월북한 미군 1. 조셉 화이트 (Joseph White)

1. Joseph White (조셉 화이트, 1961- 1985)

미주리 주 세인트 루이스 출신. 이 사람은 가장 늦게 월북한 미군이다. 1982년 8월 28일 탈영, 월북했다. 그는 비무장지대 통문의 열쇄를 쏴서 파괴하고 북으로 넘어갔다. (이 무렵에도 판문점 부근은 미군들이 철책선에서 주둔했었다.) 그가 북한군의 영접을 받는 것을 동료 미군들은 보았다. 월북 뒤 그는 북한의 방송에 나와서 불안한 표정으로 미군의 타락과 부패등에 대해서 맹비난했다.

 

그러고 그의 행방에 대한 아무런 정보가 없었는데 1983년 그의 어머니는 그가 북한에서 행복하게 살고 있고 영어 선생으로 활동하고 있다는 그의 편지를 받았다. 1985년 11월 5일 어머니는 북한 정부로부터 그가 월북후 청천강에서 수영을 즐기다가 익사했는데 시체는 발견 못했다는 편지를 받았다.

 

이에 자세한 죽음의 설명을 요구하는 편지를 보냈지만 북한 정부로부터 아무런 답장이 없었다. 젠킨스는 그가 월북 뒤 북한 TV에서 기자 회견을 하는 것을 보았을 뿐 만나 본 일은 없다고 자기 자서전에서 밝혔다. 그러나 그 뒤에 이미 월북한 네 명의 미군 중 한 명과 같이 살도록 주선이 되었으나 실행이 안 되어서 의아하게 생각이 되었었다. 그러나 젠킨스가 북한 정부 관리로 부터 화이트는 간질이 있었고 자주 발작을 해 독신으로 살도록 놔두었다는 말을 들었다.

[펌] What Happened to Joseph White? 

The story of the last American soldier to defect to North Korea.

Written by Greg Bailey

A U.S. Army captain confers with Republic of Korea soldiers at Guard Post Ouellette in April 2008.

The early morning hours of August 28, 1982, were characterized by the usual mixture of boredom and tension along the boundaries of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the no man’s land separating North and South Korea. Twenty-year-old Private First Class (PFC) Joseph T. White peered into the darkness as the North Korean soldiers across the DMZ looked back. White was on duty at Guard Post Ouellette, but his mind was elsewhere. He complained to his squad leader, Sgt. Howard Todd, about being denied the opportunity to visit his South Korean girlfriend, who happened to be in the hospital. Sgt. Todd advised White to keep cool, that he might receive a pass in a week. Sgt. Todd left his position soon afterwards and so did White, ostensibly to get a blanket.

A few minutes later, PFC David Chapman, White’s roommate, saw someone signaling with a red-lensed flashlight near a locked gate. Chapman screamed out a challenge and White identified himself. “White, what are you doing down there?” Chapman yelled. A shot rang out and Chapman reacted by diving into nearby sandbags. “What the hell are you doing down there?” Chapman repeated. White replied that his M16 accidentally discharged. Chapman stood up and ran towards the gate—first hearing and then seeing White running down the hill towards North Korea.

“I am coming. Help me. Help me, North Korea,” White shouted in elementary Korean. A guard hit the post’s alert button, and the stunned squad looked on as White carefully picked his way across the heavily mined DMZ. The unit’s chaplain, a Catholic priest, shouted at White, pleading with him to return. Shortly after dawn the chaplain watched helplessly as six or eight North Korean soldiers grabbed White and manhandled him into a bunker and out of sight.

American authorities demanded to interview White but the North Koreans refused. The army searched White’s possessions and found an Instamatic camera with undeveloped pictures of American defenses, radar tech manuals, copies of low level codes, Korean language lesson books, military and civilian clothing, and a large collection of North Korean propaganda leaflets.

In early September the North Koreans released a videotape of White reading a statement. “Nobody instigated me to come over to North Korea. I sought political refuge not by passing emotion, but by a deep conviction. While working in the Demilitarized Zone I came to know that there is a way leading to a truly wonderful life. I cast my eye on North Korea.”  In stilted, unnatural English, White attacked what he called the “corruptness, criminality, immorality, weakness and hedonism” of America.

The words struck hard in White’s middle class neighborhood in south St. Louis, an expanse of small, immaculate houses—the homes of brewery and auto factory workers. White’s parents, Norval and Kathleen, maintained that their son had been captured. They clung to every piece of evidence supporting their belief, including reports that Joseph’s arms were pinned behind his back as he was led into the bunker, and that their “nearly blind” son was not wearing his glasses when he picked his way across the DMZ.

His mother did not stop crying for two days before taking up the fight for Joseph. “I’d rather cook, clean the house and play with the grandchildren than be the center of attention, but I have to fight to save my son,” she pronounced. The Whites did their best to cope with the glare of the media spotlight, inviting journalists into their home and leaving aluminum lawn chairs in the front yard for camera crews. They displayed photos of Joseph in uniform; hanging from a crucifix was a scroll with the soldier’s creed that their son had sent from Korea.

Kathleen could not believe that her son had defected. “He was a very patriotic, conservative young man. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t smoke pot. He often said young people were too soft. He was a conservative—a Reagan[ite]. The things Reagan was saying were exactly the words in his own mind.”

But Joseph was different from the beginning. None of his four brothers and sisters showed an interest in politics, but Joseph volunteered for the Reagan campaign even before he could vote. He was shy, with no enemies but few close friends. He read military history voraciously, spending hours alone with his books. He attended parochial schools and was a devout Catholic. He was also a Boy Scout and volunteered at a muscular dystrophy camp.

In 1979 he attended a YMCA model legislature and introduced a ‘bill’ requiring 11 months of reserve military service for all 18-year-old males. (In his model state, the governor would have the power to hire out the state militia to private businesses and individuals.) The following year he introduced another bill in the model legislature that called for Missouri to withdraw from the union because of a long list of grievances dating back to the Civil War, and for a list of “present abuses and injustices” of the federal government, including the charge that the “U.S. government is no longer supreme in the world, leaving it vulnerable to enemies.”

An indifferent student and a worse athlete, White was rejected by West Point. He intended to go directly into the Army but was persuaded by his parents to attend now-defunct Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri. The commandant remembered him as an introvert. “He wasn’t outgoing but if you talked to him you could have an intelligent conversation.” Ultimately, he told his parents he would rather be a “dog soldier” than an officer and dropped out of Kemper to go on active duty.

Stationed in South Korea, White explored the local villages and began to learn the Korean language. He liked the food and sent packages of it back to St. Louis. He particularly liked the local women. “The women over here are beautifully alluring,” White wrote a friend. “It’s true the K[orean] women are generally small breasted but after Korea I’ll probably never like big breasted women…. The biggest problem is communication since frequently their English leaves something to be desired.”

In the same letter White recounted how he “almost got killed twice” on patrol. He wrote that his squad encountered a North Korean soldier signaling with a flashlight, apparently attempting to infiltrate South Korean lines. The enemy soldier fled without firing but White was frightened. “If he had chosen to fight, I would have been shot before I could have fired. By the time we reacted he had vanished.”

But for the most part White was bored, complaining about the lack of entertainment and being limited to two beers a day while on leave. He had a Korean girlfriend—a rare relationship for him. He spoke of defections from the North to the South but gave little or no indication that he might defect himself.

By mid-September the Army closed its investigation and concluded that White had defected of his own free will. His parents painfully accepted this conclusion. In January 1983, leaflets in White’s handwriting began appearing along the DMZ. “Dear old fellow friends,” White wrote. “I have been leading a contented life under the warm care of the DPRK [Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea]. I have become fond of life in the capital, seeing the sights, and visiting the institutions of culture. My seeking asylum is very right conduct.”

The best the Army could come up with as an official explanation for White’s defection was his resentment at not being allowed to visit his girlfriend, a rationale absurd on its face since White knew he would never see her again if he crossed the DMZ. Fellow soldiers speculated that White simply went crazy.

A better explanation might be found in White’s personality. All of his life he had sought the comfort of authority and indicated his desire to subjugate his will to a higher purpose. The North Korea he entered was not unlike the state militia and right wing state he had advocated for Missouri. His devotion to the Catholic Church was amplified to the nth degree in the state worship of the so-called Great Leader Kim Il-sung. Like many extremists, White had little trouble switching the form his belief took, as long as it fulfilled his need to be controlled by a higher purpose. Like Lee Harvey Oswald before him and Timothy McVeigh after, White found a way station in the military before giving himself over to an even more authoritarian culture.

White’s parents were shocked when in February 1983 they received a letter from their son. He claimed he was happy and working as an English tutor. He asked for a dictionary and an almanac but said nothing about his defection. It was the only word the Whites ever received from him.

Finally, on November 5, 1985, on what would have been their son’s 24th birthday, the Whites received another letter from North Korea. The writer claimed that Joseph drowned in the Chongchon River during an outing with friends. The letter alleged that one of his new friends heroically tried to save him but both drowned and their bodies were never recovered.

It may be true, but it probably isn’t. Perhaps White found happiness in the rigid discipline and mandated worship of Kim Il-sung, at least for a time. Perhaps he happily began his days with supervised calisthenics, proudly wearing the portrait of the Great Leader on his shirt, spending an hour midday attending lectures, then after work attending several more hours of indoctrination before returning to a cinder block apartment decorated with pictures of the self-styled God. Or maybe he soon realized his decision was a mistake, and the North Koreans simply disposed of him after prodding him for information. Whatever happened to White is known only to the most repressive regime on the planet, and the truth may never be known to the outside world.

Greg Bailey is the St. Louis correspondent for The Economist, a freelance writer and a reconsidering attorney.

출처: http://failuremag.com/feature/article/what_happened_to_joseph_white/

[펌] LIFE MAGAZINE

WHAT MADE JOE JUMP ?

A MOTHER WEEPS FOR HER G.I. SON WHO DEFECTED TO NORTH KOREA

November 1982

Reporting: David Friend

At first the puzzled U.S. Army simply called him AWOL. Facts were scarce. Around two a.m., August 28, Pfc. Joseph White, 20, walked away from Guard Post Oullette on the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone, shot off the lock of a gate and disappeared into no-man's-land. Within the day, North Korean broadcasts were exulting that an American soldier had "requested political asylum." If true, it was the first U.S. defection to North Korea in 17 years, the fifth since the DMZ was established in 1953 dividing South Korea from the Communist North. The previous GIs were used briefly for propaganda and were never heard from again. Back in Joseph White's hometown of St. Louis, his father, Norval, 52, a painter on a General Motors assembly line, insisted that his son had been captured. His wife, Kathleen, said through her tears, "It just doesn't make any sense. Why would Joey want to leave his ice cream, his chocolate syrup, his money?" But by the end of the week, a videotape of the young soldier shattered his family's hopes. Speaking in the Pyongyang People's Cultural Palace, Pfc. White, still in uniform, condemned U.S. militarism and then led a chant in homage to North Korean dictator Kim Ilsung. Joe White was a strange defector to Communism. He had been the arch-conservative in a family of blue-collar Democrats, a cold warrior who, at 13, wrote to his senator to warn of the Communist menace. Turned down by West Point, Joe enrolled in Missouri's Kemper Military School and College, where he was regarded as a loner. A fair student but a poor athlete, he dropped out and enlisted in the Army after deciding Kemper was full of "losers." In letters home from Korea, samples of which appear on the following pages, White gave no hint that his political ideas were shifting. If anything, he seemed only more fanatical. "It was drummed into him," Norval White recalls, " Hey, buddy. When you cross that line, you're gone forever."

Pfc. Joe White's duty with the last 39,000 U.S. troops on the Asian mainland began last March after three months of basic training at Fort Benning, Ga. For a rigid anti-Communist deployment to the Cold War's iciest face-off was a dream come true, though reality sometimes got in the way. In his letters White commented regularly (and with something like personal shame) on the all too human shortcomings of the GIs in South Korea, the examples of poor discipline, the equipment failures. The Koreans themselves, he liked. 'The American stereotype would seem to say that these people must be unhappy," he wrote after describing overcrowded hovels. "But their smiles suggest contentment." From the big Army base at Howze in the southwest, White was rotated north near the DMZ in July--first to Warrior Base, then to Oullette. The DMZ Installations are the only permanent bases in the world where U.S. troops go out nightly on ambush patrol with live ammo and orders to kill on sight. White complained about privations of border life--the mosquitoes, the scarcity of showers--but not the psychological pressure. Other soldiers turned to drugs. White was a straight arrow whose worst vice was an occasional beer. Those who knew him say he did not wander into the DMZ stoned. To them, that seems as preposterous as the fact that he went at all. Border duty is grim and edgy, made no less weird by the propaganda (including sexual as well as political taunts) that both sides blast across no-man's-land by loudspeaker. The war of ideas is also conducted by leaflet, and in one letter home White mentioned with boyish exuberance that he planned to start collecting these odd testimonials to the joys of life under the Communist regime to the north.

208P-013-016 - North Koreans peer across the DMZ from a typical guard post.

TO A FRIEND

AUGUST 20

I almost got killed twice two patrols ago. First our route took us right past one of our own ambush sites. A firefight would have been all too easy. The second time we got misoriented in the dark. (In the Army you don't get lost, you get misoriented.)

208P-010-007 - Camouflage paint daubed on their faces a patrol lines up at Warrior Base, the rough tent city on the DMZ where White was quartered until three weeks prior to his defection.

208P-013-007 - Sgt. James Kirk does duty at Guard Post Oullette. The gate that White blasted open is visible at rear

TO HIS PARENTS

JULY 20

The loudspeakers broadcast propaganda all night long. It is eerie to lie in ambush with 196 rounds of live ammo in your magazine pouches and listen to the voice of a Communist woman which is quivering with hate--hate for the U.S. and for South Korea.

208P-010-011

208P-013-015 - South Koreans occupy an enemy tunnel under the DMZ. Below, allied officers overlook Chor Won Valley, likeliest route of mechanized attack from the north.

None of Pfc. White's ideas about Communism prepared him for the aggressiveness of the North Korean border troops--the propaganda, hair-trigger rifle fire and their relentless tunneling beneath the DMZ. A tape cassette that White mailed home in May refers to another revelation: the prevalence of defection. Speaking in a haunted voice he himself likens to that of Marlon Brando as the lunatic Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, White mentions defection six times in a 20-minute monologue: "In South Korean newspapers you read all the time of North Koreans who defect south," he comments. "But it's not all one-way traffic."

TO HIS PARENTS

(TAPE) MAY

Tension here is very real. Four North Koreans tried to defect, so the enemy fired at us for hours. Before anybody knew it, that could have been the start of another Korean war.

Joe White scorned fellow soldiers whose curiosity about Korea extended no further than watching M*A*S*H. He began to read up on both Koreas, marking references to Kim Il-Sung. (According to a former girlfriend, White had been previously obsessed by Hitler.) He even tried to learn Hongul, the Korean tongue. "Much more precise than English," he told his parents...His incentive was not strictly academic. White had become fascinated by Korean women. After being sent up to the DMZ, he complained about the lack of female companionship--except for those teasing voices over the loudspeakers and the lovelies pictured on propaganda leaflets. In bolting to the North, maybe White thought he would find a life regimented beyond his most anxious yearnings for order and discipline. Maybe he thought he would find the "perfect man's mate." Maybe he has. There's something more pathetic than treacherous in the last words American buddies heard from him. "I am coming," he cried out as he ran across the DMZ. "Help me." He did not say it in English. Joe White was trying out the Hongul dialect he had worked so hard to learn. 

208P-010-017 - Off-duty DMZ troops at Panmunjon tune in a M*A*S*H episode.

208P-010-003 - At an entertainment staged for US troops in Chunchon last March, Korean show girls await their cue.

TO HIS PARENTS

MAY

Korean women are perfect man's mates. I'm friends with several who are much more beautiful than any girlfriend I had in the States and that's for damn sure. Besides attractive, they're hard working, they live simply. They know how to treat their man.

END

[비밀해제 미정부관련문서] 

PFC Joseph White: Defected August 1982 -Reportedly Died in North Korea

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