James Dresnok

He walked across one of the most dangerous borders in the world—and never came back.On August 15, 1962, 21-year-old U.S. Army soldier James Dresnok did something almost unimaginable. While his fellow soldiers were eating lunch, he walked across a minefield through the Korean Demilitarized Zone and entered North Korea.He had been facing a court-martial. His marriage had collapsed. His childhood had been marked by poverty, family separation, abandonment, and foster care. He later said he was searching for a "new life."Instead, he entered a world from which escape would prove extraordinarily difficult.Inside North Korea, Dresnok encountered three other American soldiers who had also defected. Together, they became an extraordinary and controversial group: former American servicemen living under the control of one of the world's most isolated states. They were subjected to political education, used in propaganda, taught Korean, and eventually appeared in North Korean films portraying Americans as enemies.But Dresnok's story did not end there.He learned to speak Korean. He built a career as an actor and English teacher. He married and raised children in Pyongyang. He became known to North Korean audiences as "Comrade Joe" and eventually described North Korea as his home.Decades later, British filmmakers were granted extraordinary access to him, allowing the outside world to finally see the man behind one of the Cold War's strangest defections.Why did James Dresnok cross the DMZ?What happened to him after he entered North Korea?Did he truly find the new life he was seeking?And how did an American teenager from Virginia become a permanent resident, actor, husband, and father in Pyongyang?James Dresnok follows his extraordinary journey from a troubled childhood in Virginia, through the U.S. Army and the tense Korean DMZ, into decades of life inside North Korea—and finally to his death in Pyongyang in 2016.This is more than the story of a Cold War defector. It is a story about identity, loneliness, freedom, belonging, choice, propaganda, family, and the astonishing consequences of a single decision.Discover the remarkable life of the American who crossed the DMZ—and made North Korea his home.