The Unfinished Conflict

Across the green-felt-topped table in the long metal hut, the American general and the North Korean general, flanked by aides, stared at each other with undisguised loathing. "Commissar Pak, if you have any legitimate business to bring before this meeting, I suggest you get on with it," began U.S. Major General William P. Yarborough, representing the United Nations Command. Major General Pak Chung Kuk waited impassively for the translation, then sat bolt upright and snarled back: "Your side must stop aggravating tension. Your slanders against our side only remind us of a mad dog baying at the moon."

For nearly six hours the acrimonious exchange continued, witnessed by Communist and non-Communist spectators peering through the open windows, and punctuated by the heavy footsteps of Communist guards being changed outside. Pak called Yarborough "a fool, an idiot"; Yarborough ridiculed his counterpart as a "political commissar" masquerading as a military man, bitingly explained the operation of a carbine with the help of a diagram: "This is where the bullet comes out."

Such was the scene played out last week on the eve of the 15th anniversary of the Communist invasion of South Korea. It was the 212th act of a farcical drama that faces little danger of closing: the periodic meetings of the Military Armistice Commission at Panmunjom on the 1953 Korean truce line. The initial, stated purpose of the commission--to police the armistice between the two Koreas--has long since been overshadowed by Red propaganda and invective. But the endless sessions serve as a grim reminder that Korea, where 54,000 Americans died and 50,000 are on active service, is still a point of confrontation between two armies in a war never formally ended.

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