"Halt!" That single word, screamed into the night, had a spine-chilling effect. Big flashlights were trained on Myung Hee and Pil Soo, and soon they could make out four North Korean soldiers with their rifles aimed right at them. When the two were almost out of the water, soldiers grabbed them and roughly dragged them to the embankment. What the two had feared most was happening.

They were handcuffed, shoved forcibly into a truck and transported to a military base near the border. During the next three days, both were denied food as they were questioned separately for hours at a time.

Pil Soo was usually questioned while seated on a chair, soldiers shouting in his face. Whenever his head fell forward, a guard would grab him by the hair and snap it back up, several times with such force that he fell off the chair. The guards considered that hilarious. Hundreds of times he was asked to give the names of his contacts in China and of places he had been. There was nothing clever about the process, nothing that indicated any expertise about how to deal with a prisoner. Their lone strategy was to tell Pil Soo that, if he would simply give information about relatives or friends in China, they would allow him and Myung Hee back into that country so they could come back with money - bribe money for the guards. Obtaining money, that was their real goal in all of this.

The worst of the guards' tactics was the assortment of ways in which they administered violence. If a punch in the face did not soften up Pil Soo, then perhaps two blows to the stomach might. Or, better yet, how about three kicks to the ribs? Blows were applied to assorted parts of the body with a heavy wooden stick that resembled a baseball bat, which was why the guards referred to this procedure as "baseball game." Blood? Nothing more than another reason for howling with laughter, especially when the blood gushed out of the nose. Pil Soo was forced to swallow his own blood. For the guards, all of this was alternately high entertainment or mounting frustration at having a detainee who refused to break...

These victims, are they spies from a foreign country, planning to bomb the government offices? Terrorists intent on destroying the nation's people or leaders? Nope. Fellow-citizens of the guards, hungry, wanting to worship freely and live in liberty. Sounds like my own heritage. But they are still at the mercy of an out-of-control system that only God can break. It is our regular prayer that the break will come soon. Today, if God wills.