What We Know About the American Soldier Who Fled to North Korea
About 20 Americans have been detained by North Korea since the end of the 1950-1953 Korean War, including the U.S. soldier who on Tuesday walked across the border in the truce village set up to help forge the armistice. There has never been an easy way for Washington to win their return.
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00:26 Yeah, what I can confirm, and I would say up front that we're very early in this
00:32 event, and so there's a lot that we're still trying to learn.
00:38 But what we do know is that one of our service members who was on a tour,
00:43 willfully and without authorization, cross the military demarcation line.
00:49 We believe that he is in the BRK custody.
00:52 And so we're closely monitoring and investigating the situation.
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01:01 >> People were just taking photos and not really doing much.
01:05 And then I suddenly noticed that there was a guy dressed in black running very,
01:08 very fast, towards sort of in a curved line towards the North Korean border.
01:12 And at first I thought, what is going on?
01:17 This must be some kind of joke.
01:19 Maybe he has a friend who's filming it for TikTok.
01:22 And I just thought that was the stupidest thing on Earth.
01:25 And then he didn't stop.
01:27 And then at about that time, one of the American soldiers shouted, get him.
01:32 And the American and South Korean soldiers chased after him.
01:36 But he was going so fast and so close to the border by that point that
01:40 they couldn't, they didn't catch him.
01:42 I didn't know he was a soldier at the time, cuz he was wearing black jeans and
01:47 just a normal civilian t-shirt with a thing.
01:51 And then when they got everyone back on the bus,
01:55 they read out the list of attendees.
01:58 We'd had our passports checked a number of times by this point.
02:01 And that was the name that got called out and no one answered.
02:06 That was when I realized what his name was.
02:09 Everybody, when we first got told to run and get into Freedom House,
02:14 there were some people who I don't think had actually realized what was going on.
02:19 And I mean, I personally just ran really quickly.
02:22 And then when we got in the house, we were told to sort of line up and
02:25 then we were doing that.
02:27 And then they said actually just get on the bus.
02:29 So we did that.
02:30 And it all happened so quickly.
02:34 I think people were shocked and scared.
02:35 It wasn't until we got on the bus that everybody kind of looked around and
02:39 looked at each other and sort of said, what was that?
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