On July 16, Super C made an announcement that sent the crew’s morale soaring. For the first time they’d be allowed to receive mail from home. Many of the letters—addressed to Pyongyang’s Central Post Office, per Navy instructions to the sailors’ loved ones—were months old, and it wasn’t clear why the North Koreans had delayed delivery. But it hardly mattered now. The men devoured their letters, reading them over and over to themselves before reading them aloud to one another.
Murphy got joyous news of the birth of his second child, a girl. Steve Harris’s mother reported writing to all 100 U.S. senators, demanding they work harder for the crew’s release. Kell’s wife said she’d moved to Hawaii and would wait for him there. There was tragic news, too: Strano’s brother had been killed in Vietnam on the same day the Pueblo was forced into Wonsan harbor.
Bucher was cheered by two letters from Rose, one written in February and the other in April. She’d been careful to tell him only the most mundane details of domestic life. But holding something in his hands that she’d held in hers gave the captain a feeling of almost physical connectedness to his distant spouse. “No tender private thoughts could be conveyed, nor any of the details of the ordeal from her side, yet it was all there by some mysterious cryptography the [North Koreans] could never break,” he later wrote. “It was instantly deciphered by my own heart.”
—
Sweltering in their cells in the midsummer heat, the sailors stank like billy goats. They were permitted to bathe only once a week now, and their clothes and bedding reeked of stale sweat. They had dispensation to open their doors and windows in hopes of catching an occasional breeze, but mostly what came through were clouds of flying bugs. From their windows the men watched as soldiers loitered outside in the sun, amusing themselves by kicking skinny dogs that groveled for scraps of food.
In spite of the heat and his frail health, Bucher launched his own summer offensive against the North Koreans.
He made fun of their language by loudly mispronouncing Korean words, causing even his captors to laugh occasionally. When a guard ordered him to kill flies in his cell, he advanced toward the man waving a newspaper and slammed the door in his face.
Another time, he took off his jacket without asking permission. A guard told him to put it back on, but the skipper complained that he’d perspire too much. The guard insisted anyway. After the North Korean left the room, Bucher dumped a bucket of water over his head. The guard returned and gazed at the sodden American in disbelief.
“I told you it was gonna make me sweat,” the captain explained.
Leading his sailors up a staircase one day, Bucher caught a vicious kick in the chest from a soldier on the landing above. The blow sent him reeling backward, but he kept his footing. Catching his breath, he marched back up the stairs and past the soldier as if nothing had happened.
The North Koreans began to let their captives play sports outdoors, and the Americans took full advantage of their time together. They used football huddles to exchange information and transmit the captain’s orders. When a guard tried to stick his nose in, the sailors would quickly line up, hike the ball, and “run over him.”
The men also organized huge, crazed games of basketball—often with 20 or more elbow-throwing players on the court—that produced a spate of injuries. Rizalino Aluague, a steward’s mate, fractured his kneecap in one game; in another, Schumacher accidentally slammed into a CT and broke the other man’s nose. Harry Iredale, an accomplished intramural hoops player in college despite his abbreviated size, sat out the games, both because they were so out of control and because he didn’t want the communists to see him enjoying himself too much.
With injuries multiplying, the North Koreans finally banned football and basketball, allowing the Americans to indulge only in relatively nonviolent volleyball.
All the while, the guards maintained the atmosphere of intimidation, beating the seamen for even trivial offenses. But a couple of poundings resulted from a remarkably reckless public statement by U.S. Senator Stephen Young, an Ohio Democrat and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Young claimed in a July 12 press release that the Pueblo’s voyage had been a CIA operation. Although a few crewmen were Navy personnel, he said, “The majority were technicians, CIA operatives, and scientists skilled in breaking codes and in knowledge of highly sophisticated apparatus.” It was likely, Young went on, that the “CIA agents in charge” of the vessel sailed it to “within 12 miles of a North Korea island” during the Pueblo’s ten days of radio silence.
Young’s words were utterly false, but they reinforced the North Koreans’ deepest suspicions. A number of sailors were called before Super C, who demanded that they confirm the CIA’s involvement. When they denied it, he countered, “Are you calling one of your senators a liar?” Two crewmen were beaten for saying Young was wrong. Yet they got off easy, considering that the communists could have used his ill-considered assertions as an excuse to execute them as spies.
In some ways, however, the crewmen’s worst enemy was the sheer tedium of their existence.
They talked about anything and everything to kill time. Women were a perennial topic, and the young seamen tried to outdo one another with tales of their most embarrassing romantic moments. Food was the subject of long, obsessive conversations. Law talked dreamily about his love of pork chops. Hayes was dying for a peanut butter–and-bologna sandwich. Chicca drew a picture of a hero sandwich for Russell, who kept it tucked away in a cigarette pack so he could take it out and drool over it at will. Discussions of favorite foods from home always seemed to hit a mouthwatering peak right before a barely edible prison meal was served.
Word games and brainteasers were popular with the bored swabbies, especially the intellectually restless communication technicians. Jim Shepard and Don Peppard constructed crossword puzzles for themselves and their SOD hut buddies; at one point eight puzzles were in circulation.
Bucher liked math games. One of his favorites was the “12 ball problem,” which involves a dozen balls of the same size and color. One is heavier or lighter than the others. The challenge is to put the balls on a scale and figure out, in only three weighings, which of them is different, and whether it’s heavier or lighter. It took Bucher 12 hours to crack the problem; a brainy CT named Charles Ayling solved it in 60 minutes.
As the prison shimmered and baked in the sun, its inmates daydreamed for hours on end. Lacy tore down and rebuilt the engine of a 1937 Ford in his head. CTs Earl Kisler and Michael Alexander constructed an imaginary sailboat and took an imaginary voyage around the world together. Steve Harris’s nighttime dreams took him back to some of the most pleasant times of his life. He went bird-watching in the woods near his childhood home outside Boston. He sailed across Vineyard Sound and along the Maine coast with his father. He relived family reunions at Christmas. The dreams remained vivid for weeks at a time.
Sex became a faint memory for the men. Back in the States, chasing women would’ve been a primary occupation for many of them. But here in prison, terrorized at random and deprived of any feminine stimulation except for the unappetizing Flo and Little Iodine, the sailors found it difficult even to conjure a good sexual fantasy.
What was fantasized about a great deal was escape. Everyone, it seemed, had his own scheme. Ron Berens, the helmsman, thought a team of men could follow electric power lines to a dam, and then follow the river below the dam to the coast. Kisler’s plan was to do the unexpected: Rather than flee south to the demilitarized zone, he wanted to head north, toward the Russian border 300 miles away. Others envisioned a breakout along the lines of a stirring World War II movie they’d seen, The Great Escape, in which British and American airmen tunnel their way out of a German POW camp.
But the Country Club wasn’t Stalag Luft III, and North Korea wasn’t northern Europe. Unlike the allied fliers in the movie, who could blend easily into European cities and towns, the Pueblo sailors�
��most of them Caucasian—would stick out like sore thumbs anywhere in North Korea. Nor were local resistance groups waiting to help them with food, guns, money, and safe houses. (And the movie was based on a real-life escape that was hardly an encouraging example. Of the 76 airmen who slipped out of the prison camp, 73 were recaptured; the Germans executed 50 of them.)
Most of the plans Bucher heard were either impractical or too dangerous or both. The only halfway realistic one came from Murphy. The XO had gotten his idea from a glossy propaganda magazine that conveniently included a detailed map of North Korea. Murphy noticed that a river stretched from the outskirts of Pyongyang to its headwaters on a mountain. On the other side of the mountain, another river flowed south to the DMZ. It might be possible for him and another man or two to slip away along the banks of the two rivers and then swim across the border. Murphy pored over the map until he’d memorized every detail: where tributaries joined the rivers, how far apart the tributaries were, and any other landmarks that might help the escapees. To help cover their tracks, the men would leave during a summer monsoon.
But Bucher decided that even this idea was too risky. The moment the prison break was discovered, he reasoned, the North Koreans would switch on their loudspeakers and sound the alarm in every village for 100 miles around. As much as heavy rain might camouflage the fleeing sailors’ movements, it would also make crucial landscape features harder to recognize. Poor health was another complication. The infection in Murphy’s foot, for example, got so bad that by August it was all he could do to trek to the latrine, much less the DMZ.
As summer wore on, illness and bad nutrition continued to grind down everyone. Hayes contracted hepatitis. Ramon Rosales, a young Mexican-American seaman from El Paso, Texas, got spinal meningitis and couldn’t get out of bed. And Charlie Law was slowly losing his eyesight.
Law realized something was wrong when he couldn’t make out Super C’s face during a mass meeting. At first he thought his mind was playing tricks on him, but by early August even close-up objects looked blurry. The self-assured navigator was terrified. Perfect vision was what defined him as a Navy man, what made him special. Even after retiring from the service, he planned to earn his living with his eyes, as a navigator aboard San Diego tuna boats.
Law was afraid of Witch Doctor, so he didn’t ask for his help. When Bucher found out what was happening, he insisted that the North Koreans do something. The prison physician stuck acupuncture pins behind Law’s ears to “let the evil spirits out,” but that didn’t work. Kell loaned Law his glasses and they helped a little. But Law’s condition worsened to the point that when he looked straight ahead he saw a big black circle; only his peripheral vision was intact. That made it hard for him to get around; other sailors had to take his arms and help him on stairs.
As Law struggled against encroaching blackness, the North Koreans decided to exploit their captives’ longing for home as a means of pressuring the Johnson administration to roll over at Panmunjom. The communists began trying to soften up the sailors with better food. Suddenly there was canned pork, potatoes, and butter to eat. Then Super C “suggested” yet another press conference.
“Good idea, sir,” Bucher replied, with pretended subservience.
Wearing fresh uniforms for the occasion, Bucher and two dozen other seamen acted out their roles before a roomful of North Korean newsmen and TV cameras on August 13. Careful as always, Super C made the captain write out answers in advance to questions the North Koreans planned to ask. The Americans spoke of how anxious they were to return to their families, and how perplexed that Washington hadn’t apologized. At the end, however, Bucher stood up to say a few closing words and make his most heartfelt point.
“Good luck, everyone,” he bade the journalists, middle finger triumphantly upraised.
As soon as the klieg lights died, however, the North Koreans returned to heavy-handed repression. The food worsened; beatings escalated. After Kisler refused to sign a letter to Newsweek magazine pleading for a U.S. apology, the Bear and Robot whipped and pounded him with a leather belt, a board, and a rubber-soled sandal until his head swelled up like a pumpkin.
Bucher was becoming dangerously weak. His orderly, John Mitchell, found him so unresponsive one day that he seemed to have fallen into a coma. Yet so disturbed was the captain by the ongoing abuse of his men that he went on a five-day hunger strike in protest. When that had no effect, he tried to scare Super C by acting like he was gravely ill, maybe even going crazy. He shivered uncontrollably. He feigned lockjaw and forced himself to vomit. When Super C addressed him, he cast his eyes downward and mumbled some nutty non sequitur. None of it worked, but the captain’s histrionics on their behalf endeared him even more to his men.
“You’re my kind of skipper,” Kell told Bucher one day as he limped through the latrine.
“That means a lot to me, coming from you, Chief,” the captain replied.
The Americans kept up their guerrilla resistance. When Super C ordered them to write another round of propaganda letters home, the men found all sorts of ways to undermine the effort. Hayes used dashes and dots above the “i”s in his letter to spell out “This is a lie” in Morse code. Peppard began a letter to his father by urging him to say hello to his old friend “Garba Gefollows” (garbage follows). Referring to the North Koreans, Kisler told his family he hadn’t “met such nice people since our high school class visited St. Elizabeth’s,” a mental hospital outside Washington, D.C.
Murphy ignored Super C’s directive that the letters be addressed to “influential Americans,” sending his to a county-fair manager he knew in Northern California. Lacy wrote to a buddy on the Seattle sewer board. The North Koreans took photos of the men in their cells, spruced up with potted plants and chess sets, to include with their letters. The photographers urged them to smile and look relaxed. The sailors grinned and hoisted their middle fingers. Law suggested a group picture of the eight men in his room, and as the shutter clicked, three of them were clearly flashing the Hawaiian good-luck sign.
Law mailed a copy of the photo to his uncle in Tacoma.
—
Not long after the August press travesty, Super C unveiled an even grander project: an “international” news conference involving journalists from around the world, most of them communist, who’d been invited to Pyongyang to cover the twentieth anniversary of North Korea’s founding. Scheduled for September 12, this dog-and-pony show was to be the biggest and most elaborate to date. The colonel boasted that he’d even invited an American newsman.
Super C warned the captives several times that their futures hinged on the success of the upcoming event. “This will be a big step toward your freedom,” he said. “You must do everything to make it a success.” He seemed nervous about the outcome; Bucher figured his career might be on the line.
The press conference was to be held in a classroom building across the playing field from the Country Club. All six Pueblo officers would participate, along with 14 enlisted men. Bucher did his best to stack the deck, recommending sailors clever enough to make the North Koreans think they were cooperating even as they signaled American viewers that the whole thing was just another coerced sham.
The communists rejected some of the suggested men and accepted others. Those selected spent two weeks memorizing scripted questions and answers; no spontaneous queries from journalists would be permitted. The sailors even had to practice walking into the room and sitting down. Those not performing were to view the show on closed-circuit TV in their barracks. Bucher warned them not to laugh at what was said, no matter how outlandish, since guards would be watching closely.
From their cell windows the skipper and his men saw TV trucks pull up and technicians run coaxial cables into the classroom building. On the morning of the conference, a fleet of small Russian- and Japanese-built cars arrived, disgorging newsmen from Poland, Hungary, Italy, the Soviet Union, India, several African rep
ublics, East Germany, Cuba, Egypt, Cambodia, and other nations. Also in attendance were several reporters from noncommunist Japanese newspapers and observers from communist embassies in Pyongyang—more than 80 people in all.
Jammed with klieg lights and cigarette-puffing journalists, the room quickly became uncomfortably hot and smoky. Super C wanted to discourage the notion that the conference was staged or coerced, and only a few soldiers guarded the doors. Bucher and his men filed in, blinking uncertainly against the dazzling lights.
Robot acted as moderator. He began by listing all the news organizations represented, including the Guardian, a leftist newspaper based in New York. The paper’s correspondent was a plump man named Lionel Martin who smoked a pipe, wore a houndstooth jacket, and looked like a New England college professor.
Robot declared the conference open. For the benefit of the foreign reporters, the North Koreans had stationed translators around the room, and a loud babel arose as they converted Robot’s remarks into a multitude of languages. Fee-ture Feel-um, the narrator of the Friday propaganda movies, served as English translator, but he couldn’t handle the pressure. He stuttered and stammered and soon fell behind.
The farcical nature of the proceedings was immediately apparent. Hoping to cover up the tight scripting, Robot falsely told the journalists that all of the questions had been submitted ahead of time. As he read them aloud, one sailor after another jumped to his feet like a pop-up toy to recite an answer, although no one had been called by name.
While his men delivered their lines, Bucher scrutinized Martin, wondering whether he was a CIA agent. Had he been sent here to glean intelligence on the crew’s whereabouts? The possibility intrigued the captain. Should he try to make surreptitious contact with the tweedy newsman? It was a big gamble, but it might be worth taking.
Prior to the start of the conference, the North Koreans had decided to boost the number of Pueblo “intrusions” from six to 17. Murphy and Law had been ordered to fabricate a chart that supposedly proved the additional violations. But the executive officer, sensing the North Korean army officers supervising him didn’t understand navigation, plotted several geographically impossible coordinates for the ship.
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