Charles Jenkins, the US soldier who defected to North Korea, interviewed on CBS “60 Minutes” (via):
In the interview, to be aired on Sunday evening, Jenkins said from the time he deserted until 1980, when he married a Japanese woman who had been abducted to the North, the communist party allotted him a Korean woman and ordered him to sleep with her twice a month, prescribing the exact date this was to take place. When he bridled at the intrusion into every corner of his life, he was severely beaten.
On one occasion the authorities decided to remove a “US Army” tattoo from his forearm: the procedure was conducted without anesthetic using a pair of scissors and a scalpel. “They told me the anesthetic was for the battlefield,” Jenkins said. “It was hell.”
When Jenkins met his wife, he said, the only thing they had in common was their hatred of the regime. To salvage their sense of identity, they would say good night to each other in the other’s native language. Jenkins and three other Americans were forced to study Kim Il-Sung’s teachings for eight hours a day for the first seven years he spent in the country. “It was the worst mistake anyone ever made,” he said. “In words, I cannot express the feelings I have towards North Korea, the harassment I got. The hard life.”
Jenkins says he deserted in the first place because when serving as a sergeant at the border, he was ordered to take part in an assault mission and was also concerned that he might get shipped off to Vietnam. So one freezing night, after drinking 10 beers, he made his way across the border.
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