Army deserter Charles Jenkins apologized when he returned to NC in 2005

Editor’s note: Charles Jenkins, a soldier and North Carolina native who deserted to North Korea in 1965, died Monday. In 2005, when Jenkins returned to his hometown, The News & Observer offered extensive coverage. Here is one of the stories we wrote then.

For the first time on U.S. soil, Charles Robert Jenkins apologized Monday for deserting the Army, a decision that led to four decades of life in North Korea.

At a midmorning news conference as he and his family prepared to leave North Carolina, Jenkins, 65, answered questions about the animosity of American veterans who think he betrayed his country.

Asked whether he was sorry about deserting, Jenkins said: “Of course I am. I let my soldiers down. I let the U.S. Army down. I let the government down, and I made it very difficult for my family in the United States to live.”

He also said he braced himself for the anger of veterans and other Americans before he, his wife and two daughters traveled from Japan to North Carolina on June 14 for a weeklong reunion with his mother, other family members and boyhood friends.

Jenkins’ return to the United States inflamed the emotions of many former servicemen who say he betrayed his country, although no one directly confronted Jenkins during his stay. Others adopted a more forgiving tone, condemning his actions but expressing approval about his mother seeing him again.

“I knew before arriving that I’d been tried and convicted by public opinion,” Jenkins said while standing on the walkway of his sister’s house with his wife, Hitomi Soga, at his side. “I’m sure the people feel that way about me, but if they knew all the things I know about the case, I think they’d have a different opinion of me.”

In the predawn darkness of July 5, 1965, Jenkins, then a 24-year-old sergeant with the U.S. Army’s 1st Cavalry Division, left the squad he was leading on patrol in the dangerous Demilitarized Zone and walked into North Korea. He has previously said he deserted to avoid combat in Vietnam.

North Korean agents were never able to break him, said Jenkins, who was given citizenship in the isolated communist dictatorship in 1972.

“I’m going to put it like this: They tried to brainwash me for 39 years and six months,” he said. “... As soon as I got one foot out of North Korea, I was through. I was never brainwashed. That much I can promise you.”

Jenkins also had sharp words for Kim Jong Il, the leader of North Korea.

“He is an evil man,” Jenkins said. “He only believes in one thing: his own personal luxury life.”

While in North Korea, Jenkins appeared in propaganda films and taught English at a school that included spies and military cadets, though he never made it past the seventh grade growing up in the Northampton County farming community of Rich Square, about 25 miles southeast of Weldon.

Jenkins resurfaced in 2002 when his wife, who had been kidnapped from Japan in 1978, returned to her home country. Jenkins reunited with Soga last year in Japan, where he was court-martialed for desertion and aiding the enemy, and served 25 days in a U.S. military jail. During the course of that trial, Jenkins apologized for his actions. The couple married in 1980 and have two daughters who were born in North Korea.

While the American focus is on Jenkins, the focus in Japan is on his wife. She was one of as many as 60 Japanese citizens who may have been abducted by North Korea between 1977 and 1983, according to family support groups in Japan. The North Korean government acknowledges abducting 13 Japanese citizens but has never admitted abducting Soga’s mother, Miyoshi. The Japanese government pegs the number of abductees at 16.

Soga believes her mother is still alive, and she called for more attention – in both the United States and Japan – to the plight of Japanese abductees she said are still living in North Korea.

“There are still people in North Korea who were abducted, and I want more people from Japan and America to pay attention and help solve this problem,” Soga said through an interpreter.

In giving Jenkins a passport last month to travel to North Carolina, U.S. Embassy officials in Japan found that he was forced to accept North Korean citizenship out of fear for his safety and, as a result, hadn’t relinquished his American citizenship, said Jim Frederick, the Time magazine writer who is helping Jenkins with his autobiography.

Jenkins didn’t defect to North Korea and become a communist convert, Frederick said. He was a depressed and fearful soldier who didn’t want to go to war and just wanted to go home. Before teaching English and stepping up to a life of relative comfort by North Korea’s deprived standards, he endured years in an indoctrination camp and was frequently beaten.

“He’s a guy who made a grievous mistake,” Frederick said.

Jenkins and his family spent a week visiting his ailing mother, Pattie Jenkins Casper, 91, and other family members. He also took his wife and daughters to Rich Square to place fresh flowers on his father’s grave.

When answering questions about reuniting with his mother, Jenkins became choked with emotion.

“It’s very difficult to express, to put into words, how I feel,” he said. “I didn’t feel I would ever see her again.”

The family will start the return to Japan early today to resume life in his wife’s hometown on Sado Island, an ancient place of exile. Jenkins said he has no plans to live in the United States.

“I’m homesick for Japan – arigato,” he said with a deep bow and the Japanese word for thanks.

This story was originally published December 12, 2017 at 10:25 AM with the headline "Army deserter Charles Jenkins apologized when he returned to NC in 2005."