The Reluctant Communist

In January of 1965, twenty-four-year-old U.S. Army sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins abandoned his post in South Korea, walked across the DMZ, and surrendered to communist North Korean soldiers standing sentry along the world's most heavily militarized border. While both the United States and North Korea would insist that Jenkins had defected for political reasons, the truth, as we learn in this riveting autobiography, was more mundane: he was scared, drunk, and homesick, and he believed his action would get him back to the States where he'd face a short jail sentence. Instead he found himself in another sort of prison, where for forty years he suffered under one of the most brutal and repressive regimes the world has known. This fast-paced, harrowing tale, told plainly and simply by Jenkins (with journalist Jim Frederick), takes the reader behind the North Korean curtain and, episode by episode, reveals the inner workings of its isolated society. Jenkins mounted numerous failed escape attempts, was indoctrinated against his will into North Korea's communist cadre system, and endured hunger, cold, and isolation. His loneliness was relieved in 1980 by his marriage to Hitomi Soga, a young Japanese woman whom the North Koreans had abducted as part of a wider campaign to teach Japanese to future spies. Their life together and as parents of two daughters, and their improbable journey to freedom, which began in 2002, brings Jenkins's story to a close. His four decades in the world's least known, least visited, and least understood land profoundly changed the man and now offer the reader a powerful testament to the human spirit.