Not Jenkins. Since his U.S. Army court-martial, at which he was sentenced to 30 days in jail for abandoning his unit, he has published a memoir, "The Reluctant Communist," a book his wife didn't want him to write out of fear of North Korean reprisals.
Still part Southern good ol' boy, Jenkins likes fast cars and racing his motorcycle. He slaps his knee when he tells a joke.
But despite his five years of freedom, the Wal-Mart-style souvenir shop greeter remains a solitary figure, a modern-day man without a country. He's an accidental expat with few close friends who still grapples with the guilt and shame of abandoning his men and his nation so many years ago.
The fallout from being held more than half his life in a secretive, alien culture still hovers about him: He knows that some folks back in North Carolina, the place that's still part of his bones, dismiss him as a communist sympathizer. Yet in Japan, where he is accepted, even embraced, he often feels like a dime-store curiosity.
Life remains a dizzying cultural puzzle. He admits that he speaks better Korean than English. He uses Korean with his wife and daughters, who prefer to speak Japanese among themselves.
He likes Elvis Presley, a boyhood hero, but also listens to Michael Jackson, whose music he first discovered buying black-market cassettes in Pyongyang, which he pronounces "pinyan."
"You couldn't make up his life -- it's something out of an absurd film," said Jim Frederick, who co-wrote Jenkins' 2008 book. "It's the story of a stranger in a strange land.
"While everyone is nice to him, he's still an outsider, still a stranger. He's still not home, and he probably never will be."
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The moment he crossed the barbed-wire border into North Korea, Jenkins realized he'd made a terrible mistake.
His time in North Korea was part comedy, part horror. He says he and three other American deserters mocked their political minders, whom they nicknamed Whitey, the Fat Cadre and the Colonel in Glasses.
Jenkins also says he once had part of a U.S. military tattoo on his arm cut away -- without anesthesia.
In 1980, he was introduced to Soga and soon became protective of the slight woman 20 years his junior. They quickly married.
"I don't know what drove us together. On the face of it, we had very little in common," Jenkins wrote in his memoir. "I do know that we were very lonely in a world where we both were total outsiders. And it took us a very short time to realize that we both hated North Korea. That gave us a strong common bond."
