AFTER nearly 40 years of living as a wanted man in North Korea, Charles Jenkins was yesterday found guilty by a US court martial in Japan of desertion and aiding the enemy.

In line with his sentence, which was arrived at by pre-trial plea bargaining, the 64-year-old sergeant received a dishonourable discharge and will spend 30 days in a confinement cell at a naval base near Tokyo. By Christmas he will be free to live on the Japanese island of Sado with his wife and two children.

Jenkins’s day in court was charged with emotion as he tearfully described his reasons for deserting, the drunken night on which it happened, and his life in Pyongyang, the capital. He was found guilty on the count of aiding the enemy by teaching North Koreans English. “You don’t say no to North Korea. You say one thing bad about Kim Il Sung and you dig your own hole, because you’re gone,” he said.

Jenkins said that he fled to North Korea in 1965 because he feared for his life during daily patrols along the Demilitarised Zone — the tense border between the two Koreas — and being transferred to fight in Vietnam.

The trial followed months of drama after Jenkins gave himself up and left Pyongyang with his children to be reunited with his wife in Jakarta. He then spent a month in hospital in Tokyo and returned to active military duty as an E5-class sergeant at Camp Zama in September.

Since then, he has been back in uniform and working as an assistant to the US Army Garrison Japan Headquarters. After missing out on four decades of technological advances, he was given a crash course in word processing so that he could help with office filing.

The political stakes between Tokyo and Washington have been raised with every twist of Jenkins’s strange Cold War journey. The US, under pressure to set an example while thousands of its Armed Forces are in Iraq, insisted that Jenkins be dealt with like any other deserter and undergo the full rigours of a court martial.

But in Japan there was a huge wave of public sympathy for Jenkins’s wife, Hitomi Soga, who was abducted by North Korea as a teenager in 1978 and returned to her country just two years ago. She added her testimony to yesterday’s proceedings, saying: “My husband and I did not like North Korea. Now I only wish we would get our family’s small happiness to become bigger and bigger.”

The couple met and married in Pyongyang in 1980 and the Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, has consistently pushed to achieve the happy ending that the family’s numerous supporters wanted.

The majority of Japanese wanted to see Jenkins given the freedom to live with his wife and two children, Mika and Brinda, in a home he has never seen. The lush fishing island of Sado was historically the home of exiled intellectuals and banished emperors. Hitomi’s new home is only a few miles from where she was abducted.

Choking back tears, Jenkins explained to the court how he met his wife: “Our mutual hate for North Korea brought us together and kept us together for 24 years.”

Jenkins was charged with defecting to the communist North while serving on the South Korean side of the Demilitarised Zone between the two countries in 1965. Until yesterday he had said nothing about the night he disappeared — the US Army has always maintained that he was on an armoured vehicle patrol one January night when he told his platoon that he was off to investigate a suspicious noise. He left alone, and never came back.

Wiping away tears, Jenkins yesterday described the scene. “It was Christmas time. It was also cold and dark. I started to drink alcohol. I never had drunk so much alcohol,” he said. He left his men and, using a compass, walked towards North Korea, holding a rifle with a white T-shirt tied around it. He said that he had planned to go to Russia and turn himself in to the US Embassy. “I didn’t know that North Korea was going to keep me.”

The court martial came as Japan was preparing for a summit with North Korea over the fate of other Japanese abductees, of whom it is feared there could be dozens more.

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