The Tree at Panmunjom
For a long time, the book existed only as notes, research, photographs, memories, maps, old newspaper accounts, military records, and scenes that slowly began to take shape in my imagination. Now it has become something real—something that can leave my hands and find its way into the hands of readers.
That is both exciting and a little humbling.
The Tree at Panmunjom is set during one of the most dangerous moments on the Korean Peninsula: the August 1976 confrontation in the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom that began with the killing of two American officers and culminated three days later in Operation Paul Bunyan.
But from the beginning, I never wanted to write only about the incident itself.
History tells us what happened.
Fiction can sometimes help us understand what it might have felt like to be there.
At the center of the novel is Bill Davis, a young American soldier who arrives in Korea in the summer of 1976. Like so many young men in uniform, he is far from home, still trying to understand who he is and what kind of man he wants to become. He is surrounded by other soldiers who joke, complain, fall in love, miss home, grow frightened, and try not to show it.
Then history suddenly reaches into their lives.
The familiar places around them—the guard posts, the Bridge of No Return, the blue conference buildings, and an ordinary poplar tree—become the setting for an international crisis.
That contrast has always fascinated me.
The great events we later read about in history books are often experienced by ordinary people who have no idea, when they wake up that morning, that the day ahead will be remembered for decades.
That is the story I wanted to tell.
The novel is a military thriller, but it is also a coming-of-age story and, in its own way, a love story. It is about fear, friendship, duty, loss, and the strange speed with which youth can disappear when circumstances force someone to grow up.
Writing it also deepened my appreciation for the men who were actually there.
Captain Arthur Bonifas and First Lieutenant Mark Barrett lost their lives on August 18, 1976. The soldiers of the Joint Security Force, the Korean troops who served beside them, and the men who returned to Panmunjom during Operation Paul Bunyan faced a situation that could very easily have escalated into something far worse.
Their story deserves to be remembered.
Historical fiction carries a particular responsibility. The novelist must create characters, conversations, and private moments that history did not record, while remaining faithful to the larger truth of what happened.
That balance mattered to me throughout the writing of this book.
I wanted readers to feel the tension of the Joint Security Area in 1976—the propaganda broadcasts drifting across the compound, the watchtowers and checkpoints, the uneasy encounters with North Korean guards, and the knowledge that a heavily armed border lay only a few steps away.
But I also wanted readers to feel the smaller things.
A letter from home.
A joke in the barracks.
A young soldier thinking about the girl he left behind.
The nervous silence before a mission.
The realization that the people standing beside you may suddenly become the most important people in your life.
Those are the moments that make history human.
Publishing The Tree at Panmunjom means finally letting go of a story I have lived with for a long time.
Once a book is published, it no longer belongs entirely to the writer. Every reader brings something different to it. Some may come because they remember Korea in the 1970s. Some may be veterans. Some may know the story of the Panmunjom axe murders. Others may encounter these events for the first time.
My hope is that they all come away with the same feeling:
that behind every photograph, every monument, and every paragraph in a history book were real human beings living through a moment whose outcome they could not yet know.
Korea has been part of my life for more than three decades. I first came here in 1990 as a young English teacher, never imagining that the country would become such an important part of who I am. Over the years, I have lived, worked, traveled, taught, written, and built a life here. Korea has given me friendships, memories, stories, and a sense of belonging that I could never have anticipated when I first arrived. Writing The Tree at Panmunjom grew out of that long connection. It is, in part, my way of honoring a country that has shaped my life and of telling a story from its modern history that deserves to be remembered.
And perhaps that is one of the reasons we continue to tell these stories.
Not simply to remember what happened.
But to remember the people who were there.
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