Customer Reviews

The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea

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A much longer review of this book will be posted on CONELRAD.com in the coming days, but I wanted to urge everyone with an interest in the mysterious world of North Korea to buy this book immediately. It is an unprecedented opportunity to read an uncensored account of what life is like in the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea by an American who lived there for nearly forty years. This is not a boring academic text. It is a riveting and, at times, mind-bending tale of endurance that is almost impossible to put down.

I picked up the book out of curiosity and now am glad that I read it. Before reading the book, I thought of him as a strange man who defected to North Korea of all places, lived the good life as the token trophy, and now decided that he had had enough. I now feel more sympathy for his plight as he's revealed as a man whose momentary stupidity consigned him to forty years in hell. I was touched by his courtship of his wife, who was even more grievously wronged (at least he walked in with his two feet), and am glad to know that they are doing well in their new lives in Japan. A fascinating personal glimpse into the most isolated, brainwashed place in the world.

The Reluctant Communist is the harrowing tale of Charles Robert Jenkins' life in North Korea following his desertion from the US Army in 1965. The story is bookended with an exposition of his life before desertion and his ultimate escape in 2003 and new life in Japan.

On the book's cover, we see Jenkins staring out from the cover of the Reluctant Communist with a near-expressionless face that belies the gripping tale he tells inside. It's part biography, part confession, part travelogue, part political history, part prodigal son, and ALL thriller. The work brings to vivid life the struggle of the individual against a profoundly evil socialist state.

Jenkins teamed with Jim Frederick of Time to write the book. The co-author manages to keep himself in the background for most of the story, limiting himself to the Foreword and to organizing Jenkins' tale into a coherent whole. To his credit, Frederick's discipline helps to retain the plain talk of Jenkins and lend the story an authentic voice, while still moving the story forward at a nice clip.

Frederick, hailing from Time Magazine, stumbles once when he inserts gratuitous references to America's racist past in the passages leading up to the desertion. But, thankfully, this PC irrelevancy isn't enough to veer the story over the cliff, and is redeemed by everything that follows.

The book could have benefited from a few maps, photos, and/or sketches to personalize the story. Without doubt, there is atill an untold but related story of Japanese abductees. One hopes Frederick will tackle that next, since he glosses over this here. But, these are quibbles in an otherwise gripping yarn. Do not miss this book!

Charles Robert Jenkins is a man who is modestly interesting in spite of himself, although his is not a very appealing personality. He grew up in an impoverished family in North Carolina. Poorly educated, he joined the Army as a teenager and ultimately defected to North Korea, for reasons which, even now, he seems unable to really articulate. Unable to leave, he made a life for himself, a life which is a kind of testimony to the rigors of existence in North Korea. I say "kind of," since Jenkins and the other American deserters did not suffer nearly as much as ordinary North Koreans, especially during the "Arduous March" starvation period of the early nineties. An unreflective man, prone to drink, buffeted by events, he emerged from North Korea only because he was married to a Japanese abductee. Today, he evidently lives happily in his wife's hometown in Japan. You won't learn much about North Korean society from this slender book; Jenkins is not much of an observer. Or perhaps he is holding back. It is impossible to tell. In any case, his account of the narrow life he led adds only a small bit of detail to what's known about this closed society. A more interesting account of this same experience is the film "Crossing the Line," about Jenkins's fellow deserter, James Joseph Dresnok, who is still in North Korea.

In this fascinating and quick-paced book, Jenkins answers questions that have nagged many people for 39 years. Why did he cross over to North Korea? Did he work against US interests while in North Korea (including being an interpreter in the capture of the USS Pueblo)? Did he want to be that kind of a communist? Did he want to leave North Korea?

Along the way to learning the answers to the questions above, the reader gets a chilling glimpse inside the closed-off country that proves to be at least as backwards and brutal as we understand it to be. We learn about how he met Hitomi Soga, his wife, and the life they endured with their two daughters. Contrary to the accusations made by many scorned Americans, he wasn't living in the lap of luxury as a treasured guest of Kim Il-sung. He had it better than most North Koreans did, but it was far from a life any of us would want. These were the consequences suffered by a man of quite limited aptitude (why did the Army have somebody like him on the DMZ) who, by his own admission, made a cowardly decision for the wrong reasons.

I believe the Army's decision to give him a light one-month sentence in exchange for whatever information he had was appropriate. Jenkins says he was treated well, and his wife and daughters were even given dependent privileges until his discharge. I was happy to see the Army resolve this situation so honorably. Jenkins returned to the US to visit his family and now lives in his wife's hometown in Japan. Many aspects of his terrible mistake will always be with him, but I'm glad he has the opportunity to move on.

The "Reluctant Communist" was extremely interesting and enjoyable to read because of some of the personal knowledge this reader had with one of the defectors. Larry Allen Abshier was one of four US Army defectors who lived together with the author Charles Robert Jenkins in North Korea. Abshier left his US Army post in the spring of 1962, never to return to the United States. He died of an apparent heart attack in North Korea in 1983. Abshier and I were in the same company of the 1st Calvary Division although in different platoons. We were sent into the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea as infantry soldiers to perform duty on outposts, foot patrols and stakeouts. Our job was to report any North Korean activity or any incursion by the North Korean army into the South. My understanding was that Abshier had gotten into an argument with the mess sergeant and was reprimanded by the 1st sergeant and may have received some type of nonjudicial punishment for his insubordination.This apparently worked on his weak emotional mind and while at an outpost, left his rifle and headed into North Korea to what he may have perceived as being a better alternative to the rigors of the treatment he received from the US Army. A few days later, we soldiers were listening to the communist propaganda on the radio from Pyongyang the capital city of North Korea. Abshier reportedly told his captors that the US Army in South Korea was preparing to wage war with the North and were bringing equipment and weapons to the border in readiness to make an invasion into the North. The army was also running their military vehicles through the towns and villages and raping and plundering as they went. Wow! What a completely unbelievable piece of propaganda that was! The broadcast went on to state that Abshier was now in a better environment and would be receiving an education and training into the Communist North Korean culture. Reminds me of the brainwashing from the movie "The Manchurian Candidate". That was the last I heard from Larry Abshier until the publishing of this book. It was enlightening for me personally to now know the culmination of what took place and the continuity of the time from the defection to his death.

In the hierarchy of mistakes, there are the small ones, the big ones and the ones so monumental that it is difficult to make sense of them. Charles Robert Jenkins made the last type while stationed in South Korea on the Demilitarized Zone in the early 1960s. Looking at a potential court martial (amazingly, for acts he had not yet even committed!), he walked across the border into the hands of North Korea. He joined three other American servicemen who had crossed the line, of which only James Joseph Dresnok remains (and who is the subject of the excellent documentary Crossing the Line), the other two having died in North Korea.

Jenkins never intended to stay in North Korea. Other soldiers facing a court martial had crossed the line between West and East Germany, to be then transferred to Moscow and later transferred back to the United States. Yes, they were still court martialled, but the distance away from the scene of their dereliction took some of the sting out. But North Korea is different. It did not let Jenkins, or the other three deserters, go. Trying its best to use him for purposes such as starring in propaganda movies or teaching English at a spy college, Jenkins found himself a 40 year `guest' of the largest political prison on the planet.

Jenkins' descriptions of daily life in North Korea are exceptionally illuminating, casting a light into a place notorious for keeping the outside world in the dark. The most striking aspect is not the physical deprivations, fighting the bitter cold and hunger with meager resources. Instead, the truly chilling part of Jenkins' tale, the part that really takes us into Orwellian territory, is how much every intimate detail of his life was subject to state control. The authorities (or the "Organization" as Jenkins came to call them) monitored how much sex he had with his live-in cook with which they tried to pair him (not enough, as the two did not get along), would move him to a different house with only a few hours notice, would dictate what work he did, everything. THE RELUCTANT COMMUNIST, written in Jenkins' own style of speaking, is very absorbing.

The North Koreans eventually fixed him up with a wife, but it turned out years later to backfire on them. Jenkins' wife was one of the poor unfortunates kidnapped from Japan by North Korea to help with the North Korean spy program (another abductee was the subject of another excellent documentary, Abduction: the Megumi Yokota Story). When North Korea, amazingly, came clean (to some degree) about these abductions, diplomacy got Jenkins' wife, followed by Jenkins himself and their two daughters, out of NK and back to Japan. Jenkins is convinced that someone fumbled the ball and failed to realize that his wife was married to one of the American defectors, and that otherwise, her name would not have been included in the list of those NK admitted to taking.

Some might say that Jenkins was a coward for deserting in the first place. Maybe. But it took a lot of courage to go back and face the authorities, especially without knowing beforehand that his sentence would be a light thirty days in the brig, and also given that North Korea was feeding him worst-case scenarios of his life behind bars if he went to Japan. Jenkins did the right thing and for the right reason. Not only to keep his family together, but to prevent his daughters from being taken (not recruited - taken) for a spy program, knowing that, when that happened, he would likely never see them again. Jenkins took the chance at life-long imprisonment to give his daughters a better life, especially pressing as the oldest was starting to drink the ideological Kool-Aid.

THE RELUCTANT COMMUNIST is not about an especially heroic man. It is, though, about an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances who did the right thing in the end. It is readable, enjoyable, and, in its own perverse way, very entertaining.

It's true what they say that people remember their actions as being more honorable then they actually were, particularly when it involves something they did of which they are ashamed. That is pretty clear in this book as Charles Jenkins tries to make himself a misunderstood hero from the start. I am sure his actions weren't half as honorable as he remembers them. He rationalizes everything....why he wasn't smart enough for school (but still a "super" hero, right?), why his alchoholism wasn't his fault, why his desertion wasn't his fault (they should have known he was drunk). It's very off-putting from the beginning. He projects alot. I don't really understand the point of the accusation that the US Army fabricated a letter from him to his mother as evidence of his desertion when there was plenty of evidence. They didn't need to fabricate any. Isn't it more likely that a sympathetic notification person did not want to tell someone that their son left several letters to soldiers he barely knew before deserting to North Korea but not one for his mother? The rationale at the end of the book that he doesn't think that he deserves the poor opinions of him because a lot of people desert the military is ridiculous as well. I don't know if his sentences of forty years in North Korea and 25 days in jail were sufficient because I don't know how many people suffered as a result of the information he gave the North Koreans. But it's clear that he doesn't truly regret his decision, only that he suffered for it. And his confusion on why he isn't granted forgiveness by everyone just because he demands it just reinforces how ignorant he has always been. This book is worth it for the insight into North Korean life. Buy the print version because the Kindle doesn't show the pictures, which is lame since several other Kindle books have shown that this is possible.

Jenkins produces a fascinating glimpse into the day-to-day workings of the North Korean government, especially in terms of the lives of "average" citizens. He writes in an engaging, down-to-earth style that makes for fast reading while still answering all of the questions that the average reader would want to know about why an American soldier would cross the DMZ one day and what his life would be like as a result. It's an engrossing story that's very much worth your time.

The problem with Jenkins' version of events is accuracy, veracity. Jenkins has more than ample motive to fabricate. There can be little doubt that he was ready to say whatever needed in order to mitigate his sentence for desertion and get back to Japan. And the story worked. What is the truth? I don't know. To get another side of the story, see the film "Crossing the Line" available at Amazon or on Netflix (both as a DVD or Instant play). This film gives James Joseph Dresnok's (another deserter) version of what happened. Then you can decide.