As a signal of the Korean army and the tension in the south near the maritime border, Yi, live ammunition and helmets, the financial crisis in 1993, but soon found themselves what to do, she and her comrades-in-arms to do most - farming.
In a country where millions can not find enough to eat, this is an important service.
That crisis 20 years ago - Pyongyang announced its withdrawal from the nuclear deal - a global final adoption. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers firing the possibility of war Pyongyang propaganda machine, Lee said spring planting, will soon become a priority.
Several other Korean army defectors said that nothing has changed, because Lee is a signal that Pyongyang may soon play down its rhetoric in Washington and Seoul, soldiers planting rice, cabbage, beans, corn, potatoes and onions .
"North Korea can not farm without the army ... gold sodium Young, female North Korean army defectors who spent five years, until 1996 troops on the East Coast, said:" The Korean army's main task is to eliminate malnutrition and to to South Korea in late 2008.
Jin-Song Zhang, who defected to North Korean government propaganda published in 2004 and run a defector in Seoul, said that the military has not changed in the past few decades.
"They are doing the same work, the same responsibilities," he said.
Drilled, sowing
Spring planting, usually in May and June, with the US-South Korean military exercises at the end of two months, North Korea claimed to be a prelude to invasion.
These exercises began around the same time fresh UN sanctions against North Korea, its third nuclear test in February, triggering an angry response, which has threatened nuclear attack in Washington and Seoul to Pyongyang.
Since the mid-1990s, North Korea has suffered chronic food shortages. Final food shipments from Washington in 2008 and 2009, about one-third of the planned 500,000 tons of sending program to pause before.
As well as food, energy shortages of fuel oil shipments countries and medical supplies.
United Nations report shows that one-third of the children under five suffer from chronic malnutrition in North Korea.
Arrived in South Korea in 2008, Lee said, around the military life to help farmers grow rice or corn and donations of food from the farm return in the fall after harvest.
"With our helmets, we set off to the farm," said Lee, now 39 years old, who served for 10 years, until 2002, in the northern part of the 4th Army Corps.
Li troops near a disputed maritime border, 30-year-old recent visit to the DPRK leader Kim Jong-un and the South.
Sometimes they dug clams and other seafood, the island mudflats exports to China to earn hard currency of a country's economy devastated 1/40th the size of South Korea, and suffered a severe famine in the 1990s.
"Everyone in my unit out April mudflats a cold wind blowing," Lee told Reuters reporters in Seoul.
Instill and then close the farm
The Korean People's Army (KPA) is the fourth largest in the world, in Human 120 million.
All of them for 10 years, from the age of 17.
40 percent of the public service in the military, paramilitary forces or defense-related industries, and can easily be mobilized for war, the U.S. Army War College, said in a 2007 paper.
Cai universe Hwal, the first 27 years of senior officer said: "Whether the the elite officer or rank and file, we must keep to help farmers, which is part of our daily lives and obligations as a party organ," the Korean People's Armed Forces Ministry of career.
Color conscripted into the parachute regiment in 1968, North Korea seized the USS Pueblo, a U.S. Navy intelligence-gathering ship, and held the crew hostage.
North Korea announced that a state of war, Choi and his elite group will take the time to shovel in their hands.
Every Friday and the weekend, we went to planting corn, cabbage or compost orchards, "Cai said.
North Korean defector who served in the military, they wake up early in the summer, you will see a typical day.
After breakfast, practice two hours of ideological education, the country's founding father Kim Il Sung and his family, battalion commander will give the squad mandate from the fish farming and gathering firewood.
Because their farm for 10 years, the soldiers in aquaculture farmers than the actual better, "said Kim, the female army defectors.
 



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