The Reluctant Communist

by Charles Robert Jenkins

  I pointed to the mountain where my guard post, Guardpost Desart, was, but I didn’t see any harm in that, since it was clearly visible by the North Koreans already. While on duty, I had often seen them through my binoculars looking at us through their binoculars. I even pointed out the locations of their loudspeakers on their side of the line that they used to blast propaganda and military music at us. That got them interested, when I pointed out Desart. “How tall is this mountain?” the colonel asked. I can’t recall the exact number now, but I replied whatever the real height was, so many thousand feet tall. The officer who hadn’t spoken before jumped up and yelled what must have been “Liar!” in Korean, and he punched me square across the face. I started to gush blood again. “There is no mountain around here that tall,” he continued through the interpreter. Obviously, he thought I gave him a height in meters, but I was not so handy with the metric system back then, so I couldn’t covert it into a height he’d understand. Finally, I got the interpreter to understand the problem enough to explain it. That interrogation lasted three or four hours. I thought I was there for the night, but at 11:30, they told me we were catching a train for Pyongyang.

  The two guards, the captain who had been with me since the first jeep ride, and I boarded a regular train car. Five minutes after we sat down, the captain got up and made an announcement, and all of the civilians who had been sitting there got up and evacuated, so it was us four alone for the trip. At one point, I noticed that the guards, who were still carrying all of my weapons, were playing with the two grenades I had brought with me. I have never been so nervous in my life. They were a new style of grenade even for us, so I was certain the guards had never seen anything like them before, and I was worried that one of them would accidentally detonate one. So I tried to tell them, in super-slow English, about the pin, saying, “No touch that. Very dangerous.” I don’t know if they were offended, but this was not the way I planned on dying, so even though I was the prisoner, I didn’t care. Eventually they stopped playing with the grenades, but it was probably as much because they got bored as it was because of my telling them not to. Relieved and finally able to relax, I fell asleep—the first sleep I had gotten in almost forty-eight hours. I didn’t wake up until 5:30 a.m., when the train had already arrived in Pyongyang in an underground station.

  After getting off the train, the captain, the two guards, and I waited about thirty minutes for a car to arrive. It was still dark outside, and there were no lights, so I couldn’t see any of the city. We drove to a house about a third of a mile away from Kim Il-sung University, right in the center of the city. The house was small, only a few rooms, with heavy paper covering concrete floors and a fireplace outside that heated the house from underneath—a typical Korean heating system. The walls were whitewashed clay or cement. They put me in one of the rooms, and a woman brought me food—more simple rice stew. About thirty minutes later, a colonel came in and gave me trousers and a white shirt and took my uniform away.

  I was in that house about ten or twelve days. I could not leave the room, except to use the toilet outside or the washbasin in an adjoining room. The lighting was naked overhead bulbs that I was not allowed to turn off, even when I was sleeping. Late that first week, however, they took me into town to get a haircut and a bath. During my time in that first house, two people in civilian clothes came and interrogated me every day from eight or nine in the morning until four or five in the afternoon. I don’t think they were all that qualified to do interrogations, and I again got the feeling that they were killing time until they figured out where they really wanted to put me. Maybe they knew already from the guys who questioned me earlier that I didn’t know anything useful about positions and placements of American forces. I hadn’t been on any field problems, for example, and I told them so. They did, however, want to know a lot about inspections. How often did we have them? How long did we prepare for them? How long did they take? What were officers looking for, and what got you penalized? I didn’t know if they were just looking for ways to improve their own drills or if they were planning on infiltrating one of our units by having a North Korean pose as one of the Republic of Korea Army troops who sometimes used to train with us. The interrogators then wanted to know a lot about my weapons, which was more understandable. How does the M-14’s automatic selector switch work? What is the blast radius of the hand grenades? Realizing that the answers to all of these questions had the potential to put American lives at risk, I did my best to answer them as incompetently as I could without arousing their suspicion.

  At the end of those ten or twelve days, the colonel reappeared and told me to get my things together quickly: I was moving in with three other U.S. servicemen who had walked across the DMZ. I knew who they were already. All along the South Korean side of the DMZ, these guys—Private First Class Larry Allen Abshier, Private James Joseph Dresnok, and Specialist Jerry Wayne Parrish—were notorious the way I assumed I now was. The colonel and I got into another jeep—I noticed that I was no longer being very heavily guarded, if at all (I guess they figured, “Where is he going to go?”)—and drove about ten minutes to a neighborhood called Saedong.

  We pulled up to a little brick house, and Dresnok and Parrish were waiting for me. Abshier wasn’t there. He was in the hospital for colitis and wouldn’t rejoin the house until the late summer. We all introduced ourselves and started talking. I was starved for anyone who could speak English, and they were also happy to have another person to break up the boredom. Just like the North Korean interrogators, they, too, were full of questions. The first thing they wanted to know was why I came over. They were all enlisted men who were in trouble with the army, and they couldn’t imagine why a sergeant who wasn’t already up for some sort of court-martial would cross the DMZ. I told them I didn’t want to go to Vietnam. Dresnok shook his head at that one and just said, “Well, you may have had one foot in the pot, but you just jumped in the fire.” We all got along okay that first night. We assumed (as we almost always did) that everything we said was being recorded, but they were so hungry for anything new in their lives that after I ran out of world events to tell them about and after trying to figure out how many people we knew in common, I stayed up all night telling them every single joke I could remember.

  The next Saturday, one of the North Koreans in charge walked me to the hospital to meet Abshier. We talked for about thirty minutes, and I’ll never forget that one of the first things Abshier asked me was if I had any money, because they had a little shop in the hospital where he wanted to buy some things. I told him I didn’t have any money, which was the truth. Abshier would wind up becoming my closest friend of the three, but I came away from that first meeting shaking my head at what a strange, simple, and disconnected man he was.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but those three men would, for better and worse, be permanent fixtures of my entire time in North Korea. I got to know them all better than I have known just about anybody else in my life. All four of us were similar in a lot of ways. We were all young, dumb soldiers from poor backgrounds who wouldn’t have had anything if it weren’t for the army, but then we threw that away too by running away from varying degrees of real or imagined trouble rather than confronting our problems head-on. If there was an odd man out, though, it was me. I was slightly older; I was a noncommissioned officer while they were enlisted men; and I had a pretty good military record while the other three were pretty much total fuck-ups as soldiers. The way they described it, Abshier and Dresnok were running from the law. They were each up for a serious court-martial before they crossed. Parrish’s reasons were more personal, and he didn’t elaborate about them much except to say that if he ever went home, his father-in-law would kill him. The three of them, also like me, walked across the DMZ without really thinking about the huge consequences of what they were doing and without understanding what North Korea was really like. None of them intended to stay in North Korea, and none of them were communist sympathizers. All of them assumed t
hat they would be able to get out one way or another, and they experienced a rude shock when it dawned on them that they were trapped, forever, in North Korea. All of them quickly grew to hate the country and would have left in a second if they could have.

  Over the ensuing decades, sometimes we were the closest of friends, and sometimes we were the bitterest of enemies. Sometimes we could count on each other for support against the insanity of North Korea, while at other times the insanity itself would encourage us to turn against each other. At first we were housemates, struggling just to stay alive and sane during frequent periods of cold, hunger, and despair. And decades later, when we all had started families of our own, we formed a strange, insular little community of foreigners in the world’s most strange, insular, and foreign society. What a sorry-ass little foursome we were when I stop to think about it.

  That Saedong house was the first of many places I lived in North Korea over the next forty years. We only stayed there for about six months. It was a simple brick house with two bedrooms. Whichever government official was watching us took one bedroom. We Americans shared the other bedroom, which was only about six mats big (or about one hundred square feet) and had three desks crammed into it. We slept on the floor any way we could manage, and it was a tight fit. Other than that, there was a room for the cook, a kitchen, and a dining room with a table and chairs that we were not allowed to use. (We ate our meals in our bedroom or outside if the weather was nice.) The dining room sometimes housed extra military officers whenever they showed up. The toilet was outside, and there was only cold running water in the house, but the running water rarely worked, so usually we had to fetch water from the well, too. The whole house was surrounded by a six-and-a-half-foot-high wood fence, and there was a guard stationed in a crow’s nest atop a telephone pole outside.

  Like every other North Korean household, we were assigned a leader. I had too many leaders to count over forty years. As members of the North Korean Workers’ Party (which we usually just called “the Organization”), leaders were responsible for keeping an eye on our every move, making sure we behaved and that we lived according to “correct ideology.” Depending on where I was living and with whom, the leader (or leaders) would sometimes live in the same house as I, while at other times he would live in a house nearby. A leader’s contact with me was nearly constant, especially at the beginning, and even in later years, rarely a day went by that I didn’t see, talk to, get criticized by, or get into a fight with my leader. Leaders oversaw our propaganda indoctrination—the hours of forced study and memorization of Kim Il-sung’s teaching that we endured—and they administered the special self-criticism sessions we underwent whenever they believed that we had committed some sort of infraction, as well as the regularly scheduled self-criticism sessions held once a week.

  Self-criticism is a way of life in North Korea. Everybody has to do it, even the highest party members. Our sessions were once a week on Monday mornings. All through the week, we were supposed to keep a diary, where we wrote about the times we failed to live up to Kim Il-sung’s teachings. Perhaps we left the house one day without permission, or perhaps the front door broke because we had not tended to its upkeep well enough—both of those would be good entries for the diary. Then we used those diary entries for our criticism. There are variations to the selfcriticism session, but basically you stand at attention and confess all your failings to those superiors present. The weekly sessions, which we called “sum up,” were pretty formulaic, and once we got the hang of it, they were not that difficult, though they could get extremely stressful when a leader decided to prove a point and got in your face and yelled at you for hours on end. Even so, the key is to detach your mind from the experience as much as possible, to treat it as if none of the words that you are saying and none of the proceedings you are participating in have any meaning at all—which happens to be the truth.

  Usually, you started by citing a teaching of Kim Il-sung’s, something like: “Our Great Leader Kim Il-sung taught as follows. The first and foremost task of a revolutionary is to study. If the revolutionary fails to study properly, he will fail to successfully create the revolution.” Some of these teaching-recitations could go on for a few minutes, and you better not screw up even a single word or you’d have to start over or get in more trouble. After that, you would read your failings from your sum-up book. My self-criticism formula was almost always to admit to not being as diligent about studying as I should have been. There were a lot of Monday mornings when we realized we hadn’t kept our diaries, so we would scramble to remember things we had done wrong. Often we’d just invent them or copy them from previous weeks. Other times, we would do something we knew we weren’t supposed to, like steal some peaches, and we’d say, “That’s one for the sum-up book.” After reading all the things you did wrong, you’d express regret that your revolutionary ideology was not sufficiently honed or whatever to uphold Kim Il-sung’s teachings, and then you’d say you were sorry you let the party and Kim Il-sung down. And finally, you’d finish by listing all the ways through more committed thinking and conduct you were going to do better next time. Once a month, we had to submit a written confession, at least four pages long. And any time we did something the cadres considered serious, we could be called in for a special session.

  Leaders never operated independently, though. In North Korea, even the watchers were being watched. A chief of staff was the leader in charge of the leaders of a small group of families or homes. He was the boss of the leaders and drivers. (Leaders usually had cars.) And the chiefs of staff always had at least a superior or two above them, simply called “cadres,” who would come around intermittently to check up both on us and on the leader.

  Some leaders would be major recurring presences in my life over many decades. Other leaders would last for only a few weeks and I would never see them again. Sometimes we would call a leader by name, although this was rare, since we soon came to assume that the names they gave us were fakes. Sometimes you would meet Comrade Pak, and the very next week the exact same man would introduce himself as Comrade Lee, as if you were some sort of moron and wouldn’t notice. Even if they were telling the truth, however, since this was Korea, almost everybody you met had the same four or five names anyway—Lee, Kim, Pak, Moon, and so forth. So for most of those who stuck around longer than a few weeks, we developed nicknames: the Tall Cadre, Whitey, the Fat Cadre, the Colonel in Glasses, and so on.

  Two or three of these leaders became the closest thing I would ever have to a North Korean friend, and they would take great risks to help me out when I was in trouble. But they were the exceptions. Many leaders were just cowards pretending to be thugs—they could be easily manipulated or bought off. Others were cruel bastards who hated me and the other Americans so deeply that they refused to see us as human and enjoyed making our lives hell. I, in turn, learned to hate these bastards right back.

  Most were just pathetic—a combination of small-time power and big-time fear. One of these idiots was the officer who was my escort from the border to Pyongyang the day I crossed over. We ultimately nicknamed him Captain Major. Why Captain Major? Because sometimes he would show up wearing a captain’s uniform, and sometimes he would be wearing a major’s. One time I asked him about his uniforms and told him how confusing it was that he seemed to hold two ranks at the same time. He responded, “That’s right, and someday I’ll make colonel!” Later, I would think about him, hoping that he did “make colonel” and that someone, somewhere is now referring to him as Captain Major Colonel.

  Starting here in this little house and throughout the rest of the next forty years, I had to adapt to live in a place that I came to think of as another planet. Years later, in fact, I would often tell my daughters, “We are not in the world. This is not the real world.” They had no idea what I was talking about until we ultimately got out. The rules of logic, order, and cause-and-effect ceased to apply. Things happened all the time that made no sense and for which we were given
no explanation. Why did a squad of ten soldiers just drive up in a truck and set up camp in our backyard? We didn’t know, and they wouldn’t say. Who are they, where did they come from, and what are they doing here? Again, no answers, either from them or our leader. They would then stay for a few days or a few weeks, you never knew how long, and then, one day, with no reason offered, they would just pack up and leave. Or we would be told to do something, to weave some fishing nets, say, “for the good of the party and the people.” Just a few days later, we would be told to drop that, since we were being moved because the Organization needed our house more, apparently, than the fishing nets. Sometimes the person telling us what to do would be our leader, and sometimes he would be a cadre we had never seen before and would never see again. You just never knew.

  For much of my forty years, it is true that I enjoyed a high amount of freedom and material comfort considering that starvation, malnutrition, slave labor, and execution or imprisonment without trial are standard risks for huge parts of the population in North Korea. It was never easy for me there, and in most other countries, my existence would have qualified as the lowest of the low. But in North Korea, I and those I was with usually had enough food to eat and a roof over our heads, which in that twisted realm made me one of the fortunate few. We four who willingly walked across the DMZ were cold war trophies, which is why I think we were never held like POWs and why, I believe, we were kept mostly healthy. As the stars of several propaganda pamphlets—and later movies—we had to look like we were happy, or at least healthy. With permission and supervision, we were allowed to leave the house fairly regularly and shop in the Pyongyang Shop, a store that was reserved only for foreigners, or go fishing if we had passed our studies and finished whatever work detail was laid out for us.