Free The Reluctant Communist by Charles Robert Jenkins, Jim Frederick

University, right in the center of the city. The house was small, only a few rooms, with heavy paper covering concrete floors and a fireplace outside that heated the house from underneath—a typical Korean heating system. The walls were whitewashed clay or cement. They put me in one of the rooms, and a woman brought me food—more simple rice stew. About thirty minutes later, a colonel came in and gave me trousers and a white shirt and took my uniform away.
    I was in that house about ten or twelve days. I could not leave the room, except to use the toilet outside or the washbasin in an adjoining room. The lighting was naked overhead bulbs that I was not allowed to turn off, even when I was sleeping. Late that first week, however, they took me into town to get a haircut and a bath. During my time in that first house, two people in civilian clothes came and interrogated me every day from eight or nine in the morning until four or five in the afternoon. I don’t think they were all that qualified to do interrogations, and I again got the feeling that they were killing time until they figured out where they really wanted to put me. Maybe they knew already from the guys who questioned me earlier that I didn’t know anything useful about positions and placements of American forces. I hadn’t been on any field problems, for example, and I told them so. They did, however, want to know a lot about inspections. How often did we have them? How long did we prepare for them? How long did they take? What were officers looking for, and what got you penalized? I didn’t know if they were just looking for ways to improve their own drills or if they were planning on infiltrating one of our units by having a North Korean pose as one of the Republic of Korea Army troops who sometimes used to train with us. The interrogators then wanted to know a lot about my weapons, which was more understandable. How does the M-14’s automatic selector switch work? What is the blast radius of the hand grenades? Realizing that the answers to all of these questions had the potential to put American lives at risk, I did my best to answer them as incompetently as I could without arousing their suspicion.
    At the end of those ten or twelve days, the colonel reappeared and told me to get my things together quickly: I was moving in with three other U.S. servicemen who had walked across the DMZ. I knew who they were already. All along the South Korean side of the DMZ, these guys—Private First Class Larry Allen Abshier, Private James Joseph Dresnok, and Specialist Jerry Wayne Parrish—were notorious the way I assumed I now was. The colonel and I got into another jeep—I noticed that I was no longer being very heavily guarded, if at all (I guess they figured, “Where is he going to go?”)—and drove about ten minutes to a neighborhood called Saedong.
    We pulled up to a little brick house, and Dresnok and Parrish were waiting for me. Abshier wasn’t there. He was in the hospital for colitis and wouldn’t rejoin the house until the late summer. We all introduced ourselves and started talking. I was starved for anyone who could speak English, and they were also happy to have another person to break up the boredom. Just like the North Korean interrogators, they, too, were full of questions. The first thing they wanted to know was why I came over. They were all enlisted men who were in trouble with the army, and they couldn’t imagine why a sergeant who wasn’t already up for some sort of court-martial would cross the DMZ. I told them I didn’t want to go to Vietnam. Dresnok shook his head at that one and just said, “Well, you may have had one foot in the pot, but you just jumped in the fire.” We all got along okay that first night. We assumed (as we almost always did) that everything we said was being recorded, but they were so hungry for anything new in their lives that after I ran out of world events to tell them about and after trying to figure out