Detained in N. Korea for 40 years: An American’s account
BEIJING — Charles Robert Jenkins deserted the U.S. Army on a freezing night in January 1965. He pounded 10 beers to quiet his nerves and abandoned his patrol unit along the border dividing South Korea and North Korea — a 160-mile-long, 2.5-mile-wide strip of mine-ridden no man’s land.
He unloaded his M-16 rifle to show the enemy he meant no harm; he raised his knees high to avoid triggering tripwires. Several hours later, he crossed into North Korea.
He didn’t years.
Now 77 with a deep-lined face and distant expression, Jenkins lives a quiet life on Sado, a small, pastoral island in the Sea of Japan. He speaks in the thick Southern accent of his North Carolina childhood, and the stories he tells, 13 years after the end of his North Korean adventure, recall decades of solitude, deprivation and torture.
“In North Korea, I lived a dog’s life,” he said in a rare interview, as he drove his boxy Subaru through Sado Island’s rice paddies and sleepy villages. “Ain’t nobody live good in North Korea. Nothing to eat. No running water. No electricity. In the wintertime you freeze — in my bedroom, the walls were covered in ice.”
Jenkins works now as a greeter in Mano Park, a placid tourist attraction on the Japanese island, selling senbei, a type of rice cracker. Tourists see him and squeal with delight — “Jenkinssan!” — as he passively poses for photos.
But North Korea somehow feels as close as ever. The television news carries a constant drumbeat of stories: Pyongyang’s increasingly advanced missile tests, and nuclear threats; the death of Otto Warmbier, a 22year-old American college student, after 17 months in North Korean custody; the assassination of ruler Kim Jong Un’s half brother in a Malaysian airport.
They all carry echoes of the one incontrovertible lesson he learned as a guest of the North Korean government for 40 years. “I don’t put nothing past North Korea,” Jenkins says. “North Korea don’t care.” leave for nearly 40 and beat them when they slipped up. Bit by bit, they learned to speak Korean. Their relationships began to fray — Jenkins and Dresnok didn’t get along at all — and when their North Korean minders weren’t beating them, they often got in fistfights themselves.
In 1966, the four Americans escaped their minders, ducked into the Russian Embassy in Pyongyang and requested asylum. The Russians turned them down, and Jenkins had a sudden, dreadful realization: “I’d never get out of North Korea. And more than likely I’d be there till I died.”
In 1972, the North Korean government declared them citizens, gave them separate homes, and for the next several years, forced them into odd jobs.
Mainly, the four men served as actors playing evil Americans in propaganda productions; they taught English at a military academy.
In 1980, Jenkins acquired a wife: North Korean authorities moved into his home Hitomi Soga, a 21-year-old Japanese woman who had been abducted from Japan two years earlier. Weeks later, the two were married. Eventually, buoyed by their mutual hatred of North Korea, they fell in love.
“I knew how badly my wife missed Japan, and so it wasn’t long after we were married that I asked her what the Japanese word for ‘good night’ was,” Jenkins recalled in his memoir. “Thereafter, every night before we went to bed, I would kiss her three times and tell her, ‘Oyasumi.’ Then she would say back to me, ‘Good night,’ in English.”
“We did this so we would never forget who we really were and where we came from,” he said.
They had two daughters: Mika, now 34; and Brinda, now 32. Generally, their lives were better than those of ordinary North Koreans. In the 1990s, as famine gripped the country, the government gave Jenkins and his family rice, soap, clothing and cigarettes every month. “I got put on rations,” Jenkins recalled. “A regular Korean got none.”
Across the country, millions people starved to death.
Still, he despaired. The cigarettes were painful to smoke, and the rice was full of bugs. One day, a government agent tied him up and instructed Dresnok, who lived in a of neighboring house and also acted in propaganda films, to beat him until his teeth protruded from his lips. He said Dresnok seemed to enjoy it. Another time, an official noticed a U.S. Army tattoo on his arm and ordered Jenkins to a hospital, where a doctor cut it off without anesthetic.
Cadres watched the procedure and laughed as Jenkins screamed. “It was hell,” he recalled.
He tried, and often failed, to form a mental map of how the country worked. He came to suspect that the North Korean government was training his daughters as spies and that North Korea had enslaved dozens more Americans — prisoners in Vietnam, sent by the North Vietnamese to Pyongyang as gifts. He deduced that high-ranking North Korean officials seemed to maintain luxury properties in Switzerland for use as refuges in case of a popular uprising or military conflict.
One day, he witnessed dogs digging up a mass grave near his home; soon afterward, a group of soldiers killed all the dogs in the neighborhood.
He learned one thing for certain: Frank conversations about the country’s conditions could prove fatal. “You can’t bring your neighbor over for a drink,” he recalled. “Why? People start drinking, they start talking. People disappear. And when one doesn’t disappear, they know he’s the one who squealed.”