US soldier who bolted to North Korea pleads guilty to desertion

A U.S. Army soldier who ran across a border into North Korea from the South pleaded guilty to five charges including desertion and disobeying an officer, receiving a sentence of confinement for a year, his lawyer said in a statement.

Travis King entered the plea at a military court in Texas and nine other charges against him were dismissed, lawyer Franklin Rosenblatt said in a statement Friday. Since King had served almost a year in pretrial confinement and demonstrated good behavior, he was set free, according to the lawyer.

“He has accepted responsibility during today’s court martial — but make no mistake, the negative public perception and the ongoing consequences of his actions, coupled with the confinement he’s endured, represents an ongoing punishment Travis King will endure for the rest of his life,” Rosenblatt said in a statement posted on the X social media platform.

He also received a reduction in rank, a forfeiture of pay and a dishonorable discharge, the lawyer said. King, a cavalry scout from Wisconsin who’d been in the Army since January 2021, dashed across the border within the Demilitarized Zone on July 18 last year.

Leading up to the incident, he’d been jailed for almost two months in South Korea for assault and was set to fly to Texas, where he faced expulsion from the military. Instead of boarding his plane, he left the airport and joined a civilian tour to the Joint Security Area in the Panmunjom truce village that straddles the border, where he broke away from the group and sprinted to the North Korean side.

The village is the only place on the peninsula where military personnel from the U.S. and North Korea regularly can stand face-to-face on their respective side of the border — a concrete slab about as tall as a cigarette lighter. A person on the tour said King gave a loud laugh and ran between some buildings that straddle the border.

Washington does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea. In addition, all Western diplomats in North Korea had left the country because of the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving the U.S. with few partners on the ground.

King was expelled about two months later and flown back to the U.S.

No concessions were given to North Korea in order to secure King’s release, according to a U.S. official. His release likely indicated that Pyongyang didn’t see much value in keeping him.

North Korea’s state media said King crossed into its territory because “he harbored ill feeling against inhuman maltreatment and racial discrimination within the U.S. Army.”

The most similar incident to the King case occurred almost 60 years ago when then-Army Sgt. Charles Jenkins said he drank several beers and fled his post in 1965 to cross into North Korea so he wouldn’t have to serve in the Vietnam War. He remained in North Korea for about 40 years. According to Jenkins’ 2017 obituary in The New York Times, he realized he had made a terrible mistake soon after he made the crossing.