In a series of vivid letters to Bucher while he was in Bremerton, Clark told of furious storms, dangerous icing on his superstructure, and Russian patrol boats coming at him with guns manned and signal flags warning: HEAVE TO OR I WILL FIRE. On Clark’s first trip, to Vladivostok, a Soviet destroyer tailgated him at night, beaming a searchlight into the Banner’s pilothouse and making Clark feel like he was “on a freeway in a go-cart with a Greyhound bus roaring up” from behind. For several nights in a row, a second destroyer steaming at 30 knots slashed past him with just 50 yards to spare. But, like Bishop, the pipe-smoking Clark had a finely calibrated sense of danger, always wriggling out of bad situations before they spun out of control.
A favorite trick of Clark’s was to act as if he didn’t understand a communist captain’s signal flags. During the summer of 1967, the Banner encountered several Chinese patrol boats in the East China Sea. Though they weren’t communicating with standard international shapes, the Chinese obviously wanted Clark to stop.
“They were flying all kinds of signals that we had reason to believe meant it was going to be serious,” remembered his former executive officer, Dick Fredlund. “They kept signaling us and we kept signaling back, ‘We don’t know what you’re saying’; ‘Would you please repeat that?’; ‘Isn’t it a nice day?’ That kind of stuff.” Clark kept it up until he was safely away from the Chinese.
After the Banner’s pre-Christmas arrival in Yokosuka, Bucher pumped Clark for more details of his experiences. Clark had tape-recorded some of the confrontations, and Bucher listened to the tension-filled audio in the Banner skipper’s stateroom. Bucher was particularly impressed by one episode in which both of the Banner’s main engines suddenly quit, leaving the ferret drifting helplessly as Chinese boats circled. A Navy destroyer 400 miles away started toward the Banner, and U.S. jets were alerted in case Clark came under attack. But his engineers managed to get the diesels going again, and the spy ship slipped away.
Interestingly, while the Chinese and Russians always sent out combat ships in an effort to intimidate Clark, the North Koreans hadn’t reacted on the two occasions when the Banner transited their coast.
Clark’s briefings made Bucher think harassment was just part of the game. It’d be nerve-racking but no worse than that. The Pueblo captain was more concerned by Clark’s accounts of erratic radio contact with his home base. Communication nulls caused by atmospheric disturbances were all too common in the Sea of Japan. It had once taken the Banner more than 24 hours to lock on an open circuit—a delay that could spell disaster in an emergency.
Bucher’s preoccupation with his upcoming mission, however, soon gave way to Yuletide merrymaking.
On Christmas Day he and his crew threw a party for some Japanese orphans, complete with cake, ice cream, and Donald Duck cartoons. Quartermaster Charles Law, a burly 26-year-old who’d emerged as a leader among the enlisted men, played Santa Claus to perfection.
A few days later, Bucher organized a spirited “wetting down” party at the Yokosuka officers’ club to celebrate his promotion to full commander, which had come through several months earlier. He invited his men, their wives or girlfriends, officers from every sub in port, and a host of others to join him at the club, gaily decorated for the season in red, green, and gold. With typical flair, Bucher seeded the floor with 300 balloons, forcing guests to weave and trip hilariously among them. The grinning skipper wore yellow trousers, a candy-striped sport coat over a red vest, a bow tie, and a straw boater. A button on his lapel read, “POETS,” which stood for “Piss on Everything, Tomorrow’s Saturday.”
Expertly holding a martini glass and a cigarette in one hand, Bucher lined up his five officers by the piano and led them in vigorous song:
“Here’s to the Pueblo, she sure is a swell ship,
Here’s to the Pueblo, she sure is a peach.
Boom-yakle-yakle; boom-yakle-yakle; boom-yakle-yakle . . .”
Lieutenant Steve Harris did a crazy dance amid the balloons, popping several with a cigar. Even Murphy seemed to enjoy himself. Watching the whole scene, Schumacher, himself recently promoted to lieutenant junior grade, marveled at his boss’s bottomless appetite for life.
—
As he got to know him better, Schumacher began to think the skipper’s hunger for human contact was rooted in his childhood, a period of his life so bleak it could have been conjured by Charles Dickens.
Born in 1927 in Pocatello, Idaho, he was adopted as an infant by Austin and Mary Bucher, who ran a local restaurant. Two years later, Mary died of uterine cancer and Austin, a Great War veteran and heavy drinker, went to prison for bootlegging. The toddler lived for a time with his grandparents on a small farm outside town, but they lost their land in the Depression. In 1933, they packed young Lloyd (he hadn’t yet acquired his nickname), two other relatives, and their suitcases into a creaky sedan and headed for the promised land of California.
The clan settled in Long Beach, where the boy caught his first sight of what would become his life’s passion, the Pacific Ocean. Bucher’s grandparents got jobs managing motor-court apartments; his grandfather tried to supplement their meager income by selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. The old couple had brought a supply of wheat from their farm, and they and the boy often boiled it for breakfast and dinner. Eventually Bucher’s grandfather fell ill and quit his sales job, and his grandmother decided they could no longer afford to raise Lloyd. At age seven, he was put aboard a train by himself and sent back to his adoptive father in Idaho.
By then paroled, Austin Bucher had lost his restaurant and moved into a shack by the Snake River with half a dozen other hard-drinking vagrants. The men played endless card games, brought in women for sex, and rustled sheep from nearby farms. They taught Lloyd card tricks, but weren’t at all happy about having a kid in their midst. At night, the boy often slept in a firewood bin outside the shack without benefit of blankets. He wasn’t enrolled in school and spent much of his time running around with a gang of other vagabond children.
After several months, his dad was again imprisoned and the shack’s remaining denizens evicted Lloyd. At a time when he should’ve been attending second grade, he had neither parents nor a home. To survive, he fished in the Snake and foraged in restaurant garbage cans. On cold nights he’d find a back alley and crawl into a flimsy shelter made of cardboard boxes. Sympathetic cops sometimes bought him a meal or took him to the town jail so he at least had a warm bed.
Soon he was arrested for trying to steal fishhooks from a five-and-dime store. He wound up in a Mormon orphanage in Boise, where other kids teased him mercilessly for being a “cat licker”—a Catholic. Yearning for his grandmother and the smell of salt water in Long Beach, he ran away but was quickly nabbed. At the behest of a well-to-do Catholic woman on the orphanage’s board, he was sent in 1938 to a Catholic children’s home in northern Idaho.
Bucher felt safer and happier there than he ever had in his life. For three years he thrived at the wilderness mission school run by the Sisters of St. Joseph. He helped milk the mission’s cows and shuck its corn. He devoured the adventure novels of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rafael Sabatini, author of such stirring maritime classics as Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk.
One day Bucher read an article about the movie Boys Town, starring Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney. It told of the famous Omaha, Nebraska, home for abandoned and abused boys founded by a lanky Irish priest, Edward J. Flanagan. Besides being a bookworm, Bucher also was an aspiring athlete, and Boys Town boasted an excellent football team. The boy wrote to Father Flanagan, pleading for admittance. By the summer of 1941 he was on a train for Omaha.
Then 14, Bucher dove into the “City of Little Men” with the gusto and ebullience that were becoming his trademarks. He sang in the Boys Town choir and served as captain of the school’s cadet corps, organized after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He did well in subjects he liked—math, science,
and geography—and not so well in those he didn’t, such as grammar and Latin. He made friends easily, as he was to do throughout his life. He read everything he got his hands on and began to envision a career in the Navy.
His favorite extracurricular activity was the football team. Though he stood only five-ten and weighed less than 160 pounds, he played tackle regularly from his sophomore year on, impressing his coach with his intelligence and hard work. Bucher and his teammates traveled by train from one end of the country to the other, going up against powerhouse squads from public as well as parochial high schools, often before huge crowds. It was during this time that the boy shed his given first name and adopted the nickname “Pete” in honor of his idol, All-America end Pete Pihos of Indiana University.
At the start of Bucher’s senior year, in 1945, his peers elected the popular footballer mayor of Boys Town, a top school honor. But someone spotted him kissing an usherette at a local movie theater and informed Father Flanagan, who criticized Bucher for “irresponsibility” and stripped him of his title. Angry and embarrassed, Bucher asked the priest to sign papers so he could enlist in the Navy as a minor. Flanagan obliged and, just eight months short of graduation, Bucher dropped out, hitchhiked to San Diego, and entered boot camp.
The product of rigidly controlled institutions for much of his young life, Bucher did well in the service. He trained as a quartermaster, honing his navigation and signaling skills aboard a supply ship in the Pacific. But the war had ended and the humdrum routine of enlisted life eventually began to bore him; he realized he’d made a mistake by not staying at Boys Town until he graduated. He wrote to a former teacher, asking for another chance. In 1946, he was granted a diploma after completing his remaining coursework by mail.
The Navy discharged him the following year and, after working as a bartender in Idaho and a farmhand in Oregon, he enrolled at the University of Nebraska in 1948. He joined a fraternity and lettered in freshman football.
On a blind date in the spring of 1949 he met Rose Rohling, a shy, pretty Missouri farm girl with silky brown hair and a brilliant smile. A devout Catholic, the 20-year-old Rose was a telephone switchboard operator in Omaha. After a summer of picnics, hand-holding, and long drives past fields fragrant with ripening wheat, Bucher had fallen hopelessly in love.
The couple married 15 days before the Korean War broke out in June 1950. The Navy recalled Bucher, but let him stay in college on the condition that he join the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps and serve two years of active duty after graduation. In 1953, he finished his studies with a bachelor’s degree in secondary education, an associate degree in geology, and some credits toward a master’s in micropaleontology.
Commissioned that year as a reserve ensign, he was assigned to the USS Mount McKinley, a communications ship. He found Navy life much more agreeable as an officer and, about a year after reentering the service, applied for submarine school. A sub assignment, he knew, would be accompanied by hazardous-duty pay. And with a wife and, by then, two young sons in tow, he needed the money.
In 1955, Bucher moved to New London, Connecticut, for training. His neighbor and fellow classmate turned out to be Chuck Clark, future commander of the Banner. The two young officers became friends, sometimes getting together with their wives for an evening of charades.
But there was little time for such diversions, given the intensity of the classes. Students were expected to know how to operate every piece of equipment on a sub, how to troubleshoot electrical problems, and how to outwit and kill Russian captains. After graduating in the middle of his class, Bucher was detailed to the USS Besugo, a World War II–era diesel sub home-ported in San Diego.
Elevated to lieutenant, he enjoyed the challenge of navigating huge expanses of ocean. He also savored the adrenaline rush of spy missions. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he served on three subs that engaged in surveillance of communist naval operations.
Bucher’s boats sat silently outside Vladivostok harbor, watching for Soviet warships putting to sea in telltale formations that would signal the start of World War III. He and his comrades monitored Soviet torpedo tests and antisubmarine warfare exercises. When a Russian sub fired a test missile, Bucher’s vessel radioed a one-letter code to another American submarine waiting near the splashdown site. The latter would then measure the telemetry and photograph the rocket as it zoomed downrange and plunged into the Pacific. In one particularly tense operation, Bucher’s boat landed an agent on an empty North Korean beach.
His submarine career took him all over the Western Pacific. He visited Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and Tasmania. His crewmen generally ranged in age from 18 to mid-30s, and after weeks or months at sea, they were more than ready for a good time ashore in some of the Far East’s most exotic ports. Among their favorite stops were the notorious red-light districts in Olongapo, near the big U.S. naval base at Subic Bay in the Philippines, and Kaohsiung, a Taiwanese port known for its government-inspected brothels.
Officers gravitated to the nearest officers’ club, drinking and laughing long into the night. “Some of those parties were real down and outers,” Bucher remembered. “If you didn’t limit yourself to two or three drinks, you’d be there till four in the morning, singing songs. We’d be chasing women around. And the nurses! The nurses were round-heels, those Navy nurses. It wasn’t that you didn’t love your wife, ’cause you did. It was just that your hormones were raging. Some of the guys out there were real straight arrows. I admired them.”
In 1964, Bucher was posted to Submarine Flotilla Seven, composed of half a dozen spy subs based in Yokosuka, the hub of Navy underwater surveillance operations in the Far East. As the squadron’s assistant operations officer, he helped plan sub missions in conjunction with the National Security Agency and the Naval Security Group.
Bucher’s boisterousness was on full display in Japan. At one party he downed 13 martinis and dumped a pitcher of water over his boss’s head. “I’d jump on top of a table and start leading everyone in song,” he recalled. “And I knew damn near every song that had ever been written.”
Bucher’s zest for life, superb navigation skills, and strong work ethic won him many friends and admirers. He knew as much if not more about Western Pacific sub operations than anyone in the Navy. In his two and a half years on the SUBFLOTSEVEN staff, his fitness reports were consistently excellent. But not everyone thought he was ready to command a sub.
“Pete Bucher was—I’m trying to choose my words carefully here—a good guy, a life-of-the-party sort of fellow,” said one former superior who, even decades later, didn’t want to be named. “In the wardroom he was always quick with jokes and things like that. But he wasn’t a submarine commander.
“I never had the confidence with him that I had with some of the other officers. I just wasn’t sure about his professional abilities—naval, technical, leave it at that. Just running a submarine. A submarine is the only vessel where one man can cause the loss of the boat. On a carrier, a cruiser, a battleship, whatever, it takes a lot of men screwing up to cause a loss. . . . It’s probably a defect in my character, but Pete Bucher was a little too free and easy and all that—devil-may-care—for my taste as a submarine captain. I wanted officers that had their head screwed on right.”
By 1966, Bucher was in line to get his own sub. But there were 35 other qualified officers and only 17 available boats. Bucher ranked 20th on the list of candidates, and the Bureau of Naval Personnel informed him that he wouldn’t get his dream job.
The Navy captain in Washington, D.C., who’d made the ruling, Lando Zech, soon began to hear from some of Bucher’s former bosses, including two captains and an admiral. All thought Zech had made a bad call. Zech couldn’t reverse his decision, but he strongly recommended that Bucher be given command of the next available surface ship.
—
That turned out to be the Pueblo. And now, back in Yokosuka, Bucher made re
ady for his first mission, although most of his men still didn’t know where they were headed.
The captain was determined to get the steering engine fixed once and for all. Navy mechanics examined it and agreed it was outmoded. But they noted its similarity to the Banner’s, and the other ferret hadn’t had much trouble while under way. Again, Bucher would have to make do.
In some ways, however, the Navy bent over backward to help him. The Pueblo’s main engines were completely overhauled. To Murphy’s chagrin, Bucher got a Lucite windscreen installed on the flying bridge to protect deck officers from the elements. Murphy thought the barrier was another ridiculous attempt to run the Pueblo like a submarine, by giving it a faux conning tower. But the skipper felt the uppermost deck gave the best visibility, and Schumacher and Tim Harris were grateful for the added comfort while on watch.
The man behind the Navy’s solicitude was the Pueblo’s new operational commander, Rear Admiral Frank L. Johnson. The genial, white-haired Johnson was an ex–destroyer captain and holder of numerous medals, including several for bravery in World War II. Not long after the Pueblo arrived in Yokosuka, Bucher paid a call on Johnson, whose title was Commander, Naval Forces, Japan, or COMNAVFORJAPAN. The admiral was responsible for ensuring that the Pueblo was ready for sea. He also was tasked with protecting the spy boat during its voyage—even though he had no dedicated air or sea forces with which to do that, as Bucher was to discover. His grand-sounding title aside, Johnson was in charge mostly of Navy shore stations and small craft scattered throughout Japan and Okinawa. The only oceangoing ships under his direct command were the Pueblo and the Banner.
After the Israeli assault on the Liberty, the Navy decreed that all ships, including AGERs, be armed. When Bucher discovered that a three-inch deck gun was to be mounted on the Pueblo, he “almost threw a fit.” Such a heavy piece of ordnance, he believed, could capsize his little vessel the first time it fired. Navy officials relented and decided to arm the Pueblo with three .50-caliber machine guns instead. But Admiral Johnson didn’t approve of even the lighter weapons. Their presence, he felt, destroyed the logic that the spy boats’ best protection was their very lack of armament. And in a real fight, the machine guns weren’t powerful enough to hold off anything larger than an armed junk. An enemy equipped with a single deck cannon could pound the Pueblo to pieces from thousands of yards away with no fear of ever being hit by .50-caliber slugs.
Act of War Page 5