The windows again were blacked out. Sitting next to the skipper, Murphy felt their vehicle roll across two bridges and stop at two checkpoints. After about half an hour, the buses pulled into another compound. The crewmen found themselves outside a three-story building, its entrance framed by two large columns. Steve Harris jumped to the nervous conclusion that it was a courthouse and, rather than being on the verge of release, the sailors were about to be put on trial.
Whatever its function, the place was a triumph of socialist grandiosity. Once inside, the Americans were taken aback by its sumptuousness. The entryway floor was made of polished marble. Beyond that was a wide staircase, also of marble, flanked by two columns emblazoned with red stars. The crewmen later dubbed it the “Country Club.”
Super C arrived, wrapped in a gray overcoat and an air of importance. He was smiling, clearly enjoying the Americans’ mystified reaction.
“Welcome to your new home,” he said, speaking through Silver Lips. “I hope you will be comfortable here. Your commanding officer has requested better and more comfortable surroundings, and we have chosen this place for you. We hope that you will be able to exercise outdoors and take sunbaths.”
The sailors were led to their new cells on the second and third floors. Each officer got his own quarters, while enlisted men had to bunk eight to a room, instead of four as at the Barn. But the Country Club was still an improvement over its predecessor. The lights could be turned off, and the windows weren’t covered. For the Americans, even staring at the winter-bleak Korean countryside was preferable to the mind-warping claustrophobia of the Barn’s sealed rooms.
At dawn the next morning, Bucher’s face was pressed to his frosty window as he studied his new surroundings. The view stretched for miles, across snowy fields and into tall hills. An earthen berm about 15 feet high enclosed the compound. Atop it, half a dozen soldiers patrolled with automatic rifles. The grounds included a separate barracks for the guards, a jogging track, even a basketball court. The facility seemed designed to house troops rather than prisoners.
Indeed, the area around it was alive with military activity. In the distance Bucher saw a drop tower for parachute practice. Trucks loaded with soldiers rattled back and forth on nearby roads. Aircraft ranging from old biplanes to modern jets flew overhead; the captain figured a military airfield must be in the vicinity.
While the setting was different, the daily routine was much the same. Turnips and rice topped the menu at almost every meal, though now the sailors were required to wash their hands with a nauseating disinfectant that made the food even less palatable. The men ate together but no talking was allowed, either in the third-floor mess hall or anywhere else. Alone in his cell, Bucher sank into long hours of despondency, pondering various ways to try to kill himself if, as he dreaded, sophisticated Soviet interrogators arrived at the new prison.
After six weeks of a diet with few vitamins and virtually no protein, the crewmen were showing symptoms of severe malnutrition. The ship’s cook, Harry Lewis, estimated they were consuming only 500 calories a day—the energy equivalent of three unbuttered English muffins. Most men were losing weight precipitously—Bucher had dropped 40 pounds—and many suffered from diarrhea. Episodes of flu blew up into pneumonia. Minor scratches became infected and the infections spread. Dale Rigby, a ship’s storekeeper, got a rash over 90 percent of his body, an early sign of starvation. The skin above his waist peeled off, and ugly sores formed on his legs. A communist doctor prescribed a mud pack that only seemed to aggravate Rigby’s condition. Another sailor’s feet began to swell—also an indicator of starvation—and the physician tried to treat him with acupuncture, which had no apparent effect. Some men developed scurvy, a vitamin C deficiency that causes spongy gums, bleeding under the skin, and extreme weakness.
In mid-March a blizzard buried the prison. The communists decided to squeeze their captives for more propaganda fodder. Besides their collective apology to North Korea, Bucher and his men had been forced to send a letter to President Johnson, asking him to apologize on their behalf. But now the communists ordered their prisoners to write letters to relatives, politicians, and “influential people” in the United States. The letters conveyed a sinister threat: If the U.S. government didn’t officially apologize, the seamen would face trial and possible execution. Steve Harris’s letter to his wife and mother was typical:
“The penalty for espionage in this country is death,” he wrote. “The only condition that we will be returned home on is for the U.S. Government to admit its crime, apologize and give assurance that it will not happen again. If these conditions are not met, then we will be executed. . . . I love you both so much that even as a grown man I have broken into tears many times.”
Bucher wrote to LBJ and the director of Boys Town, warning that “Our situation is grave.” Murphy wrote to Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Others petitioned governors and U.S. senators from their home states. Bob Hammond, the hardheaded Marine who’d endured so much brutality at the Barn, began a letter to his wife with a chatty inquiry about their new baby, but concluded that “time is running out” for him and his shipmates. By the middle of April, more than 200 such letters had hit U.S. mailboxes, leaving the men’s families more frightened than ever.
When the communists weren’t forcing Bucher and his men to regurgitate propaganda, they were trying to make them swallow it. Every Friday night the sailors were taken to a large room on the third floor to watch a movie about the joys of life in North Korea. Translating the films was a short, intellectual-looking officer the Americans nicknamed Fee-ture Feel-um, for the way he pronounced the words in his ragged English. Fee-ture Feel-um energetically shouted out lines of dialogue and even sang song lyrics.
The plots often celebrated the unwavering dedication of heroic peasants and factory workers, inspired by the wisdom and courage of Kim Il Sung, to the success of the revolution. One such entertainment was titled The Tractor Driver. Its protagonist, a city dweller, was a committed proletarian who selflessly gave up his one day off work each week to help rice farmers boost production. Frustrated by the difficulty of getting his tractor through the deep mud of the rice paddies, he fashioned a novel solution: He put a rowboat under the tractor’s front wheels. Naturally, the machine still bogged down in the muck. But the point seemed to be that good revolutionaries never stop trying to come up with imaginative approaches to building the socialist economy.
Another popular theme was the unrelieved wickedness of the American imperialist aggressors during the Fatherland Liberation War. This genre showed U.S. troops always in headlong retreat, committing unspeakable atrocities against North Korean women and children along the way. To Bucher and his men it was like watching one Western after another in which the cavalry always lost. Guards roamed around during the screenings, making sure no one talked or fell asleep. But the sailors usually spent most of movie night snickering and stifling laughter at the poor quality and droning heavy-handedness of the films.
The Americans’ spirits rose considerably when Steve Woelk, the young fireman injured by the same shell that killed Duane Hodges, was reunited with them on March 17. Woelk had spent most of his time since the capture in a North Korean hospital; despite repeated inquiries, Bucher had been told little about him or his condition. An upbeat Kansan who enjoyed singing country-western songs, Woelk was well liked by his shipmates, and Bucher and the other officers greeted him happily as he hobbled through the Country Club’s front door.
Woelk’s description of his medical treatment sounded like something out of a horror novel. Blown backward by the shell’s detonation, he’d dragged himself to the relative safety of the wardroom. A metal fragment had sliced into his upper right thigh, ripped through his abdomen, and exited his right buttock. One of his testicles was gone. Shrapnel also sheared off a two-inch piece of his tailbone, causing excruciating pain.
When North Korean boarders found the blood-soaked seaman, they
tossed him on the dining table and wrapped him in the plastic table cover. Two soldiers then dragged him down passageways and over the gangplank onto the dock at Wonsan. Woelk thought he’d be heaved into the harbor.
At the Barn he was put in a cell with two other wounded sailors. With no food or medical care for the next two days, Woelk lapsed into semiconsciousness, moaning periodically for help. The only uninjured man in the room, Dale Rigby, did his best to comfort his three shipmates with no drugs or medical equipment. He had to beg the guards for an empty bottle so Woelk could urinate.
Woelk soon found himself glued to the table cover by dried blood and gore, almost unable to move. Whenever guards entered the cell, they held bandannas over their noses and mouths to keep from gagging on the stench of festering wounds.
Woelk didn’t improve. After about ten days the North Koreans took him to another room and placed him on a metal examining table. They held him down and tied his hands and feet to the table. Then, without administering an anesthetic, doctors began cutting his flesh with scissors. By the time they were finished, they’d removed his other testicle and sewn up the incisions with what looked like kite string. Woelk’s screams echoed throughout the Barn; other sailors thought they were overhearing a particularly gruesome torture session.
Woelk was taken to a hospital and put in a room by himself. The paint was peeling and bedbugs scuttled over his sheets. His postoperative care consisted of a doctor shoving strips of ointment-saturated gauze into his wounds with forceps. No one washed or shaved him. But each day the depth of his wounds got a little shallower as the healing process took hold. The staff gave him cigarettes, playing cards, and propaganda magazines, but no one spoke or understood English. The communists snapped frequent pictures of him; once they restaged his testicle surgery for photographers. Woelk checked off the passing days on a wall with a burned match. One was his twentieth birthday.
Eventually he was strong enough to get out of bed. The hospital room had no mirror, but Woelk saw his reflection in a glass transom above the door. His emaciation startled him: In less than two months he’d lost 55 pounds.
Woelk’s Lazarus-like reappearance wasn’t the only reason for the crew to rejoice. Since the move to the Country Club, systematic beatings had all but stopped. Most of the North Korean officers from the Barn had migrated with the sailors, but the guards were new. While they rarely missed a chance to kick or clout one of the Americans when their superiors weren’t looking, the Country Club guards seemed to have orders to lay off. The communists already had extracted much of what they wanted from the seamen, and now apparently regarded them merely as pathetic dupes of the warmongering Johnson clique in Washington.
Life fell into a dull but relatively peaceful routine. Earsplitting electric bells jarred the prisoners awake at six a.m. They had a few minutes to splash water on their faces before assembling for calisthenics, outdoors if the weather permitted. Then they polished the floors of their cells with rags and marched to the mess hall, where they breakfasted on turnips and whatever other delicacies the North Koreans had prepared.
The rest of the morning the men were required to sit in their rooms and read propaganda magazines. They often just propped the publications open in their laps, bent their heads forward as if reading, and went to sleep. After a one p.m. lunch—more turnips—they were allowed to exercise or play sports for an hour. Then it was back to their cells to study communist “cultural materials” for a couple more hours. Supper was at six p.m.—turnips yet again—and lights-out at ten. Twice a week the men got baths.
“The typical day started in stupidity, proceeded through boredom, and ended in stupidity 16 hours later,” Schumacher later wrote in a memoir.
As the North Koreans loosened their grip on the seamen, Bucher moved to reestablish his chain of command. Although officers and men were allowed to eat together, they couldn’t talk, and the captain often was kept isolated from his subordinates. But the communists had assigned another enlisted man, fireman John Mitchell, to clean Bucher’s room each day, and Mitchell became the courier for the captain’s directives to the rest of the crew.
Mitchell did a good job keeping Bucher abreast of what was happening with his people. When someone got knocked around or fell ill, the skipper knew about it within 24 hours. If a man seemed to be buckling under the stresses of confinement, the captain made sure to whisper encouragement in his ear during an exercise session or mealtime.
Bucher urged the sailors to defy their captors in whatever ways they could. And despite his ebbing physical stamina, he led by example.
The guards still insisted that the Americans bow their heads like shamed criminals when they walked anywhere. The captain ridiculed the pose by exaggerating it, bending deeply at the waist as if he were a crippled old man. Told to cut it out, Bucher walked in a normal upright position, and after a while was allowed to get away with it.
Bucher also goaded his men to laugh, make sarcastic or obscene cracks, and otherwise express derision during the Friday-night propaganda films. One movie showed a U.S. pilot going out of his way during the Korean War to drop his entire bomb load on a little boy. “They have blinded the boy!” shrieked Fee-ture Feel-um at the climactic moment. “Fuck you!” the captain called back in the darkness.
The crewmen picked up on the captain’s trick of deriding the North Koreans’ authority by carrying out their orders in a preposterous way. Their antics often seemed borrowed from the TV comedy Hogan’s Heroes, in which a group of American POWs outwitted their German captors on a daily basis. Take the sailors’ slaphappy style of marching. If the North Koreans told them to turn left, they turned right. Ordered right, they went left. Directed to halt, they kept going into the nearest wall, comically plowing into one another as guards screamed at them to stop.
“Why you not march like soldiers?” a North Korean asked in exasperation. “We’re Americans,” came the non sequitur reply. “We just don’t walk like you.”
When one guard demanded that a sailor clean a spot on the wall of his cell, the man dropped to his hands and knees and furiously scrubbed the floor. Hammond made a point of trying to best his captors at every turn. The North Koreans had put him in charge of the seamen on the third floor, making him responsible for, among other things, marching them to meals and exercise. When the reveille bell went off each morning, a guard raced toward the Marine sergeant’s room, shouting “Hammondie! Hammondie!” Rather than give the communist the satisfaction of rousting him from bed, Hammond got up earlier and stood inside his darkened cell, dressed and ready to go. As the guard reached his door, Hammond flung it open and charged into the hall, calling the rest of the Americans to assemble.
The main rabble-rouser, however, was Bucher. His “rascally fighting spirit,” as CT Peter Langenberg described it, helped keep up morale. “He was absolutely the mastermind,” recalled Langenberg. “He did a great job.”
The captain and his men routinely ignored the ban on communicating with one another, whispering and passing notes during meals and calisthenics. After Schumacher was beaten for washing his socks in his room, he started doing his laundry in the latrine. Other men did the same, and soon as many as ten sailors at a time were quietly conversing as they rinsed underwear.
Often the talk was of escape. The men were convinced they could overpower the small guard detachment and get outside the compound walls, but what then? The surrounding countryside crawled with communist military personnel. A large group of Americans slogging across the snow-draped plains would be easy to spot from the air. If they somehow managed to reach the coast, could they find a boat big enough to carry all of them south? How would they evade communist patrol boats? Tim Harris proposed stealing a plane from a nearby airfield and flying to freedom. But he’d washed out of Navy flight school, and Bucher viewed his scheme only as a desperate last resort.
Although the captain doubted that any mass breakout could succeed, he appointed a co
mmittee, chaired by Schumacher, to explore the possibilities. Word was passed to the men to put forward their best ideas. If nothing else, dreaming up escape scenarios would help distract them from the misery and ennui of prison life.
By the end of March the North Koreans apparently began to think their charges were getting too uppity. After two sailors accused a guard of filching their cigarettes, Super C cracked down.
On April 1, the colonel called the entire crew to a meeting in the room where the Friday movies were shown. He shouted that his guards didn’t steal and the two complainers had insulted all Koreans. They were liars who’d committed a grave violation of the Rules of Life and deserved serious punishment.
“What should we do with these men who have lied and brought disgrace on themselves and their benefactors?” he asked the assemblage, his voice low and ominous.
Bucher, who gained a better understanding of how Super C’s mind worked with each passing day, jumped to his feet. “I think these men have realized they are wrong,” he said, “and I think you should give them one more chance.” Taking his cue, other crewmen murmured similar sentiments.
Super C wasn’t persuaded. He demanded to hear from the culprits themselves.
Communication technician Charles Sterling stood up, bowed his head, and recanted his original story. He now claimed that he, not the guard, had actually taken the cigarettes. Sterling begged forgiveness. The other accuser, fireman Michael O’Bannon, reversed his story, too, insisting he’d lost his cigarettes while exercising outdoors. He lowered his head and asked for absolution.
Their shipmates muttered faux disapproval. “You rats,” said one. “How awful,” exclaimed someone else. “You ought to be beaten,” chimed in a third.
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