Pacific

by Simon Winchester

  But if a signal was then sent to the Pueblo, it went unheard. A number of North Korean ships—six in total, summoned by the subchaser’s first broadcast, and now appearing from all corners of the compass—were closing in on the Pueblo, fast. Only twenty minutes had passed since the first ship was seen, and now heavily armed enemy vessels were everywhere. They had clear intentions. “We will close down the radio, tie up the personnel, tow it and enter the port at Wonsan,” said the subchaser to one of her sister ships. “We are on the way to boarding.”

  Bucher, aware only of the presence of a flotilla closing around him, quickly considered his limited options. He might try to outrun his pursuers, or else he might scuttle his ship, destroying secret documents. Two MiG jets then flew low overhead, adding to the gathering drama.

  The U.S. captain decided on defiance. He first ran up signal flags indicating he was staying put—he was, after all, officially an oceanographic ship, collecting water samples. But within moments, a number of North Korean sailors appeared on the deck of the subchaser, all of them armed with rifles and clearly readying themselves to board the American vessel. So, beginning to sweat, Bucher ordered his signalman to put out more flags, this time spelling out a more conciliatory message: “Thanks for your consideration—I am leaving the area.” He pointed his prow eastward, spooled up his engines, first to two-thirds ahead and then to full speed, and lit out for the open sea. He was trying to leave with dispatch and dignity, he later said.

  Up above, the American aircraft heard, quite distinctly, an alarming radio call from the North Korean subchaser: “They saw us, and they keep running away. Shall I shoot them?” Orders were evidently given from an unseen controller ashore, because Bucher then spotted a fresh set of signal pennants going up on the ship that was now half a mile behind him: it was the same warning—“Heave to or I will fire.” But he decided to keep on running. He ordered his crew to destroy as much secret material as possible, to smash the electronics, to burn the paperwork. He doubted he’d have much time.

  He heard the jets thunder past overhead once again, this time terrifyingly low, terrifyingly loud. The smaller North Korean patrol vessels broke away, leaving the Pueblo alone, firmly in the gun sights of the pursuing capital ship. Then, with a terrible fusillade of sound and smoke and flying lead, the North Korean navy finally opened fire on the fleeing American warship. Piracy? War? Dangerous lunacy? Whatever the official term, the matter had swiftly become fraught with peril.

  It took no more than one frantic hour for it all to play out. Topside, the crew did their best to avoid or to mitigate the withering bursts of gunfire—but shrapnel was flying everywhere; fires were breaking out; glass was shattering and the shards flying; bullet and shell holes were being punched into the hull, the smokestack, the bulkheads. Men were injured—one young man, a fireman named Hodges, was hit in the abdomen and leg and died from an immense loss of blood.

  Belowdecks the wreckage was even worse, though of the crew’s making, since standing orders demanded that everything classified now be reduced to garbage, useless and unreadable by any captors. So technicians with axes and sledgehammers hacked away at the electronics—finding them remarkably robust, resistant even to the cruelest of blows by the strongest of men. There were tons of papers to burn or shred, and only a small incinerator and a one-piece-at-a-time shredder with which to do the job. So, below, scores of small fires were set, the smoke filling the classified radio room and forcing its ax-wielding technicians to leave, choking, in search of fresh air—only to be forced back into the inferno as yet more shellfire erupted from the shadowing Korean boat.

  The radio operator opened a link with the navy operations room in Japan, and the whole sorry progress of the one-sided firefight was then broadcast to a team of presumably open-mouthed operators back in the safety of headquarters. Bucher was at first still trying to get away, still heading east, but his full speed was a lame and limping thirteen knots, which the enemy vessel, now alongside, could easily match. More shells were lobbed at the Pueblo, prompting the single mutinous moment of the incident: the ship’s chief engineer, viewing the situation as hopeless, demanded that the vessel come to a stop and, seeing Bucher’s momentary indecision, wrenched the pilothouse annunciator to stop all engines, which the engine room unquestioningly obeyed. The American ship decelerated quickly and sighed to a stop, finally bobbing sulkily on the half-calm swells. Black smoke billowed from every porthole and every ventilation shaft as more and more paper fires were set, the frantic continuance of a vain attempt to destroy everything.

  Then the gunfire stopped, and there was sudden silence—just the slap of cold waves against the hulls of the near-touching boats. No one aboard the Korean vessel knew enough English to shout orders, so the Koreans raised yet another string of flags, with new orders. “Follow me—I have a pilot aboard.” Bucher ignored them. The sailors then angrily pointed up at the flapping strings of colors, internationally recognized and requiring no language skills, demanding the American ship turn around and do as bidden. AK-47s were raised to shoulder height. The foredeck cannon was trained and leveled. Korean sailors, unsmiling, put fingers to triggers, awaited orders to annihilate the Americans, so close, so vulnerable, so theirs.

  Bucher could do little more than breach the cardinal rule of all naval officers worldwide: never give up your ship without a fight. James Lawrence’s battle cry, his dying command “Don’t give up the ship,” is a mantra of consummate importance to every American sailor. But Bucher would do the opposite: he would make the entirely contrary decision, and one that would haunt him for years to come. For not only was he unable to destroy all classified documents and machinery (to the eternal chagrin of the intelligence community), but also he simply acquiesced when asked to turn over his ship to an enemy. He did what he was told and didn’t fire a single shot in defiance.

  Commentators in America would long be unforgiving: one could hardly imagine, they said, that John Paul Jones or Admiral Farragut or even Lord Nelson or Rodney would ever have done such a thing. They would have traded shot for shot, lead for lead, crewman for crewman, and they would have gone down if necessary with a crippled and burning ship, her ensign sinking into the depths just as the captain’s hat floated off to join it. That was the way navies did things. To do otherwise was unworthy, unacceptable, un-American.

  But Lloyd Bucher did it anyway. This forty-one-year-old rakehell from the arid plains of southern Idaho, a man brought up as an orphan in the Nebraskan prairies, who went to college on a football scholarship, and who could in no sense ever be said to have had seawater in his veins, promptly acted in the western Pacific Ocean as no true-blue sailor would ever have done, they said. He ordered his helmsman to turn about and to limp slowly toward land, to slide westward (at a paltry four knots, to enable yet more papers to be added to the pyre). He sailed his sad little ship morosely toward the enemy shore, to acquiescence, and to be henceforward inevitably thought of in connection with such words as surrender, captivity, humiliation, and shame.

  “Now hear this!” the Pueblo’s public-address system barked. “Now hear this! All hands are reminded of our Code of Conduct. Say nothing to the enemy besides your name, rank, and serial number!” Then, within seconds, there was the stamp of heavy-soled boots on the iron deck, and ten North Korean soldiers with automatic rifles and fixed bayonets boarded the American vessel. Pueblo’s maiden voyage as a spy ship was officially over, little more than two weeks after it had begun. She was under arrest, and so were her captain and all her crew.

  The Pueblo’s eighty-two surviving crewmen, led by Captain Lloyd Bucher, were held in prison in North Korea for eleven months, before being freed at Christmas 1968. They were greeted at the DMZ by the then general Charles Bonesteel.* [Associated Press.]

  The ensuing fate of the men and their ship is recorded either in the memories of eleven months of beatings, interrogations, starvation, and humiliations or else in the black-and-white photographic images taken by their captors. First ther
e were Captain Bucher and his men, the officers in black leather jackets and with naval caps displaying their official insignia, the enlisted men in fatigues and woolen beanies, walking in single file through the night with their hands held high, abject, defeated, captive. Next there is a group of sailors seated in a prison cell, potted plants placed to suggest home comfort;3 some of the Americans have their middle fingers extended, in what they later explained to the North Koreans was a Hawaiian good luck sign. (When the North Koreans found out from a tactless caption in Time magazine what the gesture actually signified, the responsible men were beaten.) There are images of one sailor, Stephen Woelk, in a reenactment of a surgery performed on him without anesthetic, and then of him smiling at having survived the surgery. His own recollections are somewhat more vivid:

  I believe it was the evening of our tenth day of captivity, I was removed from our room and taken to what appeared to be a medical examining room, just down the hall. Up until then, no major medical help had been provided to any of us. In this examining room, I was placed on a metal examining table, my hands were bound and tied down to the table. My legs were spread, my feet bound and tied down so I was unable to move. Their so-called NK doctors commenced operating on me without any form of anesthetic whatsoever. I can still recall the scissors cutting away flesh and being sewn up with sutures that looked like kite string. A small handful of shrapnel was removed in the operation that seemed to last an eternity, but probably did not last more than twenty to thirty minutes. I was told later my screams could be heard throughout the building and many crewmembers thought one of us was being tortured. I was then returned to my room and fellow wounded crewmen.

  Aside from the crewman killed in the initial raid—Duane Hodges, a firefighter colleague of Mr. Woelk, whose own injuries were sustained in the same attack—all the Pueblo crew members survived their months in prison. And Mr. Woelk, despite the exiguous medical care, recovered:

  My medical treatment would consist of the doctor taking a pair of forceps and shoving long strips of gauze saturated with a type of ointment down into my open wounds as far as it would go. Each day the healing process would not allow him to shove it in quite as far as the last time. One day something came out with the gauze that drew the attention of the doctor and his staff. It appeared that a bed bug had found refuge and a warm place to sleep inside of me. This did not seem to be a big deal to the staff. This was probably a normal occurrence in the everyday life in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. I also received several injections daily and one transfusion of a clear liquid in my leg. Although my leg swelled to twice its normal size, whatever medicine it was seemed to work since I finally started making headway towards a recovery.

  All the men, fit or injured, officers or enlisted men, had similar tales to tell, of brutality, isolation, hunger, sadism. They knew little of the negotiations going on between Washington and Pyongyang to allow their release, or of the utter unblinking intransigence of their captors and those who represented North Korea at the bargaining table. It took the better part of a year for a deal to be brokered.

  The Pueblo talks were conducted across a plain baize-covered table at the DMZ crossing point of Panmunjom—the site, still notorious and much visited by tourists, is where the original armistice talks were held that brought the Korean War’s fighting to an end fifteen years before. Like most negotiations with the North Koreans, these talks had the affect of a parallel universe, a strange dystopian Alice in Wonderland world where little was as it seemed, where there was much shouting, spluttering, and fist waving, and where truth was more fugitive than in other, more rationally organized places. The opening of the discussions—officially the 261st meeting of the UN Command Military Armistice Commission, to which the Pueblo incident had been formally added—began with a statement by the North’s granite-faced and unsmiling chief negotiator, Major General Pak Chung Kuk. His opening remarks to the lone American negotiator more than amply set the tone:

  Our saying goes, “A mad dog barks at the moon.” I cannot but pity you who are compelled to behave like a hooligan, disregarding even your age and honor to accomplish the crazy intentions of the war maniac [President Lyndon] Johnson for the sake of bread and dollars to keep your life. In order to sustain your life, you probably served Kennedy who is already sent to hell. If you want to escape from the same fate of Kennedy, who is now a putrid corpse, don’t indulge yourself desperately in invectives. . . . Around 1215 hours on January 23 your side committed the crude, aggressive act of illegally infiltrating the armed spy ship Pueblo of the US imperialist aggressor navy equipped with various weapons and all kinds of equipment for espionage into the coastal waters of our side. Our naval vessels returned the fire of the piratical group. . . . At the two hundred and sixtieth meeting of this commission held four days ago, I again registered a strong protest with your side against having infiltrated into our coastal waters a number of armed spy boats . . . and demanded you immediately stop such criminal acts . . . this most overt act of the US imperialist aggressor forces was designed to aggravate tension in Korea and precipitate another war of aggression. . . . The United States must admit that Pueblo had entered North Korean waters, must apologize for this intrusion, must assure the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea that it would never happen again.

  In the end, the Americans did as they were told. Or they went through the motions of doing so. They agreed, in essence, to the three A’s (to making an admission, giving an apology, pledging an assurance), only to repudiate all three within moments of signing the document. This tactic, this form of words, the use of bizarre new terms for what would happen—prerepudiation, a word absent from most dictionaries, was one; the term prior refutation another—was fully accepted beforehand by the Communists. And this merely added to the perception of these talks, as with most of the Panmunjom talks to have taken place in the sixty years since the end of the war, as being part of a witch’s brew of near insanity, with many of the sessions unreal and frightening by turn.

  The result of these negotiations was the eventual freedom of the eighty-two men and the return of the body of the hapless Duane Hodges. As President Johnson had wished, the men were released in time for Christmas 1968. They were brought in buses to the Joint Security Area (JSA), that small bubble of hope and horror that straddles the dividing line between the two Koreas. The MDL, the military demarcation line, runs through the bubble, with buildings of North Korea on one side, of South Korea on the other, and a few heavily guarded structures built across the line itself, and is where such talks as take place do so across tables that have the line passing through their exact midpoint.

  There is a shallow and muddy river, the Sachon, that dribbles through the western half of the JSA bubble. The demarcation line runs through the midpoint of the river, so any bridge crossing it would, ipso facto, cross the MDL as well. There is in fact such a bridge, an unattractive concrete affair two hundred fifty feet long, with a North Korean guardhouse at the western end, a guardhouse manned by American troops at the other. It has long been known as the Bridge of No Return, since Korean War prisoners who elected to cross it for postwar repatriation were told that, once across, they could never come back. Captain Bucher and his men were brought to the western end of the structure on the chill morning of Tuesday, December 23. It was nine o’clock. They had had turnips for breakfast. It was snowing lightly.

  In another building nearby, the negotiators were signing their sheaves of meaningless documents. It had been agreed that two hours after the final signatures, the men would be freed—but then, at the last minute, the North Koreans decided on another tiny torture, delaying matters by a further, quite pointless thirty minutes. Since the prisoners in their buses had no idea what was going on, they were unaffected. But for the negotiators and the political leaders back in Seoul and Washington, it must have been agonizing.

  Finally word came down the telephone line from Pyongyang that all had been approved. Captain Bucher was ordered to step out of the l
ead bus and ready himself. He was first taken to a waiting ambulance, there to identify in an open coffin the mummified body of fireman Hodges, now eleven months dead. Then Bucher stood, bewildered, in the gathering snow, listening patiently as Major General Pak, the chisel-jawed man who had made the speech starting the negotiations six months beforehand, harangued him for twenty minutes about the evils of his life.

  Then one of the better known and least liked of the guards who had presided over the prisoners, a man of studied cruelty whom the prisoners had called Odd Job, pointed Bucher toward the bridge entrance and spoke to him one last time: “Now walk across that bridge, Captain. Not stop. Not look back. Not make any bad move. Just walk across sincerely. Go now.”

  The red-and-white-striped pole across the entrance was then raised. Bucher stepped onto the bridge and walked nervously, but steadily, across the ten cement arches that supported it above the ice-choked stream. At the far end was a delegation of friendly looking men with, as he came ever closer, ever-broadening smiles on their faces. They were Americans.

  When he was just feet from safety, one of them took the final picture. It is black and white, of a now much older and much thinner Lloyd Bucher, in the last moments of his coming home. His mouth is set in a rictus, a faint and sardonic smile of exhausted relief. His left hand clutches the Mao cap he had been given, but had opted not to wear. His dark raincoat is tightly belted, its collar raised against the biting wind. His trousers are too short—flood pants, Americans would call them. His shoes are dark with white laces.

  Behind him idles the ambulance bearing the body of Hodges. Back on the far side of the creek are the milling men of his ship, to be sent off on their way to freedom, one by one, by their guards, to follow their captain, to keep a strict twenty paces apart from each other. They had been ordered to walk, not run. They had been told not to dare look back at their captors. They had been told they were forbidden, on pain of being shot, to give the final one-fingered gesture of “Hawaiian greeting” so many had so dearly wanted to give.