The Korea Times

MORNING CALM TALES The tree at Panmunjeom, 50 years later

On the morning of Aug. 18, 1976, a work detail entered the Joint Security Area (JSA) at Panmunjeom to perform what should have been a routine task: trimming the branches of a poplar tree. Within minutes, two U.S. Army officers were dead. Capt. Arthur Bonifas and 1st Lt. Mark Barrett were killed by North Korean guards during a confrontation that lasted only a few minutes. Several other American and South Korean members of the detail were also injured. This Aug. 18 marks the 50th anniversary of their deaths. The event became known as the Axe Murder Incident, one of the most infamous confrontations in the history of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). I can still remember when it happened. In August 1976, I was in the U.S. Air Force attending technical training school when I first heard about the killings at Panmunjeom. Korea was far away, and I could not have imagined that the events unfolding there would remain with me for the next half-century. But 50 years later, I find myself returning once again to that tree. To understand what happened on Aug. 18, it is necessary to know what was diffe

7h agoBy Jeffrey Miller

Morning Calm Tales

MORNING CALM TALES Fan death, a cautionary breeze

My first summer in Korea, I thought I was going to die. The heat and the humidity were unbearable. I’d naively assumed that living near the Han River in southeastern Seoul might offer some cooling nighttime breeze. It didn’t. Not even a whisper. Fortunately, I had a fan — an old, rattling workhorse that labored through the night, valiantly pushing hot air from one side of my room to the other. It didn’t cool me, but it gave the illusion of doing something, which was better than nothing. The next morning, bleary-eyed after another sleepless night, I trudged off to school. At least the classrooms were air-conditioned, which felt like a miracle. “It was so hot last night, I slept with the fan on all night,” I said casually while taking attendance. A collective gasp sucked the air out of the room. I looked up. The entire class was frozen in horror, eyes wide, mouths agape, as if I had just confessed to something unspeakable. “What’s wrong?” I asked. A long pause. Then one brave student slowly raised her hand. “Yes?” “Teacher,” she said carefully, “you cannot sleep with

Aug 8, 2026By Jeffrey Miller

Morning Calm Tales

MORNING CALM TALES Master of mistaken identity

I lived a blissfully anonymous life in Seoul — at least, until I was mistaken for a member of Metallica. Not once, but twice. This was the 1990s, a time when Korea didn’t exactly host a who’s who of global music acts. Aside from the occasional megastar like Michael Jackson or pop juggernauts like New Kids on the Block or pop/rap phenom M.C. Hammer, most big names didn’t bother. Instead, we got aging rockers on their third or fourth comeback tours — bands like Uriah Heep or Deep Purple — and, oddly enough, 1950s crooner Paul Anka. No offense to “Diana,” but it wasn’t exactly the height of cutting-edge entertainment. So, when it was announced that Metallica was coming to Korea for two shows in April 1998, it was a big deal. I scored tickets the moment they went on sale. On the day of the concert, which was being held at one of the Olympic venues in Seoul’s Olympic Park, I met up with two of my colleagues, Ray Smith and Joe Blake. We arrived early and decided to grab a drink across the street at a Bennigan’s. At the time, I had shoulder-length hair and often wore a Me

Jul 31, 2026By Jeffrey Miller

Morning Calm Tales

MORNING CALM TALES 'Ppi-ppi': Korea's brief pager fad in the '90s

Before phones lived in our pockets — before they glowed, chirped, hummed, vibrated, tracked us and reminded us of things we hadn’t yet forgotten — there was the pager. In Korea, it was commonly and affectionately called "ppi-ppi." That palm-sized device fit neatly into a brief moment in the technological scheme of things, nudging how we communicated — if only slightly — into the future. In Korea, ppi-ppi weren’t just devices. They let us be connected before we really understood what being connected would come to mean. Almost overnight, pager shops sprang up all over the city. There were at least a dozen in Sinchon alone, along the main drag leading down from Yonsei University — identical, brightly lit and impossible to miss, glowing late into the night. Young clerks stood just inside the doors, eager and alert, ready to usher you into the latest craze. Inside, glass display cases gleamed with rows of nearly identical ppi-ppi, arranged neatly in place, waiting like small, obedient creatures — each one promising that someone, somewhere, might soon be reaching out. Walking p

Jul 11, 2026By Jeffrey Miller

Morning Calm Tales

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

Jun 25, 2026By 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 The tree at Panmunjeom, 50 years later

MORNING CALM TALES Fan death, a cautionary breeze

MORNING CALM TALES Master of mistaken identity

MORNING CALM TALES 'Ppi-ppi': Korea's brief pager fad in the '90s

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

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