It was Christmas Eve of 1968, a chilly night. A busload of reporters and cameramen from Seoul newspapers and TV stations headed toward Aegi-bong Peak on the Gimpo Peninsula. There, the ROK Marine Corps had just erected a “Christmas tree,” a steel frame with many electric bulbs and other paraphernalia to make it look like the holiday symbol.

When we arrived at the windy hill overlooking the shiny water of the Imjingang River dividing North and South Korea at the western end of the Demilitarized Zone, a mixed choir from a Seoul church was waiting. Soon, the lighting ceremony started and the choir, with white gowns on, sang Christmas hymns under a brightly lit cross on top of the Christmas tree. A loudspeaker system delivered the blessings to the captive people of North Korea.

On the way back, we celebrated the night with a toast of California champagne provided by the ROKMC headquarters. The defense correspondents had worked hard during what was later dubbed the bloodiest year since the Korean War. It began with the North Korean commando raid in Seoul, immediately followed by the capture of the USS Pueblo. There were guerrilla landings on the eastern coast and frequent DMZ clashes that cost the lives of many Korean and U.S. soldiers as well as those of North Korean intruders.

The Marine Corps stopped lighting the Aegi-bong Christmas tree several years ago and last week they dismantled it for good. Thus, one monument of the Cold War on the Korean Peninsula has disappeared into history. What annoys this observer is that the steel tower was brought down not because of any improvement in inter-Korean ties; it happened after repeated North Korean threats to blow it up.

North Korea honored its warnings to “destroy the origin of anti-North provocations” in a rather soft way when its DMZ troops fired antiaircraft machineguns toward propaganda balloons flown from south of the border. A few rounds of North Korean bullets did fall in Southern villages, causing no harm to either civilians or the military, and this action was a far milder version of the kind of retaliation that the North Korean Central TV announcer had so gravely warned of.

Yet, Southern authorities are responding positively. After clearing Aegi-bong Peak they are asking the civic organizations flying the balloons to be more prudent so as to avoid causing trouble for the residents of border areas who fear a barrage from the North, especially during harvesting season. In the Paju-Yeoncheon area, tension has mounted between villagers and anti-North activists, with police troopers standing between them.

Four and a half decades have passed since the first lighting of the Aegi-bong Christmas tree and we have witnessed many changes in the ways and means of defending against Northern aggression. The designs of soldiers’ combat fatigues have changed periodically, their service caps have changed to black berets, and their individual arms have changed from the World War II M-1 to the lighter M-16 and now the easy-to-handle but powerful K-1 rifles. Unknown to the public, the weapons system and the command and control structure have undergone changes to reflect technological advancement.

Other things, though, have not followed the vicissitudes of global and regional situations. U.S. forces remain on South Korean soil, though their number has halved since the ’60s. Years of planning to allow the Korean military to take over operational control from the U.S. forces in time of war is virtually back to square one as the defense ministers of the two allies announced the scrapping of the turnover schedule in Washington last week.

The “Security Consultative Meeting,” an annual ministerial conference that alternates in venue between the South Korean and U.S. capitals, has been held without interruption since 1968, the year of the Pueblo incident. It was in these bilateral talks that the United States made its commitments of a “nuclear umbrella” and “extended deterrence” to South Korea in conjunction with changing regional situations. The 2014 SCM affirmed worsening North Korean aggressiveness, with repeated nuclear tests forcing the allies to delay the transfer of wartime operational control to “sometime in the mid-2020s.”

Scanning the timelines of the North Korean nuclear program and the scheduling of wartime OPCon transfer, we find no direct correlation between them but detect the key factor in the shift of power from liberals to conservatives in domestic politics here. The original OPCon takeover date of April 17, 2012, was decided in February 2007 during the Roh Moo-hyun administration despite North Korea’s first nuclear test four months earlier; the revised schedule of Dec. 1, 2015, was announced in June 2010, a year after the North’s second nuclear test and two years into the Lee Myung-bak presidency.

A study of a further delay of the wartime OpCon transfer began soon after President Park Geun-hye took office last year. The military was reported to have drafted and updated forces improvement plans each time the transfer schedules were changed, yet little is known about how the people in uniform presented their positions individually or collectively to politicians as they pondered the crucial security issue chiefly on the basis of their ideological orientations.

Nearly three decades after the restoration of democracy, we have no complaints about civilian control of the military. But the people are uneasy about allowing the strife-torn political community to hold sway over the strategic question of how the two treaty allies should lead and be led in time of open conflict on the peninsula given the complexity of modern warfare. The matter involves maximizing war capabilities plus national pride and prestige.

On the other hand, it is not too reassuring to scrutinize the status quo of our defenders. Spending some 14 percent of the annual national budget, the highest rate among OECD members, they have raised public concerns through ceaseless scandals in arms procurement, loose discipline in the barracks and inefficient responses to North Korean provocations.

The removal of the Christmas tree on Aegi-bong could be a sign of Seoul’s flexibility in handling the North’s adventurism, but it could also weaken public confidence in the determination and capabilities of our military to deter an invasion from the North and destroy the center of the aggressive power.

By Kim Myong-sik

Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer for The Korea Herald. ― Ed.