Jerry Wayne Parrish

Common card · No. 205099

Jerry Wayne Parrish (March 10, 1944 – August 25, 1998), also known by his Korean name Kim Yu-il, was a United States Army corporal who was one of seven American soldiers to defect to North Korea, four of them during the 1960s, in the years after the Korean War. Parrish was born in Morganfield, Kentucky and was shipped to South Korea as a corporal in the U.S Army. He enlisted in the army at age 18 on September 10, 1962, and shipped to South Korea in February 1963. Following American soldiers Larry Allen Abshier and James Joseph Dresnoks' defections in 1962, Parrish crossed the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on December 6, 1963. Sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins, who in 1965 became the fourth to cross the border, wrote in his autobiography that Parrish's reasons for defecting were "personal, and [Parrish] didn't elaborate about them much except to say that if he ever went home, his father-in-law would kill him." Dresnok stated in his documentary that Parrish had received death threats from his stepfather...

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