Thirty-five miles from Seoul (population ten million), it is an untouched stretch of nature, home to several endangered species—the red-crowned crane, the Amur leopard, the Asiatic black bear—and onemillion land mines. A combination of U.S. and South Korean troops, operating under the aegis of the United Nations, has patrolled the DMZ since an armistice agreement brought fighting to an end on July 27, 1953.
On the evening of January 4, 1965, Sgt. Charles Robert Jenkins drank a six-pack of beer and set out on his nightly patrol of the DMZ. Jenkins had been in the military since dropping outof school at age fifteen and talking his way into the National Guard. Born on February 18, 1940, in the tiny town of Rich Square, North Carolina, he had a simple motivation for joining. “I didn’t have nothing else to do, and in the National Guard I got one day’s worth of army pay for doing just two hours of work a week,” he tells me. 1 He joined the army’s First Cavalry Division when he turnedeighteen, and served at Fort Dix and Fort Hood before volunteering to go to Korea, which earned him a promotion to sergeant. After easy tours in South Korea and Germany, he was posted to Camp Clinch, right on the DMZ, and assigned to a four-man “hunter-killer” team, tasked with drawing fire from North Korean troops during nightly patrols.
Sergeant Jenkins (Associated Press)
If providing target practice for the enemy wasn’t bad enough, there were rumors that his division was going to be sent to Vietnam. Jenkins grew depressed, drank heavily, and came up with a plan. “I would walk north across the DMZ and into North Korea. Once there, I would ask to be handed over to the Russians, and request a diplomatic exchange for passage backto the United States,” he writes in his memoir, The Reluctant Communist . 2 At 2:30 a.m., Jenkins informed his squad that he was going to check the road, but instead he tied a white T-shirt to his M-14 rifle and crossed into the DMZ, taking “high, slow, deliberate steps to avoid trip wires that would set off a mine,” he writes. “It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” he tells me matter-of-factly.Three weeks later, one of the North’s propaganda loudspeakers announced the news of his arrival. “The Republic that is the Eternal Paradise will protect with hospitality the brave Sergeant Jenkins!”
The U.S. military tried to keep Jenkins’s defection quiet, for fear that more soldiers might follow. He was not the first. A month earlier, Jerry Wayne Parrish, also of the First Cavalry, had defected,and two other soldiers, Larry Abshier and James Dresnok, had defected three years before. None were motivated by ideological conviction. Abshier was being court-martialed for intoxication and dereliction of duty. Dresnok, described in an army report as “a chronic complainer, lazy … belligerent, defiant to authority,” was facing court-martial for forging signatures on documents that granted himextra leave.
After being debriefed by the North Koreans, Jenkins was assigned to live with the other three men in a two-room house, where they took turns sleeping on the floor. Compared to the bleak existence for most North Koreans, Jenkins lived well, carousing like a drunken frat boy with the three other Americans. “We were Cold War trophies, which is why we were never treated like POWs. Ourpictures were in propaganda pamphlets and movies, so they had to keep us looking healthy,” he says. 3
The American defectors worked primarily as English teachers. In the seventies, Jenkins taught at a military school. “If my students made mistakes, sometimes I corrected them and sometimes I didn’t,” he tells me. They also worked as actors whenever a North Korean film or television show calledfor Western villains. The most popular was Unsung Heroes , a twenty-episode series featuring Jenkins as “Dr. Kelton,” the head of the U.S. Korean War operations. Among the oddest jobs Jenkins had was
On the evening of January 4, 1965, Sgt. Charles Robert Jenkins drank a six-pack of beer and set out on his nightly patrol of the DMZ. Jenkins had been in the military since dropping outof school at age fifteen and talking his way into the National Guard. Born on February 18, 1940, in the tiny town of Rich Square, North Carolina, he had a simple motivation for joining. “I didn’t have nothing else to do, and in the National Guard I got one day’s worth of army pay for doing just two hours of work a week,” he tells me. 1 He joined the army’s First Cavalry Division when he turnedeighteen, and served at Fort Dix and Fort Hood before volunteering to go to Korea, which earned him a promotion to sergeant. After easy tours in South Korea and Germany, he was posted to Camp Clinch, right on the DMZ, and assigned to a four-man “hunter-killer” team, tasked with drawing fire from North Korean troops during nightly patrols.
Sergeant Jenkins (Associated Press)
If providing target practice for the enemy wasn’t bad enough, there were rumors that his division was going to be sent to Vietnam. Jenkins grew depressed, drank heavily, and came up with a plan. “I would walk north across the DMZ and into North Korea. Once there, I would ask to be handed over to the Russians, and request a diplomatic exchange for passage backto the United States,” he writes in his memoir, The Reluctant Communist . 2 At 2:30 a.m., Jenkins informed his squad that he was going to check the road, but instead he tied a white T-shirt to his M-14 rifle and crossed into the DMZ, taking “high, slow, deliberate steps to avoid trip wires that would set off a mine,” he writes. “It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” he tells me matter-of-factly.Three weeks later, one of the North’s propaganda loudspeakers announced the news of his arrival. “The Republic that is the Eternal Paradise will protect with hospitality the brave Sergeant Jenkins!”
The U.S. military tried to keep Jenkins’s defection quiet, for fear that more soldiers might follow. He was not the first. A month earlier, Jerry Wayne Parrish, also of the First Cavalry, had defected,and two other soldiers, Larry Abshier and James Dresnok, had defected three years before. None were motivated by ideological conviction. Abshier was being court-martialed for intoxication and dereliction of duty. Dresnok, described in an army report as “a chronic complainer, lazy … belligerent, defiant to authority,” was facing court-martial for forging signatures on documents that granted himextra leave.
After being debriefed by the North Koreans, Jenkins was assigned to live with the other three men in a two-room house, where they took turns sleeping on the floor. Compared to the bleak existence for most North Koreans, Jenkins lived well, carousing like a drunken frat boy with the three other Americans. “We were Cold War trophies, which is why we were never treated like POWs. Ourpictures were in propaganda pamphlets and movies, so they had to keep us looking healthy,” he says. 3
The American defectors worked primarily as English teachers. In the seventies, Jenkins taught at a military school. “If my students made mistakes, sometimes I corrected them and sometimes I didn’t,” he tells me. They also worked as actors whenever a North Korean film or television show calledfor Western villains. The most popular was Unsung Heroes , a twenty-episode series featuring Jenkins as “Dr. Kelton,” the head of the U.S. Korean War operations. Among the oddest jobs Jenkins had was
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