Breathtaking is the word we would use for the film of that communist soldier escaping to Free Korea. The video is from security footage taken from our side of the Demilitarized Zone, as the cameras peer across the central demarcation line and pick up the communist defector as he makes his desperate plunge for freedom. We gathered our children to watch after Thanksgiving.

The best edition we’ve seen of the video is the one produced, with explanatory highlights, by the New York Times (embedded above, with the Gray Lady’s voiceover). Posted on youtube.com, it captures a communist vehicle as it breezes past a communist checkpoint. A guard sprints after it, but can’t keep up. The vehicle seems to gather speed and is tracked by the cameras, until it gets to Panmunjom.

That is the so-called peace village, where meets the commission that manages the Armistice that brought to a halt the Korean fighting, if not the state of war. There, by now with gun-toting Red runners in hot pursuit, the vehicle runs into a ditch. The driver emerges and, now under North Korean fire, starts his foot-race for freedom. He makes it to our side, and takes shelter under some leaves.

Our infrared cameras, which perceive heat, capture an eerie image of his body and of courageous South Korean soldiers creeping along to rescue him. The communist defector, whose name is Oh, is now in a hospital, where doctors found him to be suffering bullet wounds, malnutrition, and horrible intestinal worms. Reports say he dreads being returned to the regime he fled.

That, though, is unlikely to happen, according to the various reports from Korea. Mr. Oh will spend at least a month being nursed to strength before he can be fully debriefed. It is something to think that there are millions more soldiers, if that is the word, like Mr. Oh. The film of his escape is an all-too-timely reminder of why the right goal in Korea is not simply denial of atomic weapons to the North but an end to the communist tyranny itself.