This was in the news a few years ago, but the LA Times did an update Piece on Charles Robert Jenkins, an American soldier stationed along the DMZ in 1965, was afraid he was going to die in Vietnam so he drank 10 beers, crossed the DMZ, and defected to North Korea.
Take heart Threedonians… I don’t care what harpy or jackass you married or what manner of self-inflcited pain you’ve incurred… I can’t imagine any decision worse than defecting to North Korea. Who knew Beer Goggles applied to countries? I crossed the DMZ at 2 with a 10 and woke up at 10 in a 2.
With a weary smile, Jenkins poses for a frenzy of snapshots, awkwardly holding a box of specialty cookies. Everyone wants a piece of him, pressing in close to shake his hand and ask him to sign their souvenir snacks.
“One day I counted 300 pictures in the first hour alone,” Jenkins recalls in the easy cadence of his native North Carolina. “Then I just gave up counting.”
And so begins another day in the bizarre life of a man famous for “the stupidest decision of my life.”
In 1965, Jenkins was a U.S. Army sergeant assigned to the demilitarized zone that divides the Korean peninsula, a skinny 24-year-old who was terrified of being sent to what he considered a sure death in Vietnam.
One night, after guzzling 10 beers for courage, he abandoned his sense of duty and freedom as he knew it to stumble across the border into North Korea, a desperate midnight maneuver that led to four lost decades in communist captivity.
Jenkins quickly became the Pyongyang government’s most prized Cold War pawn. He starred in propaganda movies and memorized the inflated political tracts of “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung, enduring a life so dreary and deprived that “most days you wished you were dead.”
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That ain’t a very smart man der peeps.
What a sad, horrible waste of a life. He’d have had a better life if he’d gone to Nam and been killed there, if you catch my intent.
+JMJ+
Well, he walked into that–quite literally–but I can’t help but feel sorry for him. =( That is one sad life.
I don’t know, I think more than a few members of Congress need to follow his example.
The choices were as clear and the consequences as obvious as anything that could possibly be conceived. A slave to his cowardice, he became a slave to a tyrant. He chose his hell with eyes wide open and he got every bit of what he chose.
+JMJ+
Do you know what’s coming to mind? “Whosoever seeks to save his life shall lose it . . .”
Hi, I’m Charles Robert Jenkins and I am going to tell you why you should not drink alcohol . . .
Pretty much cause and effect. If he had made the decision AFTER the 10 beers, I could understand it better. Hollywood probably will make a movie from it, but spin it so bad it will look like the life of Riley.