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“ Their drive to survive is beyond our imagination,” says Chun Junghee, head nurse at Hanowan [a government-run facility]. But helping defectors is rarely easy, the staff says, for they trust no one. “People from North Korea are very paranoid,” says Kim Heekyung, a clinical psychologist at Hanowan, who supervises group therapy for defectors. Paranoia, she adds, is a rational response to reality in North Korea … When defectors arrive at Hanowan, they whisper. They are reluctant to disclose their names or dates of birth. They question the motives of people who want to help them … A majority of defectors suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

“ It’s no big stretch of the imagination for a foreign-policy expert to connect the operations of small-time Somali pirates with big-time terror groups. And, as leading naval defense commanders from around the world tell him, our ports aren’t yet prepared for a maritime mob’s next big attack. We’re not talking ransom notes here.

“ To 1st Sgt. Stanton Brown of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division, watching a performance of the play last week in a bar on an Army post, the plight of Ajax is a story from his own life: In January, he lost his best friend, a man under his command, to suicide two months after their return from Iraq. It was the dead soldier’s third deployment in five years. Like Ajax, Brown says, “he had been so stressed for so long.