CAMP ZAMA, Japan – Four decades after he vanished from his Army unit, a frail, tearful, 64-year-old American soldier pleaded guilty yesterday to desertion, saying he wanted to avoid dangerous duty on the Korean Peninsula and in Vietnam.

Sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins was given a 30-day sentence and a dishonorable discharge, and immediately began serving his sentence at an American naval detention center near Tokyo.

The plea, which came during a court-martial at this Army camp outside Tokyo, was part of a plea bargain with American military officials to win Jenkins a lesser sentence.

The maximum sentence in his case could have been life in prison.

The North Carolina native lived in communist North Korea for 39 years after he fled his post on the Korea Peninsula.

“Ma’am, I am in fact guilty,” Jenkins told the judge, Colonel Denise Vowell. He also pleaded guilty to aiding the enemy by teaching English to military cadets in the 1980s.

However he denied that he advocated the overthrow of America in propaganda broadcasts, and pleaded innocent to charges of making disloyal statements. Colonel Vowell dropped those accusations.

The American turned himself into American military authorities on September 11, two months after he left Pyongyang and came to Japan for medical treatment. Tokyo called for leniency in his case so he could live in Japan with his Japanese wife, Hitomi Soga, and their two daughters.