After a drunken pub battle, an incident with police and a keep in South Korean jail, Personal Second Class King was being taken to the airport in July to fly again to Texas.
However as an alternative of travelling to Fort Bliss for disciplinary hearings, King snuck away, joined a Demilitarised Zone sightseeing journey and slipped over the border.
King’s border crossing got here with relations between the 2 Koreas at considered one of their lowest factors ever, with diplomacy stalled and North Korean chief Kim Jong Un calling for elevated weapons improvement, together with tactical nuclear warheads.
Seoul and Washington have ramped up defence cooperation in response, staging joint navy workouts with superior stealth jets and US strategic belongings.
RARE DEFECTIONS
The 2 Koreas stay technically at warfare as a result of the 1950 to 1953 battle resulted in an armistice, not a treaty, and many of the border between them is closely fortified.
However the Joint Safety Space the place King made his escape, the frontier is marked solely by a low concrete divider and is comparatively simple to cross, regardless of the presence of troopers on either side.
Pyongyang has an extended historical past of detaining Individuals and utilizing them as bargaining chips in bilateral negotiations.
One of many final US residents to be detained by the North was pupil Otto Warmbier, who was held for a year-and-a-half earlier than being launched in a coma to the US. He died six days later.
Round half a dozen American troopers made rare defections to the North after the Korean Struggle and had been used for the nation’s propaganda.
In a single such case, US soldier Charles Robert Jenkins crossed into the North in 1965, drunk after 10 beers, whereas patrolling the DMZ in an try to keep away from dealing with fight obligation in Vietnam.
Though he rapidly regretted his defection, Jenkins was held for many years, educating English to North Korean troopers and showing in propaganda leaflets and movies.
He was finally allowed to depart in 2004 and subsequently spoke out concerning the dire circumstances of life within the North till he died in 2017.