The Reluctant Communist by Charles Robert Jenkins

Author:Charles Robert Jenkins
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6 | Friends and Strangers

In mid-1981, we all had to go back to teaching at the school where we had taught before. We were still English instructors, but the school had changed. Newly reopened after shutting down hastily in the wake of the Panmunjom incident in 1976, it had become a four-year military college and its name had changed to Mi Dang-hi University. Cadets still graduated as lieutenants, but the school had been enlarged to enroll one thousand to fifteen hundred students and the curriculum expanded to include more subjects. It was now named after an anti-Japanese guerrilla fighter who was captured by the Japanese during World War II. The legendary story that made him a hero went like this: While a prisoner, he realized that he talked in his sleep and that he was inadvertently giving away secrets about the revolutionary movement. His solution: He bit off his own tongue. Every North Korean knows this story.

In addition to our teaching, the school’s administrators would frequently give us side work that would often keep us up until almost dawn. Even though the four of us now went for our teaching stints individually instead of in pairs, Dresnok and I had to collaborate on a military dictionary with more than forty thousand words in it, passing off the work to the other as we each left or returned. All the administrators who saw the English typewriter we were using that was part of the college’s office equipment would say proudly, “That came from the U.S.S. Pueblo.” We had worked on this dictionary during our first years of teaching in the 1970s, and the school still wasn’t finished with it. Another time, we wrote an interrogation handbook. It was times like this when I most felt bad about the harm that I could be doing to the United States by helping an enemy country. But on the other hand, I don’t know how much harm I was really doing. Mostly we just translated questions into English: “What is your name? What is your unit?” Other than that, we offered very little in the way of sophisticated interrogation advice or techniques, primarily because we didn’t know any to begin with. Here is the sort of stuff we would come up with: “If you capture a foreign soldier and there are no translators available, do not beat him up, thinking that that will magically get him to speak Korean. Ask him to write things down, and maybe you will be able to translate whatever information he offers later.”

One task that never made me feel like a traitor, though, was translating the soundtracks of Hollywood movies. We had a tape deck that had slow-motion forward and rewind, and we had to capture every word. I assume someone would create subtitles from the Korean scripts we would write. This was not as enjoyable an exercise as it might sound, however. There were no visuals—it was just the sound tape—and they would chop up the tapes into

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