Free The Reluctant Communist by Charles Robert Jenkins, Jim Frederick Page A

how many people we knew in common, I stayed up all night telling them every single joke I could remember.
    The next Saturday, one of the North Koreans in charge walked me to the hospital to meet Abshier. We talked for about thirty minutes, and I’ll never forget that one of the first things Abshier asked me was if I had any money, because they had a little shop in the hospital where he wanted to buy some things. I told him I didn’t have any money, which was the truth. Abshier would wind up becoming my closest friend of the three, but I came away from that first meeting shaking my head at what a strange, simple, and disconnected man he was.
    I didn’t know it at the time, but those three men would, for better and worse, be permanent fixtures of my entire time in North Korea. I got to know them all better than I have known just about anybody else in my life. All four of us were similar in a lot of ways. We were all young, dumb soldiers from poor backgrounds who wouldn’t have had anything if it weren’t for the army, but then we threw that away too by running away from varying degrees of real or imagined trouble rather than confronting our problems head-on. If there was an odd man out, though, it was me. I was slightly older; I was a noncommissioned officer while they were enlisted men; and I had a pretty good military record while the other three were pretty much total fuck-ups as soldiers. The way they described it, Abshier and Dresnok were running from the law. They were each up for a serious court-martial before they crossed. Parrish’s reasons were more personal, and he didn’t elaborate about them much except to say that if he ever went home, his father-in-law would kill him. The three of them, also like me, walked across the DMZ without really thinking about the huge consequences of what they were doing and without understanding what North Korea was really like. None of them intended to stay in North Korea, and none of them were communist sympathizers. All of them assumed that they would be able to get out one way or another, and they experienced a rude shock when it dawned on them that they were trapped, forever, in North Korea. All of them quickly grew to hate the country and would have left in a second if they could have.
    Over the ensuing decades, sometimes we were the closest of friends, and sometimes we were the bitterest of enemies. Sometimes we could count on each other for support against the insanity of North Korea, while at other times the insanity itself would encourage us to turn against each other. At first we were housemates, struggling just to stay alive and sane during frequent periods of cold, hunger, and despair. And decades later, when we all had started families of our own, we formed a strange, insular little community of foreigners in the world’s most strange, insular, and foreign society. What a sorry-ass little foursome we were when I stop to think about it.
    That Saedong house was the first of many places I lived in North Korea over the next forty years. We only stayed there for about six months. It was a simple brick house with two bedrooms. Whichever government official was watching us took one bedroom. We Americans shared the other bedroom, which was only about six mats big (or about one hundred square feet) and had three desks crammed into it. We slept on the floor any way we could manage, and it was a tight fit. Other than that, there was a room for the cook, a kitchen, and a dining room with a table and chairs that we were not allowed to use. (We ate our meals in our bedroom or outside if the weather was nice.) The dining room sometimes housed extra military officers whenever they showed up. The toilet was outside, and there was only cold running water in the house, but the running water rarely worked, so usually we had to fetch water from the well, too. The whole house was surrounded by a six-and-a-half-foot-high wood fence, and there was a guard stationed in a crow’s nest atop