‘Many of the soldiers who died in the Korean war were teenagers, killed in their first two or three weeks of battle. Their corpses were never buried or identified’
Heartbreak Ridge sits in the east of the demilitarised zone, a 160-mile-long stretch that has separated North and South Korea since the end of the war in 1953. It got its name from an American journalist who reported on a particularly bloody battle there in 1951. Thousands of Korean, Chinese, American and French soldiers died in the space of a month and yet very little was gained from the fighting. Countless bodies remain where they fell, preserved in the mud.
In the late 2000s, I was commissioned by the South Korean Ministry of National Defense and a national newspaper to photograph the DMZ to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950. I was the first civilian photographer to enter the region since the zone was established. I first went in 2009, but the process was tightly controlled and I was only ever allowed into the southern half. Every time I crossed the civilian control zone checkpoints, I was escorted by an armed military squad. Most roads in the DMZ are unpaved and almost unusable, and the eastern part is mountainous. Most days, I would have to travel for hours to reach a given location, and then trek the remaining distance.
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