Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(68)
We were introduced, and a few people whistled and wahooed. Still backstage, my heart pounded, and I looked around at my band members. We were all jet-lagged, and the energy of playing was going to be all over the map. Yet we all made a silent pledge: we would go big with everything we had. One by one, we filed onto the stage, me wearing fatigue pants and a tank top because of the heat. I glanced at the people milling about in front of us, and we blasted away into our opening song. I closed my eyes, and the nighttime temperature seemed to soar. A minute later when I opened my eyes, I looked out again, and the crowd seemed to be getting a little bigger, and they really seemed to be having a good time. Midway through the show, we launched into “Purple Haze.” Kimo was channeling Jimi Hendrix while Ernie Denov played his electric guitar behind his head, giving it his all. For the next song, Gina Gonzalez channeled Janis Joplin, singing the hell out of “Piece of My Heart.” By the time our show finished, my tank top was drenched in sweat, the crowd had swelled a bit more—and everybody had been partying hard, dancing like nobody was watching. I started breathing easier, and for the first time it felt like we were taking off. When we got to Singapore, the secretary of the navy introduced us, and the crowds grew a bit bigger. Then we went to Korea and did three shows there. At every venue, importantly, the troops seemed to have a good time, especially at Kunsan Air Base where they packed into the officers’ club and I would meet Colonel Robin Rand, who would rise to the rank of four-star general and become a dear friend in the coming years.
Our time in Korea proved particularly eye-opening, even startling. Americans are so blessed to live in a free society, yet many people are not so fortunate. The band toured the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea near Camp Bonifas, a United Nations Command military post. When I traveled there, between the two countries lay a foot-wide strip of concrete, about four inches off the ground. That was the borderline. The North Korean guards and the South Korean guards could come right up to their respective edges of the border and look across. I stood right next to that border, and there was probably no place on earth where you could feel more vividly the difference between freedom and slavery than there, staring into the eyes of a North Korean soldier just a few feet away. Several blue-colored buildings overlapped the line, with doors at either end of the buildings. The North Koreans could enter from their side, and the South Koreans could enter from their side. In the middle of each building is a common area with a table that straddles the border. Over the years, meetings and negotiations between the two countries have been held at that table.
Our band has traveled to South Korea three times—in 2004, 2009, and 2015—and each trip we visited the DMZ. More than once we saw North Korean guards studying us with binoculars and taking our pictures—official photos taken by guards wanting to know who was getting so close to the border. During several trips we toured the insides of the blue buildings. You could actually walk around freely inside these buildings—technically on either side of the border. On one trip, a North Korean guard came right up to the window where I stood inside the building. He snapped my picture, then stared at me for some time. I snapped a picture of him in return, then simply tried to hold his gaze and smile a bit, in the interest of maintaining goodwill. The man didn’t smile back. In his eyes I saw a deep and distant sadness, a haunting, almost blank despair.
On each of our trips to the DMZ, I felt terribly sad for the people of North Korea and for their inevitably difficult experiences living in a totalitarian society. For more than six decades, they have known only slavery. The soldiers of North Korea, their families, and their fellow North Koreans, all forced to worship and serve their supreme leader, while all those years ago the people in the south had the American military on their side and have been far more fortunate. The South Koreans have a tremendously skilled army too, and they work well with our forces in defense of their country, while the North Korean regime has defended only themselves, ruling through terror for decades. The existence of multiple labor camps has been verified in modern-day North Korea, and reports indicate an equivalence to Nazi concentration camps. In the twenty-first century, these things still exist. Reports say life outside the prison camps hasn’t been much better. Since military action was halted in 1953, the United States military, along with the army of the Republic of Korea, has provided a defense and security, and the people of South Korea have lived free because of it. One military force on the Korean peninsula has oppressed, prohibited freedom, and struck fear into the hearts of the people. Another military has provided freedom to its citizens. Two nations: one has flourished, the other has starved in darkness.
Freedom is truly a precious thing.
Our visits to the DMZ also held a few absurd moments. Officials on each side of the line had held an unspoken contest as to who could put up the biggest flagpole. The North Koreans would build a little bit on theirs, then the South Koreans would build a little bit on theirs. This went on for years until finally the South Koreans gave up. So now, on the North Korean side, one little hamlet of buildings exists with a huge skyscraper of a flagpole in the middle. The height of this structure is so glaringly out of proportion with the buildings around it, you look at it and go, “Yep. That’s a flagpole, all right.”
By the time of our second visit, CSI: NY had grown pretty big and was a hit even in South Korea. On the South Korean side at the DMZ sits a gift shop. We were inside browsing when a bus filled with Asian tourists pulled into the parking lot. Everybody climbed out, and although I pulled my baseball cap down a little lower, I was spotted. It turned into mayhem at the DMZ, everybody wanting my picture and autograph. The star of a hit American TV show was mobbed by Asian CSI: NY fans at the DMZ gift shop. Surreal, but that’s the power of television.