The former U. S. soldier defected in 1965, but said his decisions at the time «don’t make sense now.»
Charles Jenkins, a former American soldier who defected across the Demilitarized Zone into North Korea in 1965 and was held by the totalitarian regime for 40 years, died in Japan on Monday at the age of 77.
Jenkins, who was freed in 2004, had lived on Sado Island with his wife, a Japanese woman named Hitomi Soga who herself was kidnapped by North Korea and forced to teach her language to Pyongyang’s spies. Jenkins’ death was first reported by Kyodo News and Japan’s NHK broadcaster, who said the cause was heart failure.
In January 1965, Jenkins decided to cross into the North and desert the U. S. Army in an attempt to avoid serving in Vietnam. He drank 10 beers to soothe his nerves, unloaded his military-issue rifle as a gesture of peace and walked across the border hoping he could travel through the country and possibly seek asylum in Russia.
But those hopes were quickly dashed, he told The Los Angeles Times earlier this year, and Jenkins said in retrospect that a lot of his decisions “don’t make sense now.” He was held for eight years in a room with three other American defectors and forced to memorize information about North Korean founder Kim Il Sung, beaten at times and forced to live in bleak, freezing quarters.
