Act of War

by Jack Cheevers

  The Americans were powerless to stop the terrible withering of their bodies. Charlie Law shrank from a husky 215 pounds to 125. After Jim Kell lost 70 pounds, the bones in his face protruded so sharply that an enlisted man serving as prison barber was afraid to shave him. By wolfing down rice that others no longer could stomach, Harry Iredale managed to limit his weight loss to 15 pounds. But he was as weak as the rest and could hardly lift his legs.

  Big scabs formed on sailors’ necks, cracked open, and became running sores. Nearly everyone had a groin rash. Witch Doctor handed out black pills for dysentery and swabbed everything else with iodine or Mercurochrome. The lack of vitamins in the seamen’s diet seemed to affect certain nerves, and some men had trouble walking. More than a few were convinced they wouldn’t survive unless conditions improved soon.

  Summer rainstorms suffused the hot air with humidity. Bread turned moldy and the axle grease–like butter went rancid. Mosquitoes and flies buzzed through unscreened cell windows in such profusion that the crewmen staged contests to see who could kill the most. Rats flourished.

  Cooped up together for months on end, the men began to get on one another’s nerves. “When you see somebody every day, and you look across at them at the table, and you know every little nitpicky thing they do—the way they pick their nose, the way they fart—you know everything about them,” Kell explained. “And you don’t want to know everything about them.”

  Knowing too many nitpicky things led to arguments, and arguments spiraled into physical conflict. A brawl in a third-floor room became so violent that plaster fell off the ceiling of the cell below. A disagreement between seaman Stu Russell and Lee Roy Hayes, a radioman, escalated into a fistfight, with Hayes slugging Russell in the jaw and knocking him over a bed. When Russell stood up, Hayes decked him again. Russell got up a second time and another man finally stopped the fight.

  More fisticuffs broke out in the same room when another seaman, John Shingleton, called Doc Baldridge, the veteran corpsman, an old man. Shingleton wound up with a knot on his head and Baldridge with a black eye.

  CT Angelo Strano threw a cup of water in Bob Hammond’s face during a set-to over religion. Another CT chattered on and on about the wonders of rapid transit systems until an exasperated roommate tried to strangle him.

  Bucher began to worry that his men might descend into Lord of the Flies behavior. Whenever he heard of a fight, he passed word to the combatants that he was prepared to bust them in rank, but had suspended judgment pending their return to the States. “I reminded them that it would cost them a lot of money if the Navy added up their days [in North Korea] as a seaman apprentice, as opposed to a second class petty officer,” he said.

  The captain’s concern deepened when he learned through the grapevine that several sailors were plotting to kill a roommate who’d allegedly turned snitch. The man supposedly had been overheard offering to tell the guards everything his fellow Americans said and did. Bucher sent a stern warning to the conspirators that he’d make it his solemn business to see they faced murder charges at home if they carried out their plan. No harm befell the purported informer, although the men in his room stopped talking to him and froze him out of their activities.

  While the crewmen beat on one another, the North Koreans resumed beating on them. A guard called the Bear was the most feared. Nearly six feet tall, with high cheekbones and a sullen expression, the Bear seemed a born sadist. He loved to barge into a cell and stare down all the Americans until someone flinched. Then he’d order one unlucky man out to the hallway, which soon echoed with grunts, thumps, cries of pain, and pleas for mercy. When the Bear was finished, he flashed a smile and sauntered off.

  The men in room five on the third floor were especially vulnerable. Their cell was at the far end of the hall, directly across from where the Friday-night movies were shown. Because of its relative isolation, the Bear and other guards felt freer to go after its occupants, especially during periods when Super C jacked up the mayhem.

  Cell doors were supposed to stay closed at all times, but the door to room five had a broken latch and the wind often blew it open. Whoever tried to shut it generally was rewarded with a volley of blows from a watchful guard. To ensure an equal distribution of pain, the sailors took turns sitting in a chair next to the door, hoping to catch it before it swung open. With morbid humor, the men called this rotation the “Carousel of Death.”

  One day seaman Steve Ellis drew the short straw. Alert and tense, he waited for the door to move. When it did, he sprang up and grabbed the knob. But the Bear was a step ahead of him, yanking the door out of his grip from the other side. The guard stepped across the threshold and punched Ellis hard in the forehead, causing him to stagger backward but not go down. Angered, the Bear delivered a flurry of blows until Ellis crumpled. As lumps began to form on the sailor’s head, the Bear grinned and strode out of the room.

  The Americans seethed with hatred for their brutish captors—not just for physically abusing them, but for forcing them to be afraid, to cower and flinch. Many sailors wanted nothing more than to rip their tormentors’ heads off. But fighting back would cost them at least a severe beating, and very possibly their lives, and that stark reality stopped them. So they found other ways to resist.

  As usual, Bucher took the role of provocateur-in-chief.

  The captain was sick during part of June. His energy sapped by the anemic diet, he seemed to slip in and out of depression. His right hip and leg still ached from repeated kicks. Sometimes Stu Russell brought meals to his cell. When Russell once asked what he thought the crew’s prospects were, Bucher mumbled that he no longer cared.

  But the skipper shook off his melancholy long enough to engage in an inspired piece of subversive theater. The occasion was a meeting between the crew and Super C and several room daddies. The colonel ranted for a long time before turning to Bucher, who went on and on about how much the Americans appreciated all the North Koreans had done for them. His unctuousness convinced some of his men that he’d been ordered to make the speech.

  The captain kept using the word “paean,” which means a fervent expression of praise. Paean is a noun and is pronounced “PEE-en.” With his facility for wordplay, however, Bucher turned it into a verb and deliberately mispronounced it. The sailors, he insisted, had an obligation to “pee on” Super C for his leniency. Similarly, they should pee on the rest of the communist officers and guards for their incredible hospitality. In fact, the crew really should pee on the generous North Korean people as a whole.

  Most of the seamen got the joke and burst into cheers. It took Law a minute. “Then I’m thinking of somebody urinatin’ all over ’em,” he remembered, “and I’m happier than shit.”

  Another oblique but satisfying method for Bucher and his men to express their anger was by surreptitiously killing the potted plants that sat in every room and throughout the halls. The greenery often was used as a homey accent in propaganda photos of the sailors “enjoying themselves” in prison. The North Koreans were oddly devoted to the plants, making sure they were properly watered and tended by the prisoners.

  Tim Harris detested his plant as a living symbol of the North Korean nation. About four feet tall, with long branches and narrow leaves, the plant grew out of a small porcelain pot in his cell. A duty officer called King Kong had given Harris detailed instructions on caring for the plant, telling him to pour a cup of water on it each day. The first thing King Kong did whenever he came into Harris’s cell was to inspect the plant.

  That infuriated the ensign, who believed the communists had more compassion for shrubs than human beings. He decided to destroy their pet plant by pissing on it each day rather than watering it. The plant stood up to his onslaught for about a month. Then its leaves began to turn yellow and droop. Worried, King Kong shook a cup of fertilizer on the plant as Harris looked on, assuring him somberly that it was already getting plenty of fertilizer.
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br />   The decline couldn’t be stopped. “Why plant die?” King Kong angrily demanded one day. Harris theorized that it didn’t get enough sun, since his cell was on the shady side of the Country Club. King Kong wanted to know precisely how Harris was watering it. The ensign replied that he was using his teapot. “Ah,” said the communist, “you should not do that.” Boiled water lacked minerals; the plant obviously was undernourished. He ordered Harris to use only unboiled water, and the American dutifully complied. Between the tap water and his micturitions, the plant was drowning. When only a few leaves clung to it, Harris sensed he was close to his goal.

  King Kong decided Harris might be right about the inadequate light. He had him take the plant across the corridor to Bucher’s room on the sunny side of the prison. The plant smelled so bad Harris had to hold it at arm’s length; he couldn’t believe the North Korean didn’t smell it, too. King Kong then asked the captain why the plant was in such bad shape. Bucher, who knew what Harris was up to, stroked his chin and suggested it needed pruning. “Okay, you prune,” assented King Kong, who then left. Bucher and Harris opened their penknives and went to work. Off came the last few leaves. Branches were amputated next. For good measure the Americans carved up the stem. All that remained was a stricken-looking, six-inch stump.

  When King Kong returned, he was dumbfounded. He summoned another duty officer nicknamed Snake. “Why you kill plant, huh?” Snake demanded. “Goddamn it, I didn’t kill the goddamn plant,” said Bucher, walking away. Harris was elated; he’d finally found a way to defeat the North Koreans. Gene Lacy took to urinating on the plant in his room; Schumacher knocked off three plants. Murphy, ever the contrarian, regarded his small rubber tree as a sort of companion. He took such good care of it that the communists gave him a second rubber tree to tend and, later, a lemon tree.

  —

  Almost as much as they hungered to lash back at their captors, the crewmen yearned for news of the outside world. Several of them began secretly gathering materials to build a crystal radio that could pick up stations in South Korea or Japan. Hayes sketched a blueprint and slipped it to Strano for manufacturing. Bob Chicca sculpted an earpiece from a piece of wood. Nails were collected from the playing field for a coil; a cigarette packet yielded foil for the diaphragm.

  Magnetizing the nails posed the biggest technical hurdle. Dale Rigby, the ship’s storekeeper, took a nail wrapped with copper wire and shorted it across an electrical switch. The cheaply made nail wouldn’t hold a charge, but Rigby kept trying. At one point the lights in the prison compound flickered, and guards rushed around trying to find the faulty fuse. As his confederates tried to fabricate or steal the rest of the needed parts, Strano husbanded his growing stash under a floorboard in his room.

  Meanwhile, the crew did their best to chafe the North Koreans. Law and his cellmates regularly tweaked their room daddy, Possum, after discovering how easy it was to make him lose his cool. One day they got into a big argument with him over The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s 1848 tract that theorized how proletarians could overthrow capitalism and establish a classless society. The sailors refused to listen to Possum’s views on the Manifesto until they’d read it for themselves. Possum searched for but couldn’t find a copy. Still, he tried to convince his obstreperous wards that democratic societies were riddled with theft and other crime; by contrast, socialism bred no criminals, because everyone shared equally in material goods. But if there was no thievery in North Korea, the Americans countered, why was it necessary to lock the prison supply shed? Confronted with such impertinence, Possum frequently blew up and slapped each seaman in the face with one of his slippers.

  “He never hurt anybody; it was only a little slipper,” recalled Law. “Then he’d realize we got to him and he’d send us off.”

  By now the North Koreans’ efforts to propagandize the crew had an almost pleading tone. The communists were proud of their country and sincerely believed its economic and political systems were superior to anything the West had to offer; they seemed to want the Americans merely to recognize this self-evident truth. But Bucher and his men weren’t buying. On the contrary, they were fully committed to defying all further attempts to use them as propaganda shills.

  The communists themselves handed the sailors their most effective weapon. On a sweltering June night the crew gathered to watch yet another turgid propaganda movie. But this one was followed by something different: a newsreel about the North Korean national soccer team playing in the 1966 World Cup championships in England. The camera tracked the waving, smiling players as they arrived at the stadium. Among the spectators was an elderly British gentleman, classically attired in a bowler hat. With great deliberation, the old man balled one hand into a fist, aimed it directly at the cameraman, and raised his middle finger. The North Korean officer narrating the newsreel appeared not to notice.

  A second newsreel showed two U.S. Army helicopter pilots, shot down over the DMZ and captured by the North Koreans in 1963, as they were freed at Panmunjom about a year later. When the camera settled on a clutch of onlookers, one of them—a U.S. Navy officer—also flipped the bird. Again, no reaction from the narrator. Subdued laughter rippled among the Pueblo men. While the contemptuous gesture was universally recognized in the English-speaking world, the communists evidently didn’t understand it.

  The sailors soon began to flip off the North Koreans every chance they got. Bucher told his men, if questioned, to say they were displaying the “Hawaiian good-luck sign.” To give that explanation credibility, Law dismissed the crew from calisthenics by raising his middle digit and shouting, “Good luck to everyone!” Grinning seamen returned his salute with the same sentiment.

  Morale took an upswing as the Americans dissed their captors, plotted escape, built a clandestine radio, and murdered their plants. Yet even as his men’s spirits improved, Bucher’s deteriorated. He still was fighting dysentery and had lost 80 pounds from his precapture weight of about 205. He marched outside for exercises with “his head down, his arms at his side, and his fists clenched.” He said little and didn’t eat much. One day he collapsed in the latrine; a sailor dragged him back to his cell, unconscious.

  On June 27, Super C ordered the crew into the movie room and informed them of problems at Panmunjom. The U.S. side, he said, had rejected his country’s “just” demands, and the bilateral talks were foundering. However, the colonel reported approvingly, some high-profile Americans were publicly decrying Washington’s intransigence. Among them was Rose Bucher, who, in speeches and media interviews, was denouncing the Johnson administration for not doing more to get her husband and his men back home.

  It was the first news the captain had had of his family in almost five months. Hearing his wife’s name, he dropped his head to his chest and began to weep—first quietly, then without holding back. The room grew still. Between sobs, Bucher stood and choked out an apology to his men for losing his composure. His first reaction to his spouse’s activities was strongly negative. “Christ, there goes my career,” he lamented to Schumacher. “I’m wiped out. It’s the wrong thing to do.” Later he reconsidered. Although he didn’t fully understand Rose’s motives, he came to accept her crusade. When all was said and done, she was his wife and he loved her.

  Another possible threat to his career—assuming he ever made it home—was the Navy investigation that undoubtedly would follow. After all, a sailor had died on Bucher’s watch, the rest of his crew had been imprisoned, and a floating surveillance platform worth millions of dollars had fallen into enemy hands. “You lose a .45[-caliber pistol] in the Navy and you’re gonna have a court of inquiry,” he told Schumacher over one of their nocturnal chess games.

  But what would such a probe focus on? The actual circumstances that led to the Pueblo’s seizure or Bucher’s personality clash with Murphy? The captain’s pleas for rapid-destruct gear or his escapades ashore? Substantive issues or sideshows?

/>   At the time Bucher had no reason to believe a Navy inquiry would be anything but fair, objective, and thorough. Nor did he worry that it would necessarily be fatal to his future in the service. He knew, however, that a public airing of the Pueblo’s dirty laundry would benefit neither him nor Murphy. The captain was firmly convinced he’d made rational, defensible decisions on the day his ship was taken, and he wanted to be able to explain them to a board of investigation without irrelevant distractions.

  He also wanted to make sure his officers were on the same page if they ever had to testify before such a board. Men under fire often remember events differently, and the skipper didn’t want his people contradicting one another over such basic facts as the time of capture or how many PT boats were involved. Since he’d spent so much time on the bridge during the attack, Bucher himself wasn’t fully aware of everything that had transpired in the SOD hut and belowdecks, and he wanted to fill in some of those blanks.

  So the captain began asking his officers what each of them remembered of the chaotic, terrifying hours on January 23 after sub chaser No. 35 signaled them to heave to. During meals, card games, and outdoor exercises, he grilled them about exactly what they’d seen and heard. He professed not to care whether their reconstructions put him in a favorable or unfavorable light, but he wasn’t above pressuring them to get their stories straight. “If you got five or six guys who saw it one way, and one guy who saw it another way, well, you try to convince him,” Bucher explained years later. The last thing his officers should do during an official inquiry, he told them, was “create controversy.”