Act of War

by Jack Cheevers

  “As far as the U.S. government and the Navy are concerned,” declared the admiral, “these men have acted honorably.”

  Rosenberg’s words undoubtedly were heartfelt. But he’d gone too far and the journalists knew it. The admiral sounded like he was exonerating the crew of any possible wrongdoing before the Navy’s investigation even began. Indeed, his unconditional praise was a major public-relations stumble that helped set the stage for a severe public backlash against the Navy when it actually convened the court of inquiry.

  Predictably, Rosenberg was asked whether his comments had the effect of prejudicing public opinion in favor of the crew. Rosenberg denied that, clearly annoyed by the question. Another newsman wanted to know how often the Navy dragged “heroes” before a board of investigation. That happened “all the time,” the admiral insisted.

  A flag officer labeling the sailors as heroes and men of honor, however, couldn’t help but tilt public attitudes toward them. Rosenberg’s remarks were widely circulated in the U.S. media. At a time when many Americans were trying to decide whether Bucher and his crew were exemplars or collaborators, Rosenberg had given them what looked like an official Navy seal of approval.

  Later that day Bucher was visited at the hospital by the South Korean prime minister, Chung Il Kwon, trailed by several other cabinet ministers and still more reporters. His face flushed with emotion, the captain told Chung of the falsity of North Korean propaganda about the south and said he hoped that “at no time did we ever embarrass your country.”

  “There were methods used that made us sometimes ashamed of ourselves,” said Bucher. “But we tried to give you at least some evidence that we didn’t believe a word of what we were doing.”

  “Our experience in the Korean War taught us the value of freedom [is] more than life,” replied Chung.

  “Freedom is worth more than anyone’s life,” agreed the captain. “You have a splendid country. I hope your republic stands a thousand years, at least.”

  As he spoke, Bucher clasped both of Chung’s hands in his for several minutes. The gesture had a strong impact on the premier and his party. Watching the scene, Ambassador Porter was struck by the skipper’s composure and his “measured and eloquent” words. “He is an unusual individual,” Porter cabled Washington, adding that Bucher’s “affection for [his] crew came through clearly,” and that the captain obviously enjoyed his men’s respect and admiration.

  At the White House, Walt Rostow forwarded Porter’s “heartening report of Captain Bucher’s graceful performance” to LBJ.

  Cleared by military doctors to travel, the sailors were taken that afternoon to Kimpo airport outside Seoul. As an Air Force band blared “California, Here I Come,” they boarded two cavernous C-141 Starlifter jets for the long flight to San Diego.

  The transports landed at Midway Island to refuel at two a.m. Despite the late hour, the Navy post exchange was opened and everything was on the house. The sailors wolfed hamburgers and read about their release on the front page of the Honolulu Advertiser. The next-biggest story was the Apollo 8 astronauts heading for the moon.

  On hand at Midway to greet the crew was Admiral John Hyland, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, who’d flown over from his Hawaii headquarters. He made the same mistake as Rosenberg, hailing the sailors at a press conference as “a group of young heroes.” The encomium carried even more awkward implications coming from Hyland, since it was his responsibility to appoint the members of the Pueblo court of inquiry. Bucher also spoke to the reporters, but by now he was running on fumes. He earnestly tried to take responsibility for the entire spy-ship debacle in a statement so embarrassingly disjointed that newsmen didn’t even quote it.

  The captain spent the rest of the flight “in fitful sleep and jittery talks with my men.” He awoke with a start at dawn. The crewmen had left South Korea on Christmas Eve but, by crossing the international date line, they’d gain a day and still arrive in San Diego on December 24. The prospect of spending Christmas with their loved ones was thrilling and nerve-racking at the same time. Bucher’s head filled with thoughts of his wife. He’d regained some weight in his last weeks in North Korea but still weighed only 127 pounds, nearly 80 pounds less than before his capture. Would Rose even recognize her stick-thin husband?

  Then there was the matter of the Court of Inquiry. Many crewmen had no idea how they’d be received at home. Some expected mostly contempt and derision from the public, and probably punishment from the Navy. As he’d done in prison, Bucher again emphasized to his men that they should tell Navy investigators more or less the same story about their capture and confinement.

  “You guys are gonna get a lot of questions, and I’d like to be reasonably close to being on the same page,” he told the sailors on one plane. “It’ll save us a lot of agony.” At Midway the skipper switched aircraft and made the same speech to the rest of the crew.

  Anticipation and stress spread through the cabins of the two jets as they raced over the Pacific. Sailors were combing their hair and otherwise preening. When the pilot announced an estimated touchdown in San Diego at two p.m., Bucher got goose bumps. Then someone peered out a window and yelled, “Land to starboard!”

  —

  By early afternoon on Christmas Eve, a restless crowd had gathered at the edge of a runway at Miramar Naval Air Station, ten miles north of downtown San Diego.

  Wives, children, parents, and siblings of the seamen had flown in from all over the nation, some arriving only that morning. Summoned by electrifying phone calls from the Navy just two days earlier, family members had dropped everything—work, holiday preparations, everything—to make travel plans. Since the Navy was allowing no one except immediate kin through the base gate, only about 200 people were at the airfield. But outside, traffic had backed up for miles as thousands of well-wishers spontaneously converged on the base to witness the homecoming, which was to be televised live on all three networks.

  At the front of the throng stood Rose Bucher, elated and on edge. She wore white gloves and a tailored brown dress suit, a big white orchid pinned to the shoulder. With her were her two teenage sons, Mark and Mike. Around them, anxious young mothers cooed to infants in strollers as older children—little girls in ribbons and boys in their Sunday best—giggled and fidgeted. Rose chatted with other relatives while casting hopeful glances at the western sky.

  Finally two black dots appeared on the horizon, getting bigger by the moment. “They’re coming in!” someone shouted. The Starlifters circled the airfield and seemed to land in slow motion. The big jets taxied toward the waiting families and cut their engines. A tense stillness settled over the crowd as uniformed sailors unrolled red carpets up to the aircraft. Then a hatch on the lead plane popped open, and Pete Bucher wobbled down the staircase, worn-looking but smiling.

  To his amazement a Navy band was playing “The Lonely Bull.”

  “It’s so great!” he exulted. “You’ll never know how great it is!”

  A moment later he and Rose were locked in a fierce embrace, their tear-streaked faces crushed together.

  “I love you, Rose,” the skipper said simply.

  His men ran into the hungry arms of their loved ones. “Oh, Anthony! Oh, darling, I’m so happy!” cried a gray-haired mother as she embraced her son. An older man in a checked vest pumped away at his boy’s hand, saying, “Well, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas. By golly, it’s good to see you.” One wife supported a pale, gaunt husband who seemed too weak to stand on his own; another pressed her head hard into her man’s chest, drawing comfort and strength from his presence. A sailor held his infant son for the first time, regarding him with pride and wonder.

  “This was the nation’s Christmas present,” a local newsman summed up, “and the emotion was almost too big to handle.”

  Like two small islands of grief amid this ocean of joy stood Duane Hodges’s parents. Jesse and Stella H
odges were plain, deeply religious people from Oregon with faces out of a Dorothea Lange photograph. The Navy had never officially explained how their son died, and so they came to San Diego seeking the truth from his shipmates. Rose brought the bereaved couple over to meet her husband, and placed a steadying hand on his back as he struggled to get out some words of comfort.

  “Mr. Hodges, I—I can’t tell you what a tremendous job your son did for us,” Bucher said, looking intently into the retired millworker’s tear-dappled face. “I’m so, so sorry that he couldn’t return alive with us.”

  “Captain, I’m so glad you got back,” replied Hodges, gripping Bucher’s hand.

  The stricken skipper wrapped his arms around both parents and told of the North Korean shell that hit their son and his death in a shipmate’s arms. “What were his last words?” Mrs. Hodges asked. Bucher said he wasn’t there at the time and didn’t know. But he promised to put her in contact with the sailor who’d cradled her boy in his final moments.

  Bucher was led to the speaker’s podium, flanked by military and political dignitaries. Governor Reagan spoke to him briefly, recalling the captain’s role as an extra in Reagan’s 1957 movie Hellcats of the Navy, filmed in part aboard one of Bucher’s old submarines, the Besugo. The captain congratulated him on his excellent memory and turned to face a brace of microphones. TV lenses zeroed in on his tired face.

  He spoke of his obsessive worrying in prison about “the embarrassment that we caused the United States by losing one of its very fine ships to the North Koreans.” He described the Pueblo getting shot up at “point-blank range.” When he mentioned Duane Hodges’s mortal wounding, he choked up. His jaws moved but no sound came out. An admiral patted his shoulder.

  Moments later, six Navy pallbearers in dress blues and white helmets carried Hodges’s flag-draped coffin from a Starlifter to a gray hearse. An honor guard snapped off crisp rifle volleys at the winter sky. As muted trumpets played taps, Bucher and his men came to attention and saluted their fallen comrade. Reagan made some welcoming remarks, as did the mayor of San Diego, who also offered Bucher a key to the city. But the jittery politician kept extending and withdrawing the key, doing so three or four times. Finally he finished his speech, dropped the key in his pocket, and walked away. Bucher had his first really good laugh since leaving North Korea.

  The crewmen and their families climbed into eight buses for the short ride to the U.S. Naval Hospital at Balboa Park, in the gentle hills overlooking downtown San Diego. Rolling through the base gates, the sailors met a completely unexpected sight: multitudes of cheering San Diegans lining the route to the hospital, standing three and four deep in places. The civilians pounded car horns, whistled, flashed thumbs-up, and shook handmade “welcome home” signs.

  Bucher grinned and waved at the crowds like a barnstorming senator. The wild outpouring of public joy, however, unnerved some of the others.

  Gazing out a window, Schumacher wondered for the thousandth time whether he could’ve done more to resist the North Koreans. Steve Harris’s mother, Eleanor, an effervescent Boston-area schoolteacher, noticed that most of the wan-looking sailors on her bus weren’t waving back.

  “Wave to them!” she urged. “You should all wave to them!”

  Her son tried to restrain her. “Mother, we’re not heroes,” he said mildly. “We’re just a bunch of ordinary guys who were in the right place at the wrong time.”

  The buses passed a little boy, clad only in faded brown shorts, jumping up and down as he waved a small American flag. For many passengers the sight of the dirt-streaked kid and his guileless patriotism was too much. “Slow tears came upon faces all along the aisle, parents and sons alike,” Eleanor Harris wrote later. “An older sailor across from me—at least his hair was gray—was crying into thin, gnarled hands.”

  The convoy arrived at the hospital. With 2,600 beds and more than 300 doctors, the Balboa complex was the largest military medical facility in the world. The sailors lugged their white ditty bags into a four-story pink stucco building normally inhabited by Navy hospital corps students. Dubbed the “Pink Palace,” it was to be their home for the next few weeks. Murphy was impressed by the luxuriousness of the two-man suites: carpeting, writing desks, and beds long enough to accommodate American frames. The only drawback was that he had to share his digs with Bucher.

  By now the captain was bleary with fatigue. His head was ready to burst from the day’s excitement and stress. Fewer than 55 hours had passed since he crossed the Bridge of No Return. He limped over to the adjacent enlisted men’s club to have dinner with his sailors, only to be mobbed by their exuberant, grateful families. “Some of the handshakes I received from fathers and brothers of my crew nearly broke my hand,” he was to write of the experience. “Mothers and wives hugged and kissed me. It was overwhelming.” After dinner he and Rose sneaked to the back of the room for a semiprivate reunion with kisses, hand-holding, and tender words.

  The Navy was working hard to satisfy the needs of the crewmen and their kin. It had paid for last-minute plane tickets to San Diego for scores of family members. Phones were set up so sailors could make free calls to friends and relatives all over the country. “An admiral just fetched me a cup of coffee,” a bemused enlisted man told Murphy. By the same token, the crewmen were confined to the hospital grounds for at least the next several days. They had orders not to talk to the media, not even about the weather. The Navy wanted to be sure no military secrets leaked, and no one said anything that might later jeopardize himself legally. Armed sentries were posted to keep news reporters away from the Pink Palace.

  On Christmas morning, the crew went on a shopping spree at the Balboa post exchange. With $200,000 in back pay in their collective pockets, they snapped up cameras, watches, appliances, coats for their wives, and toys for their kids. Bucher moved easily among his men, joking and wishing them a merry Christmas. That evening, under the Navy’s liberal definition of “next of kin,” more than 500 people jammed the dining room, feasting on turkey, rainbow trout, beef prime rib, French onion soup, and tomato bisque. Catholic and Protestant services were held before an altar jury-rigged out of a table, a sheet, and two candles; the faithful took Communion in the soft, flickering light.

  “When we sang ‘Joy to the World,’” one mother said, “you never heard anything like it.”

  The happy homecoming triggered a widespread catharsis. “Never, in 35 years, have I been so burstingly proud to be an American,” a San Diego man wrote to a local newspaper. “Standing on 10th Avenue, with many others, to welcome home the Pueblo crew was an overwhelming experience.” America’s first television-age hostage crisis—a phenomenon that would become distressingly familiar in the future—had ended remarkably well. The survivors were safe, they were in one piece, and—thanks to the Johnson administration’s dogged diplomacy—they were back home with loved ones just in time for Christmas.

  LBJ was widely praised for not succumbing to the temptation to unsheathe military force during the long standoff with Pyongyang. The New York Times hailed his “wise decision . . . to accept some sacrifice of American pride.” Even some hawks applauded the gentler approach. “Many of our members called for speedier and forceful action immediately after the Pueblo was illegally seized,” the national commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars wrote to the White House. “Many more became most impatient as the months dragged by. In retrospect, however, the Nation’s restraint and patience have paid off.”

  Amid the exultant chorus of hosannas, however, were strident notes of dissent.

  Soon after the sailors were safely across the bridge, Dean Rusk had publicly characterized the Panmunjom deal as “a strange procedure” with “no precedent in my 19 years of public service.” He described General Woodward’s signature as “worthless” and said only the North Koreans could explain why they accepted the “prerepudiated” apology.

  Flushed with holiday spirit, many Americ
ans seemed inclined to savor the gratifying ends and overlook the slippery means. But some conservatives derided the settlement as an odious sellout of American honor. “If a formal apology is signed but a verbal repudiation made, what can one believe?” asked a St. Louis Globe-Democrat editorial. “This is the propaganda predicament into which Red Korea has finessed the United States.” Columnist James J. Kilpatrick concurred: “All this is being served up to the American public as a glorious achievement. It seems a far cry, somehow, from Stephen Decatur and John Paul Jones.” Critics also questioned whether the sailors deserved all the public adulation. “They were heroes in the sense that they survived the imprisonment, but they did sign a great many statements that didn’t reflect to my mind any great heroism,” sniffed Senator Richard Russell, the powerful Georgia Democrat who chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee.

  North Korea wasted no time in capitalizing on the Panmunjom pact. “U.S. Imperialists Bend Their Knees Again Before Korean People,” gloated the Pyongyang Times. In spite of Woodward’s disclaimer, the newspaper trumpeted his signature as an “ignominious defeat” for America. Other Eastern bloc nations jumped on the bandwagon. Given the Johnson administration’s disavowal of its apology, the East German news agency questioned whether the United States could be trusted to stand by any international treaty or agreement it signed. The San Diego Union acknowledged the potency of the communist campaign with an editorial cartoon that managed to combine a racist caricature with a racially mocking double entendre. It depicted a North Korean military officer with huge buckteeth holding a piece of paper marked, “U.S. Pueblo ‘Confession’ Propaganda.” “We sank you!” the officer crowed, with a bow and a grin.