Originally published at: American soldier pretends to be a tourist before escaping into North Korea | Boing Boing
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But it wasn’t long before King suddenly took off, laughing out loud as he ran between buildings
An interesting strategy, but it seems to have paid off
The witness said military personnel reacted within seconds to the man’s actions, but at first, there was confusion.
“I thought it was a bad joke at first,” one witness said.
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So…facing disciplinary action and he decided his best option was to seek asylum and spill some of whatever limited state secrets he knows to the NK authorities?
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Im just guessing here but Ill bet he’ll regret that move.
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I doubt it will work out the way he wants. Even if he has any secrets to sell
Edit I owe @iquitos46 a coke. But the gif thing isn’t working. You’ll just have to imagine it
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Historically most American defectors to North Korea eventually moved back to the US, but not all of them. Who knows what’s up with this guy.
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or he’s not well. the army can do that to people.
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If he was already a suspected spy, this might sort of make sense. But if he’s eventually returned to the US, I imagine whatever trouble he was running from was just made many times worse.
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Maybe he just wanted to catch a Laibach concert the next time they come through?
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I got a chuckle out of his North Korean propaganda film name - Arthur Cockstud.
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Phase One of Operation Mockingbird complete.
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Laibach does NOT disappoint!
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Private 2nd class is the second lowest rank, IIRC.
The biggest military secret he’ll be privy to is who knows the Netflix password.
He also wasn’t being disciplined for spying:
Two U.S. officials said the soldier detained was Private 2nd Class Travis King, who had just been released from a South Korean prison where he’d been held on assault charges and was facing additional military disciplinary actions in the United States.
So he was some idiot who beat up someone else and now thinks he’s going to have it easy in the most tightly controlled dictatorship in the world? Best wishes.
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The US Army isn’t exactly known for being selective in terms of recruits, he may have been unwell before he joined up, too. Either way, I’d bet he’s not going to have a fun time.
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I’m sort of surprised Pvt. King didn’t get shot. It seems even the North Korean army is less trigger-happy than any number of US city police forces.
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Thanks, I’m using it to wash down the popcorn while watching this dopey drama
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Certainly Charles Jenkins did.
Charles Robert Jenkins - Wikipedia
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That link somehow led me to this doc, which sounds intriguing:
https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/movies/crossing-the-line
In 1962, James Joseph Dresnok, an American soldier stationed on South Korea’s side of the Demilitarized Zone, sneaked away from guard duty to visit a woman. Threatened with court-martial, he strolled through a minefield and defected to North Korea. In 2004, the filmmaker Daniel Gordon interviewed Dresnok and his new family there, and got an astonishing story. An abandoned child, a self-proclaimed “illiterate,” and a cuckolded husband, the young sad sack Dresnok became a North Korean celebrity—thanks, in large part, to a twenty-part film directed by Kim Jong Il, in which Dresnok plays an evil American called Arthur, the name by which North Korean strangers greet him on the street. (Dresnok died there, in 2016.) The vertiginous play of ideology and identity and the sheer strangeness of Dresnok’s experience (as well as that of three other American defectors from the sixties) make this film absorbing; the glimpses of life in North Korea make it important. Released in 2006.
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