Freed Army Deserter Hopes to Stay in Japan

U.S. Army deserter Charles Robert Jenkins was released from military jail today after serving 25 days for abandoning his squadron in 1965 and defecting to North Korea, where he lived for nearly four decades.

Jenkins, 64, left the prison at the U.S. naval base in Yokosuka and was taken by helicopter to the Camp Zama Army base, where he was to stay with his family for several days before moving to his wife’s hometown in northern Japan.

“Forty years is a long time,” a sobbing Jenkins, still in uniform, said at Camp Zama. “My plan is to stay in Japan, if they will accept me. I want to go back to the United States, but only once. With my wife, I’ll live in Japan, with my family.”

Jenkins testified at his Nov. 3 court-martial that he fled across the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea on Jan. 5, 1965, to avoid service in Vietnam.

The native of Rich Square, N.C., said he had intended to cross into North Korea, then defect to the Soviet Embassy and eventually make his way back to the United States.

Instead, the communist regime held him for 39 years, some of the time with three other American deserters. He was used as a propaganda tool in broadcasts to South Korea and was forced to teach English to North Korean military officer cadets, he said.

Two of the other three Americans have died, but the third, James Dresnok of Richmond, Va., still lives in the North. Dresnok was a private when he crossed over in 1962.

In 1980, Jenkins met and married Hitomi Soga, a Japanese woman who had been abducted by North Korean agents in 1978 to teach Japanese language and culture to its spies.

She was allowed to go home in 2002, and last July, Tokyo arranged for Jenkins and their two daughters to join Soga in Jakarta, Indonesia.

They were then flown back to Japan, ostensibly because Jenkins needed emergency medical care. He was discharged from a Tokyo hospital Sept. 11 and immediately turned himself in to American authorities at Camp Zama. In a plea bargain, he was sentenced to a month in prison. He was released five days early for good behavior.

During his court-martial, Jenkins described a hardscrabble existence for the defectors, with no electricity or running water.

He told the court, “I longed to leave that place every day.”