Buck described the Pueblo’s intelligence-collection mission as a “passive” activity that “hardly qualifies . . . as an ‘action,’ a term that denotes violence in the employment of weapons.” She also said North Korea wasn’t an enemy of the United States, since the two countries had signed an armistice in 1953.
Addressing the second criterion, the Pentagon lawyer wrote that while the Pueblo’s voyage “could arguably” be categorized as a military operation, its bloody capture didn’t involve “conflict as that term is normally construed,” since the spy boat “offered no resistance.” At a minimum, she added, “there must be a fire fight of some kind.”
Bucher couldn’t believe it. The Pentagon, he felt, was resorting to pretzel logic to keep his guys from getting their medals. He was convinced that the real reason for the denial was his embarrassing revelations at the court of inquiry. In November 1988, he fired off his own letter to Montgomery, angrily refuting Buck’s arguments: “I don’t know what [the Defense Department’s] definition of conflict is, but one hell of a lot of conflict occurred that noon in international waters in the Sea of Japan.”
In a separate letter to the chief of naval operations, Bucher pointed out that he and all of his men previously had been awarded the Combat Action Ribbon. How could the Pentagon now say they hadn’t engaged in action against an enemy? The captain also noted that since the Korean War ended with a truce, not a peace treaty, the United States technically still was at war with North Korea. If North Korea wasn’t an enemy, what was it? He denied that the Pueblo hadn’t resisted capture, and rejected Buck’s argument that the POW medal couldn’t be granted in the absence of a “fire fight.” And he was right: The law authorizing the decoration made no mention of a firefight as a prerequisite.
His pleas fell on deaf ears, however.
Temporarily stymied, the skipper took a trip with Rose to visit a friend on Prince Edward Island, off Canada’s east coast. On the way they stopped in Boston to see another friend, a local TV news reporter. Agreeing that something needed to be done about the POW medals, the journalist put Bucher in touch with a longtime acquaintance, U.S. Representative Nicholas Mavroules, a Democrat whose district lay in the suburbs north of Boston.
The son of Greek immigrants, Mavroules happened to be chairman of the Subcommittee on Investigations of the House Armed Services Committee. He knew his way around the Pentagon and he knew what buttons to push. Mavroules had led the congressional investigation into the 1983 bombing that killed 241 U.S. Marines, sailors, and soldiers in a Beirut barracks, and he’d challenged President Ronald Reagan’s controversial “Star Wars” missile-defense program. He was no particular friend of the Navy. His subcommittee had exposed cost overruns on Navy aircraft and soon would look into the deadly 1989 gun-turret explosion on the battleship Iowa, which killed 47 seamen.
Mavroules gave Bucher an hour one Sunday morning at his campaign office in Massachusetts. The skipper related his experiences aboard the Pueblo, in North Korea, and at the hands of the Navy afterward. Mavroules sympathized. From his probe of security problems at the bombed Beirut barracks, he knew military higher-ups occasionally sought scapegoats in the wake of a high-profile disaster. He also thought that, in view of the Pueblo sailors’ struggles to evade the North Koreans at sea and to resist them in prison, the Pentagon had made a mistake in not giving them the POW decoration. “The thing that really gnawed at me was that I wondered what they would have done—that is, the head of the Pentagon, or whoever is making decisions—if they were in that same situation,” Mavroules recalled. “I truly think they would have made the same decisions as Pete.” The congressman promised to bring the matter before his subcommittee soon.
Mavroules was as good as his word. Back in Washington, he convened a hearing on June 23, 1989. Among the invited witnesses were Bucher, Schumacher, and Harry Iredale.
The chairman made it clear in his opening remarks that his goal was to change the law so the Pueblo crew was eligible for the POW medal.
“Due to the wording of the law, the crew of the Pueblo were technically ineligible since the Pueblo was engaged in an intelligence gathering mission and not in a military engagement,” Mavroules said. “However, in my judgment, that was an oversight. The crew members of the Pueblo made great sacrifices and it is important to recognize their accomplishment.” He proposed an amendment that would award medals to men who’d been “held by hostile forces under circumstances which the Secretary of the Navy considers comparable to their being held captive during a period of armed conflict.”
Bucher testified, as did a Kansas congressman whose constituents included Steve Woelk, the sailor who’d undergone surgery without anesthesia in North Korea. But the most anticipated witness was Vice Admiral Jeremy M. Boorda, the chief of naval personnel. Boorda surprised the other witnesses by quickly stating, “Navy supports the award of the medal.”
The admiral acknowledged that a case could be made for decorating Bucher and his men under the existing statute. But the Navy, he said, believed the law should be changed so that the Pueblo sailors were explicitly eligible.
“I personally feel that we as a nation should recognize the sacrifices made by these crew members,” Boorda told the subcommittee. “We, as elected and appointed officials of our government, have an obligation to do the right thing and, in this case, that means to do what is necessary to permit the award of the POW medal to each Pueblo crewman. They have earned it.”
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Congress passed the Pueblo amendment in November 1989, and President George H. W. Bush signed it into law. The following spring, Bucher got a call at home in Poway. His men would get their medals at a public ceremony in San Diego on May 5, 1990. The date was only two weeks away.
By now, the crewmen were scattered across the country. Knowing some of them couldn’t afford a trip to San Diego, the captain set out to raise money to cover their expenses. He phoned a bond broker he knew, hoping to squeeze $50 or $100 out of him. When the man pledged $1,000, Bucher was stunned. “I couldn’t speak and neither could he,” remembered the captain. “We stood there on the phone, listening to each other breathe. I couldn’t say anything, I was so emotionally choked up. And he got choked up because I was choked up, so we sat there holding on to the phone for about a minute or so.”
Emboldened, Bucher started putting the arm on other people. Helen Copley, wife of the publisher of the San Diego Union, which had editorialized in favor of POW medals for the crew, gave $5,000. The owner of the San Diego Padres kicked in $1,000. Stu Russell collected $350 from friends in Eureka, California, where he lived. In ten days Bucher and company raised a phenomenal $40,000. The owner of a travel agency the captain had met on a trip to Russia contributed free plane tickets for six crewmen living in New England. Each donor received a framed copy of Bucher’s watercolor of the Pueblo at sea.
Bob Chicca, the former Marine linguist who was now selling graduation rings to high school students in the San Diego area, called some of his old shipmates to invite them to the ceremony. Some of the men “just broke down and cried” at the news. The Veterans Administration, not the Navy, was put in charge of the event. The VA wanted a “neutral site” for it and selected the lawn in front of the San Diego County Administration Building.
May 5 was a gorgeous Southern California Saturday. The city fathers had proclaimed it “USS Pueblo Day.” About 400 people gathered outside the county building, enjoying a panoramic view of the azure waters of San Diego Bay. Sixty-four of the 79 living sailors showed up, yellow carnations in their lapels. Reporters and TV cameramen wandered around, interviewing people. Anchored in the distance was the USS Ranger, one of the aircraft carriers dispatched to the Sea of Japan during the Pueblo crisis. On its flight deck stood its entire complement of 3,800 officers and men, perfectly spaced, in brilliant white uniforms. The carrier ran up signal flags congratulating the Pueblo crew.
A Navy band played the national anthem,
and the director of the local VA office acted as master of ceremonies. “It is, I hope, a bad day for the ghost of the Pueblo,” he said. “We all hope that this is the day that that ghost is laid to rest.” Several dignitaries spoke. Barbara Pope, an assistant secretary of the Navy, read a proclamation from President Bush and declared that, with the presentation of the POW medals, the Pueblo sailors “rightfully join the ranks of all the nation’s sons who have suffered, on our behalf, the bitter trials of enemy captivity.”
Congressman Mavroules also spoke, striking a humbler note. “I apologize for all the citizens of this nation,” he said, “because it has taken us so long to recognize your bravery and your service.”
That was all the aging ex-seamen really needed to hear. The medal was, after all, just a trinket, a bronze disk an inch and three-eighths in diameter. But it represented an important piece of their lives. It was both symbol and acknowledgment of their suffering, their comradeship, their valiant struggle to stand up to cruel, ruthless foes who’d tried to crush them. It attested to their dogged will to survive. The medals would be taken home and slipped into desk drawers and shoe boxes. But they’d never be forgotten.
The Pueblo men leaned forward in their chairs, eager to catch every word of every speech. Then it was time to receive their decorations. An admiral and a Marine general, resplendent in dress uniforms, handed them out one by one. Among the sailors there were grins and backslaps, bear hugs and damp eyes.
Bucher was too overcome to make a speech. But when he stood up in the sunshine to accept his medal, his men cheered like there was no tomorrow.
EPILOGUE
In the late 1990s, the North Koreans gambled again with the Pueblo. They disguised it as a freighter and sailed it around South Korea to the west coast of North Korea, and then up a river to Pyongyang. The ship chugged through international waters for nine days. American and South Korean forces, although presumably monitoring communist ports and sea lanes, again made no apparent move to intercept the vessel.
Not long after its arrival in Pyongyang, the Pueblo was opened to the public as a combination war trophy and tourist attraction. Moored on the Taedong River in the heart of the communist capital, it drew large numbers of visitors, including Americans and other Westerners. Tourists were shown a video declaring that the captured ship “will testify century after century [about] the crimes of aggression played by U.S. imperialists against the Korean people.” Escorted by English-speaking guides in snappy military outfits, visitors got to see battered code machines in the SOD hut and a framed copy of General Woodward’s apology (lacking any mention of his “prerepudiation,” of course). They mugged for photos at the ship’s wheel, gleefully swiveled machine guns back and forth, and gawked at clusters of large-caliber bullet holes—helpfully circled in red paint—in the bulkheads.
The North Koreans were said to be intensely proud of their prize and, despite its age, the Pueblo seemed well preserved. Strolling its decks in 2001, a U.S. Navy veteran met a North Korean guide who said he was part of the 1968 boarding party. The aging communist offered regards to the Pueblo’s crewmen and promised to “care for [their] ship until he dies.”
Near the end of 2012, the Pueblo suddenly vanished from its dock. But several months later, the ship reappeared, anchored outside a renovated war museum as a permanent anti-imperialist exhibit.
As of this writing, the Pueblo has the unhappy distinction of being the only commissioned U.S. Navy vessel in the hands of a foreign power. Yet the U.S. government has made no visible effort to get the ship back since the crew was repatriated 45 years ago. As a Navy spokesman explained, Washington faces far more pressing problems with North Korea, especially trying to curtail its determined efforts to build nuclear weapons.
And so the Pueblo languishes, with no influential constituency to demand its return. Many Americans have either forgotten about the ship or never heard of it. Its surviving sailors, now mostly in their sixties, want the Pueblo brought home as closure to their ugly experiences in 1968—memories of which haunt them to this day. (“It would give all us crew a peace of mind if we knew it was on our home ground,” Alvin Plucker, a young quartermaster who later managed a Colorado turkey farm, told a journalist.) But the ex-crewmen have virtually no voice in Congress or at the White House. Their only committed allies seem to be residents of the small, rough-and-tumble city for which the ship is named: Pueblo, Colorado.
Located in the high desert about 110 miles south of Denver, the city of 105,000 was once an important steel-making center. Now home to Professional Bull Riders, Inc. (motto: “The first rule is just to stay alive”) and an annual car show put on by the National Street Rod Association, it’s the kind of place that takes its military heritage seriously. In 1993, the city dubbed itself “the Home of Heroes,” since four Medal of Honor winners have hailed from Pueblo—more per capita than any other city in the nation. (“What is it, something in the water out there in Pueblo?” asked President Dwight D. Eisenhower as he presented the medal to one local man, Raymond G. Murphy, in 1953.)
The local newspaper, the Pueblo Chieftain, has campaigned for years for the ship’s return. It runs stories every year marking the anniversary of the capture. It editorializes for North Korea to do the right thing and give back the ship. Its publisher, Bob Rawlings, chairs the “Puebloans for the Return of the Pueblo” committee. Other citizens have taken up the cause, too. At one point, an enterprising businessman planned to build a memorial park featuring an eight-foot-deep pond, in which the Pueblo could one day float. The city’s elected representatives in the Colorado legislature routinely introduce resolutions calling on North Korea to return the ship; Colorado’s representatives in Congress sponsor similar pleas.
Some Coloradans regard Washington’s failure to recover the ship as a national disgrace. Others view the vessel’s release as a long-overdue act of goodwill by North Korea that could open big doors of potential cooperation with the West. After all, a series of Ping-Pong games in 1971 helped pave the way for the United States to establish diplomatic relations with China.
For a while, it seemed as if a breakthrough were possible. Following a 2002 visit to North Korea, Donald Gregg, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, said he received a “cryptic note” from Pyongyang’s deputy foreign minister that Gregg interpreted as a sign of the communist regime’s willingness to release the vessel. But any possible deal fell through when the Bush administration later revealed that the north was trying to produce uranium-based nuclear weapons. The North Koreans again hinted at a possible rapprochement to Gregg in 2005 and to another American visitor, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, in 2007. But no agreement ever materialized.
Hope also flickered in 2007 when U.S. Senator Wayne Allard, a Colorado Republican, called for the return of a Korean battle flag seized by American sailors and Marines who stormed a Korean fort in 1871. The blue-and-yellow flag, belonging to the fort’s commander, General Uh Je-yeon, had been displayed at the U.S. Naval Academy, along with 300 other captured foreign battle flags, ever since. (About 350 Korean warriors died defending their turf against the smaller but much better armed U.S. landing party; many Koreans today regard the Battle of Kanghwa Island as their Alamo.) Allard and other Pueblo supporters thought giving back the 13-by-13-foot pennant might prompt Pyongyang to release the ship as a reciprocal gesture. But the north didn’t reply to the offer; instead, the South Korean government promptly sent a delegation to Annapolis to retrieve the treasured banner.
North Korea’s traditional intransigence has only seemed to worsen in recent years. In 2012, a Colorado lawmaker who’d cosponsored the legislature’s annual bring-home-the-Pueblo resolution received a postcard with a return address in Pyongyang. The postcard said that “never, not in a million years” would the ship be returned. Its sender dared State Representative Keith Swerdfeger: “Come and get it! The Korean People’s Army is ready to offer you full hospitality!” On the postcard’s flip side was an i
llustration of two North Korean soldiers battering a terrified American serviceman with rifle butts. It wasn’t clear whether the postcard came from the communist government or just an angry citizen.
On the other hand, the North Koreans can be jaw-droppingly unpredictable. (Who could ever have imagined their current leader, Kim Jong-un, hugging ex–Chicago Bulls star Dennis Rodman like they were best friends?) It’s not outside the realm of possibility that they might abruptly hand back the ship, based on some internal calculus of political or economic gain in the future.
In the final analysis, however, asking North Korea to return the Pueblo may be as futile as asking the British Museum to return the Elgin Marbles. Pyongyang’s leaders have as deep an attachment to the ship as the museum’s overseers have to the famous sculptures and other marble artifacts Lord Elgin removed so controversially from Greece’s Parthenon early in the nineteenth century.
It’s hard to imagine the Pueblo ever coming home except as part of a grand bargain between North Korea and the United States in which Pyongyang agreed to permanently halt its nuclear weapons program in exchange for, say, large deliveries of fuel oil and food for its chronically underfed populace. But it’s unlikely that American negotiators would push very hard for the Pueblo if it meant upending a potential deal with North Korea to stop building nuclear warheads and missiles that can deliver them far from its territory.
With such limited prospects of getting the ship back, three ex–Pueblo sailors and the captain’s wife decided to seek another kind of justice. In 2006, they sued North Korea under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which permits U.S. citizens to seek damages from foreign governments for torture.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., was organized by William T. Massie, a onetime machinist’s mate. His fellow plaintiffs were Friar Tuck, the ex-oceanographer; Don McClarren, the former communication technician; and Rose Bucher, standing in for her husband, who died in 2004.
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