How does one tread on Kim Jong-un’s turf ?

Please don’t tell Kim Jong-un. It might only make a madman madder. But the first thing I did on my way to the Winter Olympics was step over the line into North Korea and tread on his turf.

“Are you scared?” asked Travis Earp. The Army private stood at the front of a military bus, packing a pistol on his hip, as he sternly warned 40 intrepid travelers rolling into the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas that this was no place for fooling around.

On this February afternoon, the DMZ is cold and eerily silent, but what sends shivers down the spine isn’t the wind from a Siberian blast of winter. Straddle the line at the 38th parallel, where military enemies stand so close they can stare each other in the eye, and you fill the tension in your bones from “the scariest place on earth,” according to former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Can the Olympics prevent a nuclear war?

It seems a far-fetched, fanciful and perhaps foolhardy dream, but printed on huge banners welcoming the world to the Winter Games there is a bold statement that the Korean peninsula is preparing for unification, not a cataclysmic conflict. In late January, the International Olympic Committee triumphantly announced athletes from Kim’s ill-named Democratic People’s Republic of Korea would not only participate, but compete as teammates with the South Korean delegation, in sports from skiing to hockey.

Let Olympic love rule.

“A couple of months ago, the question was not if the athletes from the

DPRK would participate here, but if the Olympic Games could take place here,” IOC president Thomas Bach bragged Wednesday, while sitting in PyeongChang, an Olympic site where the venues were completed ahead of schedule, the volunteers greet everyone with a smile and the buses run on time.

It should also be noted: Before inviting the world to this big winter sports carnival, the host city changed its name, making the “C” a capital letter, for the express purpose of avoiding any confusion with Pyongyang, the capital city of North Korea.

When athletes from the two Koreas march together Friday night at the opening ceremonies, under a single flag, approximately 50 miles from where I visited the DMZ earlier this week, maybe we can suspend disbelief and imagine sports conquering treachery.

Or will the video images that linger be from a military parade scheduled Thursday in Pyongyang, in what seems like an attempt by the notorious North Korean leader to hijack the warm fuzzies of peace and love generated by the Winter Games?

With the Olympic flame flickering as the doomsday clock clicks closer to midnight, I felt the story couldn’t be told without a journey to the DMZ. In a squat, blue building where a wooden negotiating table is divided down the middle by a line drawn between two warring countries that agreed to an uneasy ceasefire in 1953, a visitor is given the chance to step across to the North Korean side for two minutes and take a photo to show the friends back home. Outside a nearby door is the ground where a soldier survived five gunshot wounds while defecting to South Korea in November.

Stick to sports?

The Olympics never do. Politics get all tangled up with sports at the Games. It was true in the time of Adolph Hitler and Jesse Owens. It is true now, as President Trump belittles Kim as “little rocket man” and brags his nuclear button is bigger than North Korea’s war-making capabilities.

For 17 days in PyeongChang, the Olympic flame will burn with unbridled optimism. That’s all good. Let’s give peace a chance, but not get carried away. There’s a wise, old diplomat from South Korea. His name is Chun Yung-woo. He is 65 years old, born as war waged between the two Koreas.

Chun has spent much of his adult life working to heal the divide, and has advocated for nuclear disarmament. In a recent interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail, however, he warned this Olympic competition “creates an illusion of peace without actually strengthening peace.”

History tells us this can certainly be true. The warm glow of the 1984 Winter Games in Sarajevo did not stop a bloody civil war.

Giving a big, old hug to the Olympic spirit, U.S. skier Ted Ligety said: “I think it’s great that the North Koreans are going to be at the Games to compete. I think that an important part of the mission at the Olympics is to bring the world together.”

Feel that cold wind blowing at the DMZ, and it feels like a storm’s coming. Trouble can wait.

Let the Games begin.

The fences of Imjingak Village, in the DMZ, are covered with bright ribbons that feature messages directed at family members living in North Korea or in honor of those who died there. The village is the most-northern point in South Korea where South...

An officer stands on the military demarcation line in a conference room in Panmunjom, a village in the North Hwanghae Province of North Korea and just north of the de facto border separating North Korea and South Korea.

Three blue huts sit on the border between North and South Korea, with soldiers from both sides guarding the Joint Security Area. The South Korean soldiers stand partly behind the corner of the buildings in case shooting breaks out.