JAPAN: The long, strange journey of Charles Robert Jenkins reached a tearful climax yesterday with a 30-day sentence in a military prison and a dishonourable discharge from the US army he deserted for North Korea almost 40 years ago.
Voice cracking with emotion, Mr Jenkins pleaded guilty to leaving his post in South Korea in 1965 as a 24-year-old sergeant, saying he wanted "to be discharged to my civilian life", and avoid hazardous duty on the Korean Peninsula and in the worsening conflict in Vietnam.
Mr Jenkins told the military hearing in Zama Camp, Tokyo, how he disappeared behind the 'bamboo curtain' one bitterly cold January night after getting drunk on beer, wrapping a white T-shirt around his rifle and walking toward the demilitarised zone with the North.
"I knew 100 per cent what I was doing but I did not know the consequences.
"I should have asked for... a discharge, but I didn't. It was a mistake."
He also admitted to 'aiding the enemy' by teaching North Koreans English but denied encouraging disloyalty and soliciting other personnel to desert, charges that were dismissed by US army judge Col Denise Vowell.
The US army previously alleged that within weeks of crossing the demilitarised zone, Jenkins's voice was heard over loudspeakers singing the praises of his adopted home and North Korean founder Kim Il-sung, and that he subsequently appeared in an anti-American film.
Mr Jenkins claimed his career as a Cold War propagandist and later English teacher at a military college near Pyongyang had been motivated by fear: "You don't say no to North Korea. You say one thing bad about Kim Il-sung and you dig your own hole, because you're gone."
He said that his handlers had "tied me up and beat the hell out of me" after he told them he wanted to quit teaching. "That time I didn't go back to the university for 20 days, my face was messed up so bad."
The relatively mild sentence was the result of a plea bargain struck before the hearing began between Mr Jenkins and the head of the US army in Japan. The US was desperate to avoid an unpopular verdict in the country of one of its closest allies during the conflict in Iraq, where about 550 Japanese troops are based.
There is enormous public sympathy in Japan for the plight of Mr Jenkins, his Japanese wife, Hitomi Soga, and their two daughters.
Ms Soga was kidnapped as a teenager in 1978 by North Korean agents from her home on the Japan Sea coast. She subsequently married Mr Jenkins after she said they were "drawn together by mutual loneliness" in Pyongyang.
In October 2002 she returned with four other abductees to an ecstatic welcome in Tokyo, leaving her family behind in North Korea and starting a drama that has transfixed Japan since.
After much diplomatic haggling, Mr Jenkins finally left North Korea with daughters Belinda and Mika in July and was reunited with his wife in Indonesia, before being persuaded to return to Japan in September to confront his past.
In her testimony to yesterday's military court, Ms Soga, who has until now remained largely silent about her life in Pyongyang, pleaded for leniency, saying that Mr Jenkins had provided for his family despite their difficult life in the reclusive Stalinist state.