Act of War

by Jack Cheevers

  The colonel threw so many curveballs, in fact, that Bucher often lay awake at night trying to suss out what they all meant. He replayed the tedious interrogations over and over in his head, trying to interpret every twist and nuance. What were all the questions Super C asked, and how had the skipper answered each one? Had he given away some important secret without knowing it? It was the kind of compulsive mental wheel-spinning that can drive an imprisoned man to madness. But the captain couldn’t stop it.

  One thing was clear: It was Super C who ran this place. Guards jumped at his every command; prisoners were subject to his every whim. And having broken Bucher, he could turn his attention to crushing other Americans.

  Like Schumacher.

  The lieutenant had been beaten on January 26 and again, much more severely, the next day. Taken to the big interrogation room where the Pueblo officers had been threatened with a firing squad, Schumacher was ordered to kneel down and raise his arms over his head. Two guards cocked their AK-47s and pointed them at his temples, bayonets jabbing within inches of his face.

  “What oceanographic measurements did you take?” an interpreter with fierce black eyes demanded in precise English.

  The American officer responded with a defiant question of his own: “Why did you shoot at our ship?”

  Like Bucher’s, Schumacher’s head was crowded with military secrets. He’d written the daily narrative of the Pueblo’s voyage, noting the positions of intercepted radar and radio stations. As the ship’s communications officer, he knew a fair amount about the code machines. And, perhaps most dangerously, he knew which communication technicians specialized in which electronic instruments.

  Schumacher felt a strong obligation to protect the secrets entrusted to him—with his life if need be. Sitting alone in his ice-cold cell, he’d decided to adhere rigidly to the Code of Conduct for Members of the Armed Forces of the United States—the famous injunction that captured servicemen should reveal nothing to the enemy beyond name, rank, and serial number.

  Yet as much as he wanted to obey the code, Schumacher knew his pain threshold wasn’t particularly high and it was only a matter of time before he cracked. Now, kneeling in the interrogation room with his upraised arms beginning to ache, he tried to keep from trembling. While the fierce-eyed interrogator and guards worked on him, five other North Koreans watched with detachment, like medical students observing an interesting new surgical procedure.

  When Schumacher refused to talk about oceanographic activities, one guard began karate-kicking his elbow while the other kicked him in the chest. Pain shot down his arm like high voltage; he thought he’d suffocate from the boot strikes to his rib cage. The beating went on for at least 15 minutes, until his upper body felt as if it were on fire and his thoughts began to blur and break up like images on a badly tuned TV.

  Schumacher couldn’t hold out much longer. It seemed silly to get kicked to pieces over such innocuous information. To cough it up was to violate the Code of Conduct, but did the code even apply in this nightmare situation? The United States and North Korea weren’t at war, so how could he be a POW? And what if the communists beat him into some grayed-out state of derangement in which he lost all control of his words and actions? Who knew what he might blurt then? He had to put an end to this insidious pounding.

  “All right,” he said, breathing heavily. “Stop kicking me and I’ll tell you.”

  He described how the Pueblo measured ocean temperatures and salinity. The North Koreans had begun to jimmy their way into his mind, and that terrified Schumacher. On January 28, he tried to commit suicide the same way Bucher had, using the water pail in his cell. But, like the skipper, Schumacher soon discovered he couldn’t drown himself in such a small amount of water.

  The communists didn’t confine themselves to breaking only officers. The day after he tried to kill himself, Schumacher walked down the corridor and saw Harry Iredale, the junior oceanographer, kneeling in a room with his arms in the air.

  At five feet, six inches tall, Iredale was one of the shortest members of the crew and quite self-conscious about it. What he called his “vertical deficiency” had made him the target of gibes for much of his life. The son of a pipe fitter, he was raised in a loving but, he felt, overprotective blue-collar family near Philadelphia. He channeled much of his energy into academics, racking up nearly straight As in high school (he got a single B). He also loved sports, particularly basketball, football, and volleyball. Teammates nicknamed him “Half Pint,” but Iredale could be a tigerish competitor.

  Like some other crewmen, he tried to survive his first days in prison by drawing as little attention to himself as possible. On the third night, however, Iredale was rousted from bed at three a.m. and taken to a room with four or five guards gripping AK-47s. He refused to confess to violating North Korean waters and was ordered to his knees. An interpreter told him to pick up a wooden chair by its front legs and hold it over his head. After a few minutes his arms and shoulders began to throb with pain, then burn. When his arms sagged, guards kicked him in the sides and upper body. He struggled to maintain his balance but finally keeled over onto the sooty floor. The North Koreans began kicking his entire body except for his head.

  Several times he picked up the chair, held it aloft as long as he could, dropped it, and curled into a ball as boots thudded into him. Even a much bigger and stronger man couldn’t have performed this cruel stunt very long. Iredale knew some details of the Pueblo’s mission, but he wasn’t familiar with eavesdropping equipment or most Navy intelligence operations. What could he reveal that was so bad? Absorbing this much pain and abuse for nothing, he told himself, was stupid and dangerous. He didn’t want to wind up dead or in a coma on the floor of this dirty, freezing room. After about 25 minutes of kicking, he agreed to confess.

  An interpreter looked at him with contempt. “You’re a weakling,” he said. “You gave up too early.”

  Since their arrival at the Barn, the sailors had subsisted on watery turnip soup, rice, stale bread, and sometimes a small hunk of foul-smelling fish they dubbed “sewer trout.” This miserable fare was served for breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day. Guards dropped off the rice outside the sailors’ doors in buckets that looked like they ordinarily were used to wash the floors.

  At lunchtime on the day he signed his confession, Iredale got the same slop as his cellmates, but a much larger portion. The extra food deeply embarrassed him. “It looked like I was being rewarded,” he recalled. “It made me look bad.” Too hungry to reject the meal, he ate his usual amount and gave the rest to the other Americans. The whole experience left the bantam oceanographer twitching with anger.

  By far the most harrowing punishment was inflicted on one of the Marine sergeants, Bob Hammond.

  About a week after his arrival at the Barn, Hammond was taken for interrogation. The North Koreans demanded to know whether he spoke their tongue. The Marine figured they’d seen the notation in his service jacket for Korean language training, but he decided not to take the easy way out. Rather than confirm something the communists almost certainly knew, Hammond refused to say anything except his name, rank, and service number.

  He, too, was forced to hold up a chair and then kicked in the hands, arms, and sides as it inevitably sank. The blows only made Hammond mad. “I was determined not to tell them anything at all, for as long as I could last,” he said. For the next six hours he was punched, kicked, and karate-chopped from head to toe by up to four soldiers at a time.

  His hands and an arm soon went numb. When he couldn’t hold up the chair any longer, his tormentors slammed a two-by-four board behind his knees and made him squat down on it. Then they used him as a punching bag while an interpreter asked, over and over, whether he spoke Korean.

  The Marine kept blacking out and toppling over. Usually the guards yanked him back into a squatting position. Sometimes they just kicked him while he sprawled semiconscio
us on the floor. Several times they picked him up by the shirt and dropped him, his head bouncing off the concrete. Once, a guard stepped on his throat and Hammond thought he’d suffocate. At another point, he was taken to a different room and beaten some more as a group of about ten Koreans—including some women—watched wordlessly.

  Angered by his resistance, the guards dialed up the violence. They propped him against a wall in a sitting position and stomped several times on his groin. When he screamed, a rag was stuffed in his mouth. He was placed in a chair and guards hand-chopped his neck and head, closing his right eye and paralyzing his neck. Two soldiers held him upright as the interpreter clubbed the backs of his legs with the two-by-four. To make the whacks hurt more they made him take off his pants. Finally, he mumbled through swollen lips, “Okay, okay.” Then he was interrogated for 13 hours, during which he “wrote a brief confession and answered a lot of questions.”

  Hammond’s condition shocked his cellmates when he returned. Fearless and obstinate, he’d absorbed an almost superhuman amount of punishment. “His face was beaten so that it was distorted,” remembered another enlisted man. “His body was swollen and his stomach was so black and blue it looked as though his intestines were spilling out.” For days Hammond vomited blood. He couldn’t eat. For almost a week he couldn’t get out of bed.

  His only regret was not holding out longer.

  —

  After nine days at the Barn, Bucher still was wearing the same bloodstained, dirt-caked clothes he’d been captured in. The stink of his own unwashed body nearly made him retch. It was a miracle, he thought, that his wounds hadn’t become infected in this filthy pen. He often saw rats scurrying through the latrine. Whenever he lay down, tiny gray bugs swarmed out of his rice-husk mattress and bit him all over.

  He thought endlessly about how to signal the U.S. government that the Pueblo had never entered North Korean waters, and that any statements to the contrary by him or his men were lies extracted under heavy duress. He also tried to find a way to reach out to his sailors, kept apart and isolated in their cells.

  While a few men had been badly beaten, it was becoming apparent that the communists weren’t trying to kill them. In fact, the physical abuse seemed to be tapering off in frequency as well as severity. Whenever a guard worked over one of the Americans a bit too enthusiastically, an officer restrained him.

  But the North Koreans never stopped stoking the climate of fear. One day, for example, an officer Bucher had never seen before burst into his room and shrieked, “Speak Korean? You speak Korean?” The question was a dangerous one, the captain figured, because the communists probably considered such fluency prima facie evidence of espionage.

  Bucher denied that he or his men spoke anything but English. The next night, the sounds of a violent struggle erupted in the corridor outside his door. Alarmed, the captain wondered whether the North Koreans had zeroed in on Hammond and Chicca. Later Bucher glimpsed a badly beaten American being hustled past his cell door on a stretcher. Who it was, he couldn’t tell.

  On a different night the skipper was brought before a North Korean in a blue naval uniform. Scowling grimly to emphasize his serious purpose, the man said through an interpreter that he was announcing “rules of life” that the prisoners must obey at all times. Violators would be severely punished. Bucher listened carefully as the communist went down the list:

  The daily schedule will be strictly observed.

  You will always display courtesy to the duty personnel when they enter your room.

  You must not talk loudly or sing in your room.

  You must not sit or lie on the floor or bed except during prescribed hours; otherwise you should sit on the chair.

  You must wear your clothes at all times except when washing your face and in bed.

  You must take care of your room, furniture, and all expendables issued to you.

  You will keep your room and corridors clean at all times.

  You will entertain yourself only with the culture provided.

  If you have something to do, ask permission from the guards, who will escort you to the appropriate place.

  Trudging back to his cell he mulled the implications of the new edicts. They suggested the North Koreans intended to keep their captives around for a while and wanted them to behave in an orderly, disciplined manner. In fact, the communist rules weren’t much different from those governing life in a U.S. military stockade.

  The prospect of death receded even further in Bucher’s mind until one night when a North Korean lieutenant and two soldiers charged into his room at about 10:30 p.m. The officer trained a pistol on the captain, who’d taken off his clothes in preparation for bed.

  “You must dress,” the officer snapped. “Must hurry!”

  So this is it, Bucher thought, terrified. He’d be hooded, shoved against a wall, and shot.

  “You will go now for bath,” the lieutenant explained, his stern expression not changing.

  A bath? At this time of night? Now Bucher knew he was doomed. All he wanted was a quick end. If torture seemed imminent, he’d attack a guard or try to run away—anything to get himself killed fast. A feeling of calm resignation settled over him as he slowly put on his grimy clothes. The communist officer again urged him to move faster. He also handed him a sliver of soap and a ratty towel.

  The guards hustled him down the stairs and out the front door into a crisp, clear winter’s night. The captain looked up appreciatively at the star-dusted black sky as he crunched through the snow toward a waiting bus. Two more guards got in behind him and the bus lurched off down the road.

  Bucher guessed they were going to the dungeon where he’d seen the mutilated South Korean, but the bus stopped before traveling that far. Outlined against the darkness were three gloomy cement buildings. Several officers and soldiers stood outside, stamping their feet in the biting cold. The skipper was led into one of the buildings and told to take off his shoes—an odd way to get ready for execution, he thought.

  Entering a white-tiled room, Bucher was met not by a row of riflemen but by soothing clouds of steam. Jesus, they really were taking him for a bath! A feeling of relief hit him so hard his legs nearly buckled. Stripping off his reeking clothes, he wanted to laugh out loud.

  The scene became even more unreal when a platoon of cameramen barged in, grinning like madmen. They switched on klieg lights and recorded the naked captain, also beaming, as he stepped into a sunken tub filled with deliciously clean hot water. Knowing he was once more being used as a propaganda patsy, Bucher, still smiling, made a fist at the photographers and extended his index and little fingers. The gesture, easily recognized by American enlisted men and college students, meant “bullshit,” and the skipper hoped that anyone in the United States who saw a picture of him would understand his message. After the camera crew departed, he was allowed to spend a blissful hour in the tub.

  At six o’clock the next morning he was taken from his cell at the Barn to another room on the same floor. There he was told to strip and put on a prisoner’s uniform consisting of a jacket and pants of blue padded material, a white cotton shirt, coarse underpants lacking a fly, and socks. He was not given shoes, perhaps to discourage any thought of trying to escape through the snow-covered countryside. The new clothes hung on his undernourished frame like a potato sack on a scarecrow. At least they were clean. Being forced to wear his grungy Navy togs for so long had been a low-grade form of torture.

  On the evening of February 7, Super C summoned the captain for another round of theatrics. He opened with his usual greeting—“How is your life these days?”—and then began a shrill denunciation of alleged U.S. atrocities during the Korean War.

  With Wheezy coughing and sputtering his translation, the colonel argued that he was shielding Bucher and his men from the righteous wrath of the Korean people, who would instantly dismember the Americans if the
y ever got their hands on them. Bucher believed him. He’d already begun thinking of ways to escape, but it seemed impossible that his mostly Caucasian crew, even if they succeeded in breaking out of the Barn, could make their way on foot through an Asian police state whose inhabitants were universally hostile to them. One or two of his Filipino or Mexican-American sailors might be able to pass for Korean and reach the demilitarized zone or the coast, where they could perhaps steal a boat and sail south. But an escape by a large number of white sailors almost certainly would fail.

  Bucher was imagining various breakout scenarios when Super C suddenly ended his philippic and proclaimed, “Tomorrow you will be given a special treat! Tomorrow is the great Korean holiday—the anniversary of the beginning of the Korean People’s Army!” The celebration, Super C promised, would include apples, candies, cakes, and other “special food” for the captives. Bucher’s mouth watered at the thought of such delicacies, but he merely shrugged and was dismissed.

  The next day a pair of women in drab army dresses came into his room, spread a cloth over the little table, and positioned a bowl of apples as a centerpiece. Then they brought in platters of boiled fish, steamed rice, and bread and butter. An officer told Bucher not to touch anything yet, and the captain steeled himself for the possibility that the feast would be snatched away the moment the requisite propaganda pictures were taken.

  The same gang of cameramen who filmed his late-night bath rushed into his cell. An anxious major accompanied them, fussily rearranging Bucher’s sparse furnishings. The skipper nicknamed him Jack Warner and his subordinates the Warner Brothers. The two army “maids” reappeared, wearing colorful native costumes and bearing still more food: rich pork and potato soup and sparkling beer. As Bucher gaped in disbelief at the feast, Jack Warner signaled for filming to begin.