“Everybody was scared to death of me,” he recalled. “It was like I had the plague or leprosy or something.”
Finally, Bucher appealed to the top. He wrote a letter to the new chief of naval operations, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, who had a reputation for trying to make enlisted life less regimented. (Among his more memorable reforms were letting sailors grow beards and mustaches and installing beer-dispensing machines in barracks.) Bucher included his résumé and insisted that nothing in his record should preclude him from getting an assignment commensurate with his rank and experience. Zumwalt responded by summoning him to Washington. Bucher chatted about his future with the CNO and figured things were going his way when Zumwalt began calling him “Pete.”
“He says, ‘Pete, you go on back to San Diego and tomorrow you’ll have an offer for a job,’” Bucher recalled.
Sure enough, the Bureau of Naval Personnel called with three attractive choices, all chief of staff billets. Two were in San Diego, the third on Guam. Mostly to escape his own notoriety, Bucher picked Guam. He was sick and tired of answering questions from reporters and scribbling autographs for strangers. He didn’t want airline pilots eagerly asking him about the attack or people pointing at him in restaurants. “Every place I went—everywhere—it was always on my tail about my service in the Pueblo,” he said. The skipper just wanted it all to stop. Maybe if he moved to an island in the North Pacific, it would.
In September 1971, he took up his new duties as chief staff officer for a Guam-based minesweeper squadron. Mine Flotilla One later would clear mines from Haiphong harbor as part of the peace deal with North Vietnam that ended American involvement in the war. But Bucher’s new gig had a very unpleasant downside: cold shoulders and insults from some of his brother officers.
The sniping started even before he arrived. The commander of MINEFLOTONE wasn’t happy to have the infamous Pueblo skipper as his number two and tried hard to keep him off the island. Bucher found out about his new boss’s displeasure when an old submarine buddy, then on the Seventh Fleet staff, slipped him copies of protesting messages from the minesweeper chief to other commands. But, backed by Zumwalt, the captain moved into his new position anyway.
A more direct snub took place when Bucher boarded a helicopter to join his squadron’s flagship at sea. As he sat down next to an admiral he’d never seen before, the other man “pointedly got up and moved his seat to the other end of the damn [aircraft],” Bucher said. “I thought that was a little tacky.”
The hassling followed him into a rowdy, country-western-style officers’ club on the huge U.S. naval base at Subic Bay in the Philippines. The bar was usually jam-packed as off-duty officers drank, laughed, and egged on the Filipino singers trying to imitate Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard onstage. Bucher liked the place and visited as often as he could. One night a waitress came over and handed him a note from another patron asking “what ships did I surrender today, or something like that,” remembered Bucher. “There was no name on it or anything, so I didn’t know where the hell it came from.”
Yet the captain wasn’t completely shunned. One day a three-star admiral poked his head into Bucher’s office and asked him to take a walk. As they strolled, the flag officer told him that “he thought I’d handled myself with honor and integrity, and my service had been everything that I could have done.” It was the first time since the skipper came home that a high-ranking officer had spoken such comforting words to him, and he was deeply appreciative.
Despite the occasional hazing, Bucher enjoyed the Guam job and postponed his plans to retire at the end of 1971. Technically, there was nothing in his record to prevent him from moving up in rank. As a practical matter, he knew his chances were nil. Everyone in the Navy was aware of the court of inquiry’s recommendation that he be court-martialed. That was a political brick wall he’d never get around. By 1973, he was ready to leave. He put in his retirement papers on June 1, 1973; the Navy approved them in “about two minutes,” he said.
Separated after 27 years from the service he loved, Bucher concentrated on what to do next with his life. For a while he worked as a paid speaker, regaling rapt audiences with stories of his Pueblo and North Korea experiences. He also tried his hand at writing a humorous novel, based on the antics of a trouble-prone torpedoman Bucher knew who ended up in jail in nearly every port he visited. But, although the captain hadn’t had much difficulty producing an autobiography with the help of a professional writer, composing a work of fiction on his own proved much harder.
He eventually gave up and tried to ease into a quiet, low-profile existence in Poway. To stay fit, he walked three miles a day and played an occasional round of golf. He watched sports on TV and played poker at the officers’ club at Miramar Naval Air Station. Once a month he took Rose out for seafood in downtown San Diego.
The controversies engendered by the Pueblo were never far away, however. In 1974 or 1975, he made a trip to St. Louis to see Schumacher and his new wife. During the visit, the former lieutenant took Bucher to dinner at the home of an old friend, a local businessman. The evening started off amiably, but when Bucher talked about surrendering the Pueblo, the businessman exploded in anger, yanking the tablecloth off the dining table and sending plates and glasses crashing to the floor.
“He said, ‘Commander, I don’t care what the situation was, you just don’t give up the ship!’” recalled Schumacher.
Having dropped the idea of becoming a novelist, Bucher cast about for something else to do. His speaking engagements paid well, but public interest in him probably would diminish over time. He’d had a couple of job offers, including one in public relations for Boise Cascade, a company that made wood and paper products. But he declined, figuring he’d never be able to discard his Pueblo baggage in such a visible position.
One thing Bucher had always enjoyed was art. Whenever he went ashore in a new port, he made a point of visiting local art museums. He checked out an armload of how-to books from the Poway public library and, over the course of a year, taught himself to draw and paint. When he presented a portfolio of samples to the Art Center College of Design, an elite school in Los Angeles, he was granted admission.
Bucher rented an apartment in L.A. Not only was he the sole incoming student without an undergraduate art degree, but he’d never even taken an art class. On top of that, he was the oldest student. The others, most in their twenties, called him “grandpa.” He turned 50 while attending the Art Center in 1977. On weekends, he commuted home to Rose behind the wheel of a powder-blue Porsche he’d bought after returning from North Korea.
The captain turned out to be a natural. He liked oils and watercolors, and ships and serene landscapes were among his favorite subjects. Time magazine heard he was at the school and photographed him in a drawing class. In later years, he’d become an accomplished artist, selling his pieces for top dollar. (One of his most popular images was a watercolor of the Pueblo under way.) Besides, painting helped to calm him after a night of bad dreams about North Korea, an increasingly common occurrence.
He wasn’t alone. In 1978, Captain Raymond Spaulding, the Navy psychiatrist who’d screened the Pueblo sailors upon their release, published a psychological study of the crew, based on questionnaires answered by 41 men. It concluded that some of them displayed symptoms consistent with “concentration camp syndrome,” a collection of mental and physical disorders that afflicted survivors of Hitler’s death camps. About half of those responding to the questionnaire reported having nightmares, feeling “weak all over,” and sometimes wondering “if anything is worthwhile.” Seventy-one percent of the respondents admitted to “difficulty in controlling their temper.” Fifty-six percent reported “emotional instability,” “depressive episodes,” and “loss of initiative.” Nine men said they’d been partially disabled by their Pueblo experiences; eight said they could no longer work in their usual occupation.
Busy with his art classes, Bucher
cut back on lecture tours, though he continued to give a talk now and then. One sponsor was the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, controversial founder of the Unification Church. In 1980, Moon brought the captain to South Korea, where he gave speeches and received several medals from the government. In 1988, the South Koreans invited him back. He met with the president, spoke at three universities, and took part in a big parade.
Yet even two decades after the capture, the Navy establishment still viewed Bucher as an outcast. To mark the twentieth anniversary of the Pueblo incident, in 1988, the editors of Naval History magazine—a prestigious journal with a wide readership among active-duty and retired officers—published excerpts from oral histories of five admirals who’d played a part in the spy-ship drama. Three of them took potshots at the captain, including John Hyland, the former Pacific fleet commander who’d been arm-twisted into not advocating a court-martial for Bucher.
“I guess Bucher looked around his ship and saw this man bleeding like hell, so he decided that the jig was up,” said Hyland. “He thought he was in a hopeless situation, so he surrendered. He never fired a shot. He never manned the guns. He didn’t go to general quarters until he’d already been fired upon and sustained some casualties.” Hyland said Bucher “had all kinds of opportunities to observe what was a very threatening movement against his ship,” but didn’t do anything to avoid it. He gave the captain “a completely failing grade.”
Bucher was permitted a reply in the next issue of Naval History. In an eloquent statement that stretched over seven pages of the magazine, he retold the melancholic tale of the Pueblo and vigorously rebutted Hyland, making several points he hadn’t during the court hearings. Most significantly, he underlined the contradictory nature of the Navy’s orders and expectations of him.
On one hand, he’d been instructed not to provoke the North Koreans, to deny them any pretext for starting another war. On the other, he was expected to uphold the don’t-give-up-the-ship tradition, to fight back with all his might. As Bucher wrote, “We could not have it both ways.” His remark echoed the findings of the Ball Committee’s secret report to President Johnson in 1968.
Regarding his “failing grade” from Hyland, Bucher asked rhetorically, “What grade can be given to the many commanders, such as [Hyland], who were not prepared for our emergency?” What grade, the skipper asked, should be assigned “to the naval and air forces close at hand who did not respond to our plight?” What grade for the intelligence analysts who so badly underestimated the danger of the mission?
“The story of the Pueblo in a nutshell,” wrote Bucher, “is one of a naval officer, his crew, and his ship, sent to do a job; things went bad, and the Navy abandoned them. Our country and our Navy were served honorably and loyally by all the officers and men of the Pueblo—and, if I may say so, one hell of a sight better than they were in turn served.”
Bucher claimed in the article that his ship had carried “only a few pieces of classified equipment.” It was an assertion he’d make again in the future in an attempt to downplay the seriousness of what actually had been a colossal compromise of code machines and other highly sensitive materials. (The captain also erroneously wrote that three aircraft carriers had been within easy flying range of the Pueblo; in fact, only the Enterprise had been relatively close.)
Bucher ended by saying he’d “answered all the questions put to me” in the previous 20 years. He challenged the admirals quoted in Naval History to meet him at the U.S. Naval Academy, in an auditorium full of midshipmen, and answer some questions from him. “I am ready!” he declared.
The skipper’s spirited self-defense left some naval officers unmoved. “Even if we assume that all of Commander Bucher’s complaints about failure on the part of his seniors to act are true, one fact remains,” said one retiree in a letter to the editor. “Commander Bucher was the first U.S. Navy captain to surrender his ship without firing a shot.”
But others had begun to see the Pueblo in a different light. “Commander Bucher’s article was quite a shock to me,” wrote Daniel M. Karcher, a retired captain. For years, Karcher related, he’d been embarrassed when friends in the Army or Air Force chided him over Bucher’s “cowardly performance” as a Navy officer. “But now,” he continued, “there seems to be more to this incident than previously known. . . . I think it is time to reevaluate Commander Bucher’s performance as commanding officer of the Pueblo considering the circumstances under which he found himself, and to establish who is really responsible for this operation.”
—
In 1988, Bucher turned 61. It was an age at which he should’ve been slowing down, golfing and traveling more, enjoying his leisure with Rose and his sons, now in their mid-thirties. Instead, he went to bat for his sailors once again. For even as he dueled with admirals in the pages of Naval History, he began a bitter public struggle with the Pentagon after it refused to give his men the newly created Prisoner of War Medal.
It wasn’t the first time the skipper had sought medals for his men. In 1973, based on his recommendations, the Navy decorated 18 crewmen for bravery during the attack. The following year, 78 men won medals for their actions in communist prisons. Hammond was awarded the Navy Cross; Schumacher got a Silver Star.
The POW medal, however, was unique. No nation ever had decorated its fighting men specifically for being captured and incarcerated by an enemy. Public support for such a medal had begun to swell following North Vietnam’s release of American POWs in the early 1970s. The Pentagon initially opposed the award, arguing that it wouldn’t take into consideration the circumstances of a recipient’s capture. Men who’d willingly thrown up their hands would be just as eligible as those who’d fought valiantly or had been badly wounded or unconscious when taken prisoner. Nonetheless, Congress, after a number of unsuccessful attempts, finally authorized the award in 1985. No one convicted by a military tribunal of misconduct during captivity could receive it. About 142,000 veterans of the two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam were eligible.
Struck in bronze, the medallion bore the proud but somber image of an American eagle encircled by barbed wire and bayonet points. When the Pentagon started issuing the POW badge in the spring of 1988, many veterans believed it was long overdue. “I have a couple of medals tucked away in a drawer, fading and maybe a little rusty, but with meaning,” a New Jersey veteran of World War II told a newspaper interviewer. “But this one I have earned and paid for in ways that I just can’t describe.” A gunner on a B-17 bomber, the man had been shot down over Germany and imprisoned there for nine months. As the Soviet army advanced on his camp, the Germans ordered the POWs on a forced march westward that many didn’t survive. The veteran said his haunting memories of that time had never dimmed, adding that the POW medal might be “a way of just easing the pain.”
Some Pueblo sailors, now in their forties, had similar feelings. Bucher estimated that half of them had been at least partially disabled as a result of beatings and torture. Howard Bland—the young fireman whom the North Koreans threatened to execute as a way of pressuring Bucher to sign his first “confession”—had felt for years as if his heart were about to explode. John Mitchell, who’d served as Bucher’s prison orderly and courier, suffered back pain and excruciating migraines. Stu Russell, who’d gotten happily sloshed in the Gypsy Tea Room, endured terrifying nightmares. Ed Murphy couldn’t move at times because his back “was totally redesigned by rifle butts and boot kickings.”
In September 1988, the military arranged for 320 veterans to be presented with the Prisoner of War Medal at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. The Pueblo crewmen weren’t included. When asked to explain, a Pentagon spokesman said they didn’t meet the criteria set forth by Congress: They’d been “detainees” rather than prisoners of war. Many crewmen were furious and deeply hurt, and their exclusion caused widespread outrage among veterans’ groups. The Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, Disabled American Veterans, and Jewish Am
erican War Veterans all wrote letters of protest. Some of those scheduled to receive decorations threatened to return them or give them to Bucher.
Publicly, the captain insisted the snub was no big deal. The military had classified his men as ex-POWs for purposes of medical benefits, and that was what really mattered. Privately, he was incensed. Two decades after the crew’s bondage—after they boldly flipped off their torturers before the eyes of the world; after a bloody CT grinned in spite of a vicious beating; after they all marched to freedom across the Bridge of No Return—Bucher still felt a strong sense of responsibility for the men. How dare the Pentagon deny them a slug of base metal after all of the blood, sweat, and tears they’d shed in hellish communist prisons? “This was such a slap in the face to them,” he remembered. “I thought, ‘By God, I gotta get that son of a bitch, one way or another.’” One of the things Bucher had always admired about the Navy was that it took care of its own. The crewmen were the skipper’s own, and he’d be damned if he didn’t take care of them now. During an interview more than a dozen years later, he got so choked up over the issue he could hardly speak.
Bucher began writing to every government official he could think of, asking them to demand that the Defense Department change its mind. He wrote to senators, congressmen, the secretary of defense, the secretary of the Navy, the chief of naval operations.
The cause was taken up by U.S. Representative Sonny Montgomery, an influential Mississippi Democrat who chaired the House Veterans Affairs Committee. Montgomery asked the Pentagon to formally explain its reasons for not awarding the Pueblo crew the medal. To qualify, a service member had to have been captured while “engaged in an action against an enemy of the United States” or “engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force.”
In a letter to Montgomery, Kathleen A. Buck, a Defense Department attorney, said the sailors met neither test.
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