"I was anxious and didn't know if I should go to sleep or not," recalls a resident of Yeonpyeong Island after North Korea fired an artillery barrage near the sparsely populated South Korean island that is just south of a de facto maritime border between the two sides. Residents were ordered to evacuate and ferries were suspended as South Korea held a live-fire exercise following North Korea's barrage – one of the most serious military escalations on the peninsula since Pyongyang fired shells at the same island in 2010.