Life in the DMZ is getting more tense for the soldiers monitoring North and South Korea’s fragile peace
The rising risk of accidental conflict between North and South Korea is evident to soldiers in the Demilitarized Zone tasked with keeping the peace between them.
PANMUNJOM, Demilitarized Zone — With his bed less than 50 feet from the North Korean border, Maj. Luca Meli jokes that he sleeps closer to the reclusive nuclear-armed state than anyone in the world.
From his bedroom in the heavily fortified buffer zone that separates North and South Korea, the Swiss soldier has a front-row view of the North’s expanding military activities amid the highest tensions on the Korean Peninsula in years.
“We hear explosions every night,” he said.
As a delegate to the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC), an organization made up of five Swiss and five Swedish soldiers who live in the Demilitarized Zone, Meli is tasked with monitoring adherence to the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War in 1953.
While the agreement ended fighting on the Korean Peninsula, a final peace treaty was never signed. The two Koreas are now separated by the 2.5-mile-wide DMZ, where nature has flourished as its fields and forests have gone largely untouched for decades.
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