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By the mid-1990s, nearly everything in North Korea was worn out, broken, malfunctioning. The country had seen better days.

There are certain moments in the history of a nation when the choices made define the decades to come.

The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.

My generation was the tail end of the Cold War.

When I was born in 1942, World War II was still going. And I began to realize when I became a young adult that if we don't teach our kids a better way of relating to their fellow human beings, the very future of humanity on the planet is in jeopardy.

The Korean war has always been an unpopular war among the American people.

I remember the 1940s as a time when we were united in a way known only to that generation. We belonged to a common cause-the war.

Just five years before that the Russians were our allies.

From the early 1960s to the mid-1980s - the era of military dictatorship when South Korea was rebuilding itself from a postwar economic basket case to a humming, modern nation - military schools were the track of choice for ambitious young men.