More than 32,000 North Koreans have fled to the South since 1998.
Kim Kang Yoo was shaking as he passed by his fellow soldiers at North Korea's front-line guard post. A security guard looked at him in the eye, and Kim held on tight to his knapsack. He knew by instinct that if he acted awkwardly, the soldiers guarding the North-South Korea border might notice that he was there not to carry out his assigned mission.
In the last three years, 3,682 North Koreans have escaped to South Korea, according to the Unification Ministry. Only six of them -- less than 0.002% -- ran across the untouched area of tension to defect. South Korea's Defense Ministry neither confirmed nor denied the number of defectors through the DMZ. A majority of defectors tend to use routes through a third country like China and Thailand, which is also risky but without the threat of gunfire from colleagues at the DMZ.
An escaped the communist regime on July 27, 1979. The rainy season had just begun so the weather was foggy and nippy. He believed that heavy fog could help him hide. Unlike An, who knew how to avoid electricity running through the barbed-wire fence, Kim chose the ragged valley to avoid mines buried in fields and looked for cracks under the fence that were safe enough to get through. He assumed that electricity won't be running on the fences above water.
To Kim's dismay, he confronted yet another fence on the South Korean side. This time it was so thick and the roots were so strongly buried to the ground that there was no way he could dig a hole underneath. Instead of finding a way around it, he decided to climb over the fence. In doing so, the wires scratched his arms and ripped his uniform. Exhausted, Kim laid himself in front of the South Korean guard post speechless until the soldiers noticed him.
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