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 illustration 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.
A farm boy from Illinois, Massie had enlisted in the Navy at 18, hoping to see the world while serving aboard a nuclear submarine. Instead, he was assigned to the Pueblo. Like other crew members, he was beaten remorselessly in North Korea. Guards wearing heavy combat boots kicked him over and over in the back, groin, knees, arms, elbows, and ankles. “My ankles were raw—they were actually bleeding,” he says. “They just kept it up, and kept it up, and kept it up.”
One day, after Massie was caught whispering with a shipmate, the Bear jammed the muzzle of an assault rifle into his mouth. “He took the clip out, and all this time he was yelling at me in Korean. He showed me the bullets and he slammed the clip back in and put his hand on the trigger and showed that the safety was off. And he just kept yakking at me. Finally, my knees were shaking so bad he pulled the rifle . . . out of my mouth and whacked me upside the head with it. Knocked me to the floor.”
Back in his hometown after his enlistment ended, Massie worked variously as a road paver, mechanic, and truck driver. He got married four years after coming home but suffered from nightmares and sexual dysfunction. His wife divorced him after only six months.
“I had a short temper. I wasn’t the same guy I was before I left. I was kind of moody. I’d have these dreams at night that would startle me in the middle of the night. I’d wake up screamin’ or sweatin’ or whatever. It was a hard situation for somebody to live with.”
In his dreams he was being punched and kicked and bashed all over again, and the sensations were so real, the pain so intense, he thought it was actually happening. Sometimes he envisioned himself breaking out of prison, knifing or shooting a guard to death in the process, and running for days through the hostile countryside, disoriented and terrified. Eventually the North Koreans caught up to him, riddling his body with gunshots and then dragging him through the streets as civilians shrieked at and kicked him.
By the mid-1990s, he was sweating through such dreams four or five nights a week. Exhaustion set in. His weight ballooned from overeating. When he thought of Duane Hodges’s bloody death and the injuries to his shipmates during the attack and in prison, he’d “just burst out and cry.” In 1997, he started his own heating and air-conditioning business, but persistent aches and pains made it increasingly difficult to work. “My back was killing me, my legs and ankles from when I was kicked and beaten overseas. At times, I couldn’t hardly walk.”
Massie never sought help because he didn’t want to be “a burden” on taxpayers. Finally, during a crew reunion, Bucher all but ordered him to seek treatment from the Veterans Administration. Massie received a disability rating of 100 percent due to post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, at 65, he takes several medications a day for anxiety and depression, and sees a VA psychiatrist at least once a month. He receives about $3,000 a month in government disability benefits. He never remarried and lives alone in the one-story house he grew up in.
“I’m just to the point now where I don’t get out of my house. I pretty much am a hermit here. I don’t like getting outside the house, really. I don’t like that much to get involved with people. With friends, and all the things that I used to really enjoy, I don’t anymore.”
Massie doesn’t try to sugarcoat his motive for suing North Korea: revenge, pure and simple. He wanted to punish the communists by prying as much money as possible out of them for what they did to him and his shipmates. But the court action also was his way of honoring Bucher, with whom he became close.
“I didn’t want to reach the Pearly Gates and have Pete up there waitin’ on me and ask me what the hell I was doin’ because I hadn’t done anything on the Pueblo’s cause,” he says. “I knew I had to do something to carry on, or try to carry on, part of his legacy, of our legacy.”
Massie approached a local lawyer, Daniel T. Gilbert, to draft his lawsuit. Gilbert had successfully sued Iran over the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985. His clients were six U.S. Navy construction divers who’d been passengers on the plane, which was en route from Athens to Rome when Hezbollah terrorists commandeered it. The hijackers killed another Navy diver, Robert Stethem, dumping his body on the runway when the plane landed in Beirut.
Gilbert won a $309 million judgment against Iran, demonstrating in federal court that it was a state sponsor of Hezbollah. He and his clients later collected $9 million out of Iranian assets frozen by the U.S. government. But Gilbert was reluctant to take on the Pueblo case. Squeezing money out of North Korea, he knew, would be much more difficult. He told Massie the case would be long and frustrating, and stood little chance of success. But Massie persisted and Gilbert ultimately agreed to help.
When the suit went to trial, no one appeared to defend North Korea. The sailors gave emotional testimony about what the Bear and other guards did to them, and how it had marred their lives. In December 2008, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. ruled in their favor, ordering North Korea to pay nearly $66 million: $16.75 million each to Massie, Tuck, and McClarren for their time in prison and subsequent pain and suffering; $14.3 million to Pete Bucher’s estate; and $1.25 million to Rose Bucher.
Kennedy noted that the sailors underwent “extensive and shocking” abuse in prison and “suffered physical and mental harm that has endured.” Massie and his coplaintiffs were particularly pleased by the judge’s statement that Bucher surrendered the Pueblo only after “recognizing there was no chance of escape.”
To date, however, the former crewmen and Rose Bucher haven’t seen a cent. Gilbert is working with a Chicago law firm to uncover North Korean funds that could be attached. So far, they’ve found none.
“We have been continuously looking,” the attorney says. “I really can’t go into any other details than that. We’ve not been successful, unfortunately. But we’re constantly seeking to find the assets that would be available.” Gilbert adds that “it’s totally unpredictable” whether the plaintiffs will ever see any money.
Massie deeply misses Bucher, whom he credits with saving his life on the high seas and easing his pain at home. He was among about two dozen ex-sailors who attended the captain’s funeral after his death, following years of declining health, at 76. During a funeral mass at St. Michael’s Catholic Church in Poway, a priest told mourners the trials that marked Bucher’s life paralleled those of Jesus, “who was also betrayed, abandoned, discouraged, spat upon, preyed upon.” Actor Hal Holbrook, who portrayed Bucher in an acclaimed 1973 TV movie, sent a message describing him as “a beautiful man, a patriot who loved his wife and his country and the men who served and endured with him.” Holbrook added, “I salute him from my heart.”
Several hundred people attended the captain’s burial with full military honors at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego. The Navy that once tried to court-martial him provided a 21-gun salute. Two young sailors presented Rose Bucher with the American flag that had covered her husband’s casket, and his remains were slowly lowered into the ground.
The cemetery sits atop Point Loma, a windswept finger of land that curves protectively around San Diego Bay. It’s a lovely spot. To the east, you can see sailboats flitting across the bay, with the city’s sun-gilded skyline in the background. To the west is an even more spectacular view of Bucher’s first love, the vast, merciless Pacific Ocean.