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Four decades after he vanished into North Korea, an American soldier today pleaded guilty before a US military court to desertion and tearfully recounted how depression and fear of death drove him to defect. Sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins, now a frail 64-year-old, was given a light 30-day jail term in a case that had pitted American demands for justice with Tokyo’s call for leniency so Jenkins could settle down in Japan with his Japanese wife. In gripping court-martial testimony that shed light on a long-standing Cold War mystery, Jenkins said that he never intended to stay in North Korea, and...

CAMP 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...