. At first, I thought it had to do with all the yellow flowers — forsythia — which I saw blooming around my home in Jamsil, as well as Deoksu Palace. But soon enough, I learned it meant the seasonal dust storms that drifted across the peninsula from the deserts of northern China and Mongolia. These days, everyone seems to know when "hwangsa" or "yellow dust" is coming. There are forecasts and smartphone alerts, advisories and people wearing masks. But in the early 1990s, there were no warnings. One morning, the sky simply looked different. Standing there beneath that strange yellow sky, I suddenly thought of a line from T. S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:" “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes …” Eliot was writing about the air pollution of London, of course. But that morning in Korea

Mar 24, 2026By Jeffrey Miller

Morning Calm Tales

MORNING CALM TALES Lunar New Year on Mount Seorak

Six weeks after I arrived in Korea, I fell madly in love — not with a person, but with the country itself. That winter 35 years ago, I decided on a whim to join a tour group heading east for the Lunar New Year long weekend to Gangwon Province's Seoraksan National Park, home to one of Korea’s most famous mountain ranges. Seoul was already beginning to empty out for the holiday, and with several days off and nowhere in particular to be, the idea of disappearing into the mountains felt right. Along with Chuseok — the mid-autumn festival — Lunar New Year is one of the two most important holidays in Korea. They act as bookends to the year, with Lunar New Year falling in late January or early February and Chuseok in September or October, depending on how the lunar calendar lines up with the solar calendar that year. Both holidays center on returning to one’s hometown and honoring ancestors. They are also the busiest travel periods of the year, reminding me of American Thanksgiving. Depending on the lunar calendar, these holidays can stretch from three to five days, and in February 1

Feb 13, 2026By Jeffrey Miller

Morning Calm Tales

MORNING CALM TALES Korea's winter cold clings different

My first winter in Seoul taught me the meaning of warmth — by taking it away. I had grown up with Midwest winters, and thought I knew cold, but this was different — less about endurance than attention. In 1990, my apartment in Jamsil looked solid enough from the outside — concrete, utilitarian, built to last — but inside it held the cold. Not drafty, exactly, just unyielding. The windows were sealed tight, yet the chill lingered in corners and walls, settling quietly overnight. One morning, I went to retrieve my clothes from the laundry room and found ice layered on the walls and windows, my clothes frozen stiff in the unheated space. It startled me — not the cold itself, but how calmly it had arrived while I slept. Then there was ondol. I had heard of it before but didn’t yet understand it — not really. The first night, the floor began to warm, slowly and invisibly, the heat moving beneath me the way it was meant to. I sat on the floor because that was where the heat lived. The chill retreated upward, lifting from my bones in stages. The room stayed cold. The air offered

Jan 25, 2026By Jeffrey Miller

Morning Calm Tales

MORNING CALM TALES New Year’s Eve in the DMZ

Whether you’re a long-term expat or a first-time visitor to Korea, sooner or later someone will say, “You should really see the DMZ.” It’s spoken the way people recommend a temple stay or a hike up Mount Bukhan — half tourism suggestion, half rite of passage. Bill Clinton famously called the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas “the scariest place on Earth” during a visit in 1993. That alone is usually enough to seal the deal. I had been in Korea a little over six years when a buddy and I finally decided to see for ourselves just how scary the scariest place on Earth actually was. We signed up for a tour operated by the United Service Organizations (USO), the most straightforward and cheapest way back then. Along with a busload of other curious souls — military personnel, dependents and a handful of wide-eyed tourists — we headed north on New Year’s Eve, 1996. I hadn’t given much thought to the date when we made our reservations. New Year’s Eve in the DMZ. It sounded less like a sightseeing excursion and more like the opening chapter of a Cold War thriller.

Dec 31, 2025By Jeffrey Miller

Morning Calm Tales

MORNING CALM TALES The day I crashed a Korean War commemorative event

MORNING CALM TALES The ride of a lifetime

MORNING CALM TALES Adventures on Seoul Metro’s Green Line

MORNING CALM TALES Half-dreaming through early-morning English in 1990s

MORNING CALM TALES Random acts of kindness in Korea

MORNING CALM TALES How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

MORNING CALM TALES Colorful hues of springtime in Korea

MORNING CALM TALES Lunar New Year on Mount Seorak

MORNING CALM TALES Korea's winter cold clings different

MORNING CALM TALES New Year’s Eve in the DMZ

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