Act of War

by Jack Cheevers

  The spy ship crawled toward Wonsan. From the pilothouse Bucher could see the jagged silhouettes of mountains turning reddish purple in the twilight. He figured his ship was barely inside the 12-mile territorial limit and a good 20 miles from the port of Wonsan, at the far end of its deep bay. He remembered Kamiseya’s hopeful words—AIR FORCE GOING HELP YOU WITH SOME AIRCRAFT—and ransacked his brain for more ways to stall. His eyes swept the darkening horizon, straining for the electrifying sight of F-105s with cannon ablaze. If the jets did come, he’d grab the loudspeaker mike and shout for his men to attack their captors. A bloodbath would ensue, but he thought his guys could win.

  About nine miles from shore, a communist officer jerked the annunciator to all-stop. A torpedo boat pulled up to the Pueblo’s stern and deposited a second boarding party, led by a North Korean colonel with scars on his face and neck that marked him as a veteran soldier. A translator who resembled the actor Maximilian Schell accompanied him. The Americans later nicknamed the pair Colonel Scar and Max.

  Max’s English was a little stiff but his meaning was clear: “You will conduct us through a complete inspection of this ship at once and without any tricks of concealment,” he told Bucher. “At once! Go now!”

  “Tell your colonel I demand that all his people leave my ship immediately,” the captain shot back.

  The interpreter related the message to Colonel Scar, who ignored it. “Go now!” Max repeated. A soldier kicked Bucher in the lower back for emphasis. The North Koreans had brought a civilian pilot, and he pushed Bucher’s helmsman out of the way and rang up all-ahead-flank.

  The captain led the North Koreans to the passageway where Duane Hodges lay on a stretcher, unconscious.

  “I need medical attention for this man and several others whom you wounded,” Bucher told Scar. The colonel didn’t reply and barely glanced at the mortally injured sailor. The soldier kicked and shoved Bucher on toward the mess.

  A forlorn-looking pile of ashes and brown-edged scraps of paper bore witness to the convulsive activity in the compartment just 30 minutes earlier. Scar quickly surmised what had happened.

  “What were you doing here?” he asked through his translator. “Burning your secret orders?”

  “Making ice cream,” Bucher answered.

  A trooper kicked the captain backward into a bulkhead so hard he saw stars. His knees buckled but the North Korean jerked him to his feet to continue the inspection.

  After brief tours of the engine room and galley, Bucher and his escorts arrived at the SOD hut. The skipper’s heart sank. Heaps of unburned documents lay near the open security door. Just beyond was a mattress cover stuffed with more paper. Bucher didn’t know what the materials were, but he was shocked that Steve Harris and his men hadn’t gotten rid of them.

  Scar’s eyes widened as he took in the racks of banged-up listening equipment. Bucher stepped into the crypto center, noting with relief that the code machines appeared to be thoroughly smashed. One KW-7 remained online, humming faintly. Max ordered Bucher to shut it off, but he refused. A soldier decked him with a savage hand chop to the back of the neck, and the interpreter cut the power.

  Lying on the floor, Bucher saw a couple of other soldiers clearing papers away from the heavy steel door. He felt in his pants pocket for his cigarette lighter, thinking he might be able to start a fire and slam shut the door. But before he could make his move, a trooper dragged him to his feet and held a bayonet to his chest. Then, amazingly, the North Koreans forced him out of the hut and closed the door behind them, inadvertently locking it. The captain silently rejoiced. Now there was no way to get in without a blowtorch.

  Bucher was marched to the forward berth area. Almost all of his crew sat before him blindfolded and bound. Soldiers were thumping them with rifle butts while confiscating their personal property. “One of those thieving bastards just stole my watch,” growled an angry sailor. “Share the wealth—that’s communism,” said another. A sharp command from Scar halted the plunder.

  Bucher wanted to stay with his men, but the North Koreans took him back to the passageway where Hodges lay. The young fireman made no sound or movement. Baldridge, the corpsman, was tending to the other wounded fireman, Steve Woelk, who was bleeding from his groin, hip, and buttocks.

  “What about Hodges?” the captain hissed.

  “He’s dead, sir,” replied the medic. “Died about ten minutes ago.” Woelk, he said, needed a surgeon.

  A soldier responded to their hushed conversation by kicking Bucher in the back, while another karate-chopped Baldridge’s neck. The captain’s back throbbed with pain from the multiple assaults. Two troopers started to work him over, kicking and clubbing with their rifles. Bucher curled into a ball next to Hodges’s corpse to protect himself. His ribs felt like they were about to cave in.

  The captain was deposited in the wardroom for the rest of the trip to Wonsan. About three hours after the Pueblo was seized, he saw the glow of dock lights through a porthole. He felt the engines slow and then a hard bump as the ship thudded against a wharf. Shouts broke out and the deck overhead vibrated with the clomping of military boots.

  Colonel Scar and Max reappeared with what Bucher thought were a North Korean admiral and general in tow. The skipper was pushed into his stateroom, frisked, and, in spite of his loud protests, relieved of his ring, watch, and wallet.

  “Why are you spying on Korea?” Max demanded. “You are a CIA agent bringing spies to provoke another war!”

  “Absolutely not!” Bucher rejoined. “We were conducting oceanographic research in international waters. This is a research ship that has nothing to do with the CIA or armed aggression.”

  Jabs to his jaw and neck cut him off. “You will all be removed from the ship, tried, and shot,” Max said angrily. Bucher’s hands were tied and a blindfold pulled over his eyes.

  The captain and his men were forced across a narrow gangplank onto a floodlit pier. The night air was intensely cold. As soon as the sailors appeared, angry shouts erupted from what sounded like a large crowd. Bucher’s eye covering slipped just enough for him to see soldiers straining to hold back hundreds of furious civilians. The mob surged toward the sightless crewmen, shrieking and spitting and, despite the soldiers’ exertions, landing some punches and kicks. Policarpo Garcia, a ship’s storekeeper from the Philippines, got booted in the rump with such force that “the toe almost go inside my rectum.”

  Bucher knew these enraged, lunging people would tear him and his men to shreds if the soldiers didn’t keep knocking them down and pushing them back. Years of relentless anti-U.S. propaganda by Kim Il Sung’s regime had made Americans as popular in North Korea as smallpox. Someone in the crowd screamed in English, “Death to the American bastards!”

  The sailors were hustled past the apoplectic civilians onto waiting buses. Moments after sitting down, Bucher was taken off and returned to the ship. His blindfold was ripped away, and he saw several North Koreans struggling with the SOD hut door.

  “Open it!” Max commanded. The captain shrugged as if the massive door with its combination lock were a mystery to him.

  Someone stuck a pistol in his ear. “Open it or be shot right now!” Stubbornly, courageously, Bucher refused. At least he’d die fast, without having to endure torture. Instead of blowing his head off, a trooper kicked him hard in the belly. Then Steve Harris was brought back and told to open the door. He, too, bravely refused.

  Bucher was blindfolded again and frog-marched past the screeching crowd at the pier. Gobs of spit landed on him.

  On the bus, soldiers had resumed looting the Americans. Over the commotion Bucher thought he heard his Filipino and Mexican-American sailors being singled out for especially harsh treatment. He realized why when Max loudly proclaimed, “You have been trying to make infiltration of North Korea with South Korean spies! You are criminals who will be tried in our People’s Court and shot!”


  “Bullshit!” Bucher yelled. “There is nobody but Americans in this crew!”

  He was dragged off the bus and placed in what seemed to be a staff car; guards on both sides pummeled him. Max got in, and the captain demanded that his men be kept together and treated in accordance with the Geneva convention.

  “You capitalist dogs and Korea are not at war, so no Geneva convention applies,” the interpreter said contemptuously. “You have no military rights at all. You will be treated as civilian espionage agents of the CIA.”

  After a bumpy ride that lasted about 15 minutes, the car stopped. Bucher was taken into what might have been a police station. His men already were there and being beaten, as their cries and groans attested.

  “Stop this brutality!” the skipper hollered. The North Koreans shoved him into a small room and slammed the door.

  In the sudden quiet, Bucher realized his hands had gone numb from the bindings. His gut ached from the soldier’s boot, as did much of the rest of his exhausted body.

  Soon he was in the staff car again. After another brief ride he arrived at what sounded like a railroad station, with an old steam locomotive hissing as it awaited passengers. He was guided up some steps, down an aisle, and into an ice-cold, coach-style seat. The skipper sensed the presence of his men. No one breathed a word, hoping that the short lull in the beatings would be extended. A whistle blew and the locomotive pitched forward.

  God only knew where it was headed.

  —

  John Wright sat strapped in the cockpit of his F-105, feeling the powerful Pratt & Whitney engine idling behind him. On the tarmac his crew chief drew himself to attention and snapped off a salute.

  Wright lived to fly fighters, and the F-105 Thunderchief was his favorite. It was the Cadillac of combat jets—big, comfortable, easy to fly, and damn near indestructible. He returned the salute and taxied to the flight line.

  The major had flown 100 combat missions during the Korean War and 140 more during Vietnam. He commanded one squadron that suffered such heavy losses over North Vietnam that it had to be disbanded. Still, he couldn’t get enough of aerial combat. Though married and the father of four, he was prepared to die for his country at any time.

  The tower cleared him for takeoff at about ten p.m. His wingman was nearby; they’d fly the last two F-105s to Osan. Wright pushed his throttle forward and his jet began to roll. He ignited the afterburner and the plane rocketed into the night sky, a cone of fiery red streaming from its exhaust nozzle.

  Wright got to the South Korean air base around midnight. Snow skittered across dark runways. Ground crews were hastily uploading bombs to 105s that had arrived earlier. It was much too late to prevent the capture of the Pueblo, and General McKee had called off that operation. Now Wright’s squadron was about to be handed a new, more dangerous mission.

  The major strode into the run-down flight operations building and got on the scrambler phone to Fifth Air Force. He knew virtually nothing about the Pueblo, but a high-ranking officer in Japan told him about its importance. If the communists were permitted to dismantle and study the ferret’s contents, the officer said, U.S. military secrets would be “compromised for ten years.” The Navy didn’t know for sure how much classified material Bucher had gotten rid of, or indeed whether he’d disposed of any.

  Wright asked what his orders were.

  “I want you to sink that ship at all costs,” his superior replied.

  “All costs?” Wright asked, the implications hitting him. “Does that mean all of my twelve airplanes?”

  “That’s right. I want that ship sunk. The Navy lost it, and we’re gonna sink it.”

  Wright’s small band of pilots was likely to be met over Wonsan by a wall of antiaircraft fire and a horde of MiGs; the Americans’ chances of survival were virtually nil. Nonetheless, the major swung into action. He told the Osan maintenance officer to remove his jets’ drop tanks and attach more bomb racks. That meant his men wouldn’t have enough fuel to get home in the unlikely event they got away from Wonsan in one piece. But they’d have extra bombs to do the job.

  Another complication was that no one knew whether the Pueblo’s crew was still aboard or not. Wright wasn’t thrilled about the possibility of bombing Americans, but orders were orders.

  He and his operations officer began planning the mission route and tactics. As the two men worked, excited pilots kept barging into the room, offering to help. Wright finally had to shoo them to another part of the building, saying he’d brief them in a couple of hours and they should get some sleep. But there were no blankets and only a frigid concrete floor to lie down on, and the men were too keyed up to sleep anyway.

  The pilots filed into a shabby briefing room at about five a.m. on January 24. They still didn’t know what the Pueblo looked like or where it was in Wonsan’s capacious harbor. The Navy had sent over two officers to tell them as much as they could. Wright knew his men would be taken aback when they learned of the mission’s one-way nature, and he tried to think of a way to lighten the mood. One of the Navy briefers inadvertently provided it.

  “Gentlemen,” the naval officer began, “your target is to sink the Pueblo.”

  Wright couldn’t resist a joke. “’Scuse me,” he drawled. “I know what a pueblo is in Arizona; it’s where the Indians live. I don’t think any Indians are livin’ over here.”

  The Navy man acted as if he’d been insulted. The Pueblo was a ship, he said, an intelligence ship, and it had to be destroyed. Unfazed, Wright asked whether the briefer had any pictures of the Pueblo. He didn’t. Well, Wright asked, how were his people supposed to find it? How were they to know which ship, out of perhaps dozens in Wonsan harbor, to bomb? The Navy officer paused for a few seconds, thinking.

  “Did you see the movie Mister Roberts?” he finally asked.

  Wright had.

  “That’s exactly what the Pueblo looks like.”

  Wright turned to his pilots. “We’re gonna sink Mr. Roberts’s ship,” he said, his broad smile triggering raucous laughter. Then he got up to explain how they’d do it.

  The F-105s would fly northeast out of Osan as low and fast as possible. At 600 miles per hour, flight time to Wonsan was 25 minutes. As they neared the harbor, the pilots would hit their afterburners and hurtle up to 17,000 feet. On the way up, Wright and his ops officer each planned to pick out a ship they believed was the Pueblo. If they agreed, the entire squadron would dive-bomb that target. If they disagreed, the planes would divide into two groups and attack both ships. The big jets dove like winged anvils, plunging nearly two and a half miles in 30 seconds. The pilots would have ten seconds to aim.

  The final phase of the attack posed a delicate problem for Wright. His orders were to take out the Pueblo at all costs, and he intended to do that. His pilots needed to know that no one was to leave Wonsan as long as the Pueblo remained afloat. But he couldn’t simply order them to crash into the ship; military law and custom, not to mention basic morality, prevented commanders from telling subordinates to commit suicide.

  The major chose his words carefully.

  “Here’s the rules: If that ship is still floating and you’re the last one alive, go back around and sink it.” He had a family on Okinawa, he said, but he wasn’t leaving Wonsan until the spy boat went under.

  Wright didn’t directly order a kamikaze assault. After all, the last surviving pilot theoretically could send the Pueblo to the bottom with a well-aimed bomb or by riddling it with cannon fire. But that wasn’t what the squadron leader meant.

  “Does everybody understand what I’m telling you?” he asked.

  One pilot pulled back the corners of his eyes until they became slits. “Ah so, Major,” he said, mimicking a Japanese accent.

  The pilots climbed into their jets in the predawn darkness. They’d had no time to pack winter clothes before leaving Okinawa, so they wore only thin green
flight suits. A red flare was to signal takeoff.

  Wright and each of his men sat alone in a freezing cockpit, waiting for what probably would be the last flight of their lives.

  —

  The train bearing the Pueblo crew wheezed and clanked to a halt. A voice announced that they’d reached their destination and would leave the coach in order of rank with their hands up, in the abject manner of criminals. The Americans were untied and their blindfolds removed.

  They were supposed to keep their heads contritely down, but Schumacher let his eyes slide up the body of the man sitting opposite him. It was Bucher. The captain’s big eyes shone with anger and he was kneading his deadened hands in frustration. Max walked up to him.

  “Now we will take you off the train,” he said. “Captain, you first, then the others.”

  Bucher didn’t move. For several long moments, he glared coldly at Max. Finally he rose and led Schumacher, Lacy, and Tim Harris down the aisle and out the door.

  Small suns exploded in the captain’s face as North Korean news photographers took flash pictures of him stepping onto the passenger platform. Adding to the blinding brightness were the klieg lights of TV cameramen, eagerly recording the humiliation of the American spy chief and his lackeys. Bucher brought his hands down to shield his eyes; a soldier batted them back in the air with his rifle.

  Schumacher felt like an animal in a ferociously illuminated zoo. He stole a quick look at his watch: six a.m., January 24. He wasn’t sure where they were but figured it was Pyongyang, the capital. Looming over the train station was a tower adorned with a huge portrait of Kim Il Sung, set in a gold frame against a red background.

  Schumacher glanced at his shipmates, their breath visible in the chilly air as they stamped their feet to stay warm. They looked disheveled and smelled bad after their long night of captivity. The men were trying to seem composed, but their faces registered shock, doubt, fear.

  Soldiers herded them on two buses that then headed down a broad boulevard. Mercury-vapor lights cast eerie pools of green on the streets. Workers were beginning to line up at bus stops, and blue fluorescent lights were already on in some shops. But mostly the place looked as sterile and lonely as a vacant parking lot.