BEIJING _ Charles Robert Jenkins deserted the U.S. Army on a freezing night in January 1965. He pounded 10 beers to quiet his nerves, and abandoned his patrol unit along the border dividing South and North Korea _ a 160-mile-long, 2.5-mile-wide strip of mine-ridden no man's land.
He unloaded his M-16 rifle to show the enemy he meant no harm; he raised his knees high to avoid triggering tripwires. Several hours later, he crossed into North Korea.
He didn't leave for nearly 40 years.
Now, Jenkins _ 77 but looking much older, with a deep-lined face and distant expression _ lives a quiet life on Sado, a small, pastoral island in the Sea of Japan. He speaks in the thick Southern accent of his North Carolina childhood, and the stories he tells, 13 years after the end of his North Korean adventure, recall decades of solitude, deprivation and torture.
"In North Korea, I lived a dog's life," he said in a rare interview, as he drove his boxy Subaru through Sado Island's rice paddies and sleepy villages. "Ain't nobody live good in North Korea. Nothing to eat. No running water. No electricity. In the wintertime you freeze _ in my bedroom, the walls were covered in ice."
Jenkins works now as a greeter in Mano Park, a placid tourist attraction on the Japanese island, selling senbei, a type of rice cracker. Tourists see him and squeal with delight _ "Jenkins-san!" _ as he passively poses for photos.
But North Korea somehow feels as close as ever. The television news carries a constant drumbeat of stories: Pyongyang's increasingly advanced missile tests, and nuclear threats; the death of Otto Warmbier, a 22 year-old American college student, after 17 months in North Korean custody; the assassination of ruler Kim Jong Un's half brother in a Malaysian airport.
They all carry echoes of the one incontrovertible lesson he learned as a guest of the North Korean government for 40 years. "I don't put nothing past North Korea," Jenkins says. "North Korea could to do anything. North Korea don't care."
