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.
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.
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He tried to act as cool as possible, and when the guard finally turned away, he started running, frantically, until he was lost from sight in the valley.
It was Sept. 27, 2016, when Kim, now a sophomore political science major at Seoul-based Sogang University, defected through the heavily fortified border that spans the Korean peninsula. He chose to escape the communist regime's military service and flee to South Korea, where he could live a life with the freedom to choose. That journey was the toughest moment in his life.
"To hide myself from the North Korean guard posts' watch, I ran deep into the valley," Kim, 25, recalled. "For hours I wandered in the woods, round and round. I cut myself on a tree branch and almost died falling off a cliff. For the first time in life, I prayed for god's mercy although I had never been to church."