In the summer of 1976, a young American soldier named Bill Davis arrives in South Korea, fresh from basic training, and is assigned to Camp Kitty Hawk near the Demilitarized Zone. His first shift at the Joint Security Area (JSA) is a tense 24-hour watch, and he asks a veteran comrade, “How long before this starts feeling normal?” The reply, “I’ll let you know when it does,” draws chuckles, but the real answer follows: “You get used to the routine. But normal’s not part of the package.”
That exchange captures the essence of Jeffrey Miller’s latest novel, The Tree at Panmunjom, which brings to life the events of 50 years ago that led to Camp Kitty Hawk being renamed Camp Bonifas. On August 18, 1976, a routine operation to trim a tree in the JSA ended in tragedy when North Korean soldiers killed two American officers, Captain Arthur Bonifas and First Lieutenant Mark Barrett. Three days later, a joint American-South Korean task force cut down the tree under the shadow of helicopters, fighters, and bombers, an operation that risked igniting a full-scale conflict.
Miller, a columnist for The Korea Times since 1999 and author of about 15 novels, draws on his decades of living in Korea to immerse readers in the sweltering summer heat, the jostling rides in two-and-a-half-ton trucks over bumpy roads, and the dappled sunlight on the mountains visible through the haze. The novel opens with a poetic meditation on the tree whose “roots trespassed freely beneath a line men would kill to defend,” before introducing the geography and daily atmosphere of the DMZ through Davis’s eyes.
From Personal Story to Cold War Thriller
As Davis grows accustomed to the routines of guard duty, an undercurrent of tension builds until it erupts in violence. More than halfway through the novel, the narrative shifts away from Davis to follow the decision-making from the highest offices to the most remote military bases as a response is formulated and executed. This transition transforms the book from an intimate portrait of one man’s service into a larger Cold War geopolitical thriller, before returning to Davis to reveal the lingering weight of these events on him.
Miller told Asian Examiner that he wanted the book to be “more than historical fiction” and to “feel authentic” in order to convey the “extraordinary burden carried by those who stood watch in one of the most dangerous places on Earth … knowing that a single misunderstanding could change history.”
The novel grew out of Miller’s coverage of the 25th anniversary of the incident for The Korea Times in 2001. At that time, Lieutenant Colonel William Miller (no relation), commander of the JSA, invited him to attend the commemoration and arranged special tours, allowing him “to walk the ground where these events unfolded” and providing “an invaluable understanding of Panmunjeom and its history.”
To write the nearly 3,000-word article, Miller interviewed several soldiers who witnessed the events. Among them was Mark Luttrull, Captain Bonifas’s driver and guard, who “felt some degree of responsibility” for not being present when Bonifas was killed, and who “was probably the only person who volunteered” to be on the ground when the tree was finally cut down. That operation carried such potential for disaster that soldiers were ordered to rig nearby Camp Liberty Bell with explosives so it could be detonated if hostilities broke out.
Wayne Johnson, another soldier involved, told Miller that many in his unit thought “something might happen and there was about a 50-50 chance that we wouldn’t make it out.” Miller also drew on Wayne Kirkbride’s book DMZ: A Story of the Panmunjom Axe Murder, but he credits Bill Ferguson, a witness to the incident, with providing the most vivid firsthand account. As Miller put it, “His recollections brought a human dimension to the history that no official report could ever capture.”
Miller’s own service in the US Air Force lends authenticity to the novel’s descriptions of F-4 fighter jets taking off, with “heat blasting outward in shimmering sheets” and sound “rattling hangar doors, driving through the body.” He recalled, “In 1978, I was stationed at George Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert” working in Maintenance Control, “and we had F-4s, F105s and F111s. Every morning I’d watch one aircraft after another take off,” so those scenes “were easy to write.”
Readers interested in Korean or military history, as well as anyone seeking a compelling historical page-turner, will find much to admire in The Tree at Panmunjom. It is at once an in-depth portrait of service on the DMZ, an examination of one young man’s growth, and a Cold War thriller. At one point, Davis asks whether anyone will remember or care about what happened in August 1976. Miller answers by giving a vivid new account of those events and the people who lived through them, ensuring that the memory of that tense moment on the Korean Peninsula endures.
