Posted on 11/03/2004 7:25:04 PM PST by SJackson
AMP ZAMA, Japan, Nov. 3 - Charles Robert Jenkins, the Army sergeant who left his soldiers and walked into North Korea in 1965 to avoid combat duty in Vietnam, received a light sentence Wednesday after pleading guilty in a court-martial here to desertion and aiding the enemy.
After hearing bleak testimony about his harsh life in North Korea, an Army judge seemed to accept a defense lawyer's argument that Sergeant Jenkins, 64, had "already suffered 40 years of confinement." The judge, Col. Denise Vowell, then demoted him to private, stripped him of four decades of back pay and benefits, and gave him a dishonorable discharge and a 30-day jail sentence.
The prosecutor, Capt. Seth Cohen, had called for a tougher sentence, evoking, in a veiled way, the need for military discipline while American soldiers are fighting in Iraq. Referring to noncommissioned officers like Sergeant Jenkins, he said, "We can't have soldiers going into the field fearing that their N.C.O.'s will abandon them, especially given the state of the world today."
But the trial and sentencing seemed to reflect American political needs to mollify Japanese public opinion, which has been moved by the drama of the American defector from North Carolina and his Japanese wife, Hitomi Soga Jenkins, whom he met in North Korea a few years after North Korean agents had kidnapped her from a Japanese island in 1978.
Apparently to minimize American media attention, the one-day military trial took place as votes were being counted in the American presidential election.
Massaging Japanese public opinion is important to Washington, which wants to move the Army's First Corps from the state of Washington to this base, already the headquarters of the United States Army in Japan. By receiving a 30-day sentence, Private Jenkins is now detained in Japan, avoids return to the United States for incarceration, and can receive weekly visits from his Japanese wife and their two North Korean-born daughters.
To further soften Japanese opinion, military officers gave a slide show of the detention facility, which is on a United States Navy installation at Yokosuka. Drawing oohs and aahs from Japanese reporters, the slides showed rows of exercise bicycles, a living room-style visitation room, and close-ups of the food, including a large photo of a slice of pumpkin pie with whipped cream on top.
"It's not Club Med, but it is not hard labor either," said Capt. King H. Dietriech, commander of the Navy facility. He also stressed that "there will be no special treatment for Private Jenkins."
For the American, one more month of controls should not be a big strain.
Mrs. Jenkins was returned to Japan in 2002 along with four other Japanese who had been abducted. Japanese diplomats arranged with North Korea for Sergeant Jenkins and their two daughters to leave for reunification with Mrs. Jenkins this past July, and the United States Army began court-martial proceedings against him in September.
In rare testimony on Wednesday about life in North Korea, Sergeant Jenkins and his wife said their lives had been controlled by omnipresent "political supervisors."
Mrs. Jenkins said her supervisor prepared her for her first meeting with Sergeant Jenkins in June 1980 by suggesting that "I was to marry" him.
"Little by little, we started to love each other," Mrs. Jenkins said, noting that they decided to get married barely one month after meeting. "My husband did not like North Korea, nor did I."
One day, when Sergeant Jenkins was a bachelor, living with three other defectors, he took advantage of the rare absence of their political supervisor to search their house. In the attic, he recalled, they found tape recorders. In each room, they found a microphone.
The Americans, he said, were forced for 10 hours a day to study and memorize the writings of North Korea's founder, Kim Il Sung, writings that he called "class struggle from the perspective of a crazy man."
Six months ago, while he was still in North Korea, such a statement could have earned Sergeant Jenkins execution. He said here on Wednesday that if he had once criticized Mr. Kim or his son and successor, Kim Jong Il, there would have been no forgiveness. "Go dig your own hole, because you are gone,'' he testified. "I have seen that done."
With little coaxing by the defense counsel, Capt. James D. Culp, Mrs. Jenkins painted a portrait of a broken industrial society where living standards had regressed to the 19th century.
With no heat or electricity in their Pyongyang house during most of the winter, she said that to sleep in the cold "we would wear everything we owned in terms of clothing when we went to bed." Warm water never flowed from faucets. Warm baths were rare luxuries.
Reading at night was by candlelight. When the candle wick had burned, she said, her husband "would collect the melted wax in a can and use it for a homemade candle." With the food rationing system breaking down, she said, they grew vegetables and raised chickens in their yard, but the family often went to bed hungry.
The family was forbidden to leave the house without their political supervisor. Coils of barbed wire surrounded their house, she told the court.
Deprived of books, Sergeant Jenkins said he had so treasured a banned a copy of the historical novel "Shogun" that he read it 20 times. In later years, he tinkered with a state-issue, single-channel North Korean radio so that he could secretly listen to the BBC and Voice of America.
Such surreptitious acts of rebellion carried the sanction, Mrs. Jenkins said, of being "thrown out of the city, and taken to a remote mountain area to live."
With anti-American hostility acute, Sergeant Jenkins recalled that one day he was taken to a hospital where orderlies held down his forearm as a doctor, without using anesthesia, cut off a piece of skin tattooed, "U.S. Army."
In his closing statement, he apologized to soldiers under his command, to the Army and to the nation.
"After living 40 years in North Korea, there is no freedom like the freedom in the United States," he said. Referring to Kim Jong Il, he added, "People in North Korea suffer under a system that is evil and is run by a man who is evil to his bones."
After one day in North Korea, he said, he realized that he had made a terrible mistake.
Noting that he was forbidden to write to his family in America while in North Korea, he said, "I am deeply sorry to my family, who suffered in silence for 40 years."
From North Carolina, his younger sister, Pat Harrell, said by telephone that she would tell the news to their 91-year-old mother. "This has been 40 years in coming, in believing that one day I would hear from him,'' Mrs. Harrell said. "I never gave up hope. Now I am just waiting to able to touch him."
As a compassionate conservative, I say that the sentence is just. Jenkins is old and he plans to stay in Japan for the rest of his life.
At least he accepted that he is a coward and did not criticise his fellow soldiers.
I'm with the judge on this one. No point in torturing the poor sap any further. Forty years of life in North Korea is penalty enough for any man.
I hope he and his wife find happiness.
D
An update from the Workers Paradise.
IMO, let him be relegated to the dusty shelves of history.
He wasted most of his life in that place.
I find it difficult to feel sorry for traitors.
Geez, cant wait for the book, movie, clothing line, and the blah, blah blah.
I don't consider him any worse a traitor than John Kerry. At least Jenkins will confess he is wrong, and is trully sorry.
>>>I find it difficult to feel sorry for traitors.
You're both right. I'm not sure of the benefits of further punishment.
Started off quite skeptical in reading this article and ended up hoping that Jenkins and his wife will tell their story about what communism really consists of on as many college campuses as possible. I guess I finally agreed with the court that he "served his time" for the treason he committed, and that's not the conclusion I expected to have.
Worth repeating.
He's different. In a week or two Kerry will be at his chateau (Theresa's) in France. They won't extradite, and it's a comfortable country, no reason to hurry home.
I'm with you on this. I hope he does well in his new home after his stay in the brig.
His poor wife was a lifelong kidnap victim. She found some level of comfort with this guy. Certainly we should have compassion for her.
Very weighty read.Many make mistakes in their lives without the consequences so dramatic.I believe his life was hell after fatefull decision and worked in purgatory many years until by unknown strange ways he met that light.
well how many odd ball descisions in your life have come with a 40 year sentence like this?
They should let him come to the USA so he could TELL THIS STORY to the UNITED NATIONS which sits on its' collective ass and does nothing to help the people of North Korea, while complaining about the US.
Part of his sentence should have been the he go around US colleges and personally testify to life under a communist regime.
That would have been a good thing. With security, of course, it might not be a popular message some places.
It almost sounds like an episode of the original Star Trek.
I'll bet you five quatloos that he wishes he'd gone to 'Nam.
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