Feelings mixed in Army deserter’s hometown

Even after Jenkins began appearing in North Korean anti-American propaganda films, Cooke could not fully accept that his friend had deserted his country.

"I was always hoping, 'Well, maybe they're holding a gun to his head off camera and making him do this stuff,'" says Cooke, now retired and living in Raleigh.

Then, late last year, they learned the truth from Jenkins' own mouth: He defected because he was afraid of being sent to Vietnam.

Jenkins says that he learned soon after his defection that he had made a mistake, and that he even tried to escape in 1966. He has told a tale of deprivation, isolation and forced labor.

In 1980, Jenkins married Hitomi Soga, a Japanese woman kidnapped by the North Koreans and forced to teach her language to the communist country's citizens. The couple had two daughters.

Largely forgotten over the years, Jenkins' story resurfaced in 2002, when Soga and other abducted Japanese were allowed to return home. The family was reunited in Japan last July.

A guilty plea
Last September, after a politically charged debate over what should be done with this Cold War orphan, Jenkins surrendered himself with a salute at a U.S. Army base in Japan. He pleaded guilty to desertion and aiding the enemy, and was sentenced to 30 days in a military jail.

For some in Rich Square, the government's handling of Jenkins' case is the most painful part of the saga.

"Thirty days in jail? That's ridiculous," says Claudine's Restaurant customer Steve Pruden, swallowing hard as if to keep down his lunch of chicken salad and hush puppies. "I don't want him here."

Pumping gas at the Red Apple convenient store down the street, Air Force veteran Tom Ferguson wonders what kind of message Jenkins' punishment sends to the troops fighting now in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"I was afraid of being sent to Vietnam, too, but I didn't desert," he says. "I could've gone just as easily."

But Gerald Smith, a distant cousin of Jenkins' who was drafted into the Army in 1966 and served two years, says what's past is past.

"I'm sure he's seen quite a few days in those 40 years he's said to himself, `I made the wrong step,'" says Smith, clad in a POW-MIA hat topped with an American flag pin. "I think he should be able to live out the rest of his days in peace and enjoy his life."

As far as Cooke is concerned, his old playmate has punished himself far worse than any military tribunal could have.

"I feel sad for him," he says. "He's kind of like a man without a country."

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