Act of War

by Jack Cheevers

  Visiting their quarters, Bucher saw some enlisted men “drinking themselves into oblivion” and taking drugs. “Some guys were feeling just really bad about the whole thing,” he recalled. “It was getting to them, there’s no doubt about it.”

  Despite the court testimony about their mistakes and shortcomings, the skipper and his men still enjoyed strong public support. In a Harris Poll published in early February, 83 percent of the respondents said the crew “showed real courage in the face of physical and mental torture.” (Only 2 percent disagreed.) Perhaps more significantly, 65 percent of those polled disagreed with the statement that “the honor and integrity of the U.S. are more important than the lives of any servicemen.”

  —

  By early March the court of inquiry had dragged on for six weeks. Now it wasn’t just Bucher showing the strain; everyone was. Harvey was putting in 14- and 15-hour days; Newsome was working even longer. When the testimony ended each afternoon, the court counsel often had to interview the next day’s witnesses until midnight or one a.m. Newsome would get home at two and be back in his office at six a.m. The burden was heavy on the admirals, too. Not only did they have to sit through each day’s dense, often emotionally draining proceedings, but they were also responsible for running their regular commands. It wasn’t uncommon to see one of them on the night ferry back to San Diego, sitting in his car with the overhead light on, reading a sheaf of official papers. “It was damn near a 24-hour-a-day job,” recalled Grimm.

  The stress triggered occasional bouts of binge drinking. One Friday night after a difficult week, Harvey headed for the Mexican Village to unwind. Later that evening, Bowen walked in with a retinue of younger officers and all of them proceeded to get smashed. Around midnight, with the place jumping, someone asked Harvey to take the incapacitated admiral home.

  “I literally picked him up and took him back to his quarters at the amphibious base and put him in bed,” Harvey said. “I thought the media would have a great time if they saw me loading this body in the car and it happened to be the president of the court.”

  Harvey also remembered bailing a senior Navy public-relations officer out of jail after his arrest in nearby Escondido for drunk driving. Problems developed in the lawyer’s own family as well. With their father away from home so much, the only time his three daughters got to see him was on TV news. Harvey’s middle girl, then fourteen, began experimenting with LSD. “I had to go pick her up one time at the city hoosegow and bail her out,” he said.

  Jim Keys, Bucher’s Navy lawyer, spent many court sessions in an alcohol haze, according to Newsome.

  “He was asleep so much that the [court] members would get upset and they’d say to me, ‘Isn’t there something you can do?’” Newsome said.

  But he and the admirals had little latitude to interfere with the composition of Bucher’s legal team, and Harvey felt stuck with Keys. Trying to replace him at this late date would be too difficult, Harvey believed; the Navy had offered up Keys only after rejecting Harvey’s top three or four choices for a cocounsel. And if Keys was suddenly yanked from the courtroom, and the real reason leaked out, wouldn’t much of the press and public jump to the conclusion that the Navy had tried to sabotage Bucher by saddling him with a boozehound for a lawyer? From Bowen’s perspective, that would be a very bad outcome.

  Bucher got a much-needed break from the exigencies of the court when he took his family sailing on March 8. It was a glorious, late-winter Saturday, sunny and brisk, and the captain had rented a 29-foot boat for the occasion. Bundled in a thick sweater, Rose lost her balance as she stepped aboard, falling into her smiling husband’s arms. With his two sons working the jib sheets, Bucher took a helm for the first time since the Pueblo’s capture and steered out into the swells of San Diego Bay.

  Scudding past the submarine base, he spotted one of his old boats, the Ronquil, and was granted permission to come on board. “Welcome home, Captain,” said a swabbie standing atop the long dark hull. Bucher later chewed the fat with a few cronies at the Ballast Tank, the submariners’ club where his raiding party had nabbed the voluptuous nude.

  If Bucher’s stock was declining in the eyes of the admirals, it stayed high with journalists. Indeed, the captain was joined on his sailing holiday by the Washington Post’s George C. Wilson, who wrote a sentimental feature that ran on the paper’s front page the next day. The story, accompanied by no fewer than five photographs of Bucher and his family, highlighted the skipper’s desire to go back to sea when the court finally adjourned.

  On the same day the Post article appeared, Bucher was the subject of an admiring cover story in Parade magazine, inserted in numerous Sunday newspapers across the United States. He was reported to have received “many lucrative offers for books, articles, TV, radio, and club appearances.” A Hollywood agent who seemed eager for his business suggested the captain could earn as much as $2 million for the film rights to his story. “Bucher’s biography,” the agent told Parade, “has all the ingredients for a great motion picture: adventure, humor, tragedy, love, danger, and, best of all, a happy ending.” With the captain’s good looks and brains, the agent said, he’d be a strong candidate to play himself in the movie.

  Wary of being accused of muzzling the crewmen, the Navy decided that all 82 of them should take the witness chair and tell their stories. Most of the time Bowen and his colleagues listened attentively and respectfully. But sometimes their irritation and disapproval showed.

  When a bosun’s mate described reflexively catching and securing a line thrown from a PT boat so communist soldiers could board the Pueblo, Admiral White asked him, almost beseechingly, “But didn’t you have the urge to throw it back?”

  Nor was White pleased when a CT testified that he hadn’t fired a Thompson submachine gun out a porthole at the boarders because he wasn’t tall enough.

  “Well,” said the admiral, his cheeks coloring with suppressed anger, “I think I could have tippy-toed up and peeked out of there with that gun and mowed them down.”

  More sailors broke down as they related their horrific prison experiences. But their chokes and tears and hot shame were met with coolness from the admirals. When Monroe Goldman, the veteran engineman, wept as he described being forced to strip naked and crawl around a cell as guards kicked him, the court members studied the walls and ceiling. Tim Harris got little more reaction when, telling of his futile attempt to kill himself and his “extreme hatred” of the communists, he suddenly covered his face and cried so hard his body shook.

  Newsome asked the seamen-witnesses what they thought of Bucher as a leader. Many sailors regarded the man who refused to sacrifice their lives at sea and shepherded them safely through the ordeal of prison as something approaching a demigod. They praised him to the heavens.

  “He is the greatest skipper I have ever served under,” declared Harry Lewis, the cook.

  “I would consider it a privilege and an honor if I could serve with him again,” stated engineman William Scarborough.

  “He’s just a great man; I just admire him tremendously,” said Law.

  The only lukewarm assessment came from Murphy. “Under the circumstances, he did his job as well as any commanding officer could be expected to do,” the XO said.

  Policarpo Garcia, a Filipino storekeeper, told of serving as the crew’s barber at the Country Club. Each time Bucher sat down for a shave or haircut, Garcia saw the awful amount of weight he was losing, the way his skin was tightening on his skull. Garcia also had witnessed the soldier kick Bucher down the stairs. Yet for all the ill treatment and degradation he suffered, the captain always had an encouraging word for Garcia.

  “He tell me every time, ‘Don’t lose your faith; the United States will do something,’” Garcia said to the admirals. “The only thing I can say about the commanding officer is, without the commanding officer, I don’t think I could make it.”

  The crew clea
rly understood what it had cost their skipper to protect them from harm, both on the ship and in prison.

  Larry Strickland, a fireman, cried unabashedly as he testified. “I feel that we owe quite a bit to the captain and all the things that he did to get us through. He was willing to sacrifice himself and his career to see to it that we made it through the whole ordeal.”

  The testimonials moved Bucher deeply. He tried to hold back his emotions, but the words of Ramon Rosales, the young seaman from Texas, finally sent him over the edge.

  Asked whether the communists had tried to undermine his faith in American values, Rosales talked about a room daddy who insisted in his lectures that God didn’t exist.

  “I stood up and told him that there was a God,” said Rosales, smiling gently at the court members. “And he says, ‘Do you see Him?’ and I told him that I saw Him every day. I told him that I saw Him in the flowers and the trees and everything around, that God was alive. He got kinda shook up.”

  Hearing this, Bucher bowed his head. In prison, when Rosales developed a high fever, the captain had tried to get him medical care, but Glorious General just laughed at him.

  Admiral Pratt then asked Rosales what most helped him get through captivity. The seaman flashed his serene smile again. “Well, I think the help was my faith in God and my country and the decisions of my commanding officer, sir.”

  Bucher put his head down on his table and wept convulsively. Harvey grasped his right arm and whispered to him, but the skipper continued to shed tears for several minutes. Harvey finally led him out of the courtroom.

  “It’s the cumulative effect that’s gotten to him,” the attorney later told reporters. “He’s listening to all these kids and it’s bringing back too many memories.”

  —

  Bucher had tried to run from the gunboats while simultaneously destroying his classified materials. But he hadn’t fired back or resorted to other forms of resistance, like disabling his engines or scuttling the Pueblo. The admirals wanted to hear his reasons.

  The ship’s gunner’s mate, Ken Wadley, testified that he and his gun crews had been fully prepared to man the .50-caliber machine guns and do battle with the communists. Law and other witnesses, however, said that would have been suicidal; no one could have survived the withering enemy fire as they ran across open decks to unshielded machine guns and struggled to pry off half-frozen tarpaulins, pop open ammunition boxes, and thread in ammo belts.

  “We of course had 83 personnel who could have gone up [to the guns],” Murphy told the admirals, “but I feel that they had 83 or more bullets that could have easily caused fatal injuries to each one of us.”

  Bucher also could have tried to break away from the North Koreans by leaving his shell-shattered bridge and steering from the relative safety of the engine room. He hadn’t done that either, and the admirals asked several witnesses whether it would have been feasible to guide the ship from belowdecks.

  Murphy said yes. “We not only could have, but we had many times when we actually had to go through this drill for actual practical purposes. We found that the ship responded fairly well.” Monroe Goldman, the chief engineman, agreed, saying the Pueblo could have been conned from below even with its entire bridge shot away.

  Testifying all day on March 11, Bucher laid out the rationale behind his actions. He looked nervous and physically weak but he spoke evenly, and sometimes with heat.

  The captain made it clear that he hadn’t had much to work with. The Navy turned down his repeated requests for a rapid destruction system, leaving his men, while under fire, with nothing but hand tools, two inadequate shredders, and a small incinerator to get rid of hundreds of pounds of paper and numerous steel-encased electronic devices. And he had only two unprotected and unreliable machine guns to hold off six enemy combat vessels and two jet fighters.

  So he did the best he could with what he had. His first impulse was to flee back out to sea, buying as much time as possible for his men to eliminate classified materials. Although the Navy had no plan to rescue him, a radio operator in Japan held out the prospect of salvation—LAST I GOT WAS AIR FORCE GOING HELP YOU—if only Bucher could fend off the North Koreans long enough. The skipper considered scuttling but decided not to, he told the admirals, because he didn’t want to be wallowing dead in the water, with no power or maneuverability, if American warplanes suddenly showed up. For the same reason, he decided not to disable his engines. (At another point in his testimony, he conceded he hadn’t crippled his twin diesels as the communists rushed aboard because that “just didn’t occur to me.”)

  Bucher lit off his engines and tried to outrun the boarding party on the PT boat. He stopped when he realized that sub chaser No. 35, hammering the Pueblo with cannon fire, probably would blow it out of the water if he kept going. He was surrounded and massively outgunned. The slow-moving spy boat had no way to defend against shelling by the sub chaser and, potentially, torpedoes from the PTs and rockets from the MiGs. If his men returned fire, the captain figured, the communists would only ratchet up the intensity of their attack. And as more sailors were killed or wounded, he’d have less manpower to get rid of his secret materials.

  Bucher said he hadn’t tried to repel the boarders for a couple of reasons. For one, he thought they might have mistaken the Pueblo for a South Korean vessel and would depart once they realized their error. (This explanation was undercut by the fact that Bucher had hoisted the American flag before the attack began.) He also felt that shooting at the boarding party would violate Admiral Johnson’s order not to provoke the North Koreans. He was convinced his ship would be demolished if he tried to fight off the communists jumping aboard.

  In defending his decision to surrender, Bucher made the ludicrous claim that he hadn’t really surrendered. “I preferred to feel that, in that I never struck my colors, I never did actually surrender the ship,” he testified. “We were seized. The Koreans hauled our colors down when we got into port.” Yet surrender was precisely what he’d done: He relinquished control of his ship to an enemy under compulsion.

  But several of Bucher’s officers—including Murphy—backed the captain’s contention that, at the time he halted the Pueblo, he lacked the power to hold off the communists any longer. Although the XO wasn’t consulted about the decision to give up, he said he would’ve done the same thing had he been in command.

  “They were going to board us and we had no way of stopping them,” Murphy testified.

  The admirals seemed uncomfortable with Bucher’s explanations. At one point, Pratt asked another witness, Captain Pete Block, one of Bucher’s former submarine bosses, whether he thought the Pueblo skipper was “abnormally concerned” about the men under him. Block denied that. But the question—with its implication that Bucher lacked the stomach for the blood sacrifices command at sea sometimes demanded—hung in the air.

  Pratt’s exchange with Block also underscored that the Pueblo court of inquiry was more than just a dramatic clash between the Navy and one of its officers: It also represented a collision of deeply held and sometimes contradictory values. While Bucher’s impulse to save his men’s lives had been a humane one, the Navy was in the fundamentally inhumane business of spending men’s lives to help win America’s wars. It was a fighting organization, first and foremost, and loss of life was the inevitable by-product of combat.

  As sensible as Bucher’s surrender might appear, the Navy couldn’t condone its commanders giving up without a fight. The annals of U.S. military history were replete with examples of men fighting hard in the face of lousy odds. The opening words of the Code of Conduct embodied that proud, gutsy tradition: “I am an American fighting man. I serve in the forces which guard my country and our way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense.” If surrendering to preserve sailors’ lives became the norm, the Navy couldn’t do its job; it would fall to pieces.

  Officers who failed to fig
ht therefore had to be punished. That was especially true where such failure placed a boatload of top secret code machines and documents in enemy hands. So far, there were no indications the North Koreans or Soviets were intercepting U.S. military messages with the help of material purloined from the Pueblo. But who knew what they’d do with it in the future? What price would the United States one day pay?

  However, these were the views of America’s tarnished warrior class. Ordinary citizens didn’t necessarily see things the same way. Indeed, many apparently didn’t mind that the captain gave up without firing a shot. When pollsters asked whether Bucher “did a disservice to this country in trying to save his own life,” 68 percent of the respondents said no; only 9 percent said yes.

  The captain certainly hadn’t drenched himself in martial glory during the attack. With the North Koreans blasting him from all sides and a trusted subordinate yelling at him to stop the ship, he froze. But he recovered quickly and did what he could to give his men more time to destroy their secret paraphernalia. He went on to provide superior leadership in prison under dire circumstances.

  The truth was that many everyday Americans understood and empathized with Bucher’s decision to spare the lives of his men. They felt he’d been placed in a no-win position. The ultimate logic of Article 0730 was that commanders must fight on until all of their men were wounded or dead, and then die themselves. Naval regulations offered no guidance on the point at which a captain could honorably give up. Was it after he’d lost 25 percent of his men? Fifty percent? Ninety percent? The public found such calculations distasteful, if not crazy. What could Bucher have accomplished by fighting back, except to get more of his people killed? No rescuers came, and his chances of breaking free of the North Koreans on his own were poor. Men who’d done their best to resist the enemy deserved to live.