The Reluctant Communist (24 page)

Obviously, my welfare was helped immeasurably by the Japanese government—it got me out of North Korea and to Japan safely—but in the end, even it had to step away from the American military justice system. The way I see it, the Japanese government got me all the way to the gates of Camp Zama, and for that I am forever grateful. But once I was there, I was on my own, with only Capt. Culp to help me. And after all was done, my legal fate was left to the prosecution, the defense, a judge, my commanding general, and no one else.

On September 11, a car came to pick me up at the hospital and drove me to Camp Zama. There, in front of a pack of TV cameras and reporters, I got out of the car, walked up to Lt. Col. Paul Nigara (the provost marshal of the U.S. Army in Japan), gave him my best salute, and said, “Sir, I am Sgt. Charles Robert Jenkins, and I am reporting for duty.” With that, I became, as far as I know, the longest-missing deserter ever to return to the U.S. Army. While awaiting trial, I was still an active-duty soldier, so the army put me to work. That first day they issued me uniforms, an ID, and a standard-issue sergeant’s family quarters, which was a nice, old, three-bedroom house on a shady hill on base. They gave me a haircut and made me a member of the Headquarters and Headquarters Company, United States Army Garrison, Japan. My day-to-day job was to process new people who came to the base. Led by company commander Capt. Dave Watson, all of the people in Headquarters Company were very nice to me. They made me feel at home beyond anything I could have expected. Not only did they teach me how to use the computer, and the phones, and whatnot, they went out of their way to show me that while I was accused of some very serious crimes, they were able to separate the man from the deed. Everybody at Camp Zama was also incredibly kind to my family, who were very frightened and on unfamiliar ground and appreciated every bit of the hospitality that was extended to them.

I could not believe how much the army had changed. The most striking thing was the level of familiarity between officers and enlisted men. In the 1960s, enlisted men and officers ate in different mess halls and used different latrines. More than that, however, if a soldier back then wanted to talk to an officer, he needed to get permission from his squad leader. These days, anybody can talk to anybody he wants. Back then, you got paid in cash. Now, your money is deposited in your bank account. After I reported for duty at Camp Zama, I opened the first bank account I ever had.

Although everybody at Camp Zama was as good to me and my family as I possibly could have asked for, I would not have gotten through this time without Capt. Culp. He quickly became the only person in the world besides my wife that I trusted 100 percent. As we worked on my case together in the hospital and during the month and a half I was at Camp Zama, I became convinced he was a very good lawyer. But he also became a very good friend of mine. Even though I had done a terrible thing as a soldier, it meant a lot to me that he did not judge me. Since he was stationed in Seoul, I know that being away from home for so long on my behalf was very hard on him and his wife and two small children, who got to see very little of him for nearly six months.

I think that is part of the reason he took so strongly to my family. Brinda, Mika, and my wife might not speak very much English, but they can understand it pretty well, and they appreciated his clowning around, trying to put everyone at ease. For example, one time when I was in the hospital, I had just gotten my blood pressure checked. My wife was about to leave so that Capt. Culp and I could begin more work on the case. She kissed me goodbye, and Capt. Culp called the nurse back in to retake my blood pressure to see if my wife’s affection had gotten my blood racing. Sure enough, the blood pressure had gone up.

Brinda and Mika quickly became crazy about Capt. Culp, too. When we first went to Camp Zama, he was with us when the girls got their first look at the PX. Even though the PX at Zama is pretty typical by Japanese or American department store standards, this was one of the first real stores they had ever seen. In Pyongyang, even the best stores are mostly empty, dingy, and dusty. Here, the shelves were sparkling and filled, overflowing with food, clothing, electronics, and cosmetics. More things than they knew were available in the world were right there in front of them. They just about lost their minds. “Give them some money, Charlie,” Capt. Culp demanded. I had not gotten the advance on my first month’s sergeant pay yet, so the only money I had in the world was what was left of the $2,000 the high cadre had given me the day before I left for Indonesia. And I am tight anyway, so I was going to give them a few dollars apiece. But Capt. Culp was having none of that. “C’mon, Charlie!” he said. “Give them some real money!” So I looked at him and them and peeled off a $50 bill for each of them. No doubt, it was the most money they had ever held in their lives. They squealed, snatched the bills, and were off, almost running through the aisles, looking for things to buy. “Look at that,” said Capt. Culp. “If the North Koreans knew that the money they had given you was undoing years of communist indoctrination in just a few minutes at a store on a U.S. Army base, I wonder what they would say?”

It wasn’t all about money, of course, but once we arrived in Japan, I would say it took only a couple of days before both Brinda and Mika were fully convinced that leaving North Korea was the best decision we had ever made. Sometimes these days, as a joke, I will say to Mika, “Maybe we should go back to North Korea after all. What do you think?” And her response is immediate: “You have a good time while you’re there, ’cause I ain’t going.”

Later, just before the court-martial, Capt. Culp had to go back to Seoul for a few days. Brinda and Mika became very upset when they heard the news. They were afraid that he wasn’t coming back. In order to convince them, he left his dress green uniform in the front closet of my house at Camp Zama as proof that he would return. Brinda was actually going to shine his shoes for him while he was gone, but I stopped her, saying I had told Capt. Culp and he was touched, but he said they were already shiny enough.

Getting my dress green uniform together for the trial proved to be a task, since there are no infantry units in Camp Zama. I had to borrow an infantry braid from someone on post, and Capt. Culp had to get some of the ribbons for my left breast pocket in South Korea. Since I knew that my pretrial agreement limited my maximum confinement to thirty days, I was not as scared walking into that courtroom on November 3 as I would have been otherwise, but I was still mighty nervous. The proceedings took a whole day. Military court differs from civilian court. In civilian court, you can plead guilty to pretty much any crime you want, no questions asked. But in military court, if you plead guilty, you still go through a process, called a providence inquiry, where the judge has to decide whether you are really guilty of the crimes you say you are. Then, at the end of the procedure, the judge (or it can be a jury, it depends) issues a sentence. At that time, the punishment included with the pretrial agreement is opened and compared to the judge’s sentence. The guilty soldier then gets the lesser of the two sentences. At the end of the day, after hearing me plead guilty to and explain my crimes, the judge sentenced me to six months in jail, but she also recommended to my commanding general, Maj. Gen. Elbert Perkins, that he throw out her sentence entirely for clemency’s sake. (Capt. Culp later told me that my judge was the chief trial judge of the U.S. Army, and she had flown in especially to hear this case. Her recommendation to suspend my sentence out of clemency was only the second time in her career that she had done this.) My commanding general denied her request, so that meant my thirty-day pretrial jail sentence went into effect.

People talk about the “light” sentence that I received, but I think the people who matter—the judge, the lawyers, the commanding general of Camp Zama—understood what many people always seem to forget when they say I got off easy. Forty years is a long time to be a deserter and to live in an enemy country—if you are there by choice. While I walked to North Korea by choice—a crime I confessed to and fully regret—I did not stay by choice. I was forced to stay there. I am thankful that the people who truly controlled my fate understood that one crucial fact: I made a mistake by deserting, but once I had crossed the DMZ, I was trapped in a country that is little more than a giant prison.

That night, after having dinner with my family and my company commander, Capt. Watson, and 1st Sgt. Eugene Moses at my home on Camp Zama, a helicopter picked me up and took me to the brig at nearby Yokosuka Naval Base. I was released five days early, for good behavior.

10 | Homecomings

A few days after my release from jail, my wife, daughters, and I departed for what I hope will be the final stop in my life of strange travels: my wife’s hometown of Mano on Sado Island.

For many years, when we were stuck in North Korea, Hitomi and I would ease our homesickness and loneliness by telling each other stories about our homes and families for hours on end. We would describe every little detail: the shops we went to, the places we hung out at with our friends, what we used to have for dinner. But as I listened to her tell of the high green mountains, the blue ocean waters, and the flat rice paddies of Sado, I never dreamed I would actually lay eyes on them. And now, not only was I here, but it was my new home, too. After an all-day journey, we arrived at the ferry port on December 8, 2004, to great fanfare and media attention. Hitomi had been living on Sado for the twenty-one months we were separated, of course, and even Brinda and Mika had visited while I was at Camp Zama and in the brig, so I was the only one of the family for whom the place was all new.

The island is as beautiful as my wife told me, and the people are just as friendly. I moved into the small, two-bedroom house on a quiet street that Hitomi had already been living in. One of the first things I did upon my arrival was go to the hospital and meet my father-in-law. He was very sick and was expected to die in a matter of months. Through a translator, I told him I was very happy to finally have the opportunity to meet him, and I said I was sorry I couldn’t have asked him for his daughter’s hand the proper way. He told me that Hitomi had told him a lot about me over the past year and three-quarters and that he approved of the marriage and was happy to have me as a son-in-law. Thereafter, Hitomi and I would visit every other day or so until he passed away in February.

Soon after arriving, I walked around our nearby streets with my wife and met all our neighbors. I also got to know the mayor of Sado very well. He has taken a special interest in our family and has done everything he can to make sure we are fitting in as well as possible. I was also introduced to Keigo Honma, although everyone calls him by his nickname, Kakuhon-san. He speaks excellent English and volunteered to be on call to help me whenever I needed to take care of routine things that can be unexpectedly difficult for a foreigner, such as opening a bank account, applying for a residency card, or going to the hospital. Since then, he has also become one of my best friends, and I don’t know what I would do without him.

Once I had settled in, my wife and I turned our attention to our next biggest hurdle: traveling to the United States to see my mother and the rest of my family in North Carolina. Getting the trip underway took a bit longer than I expected. First, there was some paperwork to take care of with the army. Then, my father-in-law died, and my wife and I decided it was important to observe the traditional mourning period of forty-nine days. At the same time, however, my father-in-law’s death only emphasized to us how fleeting life is and how urgent it was to rush to the United States while my mother, who is ninety-one years old, was still alive.

Then there was the matter of my passport. While I had made my peace with the U.S. Army justice system, the U.S. State Department, which decides who gets a passport, still needed to be satisfied that I had not committed any “expatriating acts” or anything that would make me ineligible for a passport. Usually, things like becoming the citizen of an enemy country, serving in the military of a foreign country, or working for the government of a foreign country are reasons enough to throw an American’s citizenship and passport eligibility into doubt. Since I had already publicly declared in my court-martial that I had both been a North Korean citizen and government employee while teaching English (although almost every job in North Korea is a government job), the embassy told me that I had to come in for a face-to-face meeting.

I was very worried that I was not going to be given a passport, but the man at the embassy in Tokyo explained to me that the State Department’s rule of thumb was “to look more at intentions than actions.” He explained that if I did the things I did because I feared for the safety and well-being of myself and my family, and if I never actually desired to relinquish my U.S. citizenship, then I was probably still in good standing with the U.S. government. That’s when I knew I would be okay on this front: No matter what I did in North Korea, I never, ever intended to renounce my U.S. citizenship. The man at the embassy then gave me a written affidavit to fill out, asking me for more details about my history, which took a few hours.

While we were waiting for the passport to come through, I also had to figure out how we were going to fund the trip. I am well aware that there are many people in Japan who resent everything that the Japanese government has done for me. (Some even begrudge the assistance the government has provided to my wife.) And I know that there are some who see me as a freeloader. That is why it has always been very important for me to find a long-term means of support for myself and my family. I have no intention of being a burden on the Japanese people. That is part of the reason it was essential to me to fund 100 percent of this trip out of my own pocket. Fortunately, the contract for the Japanese edition of this book was coming together at the same time as I was planning for the trip, so I was able to bring my daughters and wife to the United States to meet their family without Japanese taxpayers’ money.