The Reluctant Communist by Charles Robert Jenkins, Jim Frederick Page A

A little while later, people from the army came around and killed every dog in the neighborhood.
    In January of 1968, we heard on the news that North Korea had captured an American surveillance ship called the U.S.S. Pueblo. A group of cadres came by a few days later just to brief us about it. They were boasting. They gave us a pamphlet in English they had already printed up, titled, “Aggressive American Spy Ship Captured by the Heroic North Korean People’s Navy,” or something like that. In the text of the pamphlet, it said that the ship had been “captured on the high seas.” We knew when we read it that they probably didn’t want to be saying that since they would have had no right to board another country’s ship in international waters. And sure enough, they came back a few days later with a new pamphlet exactly the same as the old one, except with that phrase taken out.
    Contrary to some rumors and accusations that have been aimed at me, I had nothing to do with the Pueblo incident. None of us four Americans had anything to do with the Pueblo whatsoever. Not only did we not participate in any interrogation of the Pueblo’s crew, we never met any of them or even laid eyes on any of them. There is no way the North Koreans would have trusted us enough to go anywhere near that boat, let alone speak to the sailors. All we knew about the fate of the Pueblo was the boastful propaganda that the Korean news would run throughout the year until the crew was released in December. And since then, of course, a one-sided presentation of the Pueblo incident has become a favorite part of anti-American North Korean history and lore. (When the North Koreans made a movie about the incident in 1992, I played the captain of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Enterprise, which was dispatched to the region at the height of the crisis.)
    While the Pueblo was dominating the news in 1968, a leader named Major Han showed up, and we resumed our studies. In March of 1969, we moved again, to a house in Hwachon, which was about twenty miles outside of Pyongyang. This house was a dump. It was only two big rooms, and the walls and floors were pounded mud. There was barely enough room for four beds, so we got rid of the beds and slept on the floor. One night when we were sleeping, it was raining hard, and one of the walls of the house simply collapsed—it just fell away. Rain was blowing in all night, so all four of us crept to the other side of the room, trying to keep dry. The next day, as we were repairing the wall, some farmers offered to help. They started building the wall by stacking cinder blocks one on top of another and then pushing the towers of blocks as close to each other as possible. When we showed them that the wall would stand a lot better if they interlocked the bricks in rows rather than stacking them in columns, they acted like that was the most brilliant thing they had ever seen in their lives.
    After moving to Hwachon, a cadre came by to tell us that the five won we were getting every month was being suspended indefinitely. Around this time as well, Major Han and others started dropping hints about us becoming citizens and entering society. They said that if we continued to study well (which was hilarious, since we were the worst students of all time), we could someday be more free. As part of this process, they had us write our autobiographies. My life story came out to one hundred forty-three handwritten pages. Dresnok’s and Parrish’s were about the same. Abshier, in typical fashion, topped five hundred pages and would have kept going if we hadn’t told him that the North Koreans really don’t care what types of artwork adorn the walls of Chicago’s Union Station or whatever the hell he was going on and on about.
    Our house was exactly ninety yards from the river. We had to carry so much water back to the house that we measured it. Another fifty yards downstream was a worksite for a nearby prison. Just about every day