Torture, brainwashing, American sergeant's extraordinary life in North Korean prisons

It was an inspired decision by alcohol, depression, and stupidity.

On the evening of January 4th, 1965, Charles Robert Yankees, as a U.S. Army sergeant, fell into the demilitarised area where he was arrested by military authorities in North Korea, reports The Independent”, the Periscope broadcast.

His plan has been to escape dangers from North Korean border guards to be sent to fight in Vietnam.

It was a mistake to hunt Yankees for the rest of his life, where he is now dead at 77.

He told people on the patrol that he was going alone to check something, disappeared under a hill, and was no longer seen by anyone for about 40 years.

In 2004, as 64-year-old Yankees reported in Japan to face a US military court and discover the terrible price he had paid for his folly.

Initially from North Carolina, Yankees had joined the 18 - year - old U.S. Army in 1958, never receiving a high school degree.

At the age of 24, he started drinking a lot and suffering from depression.

After he had defected, he reasoned that he could seek asylum at the embassy of the Soviet Union, paving the way for him to return to America from Communist Russians in an exchange of Cold War prisoners.

Yankees found himself effectively imprisoned in a single room with three other young, poor, educated people who had also deserted: Jerry Wayne Parrish, 19; Larry Ashier, 19; and James Dresnock, 21.

Yankees endured this existence with his fellow citizens for seven years. At times, stuck in such narrow isolation, Americans fought among themselves.

Yankees said that when North Koreans saw the US Army tattoo on his body, they had been stabbed and scissors without anesthesia.

The regime officials looked at him with smiles when he cried out in pain.

In an interview with the LA Times in August of this year, he discovered that on a single day doctors removed one of his testicles.

While millions of North Koreans were killed in the urine of the 1990s, the Yankees family received the rice, soap and clothing rations.

And then in 2002, it started order of events leading to Yankees leaving North Korea. After Kim Jong-il met with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in putian, Mrs. Soga (Janns' wife) and four others abducted were allowed to return home to Japan.

So far, all the indicators are that Yankees died, not in the hands of Communist killers, but by natural causes.. /Periscopi/