The Canadian soldier in charge of maintaining the armistice between the two warring Koreas spends some days yelling through megaphones at North Korea, other days scrambling to stop Chinese fishing boats, and other days still responding to artillery rounds fired into the south.

“There’s not another unit like this,” Rob Watt, commander of the UN Command Military Armistice Commission, told CTV’s Joy Malbon in in the Demilitarized Zone. “Every day is different.”

Watt’s latest challenge is preparing to escort U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence as he visits South Korea for Pyeongchang 2018 during a time of heightened tensions between the U.S. and the North Korea over Kim Jong Un’s escalating nuclear weapons program.

Pence plans to bring the father of deceased North Korean captive Otto Warmbier as his guest to the opening ceremonies on Friday. Pence told reporters Wednesday that he will use his trip to “remind the world that North Korea is the most tyrannical and oppressive regime on the planet."

Asked whether he’s worried something will happen at the border, Watt says “not so much.” While he says the nuclear tests have been “very important,” they don’t appear to translate into different behaviour at the border, he adds.

“I was much more concerned just after I got here when we had the landmine incident and had artillery rounds being fired across the DMZ,” Watt said. “That’s where we’re very emphatically trying to bring the North Koreans to the table.”

‘Please don’t shoot them down’

Watt says there was a time when the UN command would sit across from the North Koreans at an actual table to solve problems, and they had “quite a number of successful talks.”

“Make no mistake,” he says. “Even when we sit down with them, they’re often working off a really stilted script. They don’t negotiate in the normal sense.”

But, he adds, the two sides now communicate through megaphones to convey such simple things as: “We need to fly helicopters in to do some firefighting -- please don’t shoot them down.”

Watt says he’d like to talk to the north about the “opening of the transport corridors or resolving some of the long-standing issues we've had with military patrols.”

More defectors this year

The job, which Watt calls “fascinating,” also gives him unique insight into how the north is changing. For example, most North Koreans who flee typically do so by crossing into China, but Watt says there have been “more defectors willing to risk the DMZ this year.”

“Coming across the DMZ, you’re risking being shot at by North Korean guards. You’re risking landmines. It is the riskiest place,” he says. “The fact that in the past year we’ve seen more people willing to take that risk is an indication that something has changed there.”

Watt says he hopes for re-unification of the two Koreas, as difficult as that would be considering they have been at war since 1953, and considering the wide economic gap. South Korea’s GPD per capita was US$39,400 in 2015, compared to US$1,700 per person in the north.

Still, Watt says the Swedish and Swiss members of the UN command like to toast to the “day when they’re not required anymore ... I think the same goes for us.”

With an interview by CTV’s Joy Malbon in South Korea