The Army shipped me to Korea in 1969, a year after North Korea captured the Pueblo, a U.S naval spy ship, and North Korean commandos staged an attack on the Blue House, South Korea’s executive mansion.

I arrived in a country still on edge over these threats to the fragile peace created by a “temporary” cease fire reached in 1953.

Americans have always referred to Korea with euphemisms: The U.S engagement with North Korea in 1950 was referred to as a “police action.” Today people talk about “the situation in Korea.” The truth is what happened then was a war, and it’s a war today. And despite the fact that a cease fire in 1953 called for an arms freeze, there’s enough fire power on both sides, including now nuclear weapons, to obliterate the entire peninsula among other places.

The Korean Demilitarized Zone, still the most heavily armed frontier in the world, has been around so long without serious incident that it’s a macabre tourist attraction. Visitors can even descend into subway- like invasion tunnels dug by the North Koreans beneath the DMZ well after the 1953 Armistice.

My tour of duty was punctuated regularly by high alerts over one thing or another, during which we clerks drew our outdated M-14 rifles and waited in our barracks for the attack that never came. One such alert occurred on the birthday in April of North Korea’s leader and founder Kim Il-Sung, who had pledged to celebrate the occasion one day in Seoul, the South Korean capital.

The political division of Korea is personal to me. I married a Korean woman during my service overseas and have many relatives and friends who are among tens of thousands said to be at risk from the apocalypse of artillery and rocket fire U.S experts estimate would rain down on the densely populated area around Seoul on the first day of a conflict.

The armistice has maintained the peace for more than 50 years, but not without tragic consequences: the division of a people who are culturally united and the endless threat of another outbreak of modern warfare like the one that drove my wife from her home in June 1950.

Koreans yearn for a unified and peaceful Korea. Many young South Koreans don’t understand what’s taken so long. This sentiment was visible in a rock concert devoted to peace near the DMZ earlier this month. It also shows up in a blockbuster South Korean film, Joint Security Area, in which soldiers on either side of the DMZ become friends.

Not so long ago when North and South Korea were enjoying friendlier relations, the governments allowed exchanges to take place between families on either side of the DMZ.

On a visit to Korea, my wife Shinny and I met a Korean who had taken part in one of these exchanges. He recalled first spotting his mother, who had been a young woman when he had last seen her, then a frail figure in her 90s, walking toward him along a road illuminated by car headlights.

Sadly the division is political, not cultural or religious.

The yearning for unity is not confined to today’s Koreans. It goes back to the beginning of Korean history, as dynasties struggled to bring together the people on the peninsula. At one time, a unified Korean kingdom reached into Mongolia.

The fight to bring Koreans together as one has been violent throughout, though. And more often than not, it has been manipulated by great powers: notably, China, Japan, the Mongol empire and the Cold War superpowers of Russia and the United States. Seldom have the Koreans been masters of their own destiny.

The partition of Korea after World War II was a construct of the U.S. and Russia and continued as a Cold War issue that resulted in the Korean War.

But that was hardly the first time great powers messed with the Koreans. One of the most shameful instances was an agreement in 1905 between Japan and the U.S., under President Theodore Roosevelt, that cleared the way for the Japanese colonization of Korea in 1910 in return for a guarantee of U.S. hegemony over the Philippines.

From then until the end of World War II, Japanese overlords attempted in the most brutal fashion to wipe the Korean culture from the map. The resistance against Japan led to the rise of Kim il-Sung and nationalist followers who turned to communism and founded North Korea after the Japanese were defeated. Russia and the U.S. agreed to split the nation in two.

Though some of the dynamics have changed, this is where things still stand today: a people divided against each other by an armed wall, faced with the everyday prospect of another outbreak of violence that could leave massive death and destruction in its wake.

Much of the situation is probably irreversible. North Korea is already a nuclear power, and must be reckoned with as such. The only real chance of achieving a durable peace would seem to me to be for everyone to calm down and work within the framework of the 1953 cease fire to seek a genuine peace treaty that includes the two Koreas.

President Trump once proposed what may be the best idea yet: Talk to the other side, upfront and not through back channels, with the goal of a treaty to end the war.

That would be a deal for which Trump could really be proud.

Greg Stone retired in 2007 as deputy editorial page editor of The Day.