Crossing the Line Reviews

Of all the strange stories that can be told about North Korea, few are as compelling at that of James Joseph Dresnok, a Private First Class with a U.S. Army unit who, in May 1962, defected to that most secretive of nations. Granted access to Dresnok, whose existence was denied in the west for years, and access to whom was impeded by Pyongyang, British filmmaker Daniel Gordon (who had been allowed to travel to North Korea to film the Mass Games for his documentary A STATE OF MIND) tells that unusual story exceedingly well. Born in 1941 only to be abandoned first by his alcoholic single mother, then later by his father and his father's new wife, James Joseph Dresnok was eventually raised by a stern Presbyterian preacher in a group home for wayward kids in rural Virginia. At the age of 17, Dresnok did what a lot of kids with no real family, education or options do: He joined the Army. To help erase the memories of his early childhood abandonment, Dresnok got married while on leave from basic training, only to return from his post in West Germany two years later to find that his wife had run off with another man. Deeply embittered at the betrayal -- and after he'd abstained from consorting with German prostitutes all those years! -- Dresnok re-enlisted. This time, however, he was stationed along the heavily mined, 150-mile long DMZ that separates North and South Korea, and where, as late as 1962, both countries kept hundreds of thousands of troops a the ready in a tense face-to-face that could at any moment explode into war. Dresnok was there to help maintain the peace, but he spent quite a bit of his downtime at the brothels of a nearby hamlet the soldiers dubbed "Last Chance Village." Then on August 15, 1962, after being threatened with court-martial for forging a pass so he could spend the night with his favorite hooker, 20-year-old Pfc Dresnok did the unthinkable: In the broad daylight and risking gunfire from both sides, Dresnok walked across the DMZ and into North Korea. He was nabbed at an outpost of the Korean Peoples Army and first treated as a POW: He was held in an interrogation unit where he told them everything he knew, which thankfully wasn't much. Within the next few years, however, Dresnok and three other U.S. Army defectors would be used as propaganda tools by the North in an effort to prove its superiority over the U.S.-backed South (Dresnok amplified voice could be heard from across the DMZ reading a script designed to lure even more defectors to the North). Unable to adjust to a different race and ideology, all four defectors would try to escape -- this time to the USSR -- but were turned back. Dresnok would eventually settle into a "restricted" life of armed guards, re-education, brief movie stardom (!) and a family of his own (quite possibly with a kidnapped Romanian woman) in the strangest country on earth. It's too easy to read Dresnok's search for a new life in the land of the Great Leader one poor, virtual orphan's life-long search for a strong father figure, but then again, Dresnok doesn't come across as a very complicated person. He's just an terribly embittered one, and even after 43 years under the loving care of the fatherly leader, he still wears those his deep resentments right on his sleeve: He clearly continues to harbor a grudge against his drunkard mother, neglectful father, unfaithful first wife, the Army and especially Charles Robert Jenkins, the fourth defector who was married to a kidnapped Japanese woman, and who embroiled Dresnok in a bizarre international contretemps in the early 1990s. And Dresnok himself is quick to assign blame for the defections of Private Larry Allen Abshier and Specialist Jerry Wayne Parrish, both of whom had also defected to North Korea in 1962, to "family problems." Dresnok is a thoughtful, emotional man with no discernable political point of view who chokes up when he recalls how the North Koreans always took care of him, even as untold hundreds of thousands of them starved to death during the famine of the so-called "Arduous March." So his story, told mostly with maximum dramatic relish by Dresnok himself (although filmmaker took pains to seek out veterans on both sides of the DMZ who remember Dresnok), raises an interesting question: How much does personal damage and psychological baggage play in the personal embrace of totalitarianism? Listening to Dresnok, who, with his slicked back hair, puffy face and uncertain smile, looks astonishingly like Kim-Il Sung himself, one would have to say quite a lot.