The deserter who regrets his decision

Charles Robert Jenkins was AWOL for almost 40 years, says Blaine Harden in The Washington Post. In 1965, while stationed with the U.S. Army in South Korea, he feared he’d be sent to Vietnam. So the naïve North Carolinian got drunk and fled to North Korea, where he quickly found himself in hell. “I was so ignorant,” says Jenkins, now 68. “I attempted to run away from all my problems.” Jenkins’ Stalinist captors kept him in what he calls “a giant, demented prison,” cut off from the outside world. He shoveled coal, scrounged for food, and kept busy killing rats that came out of his toilet. When he disobeyed orders, he was punched in the face; when the North Koreans spied an Army tattoo on his forearm, they cut it out without anesthetic. For 11 hours a day he studied the mind-numbing Marxist “gibberish” of then-leader Kim Il Sung; he was also forced to act in propaganda films as an evil American. In 2004, North Korea finally let Jenkins leave. After a stay in an Army brig for desertion, he settled in Japan, where he sells cookies, poses for pictures, and talks about his experiences. His wife would rather he didn’t. “She said that in the end, North Korea is going to get fed up. I am going to walk out my garage one morning and get a bullet in the head. Very possible.”

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