The act didn’t work, however, and what the Americans dubbed the “April Purge” began the next day.
Guards cornered sailors in the latrine, punching them in the stomach, ribs, and back, and viciously kicking their shins. Schumacher was beaten senseless over a loose button on his jacket. A guard began yelling at Jim Kell, a cheerful, crew-cut chief petty officer who supervised the CTs, for having some rice tucked into his cheek as he left the mess hall. A moment later, a second guard slammed his rifle butt into the side of Kell’s head. Kell didn’t see the blow coming; he fell to one knee, his body shaking. For a week afterward he could hardly move his jaw.
“I’d never been hit like that in my life,” he remembered. “The whole side of my head just exploded.”
The purge ended as abruptly as it began. Acting as if nothing had happened, Super C asked Bucher whether any American holidays were coming up. The captain mentioned Easter. On Sunday, April 7, the crewmen were each granted an egg and some rice pastry to mark the day. Super C asked for a list of other American celebrations. Seeing an opportunity to improve his men’s diet, Bucher scribbled out 30-odd holidays—most of them invented—including Sadie Hawkins Day, Alf Landon Concession Day, and Max Goolis Day (named for the hero of a satirical folk song by the Limeliters). But the colonel ignored the suggestions.
Super C did, however, lift the ban on talking, and even let the officers play cards and other games at night. Bucher and Schumacher began getting together in the captain’s room over a chessboard. The skipper, a chess aficionado since adolescence, usually slaughtered his lieutenant. When they finished playing, the two men talked into the night, the captain entertaining Schumacher with stories of his youth, enlisted days, family, and good books he’d read. Schumacher relished the tales and listened spellbound as Bucher detailed his first few days at the Barn. The lieutenant passed along whatever news he’d picked up, and Bucher in turn relayed any orders he had for the men. A powerful bond was forming between the two officers, and the captain came to regard his intelligent young subordinate as his most trusted confidant, often bouncing ideas off him before taking them to the rest of the crew.
Super C called another all-hands assembly on April 20. With Silver Lips translating, the colonel delivered the heartbreaking news that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., America’s foremost civil rights leader, had been murdered. Cities across America were in flames as angry blacks lashed out at their oppressors, Super C said. The people finally were rising up against their capitalist rulers.
The North Korean revealed another startling fact: The United States was negotiating at Panmunjom to get the sailors back. He expressed disgust at Washington’s refusal to apologize for the crew’s transgressions. The news buoyed the hopes of many sailors, but not Bucher. The U.S. government, he was convinced, would never admit to doing something it hadn’t done.
—
April passed drearily into May. From his window Bucher watched as spring softened the countryside. Green shoots popped up in the rice paddies. A faint scent of flowers—daisies, bluebells, and lilies of the valley, Bucher guessed—floated into his cell, along with the warbles of meadowlarks and lapwings. In the distance, peasants bent over their planting.
The bucolic sights and sounds lifted the skipper’s mood. But they were mixed with the boom of artillery practice and the roar of aircraft, as military activity picked up along with the improving weather. The parachute-training tower was in action every day, and military vehicles dotted the roads.
The captain was convinced that at least some of his men would face a kangaroo court and execution—if they lasted that long on their killing diet. The portions weren’t adequate to sustain a small child, much less a grown man. Moreover, the food often was larded with repulsive foreign objects. One sailor found a tooth in his bowl; others found rusty nails, stones, insects, and animal eyeballs.
“Five minutes after you ate the meal, you’d be so hungry you’d be shaking,” recalled Kell. His pangs were sharpest in the mornings, when the smell of frying bacon seeped up from the first floor, where communist officers ate breakfast.
The only source of protein was sewer trout, which occasionally accompanied the turnips and rice. With its black skin and catfishlike horns, the putrid fish was particularly revolting. One CT described it as a “two-handed meal”: You had to pick it up by a horn with one hand, while holding your nose with the other. The best way to eat the fish, the CT told his roommates, was to stuff a chunk in your mouth and swallow it without chewing. Hungry as they were, some sailors just couldn’t choke it down at all.
The men slid into lethargy. They were eager to get outside each day and exercise in the balmy weather. But as energy ebbed from their starving bodies, jumping jacks and laps around the track became more draining than invigorating. One morning Schumacher stood watching as the enlisted men, led by Charlie Law, the sturdy quartermaster, clomped slowly along the track like exhausted dray horses. The beatings and forced confessions and daily humiliations had robbed them of much of their dignity, but they hadn’t given up. Schumacher realized that the crew possessed a hidden strength: their shared suffering. What they were going through bound them together, made them stronger. No matter what happened, Schumacher sensed, these Americans would endure. Some of them flashed smiles as they loped past, and the lieutenant felt a rush of admiration for them all.
Medical problems multiplied. Boils and weeping sores broke out on the men’s atrophied bodies. Some got worms; others, food poisoning. Bucher had trouble with his eyesight, and numbness in his legs. Murphy developed a painful foot infection.
The executive officer was getting acupuncture treatments from the prison physician, a plump, jovial man whom the crew naturally called “Witch Doctor.” He seemed to prescribe acupuncture or a mud pack for almost any ailment the seamen came down with. They had so little confidence in his healing abilities that most stopped seeing him despite their deteriorating health. Witch Doctor had two young nurses, called Flo (for Florence Nightingale) and Little Iodine. With their stringy hair, thick legs, and flat chests, however, the women didn’t even give the Americans much to fantasize about.
The North Koreans kept showing their Friday-night movies, but they decided the crew needed additional “reeducation.” A number of communist officers were designated to enlighten the sailors with twice-weekly propaganda lectures. These officers became known as “room daddies,” since each of them was responsible for raising the consciousness of the ideologically retarded capitalists occupying a specific cell.
The crewmen quickly anointed each daddy with a derogatory nickname. There was Robot, so named because of his automaton-like devotion to the party line; Possum, a short, rotund senior colonel who resembled a waddling marsupial; and Specs, a scholarly-looking officer who wore glasses. The propaganda officers promoted two leitmotifs: the extraordinary successes and inherent strengths of North Korea, and the fundamental corruption and fatal weaknesses of the United States. And they employed the classic propagandist’s trick of using a small number of truths to lend plausibility to a large web of lies.
For instance, the room daddies made hay over America’s undeniably horrendous treatment of African-Americans and Native Americans. But they twisted and distorted other episodes in U.S. history to the point of absurdity. American troops, the daddies claimed, had committed widespread atrocities during the Korean War, including massacring vast numbers of women and children and releasing clouds of disease-bearing insects on civilian populations. Walter Reuther, the great union leader, flogged autoworkers on the assembly line to increase productivity. President Benjamin Harrison honed his razor on a strop made from the skins of murdered Indians.
Sometimes the crewmen listened in silence, but other times they couldn’t hold their tongues. They often challenged the room daddies’ interpretations of American history and culture; the lectures evolved into excellent venues for resistance, if only verbal. When a daddy talked sadl
y about the impoverishment of the American working class, a sailor piped up about the nice new Chevrolet waiting for him in the garage of his three-bedroom suburban home. Impossible, declared the North Korean: Even Yankee proletarians couldn’t possibly afford such things. The American insisted they could and did.
The seamen also found North Korean claims of enormous industrial and agricultural progress laughable. One room daddy insisted that his country’s farms were “100 percent mechanized.” But the Americans had only to look out their windows at the surrounding fields to see the primitive reality of North Korean farming methods: an old woman pulling an ox harnessed to a plow, with an old man pushing from behind.
Possum’s distortions of U.S. history especially irked Harry Iredale. The shy oceanographer usually tried to keep a low profile, but he couldn’t stand listening to Possum’s nonsensical assertions. Iredale also worried that some of the less educated enlisted men might accept as fact what the North Korean said. One sailor in Iredale’s room, for example, thought the moon physically changed shape as it went through its phases. Iredale wanted to make sure that man in particular didn’t swallow too many communist falsehoods.
In his understated way Iredale went after Possum at virtually every lecture. He’d ask permission to speak and Possum’s translator would reply, “Yes, Ear-a-daily?” The oceanographer then refuted everything the propaganda officer had just said. Possum would repeat his statements and ask pointedly whether Iredale understood. The American nodded. As idiotic as Possum’s lies were, Iredale didn’t want to push his luck.
The champion lecturer was, of course, Super C, standing spit-polished and confident as he talked for six hours or longer. He could switch gears almost instantly from shouting angrily about alleged U.S. atrocities during the Korean War to softly rhapsodizing about the beauty of the Korean countryside. “This guy could talk,” said Kell. “He was programmed and he could talk and talk and talk and talk.” The tireless commandant often droned on until two or three o’clock in the morning, as his listeners’ eyelids fluttered with exhaustion.
Super C often found himself fencing with Bucher. The colonel once praised Karl Marx’s landmark economic treatise Das Kapital, and commended Soviet leaders for putting Marx’s theories into practice so successfully. But Bucher argued that Soviet bureaucrats had bastardized Marx’s ideas for their own ends. Where the socialist philosopher dreamed of a collectivist state that would turn the means of production over to workers and then wither away, Stalin had created a permanent police state that ruthlessly kept him in power while rank-and-file Russians died by the millions in gulags and state-engineered famines. Their differences aside, Super C seemed to respect the captain and even to savor their verbal jousts.
The North Koreans weren’t trying to brainwash the crewmen in the Manchurian Candidate sense. No one was hypnotized or injected with mind-altering drugs in an effort to destroy his basic beliefs and values. The room daddies seemed genuinely to believe their system was better, even though they had no accurate idea of what life in a Western democracy was like. They made some inroads with a handful of sailors who resented what they viewed as their country’s abandonment of them. But other seamen quickly convinced the doubters they hadn’t been forgotten. And so the propaganda fusillades generally fell on deaf ears.
“There was nothing to talk about,” summed up Langenberg. “They couldn’t sell us on their system.”
Super C and his minions paid special attention to two African-American enlisted men, cook Harry Lewis and Willie Bussell, a bosun’s mate. They questioned Lewis and Bussell about the riots in U.S. cities and why they hadn’t participated in any. Lewis in particular baffled his captors. They refused to believe his claim that he’d bought his own car for $3,200 back in the States. Ultimately the communists gave up trying to convert the black sailors and treated them as badly as any other member of the crew, if not worse.
The weather grew warmer. The prisoners watched each morning as columns of drab-looking peasants trudged into the rice paddies, where Kim Il Sung’s loudspeakers blared political slogans and exhortations of hard work and self-sacrifice from dawn until dusk.
Super C called another mass meeting on May 29. He swept into the movie room with his usual rakishness, seeming in an almost playful mood. The Americans, he declared, needed to do more work around the Country Club. They already were responsible for cleaning the two upper floors of the building, trimming trees and shrubs around it, and weeding a nearby pear orchard. But Super C wanted more. What specific jobs were they qualified to do?
Friar Tuck said facetiously that he knew how to drive tanks from his days as an Army officer. Bucher said he’d be happy to skipper a fishing boat. “Under no circumstances,” said Super C, apparently getting the joke about escape opportunities. Someone else said he was a good tree cutter. Another sailor suggested the crew be given a farm to run. But nothing seemed to engage Super C’s interest. Instead, he put the men to work cutting the compound’s grass.
It was a chore with a peculiarly North Korean twist. The grass was to be cut not with lawn mowers or even scythes, but with penknives. Thus all 82 Americans found themselves on their hands and knees one hot day, sawing away at tufts of grass with miniature blades.
“The reason the Korcoms don’t have lawn mowers is that they haven’t perfected the goat yet,” cracked Steve Harris, using Navy shorthand for Korean communists.
The ridiculousness of the situation was overwhelming. The sailors grinned at one another, and then began to laugh. With their self-proclaimed genius for innovation, the North Koreans had created a giggling, sunburned, 164-legged mowing machine. Soon the men were openly guffawing. To keep Super C from taking umbrage, the captain explained that his people were “delirious with delight” at being outside on such a nice day.
By late spring the guards’ continuing pilferage of their paltry supplies of food and cigarettes had become a serious problem for Bucher and his men. Complaints to Super C and his officers were met with sharp reprimands for the Americans’ lack of appreciation of the Korean people’s generosity. So the crewmen decided to take matters into their own hands and booby-trap the goodies.
One of their targets was a habitual thief. To lure him, the sailors left out a rare treat—an apple—but not before poking small holes in it and soaking it in a bucket of urine for several hours. With the fruit properly marinated, it was placed in a spot where the sticky-fingered guard couldn’t miss it. Sure enough, the apple disappeared and the thief didn’t show up for the next few days. When he finally returned, said Charlie Law, “We just would look at him and grin.”
Although wholesale beatings had stopped, the communists didn’t hesitate to use occasional violence, or the threat of it, to keep the Americans cowed. A guard called Sweet Pea karate-chopped one sailor in the throat after he accidentally dropped a water basin in the latrine. When Stu Russell gave a guard a bored look, he pointed his rifle at Russell’s head and cocked it.
The guards regularly attacked any sailor unfortunate enough to have to go to the toilet at night. This was especially hard for the men on the third floor, who had to run a gauntlet of vindictive soldiers on the way down to the second-floor head, and again on the way back up. The prisoners were required to call for a guard to escort them. And that’s when the pounding started.
“They’d beat you all the way to the bathroom, knocking you in the head, knocking you down, hitting you with the rifle butt,” recollected Kell. “And while you’re trying to take a leak, they’d be hitting you, too. You’d come back with all kinds of bruises. It scared the hell out of you. You never knew what they were going to be doing to you.”
Near the end of the May 29 meeting, Bucher stood up to speak. He wanted to take advantage of Super C’s good mood and noted that the next day was Memorial Day, a national holiday for Americans to remember their war dead. Bucher was just angling for another round of eggs for his men, but the colonel hit the roof.
> “How dare you bring that up!” he screamed. “You would honor the U.S. imperialist aggressors who came to kill Koreans. You insult us with that suggestion!” Instantly recognizing his mistake, Bucher tried to withdraw his request. But Super C raged on. There would be no more holidays of any kind for the Americans.
Then one day the North Koreans handed out summer uniforms: tan Chinese-style suits with wide lapels for officers; similar suits of gray for enlisted men. Everyone got Mao caps and black sneakers.
The message was clear: The Americans weren’t getting out of the Country Club anytime soon.
CHAPTER 10
ALLIES AT ODDS
LBJ flew to Honolulu on April 15 for a private conference with President Park. Several months earlier, at a meeting of the two heads of state in Australia, the South Korean leader had promised to contribute 11,000 more troops to the Vietnam War effort. With fresh intelligence pointing to another enemy offensive in the summer, close on the heels of the recent Tet onslaught, Johnson wanted Park to make good on his pledge as soon as possible.
Using the Tet holidays as cover, more than 80,000 Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops had launched simultaneous attacks on cities, towns, and military bases across South Vietnam. One team carried out an audacious assault on the U.S. embassy in Saigon. While American and South Vietnamese forces had decisively beaten back the communists, inflicting enormous losses, the enemy’s strength and resilience had come as a shock to the American public, which had been repeatedly assured that there was light at the end of the Vietnam tunnel and the war soon would be over. Widely televised in the United States, the savage Tet battles had stirred grave doubts among Americans about whether “Johnson’s war” was winnable, or even worth fighting any longer.
From Honolulu International Airport, LBJ traveled by motorcade to Iolani Palace, the state capitol, and gave a speech to thousands of people gathered on the palace grounds. He made a second stop at Waikiki Beach, listening to a performance of the Royal Hawaiian Band and meeting local surfers. The president then was driven to the luxurious estate of the late industrialist Henry Kaiser, where he was to stay for a few days and confer with Park.
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