US soldier who lived to regret his desertion to North Korea
Charles Jenkins: deserter: b Rich Square, North Carolina, February 18,
1940; m Hitomi Soga; 2d; d Sado, Niigata Prefecture, Japan, December
11, 2017, aged 77.
Charles Jenkins was one of a handful of GIs who deserted to North Korea. He was born in 1940 in North Carolina, and left school aged 15 to join the US Army. In 1964, aged 24, he was posted to South Korea where he became depressed and began to drink.
On the night of January 4, 1965, Sergeant Jenkins was leading a threeman patrol near the Demilitarised Zone. Just after 2.30am he signalled to his troops to wait while he went forward to check something. That was the last they saw of him. According to his later account, he was scared that he would be sent to fight in Vietnam.
Whatever his motivations he soon realised his mistake. Grabbed by North Korean guards, he was incarcerated with three other American deserters in a one-room jail where, for the next 15 years, they were starved, beaten and forced to spend up to 16 hours a day memorising the works of Kim Il Sung.
Robbed of his identity, Jenkins was renamed Min Hyung Chang; a US Army tattoo on his arm was cut off with scissors without anaesthetic. In 1966 the men managed to elude their minders and make their way to the Russian Embassy where they requested asylum – but the Russians turned them down.
Bit by bit, they learned Korean and in the early 1970s they were given houses of their own. They taught English at a military academy and were used as Cold War trophies in propaganda films. But Jenkins never forgot who he really was, secretly indulging his love of rock and roll by taking a screwdriver to his radio, which had been fixed so it could not be tuned.
His salvation was Hitomi Soga, a Japanese woman who had been kidnapped aged 19 with her mother, by North Korean agents in 1978 – part of a bizarre programme to steal identities for North Korean spies and to recruit teachers to train them in Japanese language and culture. Hitomi Soga would never see her mother again.
Gradually accepting her fate, she asked to learn English and in 1980 was moved into Jenkins’ home.
‘‘Thirty-eight days later, we got married,’’ Jenkins recalled. ‘‘Why? Because I told her the truth. ‘You take me or are you going to take a Korean? You got no choice’.’’ It was not the most romantic of chat-up lines, but they eventually fell in love and had two daughters.
The famine which gripped the country in the 1990s forced Pyongyang to open up to some extent and seek food aid. In 2002 the country’s leader Kim Jong Il admitted that North Korea had abducted 13 Japanese citizens and announced that five, including Hitomi Soga, would be released. In Japan, her story became a media sensation and two years later, in a diplomatic coup orchestrated by Japan’s prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, North Korea let Jenkins and their daughters go.
A deal was also reached with the US under which Jenkins would plead guilty to desertion in a US military court in Japan and be sentenced to 30 days in prison with a dishonourable discharge, after which he would go free. In return, he would give the US military as much information as he could about the situation in North Korea.
But Jenkins’ life had no happy ending. The transition to life in Japan was a struggle and he remained fearful of Pyongyang: ‘‘All Kim Jong-un had to say was, ‘I wish that bastard was dead,’ and I’d be dead. That’s it.’’
His wife and daughters survive him.
‘‘Thirty-eight days later, we got married. Why? Because I told her the truth. ‘You take me or are you going to take a Korean? You got no choice’.’’