19 July—The Pentagon announced yesterday that an American soldier, Private Second Class Travis King, presumably not a career soldier or a Beetle Bailey wannabe, decided to flee to North Korea “wilfully and without authorization,” as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin put it.

Twenty-three-year-old PV2 King, evidently of somewhat choleric disposition, had served a couple of months in the slammer and been fined $4,000 for his violent offenses. And he was facing further disciplinary action, for which he was being sent—escorted, as the Army puts it—back to the States. King was reportedly on a civilian orientation tour of the allegedly demilitarized Joint Security Area—buffer zone—at Panmunjom between South (the good) Korea and North (the bad) Korea.

If Travis King had been a bad boy on observation and was in fact to be shipped stateside for disciplinary reasons, what the hell was he doing on an orientation tour—in a pretty sensitive area, no less? Even given the stupid things the U.S. Army does, that just doesn’t make sense.

Since King wasn’t in shackles, let alone custody, it’s pretty safe to assume he hadn’t committed any heinous offenses, like murder, rape, or not saluting a shavetail. So why would he have bolted over to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), one of the most despicable and inhospitable places on earth? And why would the great escape—if that’s indeed what it was—have been executed as it was?

From what I’ve been able to infer from cursory reading of several sources, it doesn’t appear to have been a spur-of-the-moment defection.

Could PV2 King have been recruited to infiltrate the DPRK and spy for the CIA, after it came up with the ever-so-clever assault-detention-and-fight ruse? You never know. That’s what the CIA’s supposed to be all about, after all. If not on a CIA assignment, what the hell could the kid have been thinking?

Travis’s mama, Claudine Gates, says her son “had to be out of his mind.” Considering things back home, however, starting at the bottom of the swamp with Joe Biden and Donald Trump, then sinking even lower into the bottomless depths of political depravity and straddling party lines, maybe PV2 Travis King actually knew what he was doing . . .