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A ceremony paid tribute to Capt. Arthur Bonifas and 1st Lt. Mark Barrett, who were killed in 1976 while trimming a tree at the Joint Security Area of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.
The American and South Korean soldiers went off to chop down a poplar tree. Instead, they were chopped into pieces by ax-wielding North Korean soldiers. And what should have been a case of routine landscaping nearly triggered a second Korean War. Thousands of lives could have been lost, and the Korean peninsula devastated as it had been in 1950. All because of a tree, a hot-tempered North Korean lieutenant, and the most heavily armed border zone on Earth. The tale begins on the morning of August 18, 1976, when a United Nations Command work party entered the Joint Security Area in the Demilita...