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Jenkins' tale adds intriguing detail to the outside world's sketchy understanding of North Korean society. No other American who has spent so long a time or seen so much inside what may be the world's most despotic, secretive and brutal society has escaped to tell the tale. While a steady stream of Korean defectors, as well as escapees from its prison camps, has talked of the horrors of the Hermit Kingdom, Jenkins is the first to provide a detailed view of this little-known land from the perspective of an outsider who became intimately familiar with its perverse inner workings.
While unique, Jenkins' experience mirrored the bleak existence that North Koreans have lived through. Ordinary citizens are similarly terrorized and watched over by "leaders" directed by the ruling Workers' Party. Hunger and deprivation are the norm. Speaking in his barely intelligible rural Carolina drawl, Jenkins says North Korean society is "backwards." He seems, even now, like a man on the verge of collapse, his voice cracking as he recalls painful memories. He frequently breaks down in tears.
When Jenkins and the three other American defectors were living together, they barely got along. "It was uneasy," says Jenkins. "The North Koreans made it like that." Under 24-hour surveillance, the four managed a difficult coexistence. When one would commit an infraction--failing to memorize propaganda lessons, complaining about something, leaving the house without permission--their leader would get one of the other soldiers (usually the 6-ft. 4-in., 280-lb. Dresnok) to severely beat the offender. Jenkins soon concluded that feigning fealty was the only way to survive. "In North Korea, when you lie they think you are telling the truth," he says, "and when you tell the truth they think you are lying. You learn real quick to say no when you mean yes, and yes when you mean no."
The men shared the house for seven years, doing little apart from studying. Gradually, they began to despair. They took risks, Jenkins says, that they knew could lead to death. In his amused telling today, their escapades sound almost as if they could be ripped from the pages of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn--except that the punishment for getting caught would not be a few lashes with a belt from Aunt Sally but execution.
The Americans even coined a word for doing things without permission in this land of the unfree: "freedalisms." On one occasion, the four swam across a river to pilfer a bag of coal tar from a government construction site to repair their (illegal) fishing boat. "To steal something from the North Korean government is immediately punishable by death," Jenkins said during his court-martial. "I think we all secretly wished we would be caught." Another time, they stumbled upon an array of microphones in the attic of their house and blackmailed their leader (who feared he would suffer if his superiors learned that the bugging had been exposed) into taking one of them into town to buy wine. On yet another occasion, Parrish sneaked out of the house one night to go looking for a girl he had a crush on. But Jenkins, as a practical joke, had given him a bogus address, and Parrish wandered the streets aimlessly for hours. He ultimately got picked up in central Pyongyang by police, who suspected he was meeting a spy contact; the leader had to get him out of jail.