SEOUL, South Korea — History is not exactly reassuring for Travis King, the American GI who bolted across the heavily guarded border into North Korea on Tuesday.
The Pentagon is scrambling to determine what led the U.S. private to defect, and the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has said nothing about the incident. Some clues to Pvt. King’s future may be gleaned from the experiences of U.S. deserters who defected to the isolated hard-line state from the 1960s into the 1980s.
South Korean reports state that Pvt. King was detained after assaulting a South Korean national and damaging a police car.
Pvt. King, in his early 20s, was supposed to return to Fort Bliss, Texas, to face disciplinary proceedings, but he never boarded his flight. Going AWOL at the airport, he resurfaced in civilian garb, joined a civilian tourist group at the Panmunjom border village and dashed into the village’s northern sector before U.S. and South Korean guards could stop him.
Retired U.S. officers told The Washington Times of their surprise that a soldier planned and took such a life-changing action to avoid a punishment unlikely to be sterner than dishonorable discharge. What might be even more unpredictable is the fate that awaits him in Mr. Kim’s hands.
Pvt. King’s case is unusual but not unique. Their stories are little-known footnotes of Cold War history, but six American GIs provide possible road maps to his future — though a COVID-19-era development could be a benchmark for a bloodier outcome.
Going north
From 1962 through 1982, five U.S. soldiers based in South Korea defected across the Demilitarized Zone into North Korea. In 1979, a Korean American GI disappeared from his West German post and reappeared months later in North Korea. By contrast, some 30,000 North Koreans are estimated to have made the perilous journey south to escape the poverty and repression of the Kim family regime.
All were enlisted men, and the highest ranking among them was a sergeant. Motives for the rare decision to defect to the North included imminent disciplinary proceedings, family issues back home, fear of deployment to Vietnam and simple drunken impulse.
In North Korea, they studied state propaganda and taught English. The five White defectors earned some local fame by playing foreign villains in domestic TV and film productions. Pvt. King is Black.
They were granted North Korean citizenship, homes and female companionship. Some met and married women from the tiny community of female foreigners.
Information gradually leaked to the fenced-out world that, one by one, they died of natural causes. Two of them who clashed personally and violently during their long sojourn in North Korea won surprising visibility in their silver years.
In 2004, Charles Jenkins, a former sergeant from North Carolina, became the only U.S. military defector to leave North Korea. His departure was a byproduct of warming ties, which would later cool, between Pyongyang and Tokyo.
His passport out of the country was Hitomi Soga, the woman he married in the communist state. In 1978, Ms. Soga was abducted by North Korean agents who had the bizarre mission of capturing Japanese citizens to teach language and culture at the North’s spy academies.
In Japan, Sgt. Jenkins was court-martialed and dishonorably discharged. He claimed U.S. intelligence officials intensely debriefed him during a brief sentence he served. He then settled with his wife on Sado, the quiet island where she grew up.
In retirement, he became a minor tourist attraction on Sado, wrote an autobiography and spoke to TV and print journalists.
He made clear that his defection was an impulsive error fueled by alcohol against a background of fear of deployment to Vietnam. He said his life in North Korea was difficult and frightening and he was under near-constant surveillance.
He and his colleagues sought to defect via the Soviet Embassy but were captured and beaten. Health care was basic. His U.S. Army tattoo was cut out of his arm without anesthesia, and he lost a testicle in a cancer procedure.
He visited his aged mother in the U.S. before his 2017 death in Japan at age 77.
Pvt. James “Joe” Dresnok, a big, tough-looking Virginian who defected in 1965 against the background of a marital breakup and imminent disciplinary proceedings, was the diametric opposite of the regretful and frail Jenkins, who accused him of bullying.
Mr. Dresnok spoke at length in a British documentary shot in North Korea, “Crossing the Line” (2007), narrated by actor Christian Slater.
In the film, he discussed his marriages to foreign women who were living in North Korea under what he said were mysterious circumstances. In front of the camera, he offered effusive gratitude to Mr. Kim for keeping him fed and alive during the lethal famines of the 1990s.
A keen drinker, smoker and fisherman, he said he could never be lured back to the West.
The former soldier lived in Pyongyang — in significant comfort by North Korean standards — until his death in 2016 at age 75. He is survived by two mixed-race sons, both loyal North Koreans.
‘They need to be taken out of the gene pool’
Steve Tharp, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who retired in South Korea after extensive experiences on the DMZ, has no sympathy for defectors.
“I grew up believing in Darwinism,” he said. “When a person makes a decision like that, they need to be taken out of the gene pool.”
He suggested three possible outcomes.
One would be for Pyongyang to accept Pvt. King and treat him like prior U.S. Army deserters for propaganda purposes. Another would be to label him “crazy,” undercutting any propaganda value, and allow U.S. negotiators to take him home. Another outcome would be starker.
“They could just kill him because of COVID,” Mr. Tharp said.
In 2020, a South Korean apparently sought to defect northward by jumping into the Yellow Sea. He was shot dead in the water from a North Korean patrol boat, and his body was burned. It was an apparent enforcement of the North’s brutal quarantine policies that appalled the world.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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