ZAMA, Japan – Desertion is a crime like few others. Along with mutiny, it hits at the heart of military service, violating a fundamental code of honor. But as the U.S. Army prepares to court-martial Sgt. Charles Jenkins in one of its highest-profile desertion cases since Pvt. Eddie Slovik was executed in World War II, a little known fact is coming to light.
Serious though it may sound, desertion, especially in peacetime, rarely results in anything more than a dishonorable discharge.
Of the thousands of soldiers who bolt their units each year, only a small percentage are tried, let alone sent to prison. Jenkins, back in uniform nearly 40 years after allegedly defecting to communist North Korea, is accused not only of desertion but of aiding the enemy and urging others to join him. Yet a guilty verdict won’t necessarily mean a prison cell.
The maximum penalty for peacetime desertion is life in prison, while wartime desertion can be punished by death. But that hasn’t happened since Slovik was executed in January 1945 by a firing squad from his own unit in northeast France. Slovik was one of 70 servicemen executed during the war, but the only one shot for desertion – the others were executed for murder or rape.
Jenkins’ case presents a bit of a legal quandary. The Korean War ended in a truce, but not a formal peace, in 1953, 12 years before Jenkins allegedly left his patrol on the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone. Army officials say it’s up to the judge, Col. Denise Vowell, to decide whether death or life imprisonment applies.
There are indications Jenkins, whose court martial begins here on Wednesday, has worked out a pretrial agreement, most likely for no confinement in exchange for a guilty plea to at least one of the charges against him. He faces charges of desertion, plus two counts of soliciting other service members to desert, one of aiding the enemy and two of encouraging disloyalty.
But Jenkins has given no interviews since turning himself in, and has never publicly admitted guilt or explained how, or why, he ended up in North Korea to begin with.
“I think there’s room for lots of surprises ahead,” said Annette Eddie-Callagain, a former Air Force lawyer who now has a private practice on the southern Japan island of Okinawa. “I wouldn’t make any assumptions.”
Any prison time for the frail, 64-year-old Jenkins, restricted to the Army base in this Tokyo suburb since surrendering in September, would be unusual.
Lt. Col. John Amberg, spokesman for the U.S. Army in Japan, said 1,631 soldiers were put on desertion status Army-wide from October 200 through June this year. He did not know how many had been arrested, or what the average punishment was.
But a report compiled by the Army Research Institute in 2002 said an “overwhelming majority” of deserters are released with less-than-honorable discharges and never go through the full court-martial process. Of more than 12,000 soldiers who deserted between 1997 and 2001, it said, 94 percent were cashiered in this manner.
Length of time away isn’t always decisive in sentencing.
In January, the Air Force gave a bad conduct discharge to a 43-year-old senior airman who disappeared from Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas, in 1981, according to an Air Force Office of Special Investigations public affairs report. Though on the lam for 22 years – and though the punishment was meted out while U.S. soldiers were fighting and dying in Iraq – he was not sent to prison.
But in another high-profile case, National Guard Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia, who said he left his unit in Iraq to protest an “oil-driven” war, received one year in prison and a bad-conduct discharge in May for not returning to his Florida unit after a two-week furlough.
Jenkins, raised in poverty in Rich Square, N.C., joined the Army as a teenager and apparently liked it so much he had a pair of rifles tattooed on his arm. In November 1961, after his first tour of duty in Korea, he was given a Good Conduct Award for “exemplary behavior, efficiency and fidelity.”
But according to the Army, Jenkins, by then a sergeant, told the men in his armored-vehicle platoon one night “on or about Jan. 5, 1965” that he was going to check out a suspicious noise near the Demilitarized Zone.
He never came back.
Years later, his voice was broadcast across the DMZ from the North Korean side and he appeared as a villainous American in a propaganda movie before again vanishing behind the high walls of secrecy that guard North Korea’s communist regime. He also married.
Jenkins’ life changed dramatically two years ago, when a diplomatic thaw led to the release of five Japanese who had been abducted to North Korea to train spies in the Japanese language and culture.
One of the five was Hitomi Soga – Jenkins’ wife.
Soga was kidnapped in 1978 along with her mother, who remains unaccounted for. After two years, she began studying English with Jenkins, nearly 20 years her senior. They have two grown daughters, Mika and Brinda.
Aware he might face a court-martial, Jenkins stayed behind as his wife returned for an emotional homecoming in Japan in October 2002.
Following a plea by Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, Jenkins agreed to be flown to Jakarta, Indonesia, in July so the family could be reunited. Two weeks later, they were all whisked back to Tokyo, ostensibly so Jenkins could be treated for an abdominal disorder.
With his wife and daughters at his side, he turned himself in on Sept. 11.
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