60 Minutes Report on Dresnok
by Richardson ~ January 28th, 2007. Filed under: Korean Culture, U.S. Military. 
Several interesting minutes of an interview with James “Joe” Dresnok was on 60 Minutes this evening. The story covered all the usual facts about Abshier, Parrish, and Jenkins (although no mention of Pvt. Roy Chung or PFC Joseph T. White from 1979 and 1980 respectively), how they were all high school dropouts and in trouble in the Army, etc.
Footage showed Dresnok in his apartment – or the apartment that was his for filming – which was of course pretty rough by any Western standard but probably a palace compared to what the average North Korean has to deal with. An overweight Dresnok was drinking Jack Daniels (on the ban list?) and chain smoking. He talked about how grateful he is to the North Korean government for feeding him while all those other starved to death. Makes the fat bastard even more disgusting. He’d married an Eastern European woman and they had a couple of sons. After she passed away he remarried the daughter of an African diplomat and Korean woman, and they also have a son.
What I found most interesting was Dresnok’s older son, now a teenager attending Pyongyang’s elite schools; he speaks English poorly and with a strong Korean accent and considers himself to be Korean. Even though he believes he’s Korean, he evidently doesn’t want to marry a Korean woman. No explanation was given for that, but it may be he prefers not to have his future children being outcasts. Just speculation on my part.
Definitely worth watching. (H/T Steve). Also see a related post at the Marmot’s.
January 28th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
This is a disfunctional man who has a disfunctional family who are in the spotlight because he deserted from the US army and the North Koreans hold him in the spotlight because he deserted. What a life.
January 29th, 2007 at 7:32 am
And all this time I thought the only chubby person in North Korea was KJI, seems like someone else has been pretty good off the hog (samgyepsal) in Pyongyang besides KJI.
January 29th, 2007 at 7:33 am
eating pretty*
July 12th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
[…] smoking and drinking. And he still intends to remain in Pyongyang until his dying day.” See the earlier post on Joe Dresnok. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and […]
December 4th, 2007 at 1:11 am
[edit by admin]
What is the point of having a website called “DRPK Studies” if the point is to call the guy a fat bastard rather than use him as a case study and figure out what attracted him to the life he chose? Didn’t he go to DPRK as a substitute for suicide? If life as an American soldier is so great, why did he do it? I get the impression reading this site that it’s just trying to counterbalance the propaganda brainwashing people on those speakers.
I don’t care about Dresnok. He doesn’t “infuriate” me as a traitor. Look at McCarthy. You can only scream and bitch “traitor” until you’re the only one standing in the circle.
December 4th, 2007 at 7:59 am
If you don’t care, why make any suggestions? Or even bother to comment?
I would think that the value of looking into Dresnok’s (including his family in North Korea) situation would be glaringly obvious, but I’ll dumb it down for you; it provides additional insight into how society functions in North Korea, outside defector accounts and official propaganda. If you still don’t get it, not much can be done about that.
While I get the gist of what you’re attempting to communicate in the first part of the first sentence above, as written neither of the sentences amount to much more than gibberish, e.g., “on those speakers” needs to be defined, and the last sentence is incomprehensible. If I allow you to comment here in the future, you’ll need to make a special effort to make sense.
This site doesn’t normally need to “counterbalance the propaganda” coming out of North Korea (though I may explain it at times), but does on occasion do so for DPRK-related propaganda coming out of South Korea and from Western apologists – as well as the occasional half-cocked commenter.
December 4th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
It’s interesting to see how the DPRK has chosen to embrace this man who is so clearly from the bottom of the barrel. If he hadn’t defected, he’d be in prison today. Guess he’s in a different kind of prison today.
With the bar set this low, it’s no wonder North Koreans have a low opinion of Americans.