SEOUL — History is not exactly reassuring for Travis King, the American GI who bolted across the heavily guarded border into North Korea Tuesday.
The Pentagon was still scrambling to determine what led the U.S. private to defect and the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has said nothing about the incident. But some clues to Pvt. King’s future may be gleaned from the experiences of multiple U.S. deserters who defected to the isolated hardline state between the 1960s and 1980s.
Pvt. King is in his early 20s and South Korean reports state that he had recently been held in detention after assaulting a South Korean national and damaging a police car.
Set to return to Fort Bliss, Texas, to face disciplinary proceedings, he never boarded his flight. Going AWOL at the airport, he resurfaced in civilian garb, joined a civilian tourist group at the famed Panmunjom border village and dashed into the village’s northern sector before American and South Korean guards could stop him.
Retired U.S. officers told the Times of their surprise that a soldier planned and took such a life-changing action to avoid a punishment unlikely to be sterner than dishonorable discharge. What may be even more unpredictable is the fate that awaits him in Mr. Kim’s hands.
Pvt. King’s case is unusual — but not unique. Their stories are little-known footnotes of Cold War history, but six American GIs provide possible roadmaps for his future — though a COVID-19-era development could be a benchmark for a bloodier outcome.
Going north
Between 1962 and 1982, five U.S. soldiers based in South Korea defected across the DMZ into North Korea. And in 1979, a Korean-American GI disappeared from his West German post, reappearing months later in North Korea. (By contrast, some 30,000 North Koreans are estimated to have made the perilous journey south, seeking to escape the poverty and repression of the Kim family regime.)
All were enlisted men, the highest ranking of them a sergeant. Motives for the rare decision to defect to the North included imminent disciplinary proceedings, family issues back home, fear of deployment to Vietnam and simple drunken impulse.
In North Korea, they studied state propaganda and taught English. The five white defectors — Pvt. King is Black — even played foreign villains in domestic TV and film productions, earning some local fame.
They were granted North Korean citizenship, homes and female companionship. Some met and married wives from among the tiny community of female foreigners in the country.
Fenced off from the world, information gradually leaked out that, one by one, they had died of natural causes. However, two — who clashed personally and violently during their long sojourn in North Korea — won surprise visibility in their silver years.
In 2004, Charles Jenkins, a former sergeant from North Carolina, became the only one U.S. military defector to leave North Korea. His departure was a byproduct of warming ties — which would later cool — between Pyongyang and Tokyo.
His passport out of the country was the wife he married in the Communist state, Hitomi Soga. In 1978, Ms. Soga had been abducted by North Korean agents, who had the bizarre mission of capturing Japanese citizens to teach language and culture at the North’s spy academies.
In Japan after his release, Sgt. Jenkins was court-martialed, dishonorably discharged and served a brief sentence — during which he claimed he was intensely debriefed by U.S. intelligence officials. Then he settled with his wife on Sado, the quiet island where she had grown up.
In retirement, he became a minor tourist attraction on Sado, wrote an autobiography and spoke to both TV and print journalists.
He made clear that his defection — an impulse fueled by alcohol, against a background of fear of deployment to Vietnam — had been an error. His life in North Korea, where he was under near-constant surveillance, had been hard and frightening.
He and colleagues had sought to defect via the Soviet Embassy, but had been captured and beaten. Health care was basic: His US Army tattoo was cut out of his arm without anaesthetic, and he lost a testicle in a cancer procedure.
He was able to visit his aged mother in the U.S. before dying in Japan in 2017 at the age of 77.
Pvt. James “Joe” Dresnok, a big, tough-looking Virginian who defected in 1965 against the background of a marital breakup and imminent disciplinary proceedings, was the diametric opposite of the regretful and frail Jenkins, who accused him of bullying.
Mr. Dresnok spoke at length in a British documentary shot in North Korea, “Crossing the Line” (2007), that was narrated by actor Christian Slater.
In the film, he discussed his marriages to foreign women who were living in North Korea under what he admitted were mysterious circumstances. In front of the camera, he offered effusive gratitude to Mr. Kim for keeping him fed and alive during the lethal famines of the 1990s.
A keen drinker, smoker and fisherman, he said he could never be lured back to the West.
The ex-soldier continued living in Pyongyang - in significant comfort by North Korean standards - until his death in 2016 at the age of 75. He never left the country and is survived by two mixed-race sons, both loyal North Koreans.
‘They need to be taken out of the gene pool’
Steve Tharp, a U.S. army lieutenant colonel who retired in South Korea after extensive experiences on the DMZ, had no sympathy for defectors.
“I grew up believing in Darwinism,” he growled. “When a person makes a decision like that, they need to be taken out of the gene pool.”
He suggested three possible outcomes.
One would be for Pyongyang to accept Pvt. King and treat him like prior U.S. Army deserters for propaganda purposes. Another would be to label him “crazy” — undercutting any propaganda value — and allow U.S. negotiators to take him home. Another would be starker.
“They could just kill him, because of COVID,” Mr. Tharp said.
In 2020, amid the pandemic, a South Korean apparently sought to defect northward by jumping into the Yellow Sea. He was shot dead in the water from a North Korean patrol boat and his body was burned — an apparent enforcement of the North’s brutal quarantine policies that appalled the world.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.