Gobaek (To Tell the Truth)
By Charles Robert Jenkins with Jim Frederick
281 pages, Seoul: Mulpure Publishing, 2005 (in Korean)

In January 1965, few people were paying attention to the shadow war being waged on the Korean Peninsula. As the U.S. military campaign in Vietnam heated up, North Korea’s Kim Il Sung was attempting to reunify the two Koreas using unconventional warfare. His goal was to launch surprise attacks on U.S. and South Korean patrols and erode the boundaries of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), while sending agents across its porous defense lines to subvert the citizenry of the south. The Americans called it a “lowintensity conflict.” But American and South Korean soldiers were fighting and dying in counterinsurgency and antiinfiltration missions along the DMZ. The shadow war was just beginning.

For U.S. Army Sgt. Charles Robert Jenkins, a 24yearold North Carolina native stationed at one of the many small outposts on the edge of the DMZ, the choice was stark: Risk death in a counterinsurgency operation in East Asia, or risk death in the jungles of Vietnam, where he feared being sent after Korea. Cowardice crept in. The young squad leader felt less and less competent to lead his 8th Cavalry men on recon patrols. Jenkins wanted out. Having heard the story of an army deserter who had defected to East Germany, moved on to the Soviet Union, and was then repatriated back to the United States, Jenkins naively figured that he could model his desertion in the same way. He would simply walk to North Korea, which was then allied with the Soviets, and they would deport him home.

In the cold darkness on the night of Jan. 4, 1965, Jenkins chugged 10 cans of beer and led three other soldiers on his last patrol near Panmunjom.

Read the rest at Foreign Policy

Copyright © James Card.