I am an honorably discharged U.S. military veteran, having served four years active duty as a search-and-rescue crewman in the U.S. Coast Guard. During that time as a SAR crewman, in my early 20s, I was forced to see and experience terrible things, human tragedies. Sadly, most of the time, we did not rescue people. We recovered their long-dead bodies.

But our mission was to rescue, and that was our primary training.

Just as the U.S. State Department's mission is primarily to rescue -- to save the peace process before the body politic becomes a corpse, sometimes those efforts come too late.

But we are all in this world together, a small planet just a speck of dust in the universe. We all barely hold on to existence, often without realizing that, most of the time. This is why peace between nations is the highest and most worthy cause in our world today, far above even research for the worst diseases, eradication of violent crimes, traffic accidents, etc.

A film from a Cold War that thankfully never turned hot was called Fail-Safe. It starred Henry Fonda as a U.S. president dealing with the unthinkable global consequences of military miscues and miscalculations between the two superpowers at the time, the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In that film, a group of long-range U.S. bombers was unwittingly unleashed with their payloads of nuclear weapons and went past the point of being recalled. This resulted in disaster.

While that film was fiction, it was a cautionary tale not long after the near-catastrophic Cuban Missile Crisis, where nuclear war could easily have been triggered by miscues and miscalculations between Cuba, the U.S. and the Soviets.

Today, we face a similar situation between North Korea and South Korea. The world faces this strained, divided country always seemingly on the verge of one side attacking the other, because if a war does break out there, it could rapidly expand exponentially beyond the peninsula's borders, leading to a regional conflict, perhaps even a global one.

Sanity regarding this situation is the acknowledgment now that in our nuclear age no one on this small planet can afford a war between nations. In the bank of life, there are just not enough funds to cover that, so it would bankrupt our human society. No ideology, no grudge, no saving of face, nothing is worth risking ultimate modern warfare, especially in Korea.

I chose the Coast Guard over other military branches because Vietnam was a recent memory, and I wanted to save, not destroy. My fervent hope is that the governments of North Korea and South Korea will keep in mind every day what is really at stake, and that peace will be the route they choose to take. We are all in this together.

I am just a common citizen of the U.S., but as a citizen here I can speak my mind. To be silent is, in fact, a kind of moral crime when it comes to situations demanding strong opinions.

Too many millions of Americans stand silent now, when we should all be voicing our concerns loudly, on whether all that can be done is being done to help facilitate peace in Korea.

The former governor, Bill Richardson, was somehow able to have a dialogue with the North Korean leaders in recent years, and that was very positive. He did what even the secretary of state was not able or willing to do. He helped keep the peace.

I hope that he can be called upon again under the current, the new, North Korean leadership. There is hope for peace in open and honest discussion between nations.

A journalist and author living in Albuquerque, John W. Flores is a former editor for the Dallas Morning News.