It has been 20 years since the North Koreans boarded and captured the intelligence gathering ship, USS Pueblo (AGER-2), on 23 January 1968, taking her 83-man crew as hostages for 11 months. By 22 December when the crew was released, a sailor who was seriously wounded when the ship was seized had died in captivity. The ship herself was never returned.
The following excerpts are firsthand accounts by naval officers involved with this incident. After retirement, all were interviewed for the Naval Institute's oral history program.
The Skipper and His Ship
By Vice Admiral Edwin B. Hooper, U. S. Navy (Retired)
Commander Service Force, U. S. Pacific Fleet, July 1965 to November 1967
On the recommendation of the Office of Naval Intelligence, a new class of ships was devised in the mid-1960s called environmental research ships (AGERs). Several small Army cargo vessels were converted for this purpose. We had a few of these cargo ships working the shallow waters around Vietnam at the time. They had a minimum of damage control compartmentation. Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, without a hitch, did the first conversion on what became the USS Banner (AGER-1). The Banner proved highly successful, and Washington decided to convert two more ships. They became the Pueblo (AGER-2) and the Palm Beach (AGER-3).
Commander Lloyd M. Bucher, the prospective commanding officer of the Pueblo, was given the fullest support by my staff. He recommended all kinds of changes, and had many complaints. Almost everything Bucher asked for was approved. My staff was quite impressed by him, but unfortunately the conversion didn’t go as smoothly as was the case with the Banner. One request that was not granted was armor for the bridge. I originally favored it, but turned it down after being shown that the extra topside weight made the ship’s stability—already marginal—worse.
Bucher also requested destruct devices for the sensitive machines on board. I agreed, and wrote an endorsement to give it more strength, but this was turned down by the office of the Chief of Naval Operations. Bucher was also concerned about a means of scuttling the ship—he made quite a point of this. The chief engineer of the Pueblo was taken down into the engine room and shown the sea valves that could readily be knocked off with a sledgehammer. These were singlecompartment ships, so they would go down very rapidly. The engineer was also shown the recommended place for the sledgehammer to be mounted for emergency use.
After her commissioning in May 1967, the Pueblo went down to San Diego for training. She then made a brief stop at Pearl Harbor, where one of my service group commanders conducted the predeployment inspection. One discrepancy that the inspector reported, and directed be completed as soon as possible, was the lack of an emergency bill for the destruction of classified papers and publications. Bucher had looked into this before but hadn’t followed it up. The Banner did have a destruct bill.
While he was in Pearl, Bucher called on me, and we talked for about an hour. When I found he still had no emergency destruct bill, I instructed him to get to work on it immediately, and to report back to me. The ship also had some minor steering difficulties which were given a quick fix; the final solution would be administered when she reached Yokosuka. After the ship left, I did get a message saying that the destruction bill had been completed.
Another item I discussed with Bucher was the need for him to get all the information he could from the Banner's commanding officer about operations in the East China Sea, particularly about harassments the Banner had endured from the Soviets, the Chinese, and the North Koreans while at sea. I told him what little I knew. Bucher told me that the skipper involved in those operations had been relieved—which turned out to be correct—and that he had already gotten information in detail from this officer when he’d returned to the United States.
My impression of Bucher from this session was a highly favorable one, except for the fact that he hadn’t gotten this destruction bill. He was hard-driving, enthusiastic, and seemed to be highly dedicated. I might have been less impressed had I known some of the wild things he did that he discussed in the book he wrote after he was freed.
After the Pueblo had arrived at Yokosuka, the decision was made to install .50-caliber machine guns. I sent Bucher a message ordering him to conduct intense training with these guns in the Yokosuka area before his first operation. I’m not sure that he did this.
One sidelight was that Naval Ordnance Facility, Yokosuka, which was one of ray commands, had recommended that Commander Bucher procure destruction devices at the ordnance facility at Sasebo, which the ship was to visit. I don’t know why, but the Pueblo never picked them up.
The Capture
By Admiral John J. Hyland, U. S. Navy (Retired)
Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet, November 1967 to December 1970
I’ll never forget it. We were having a small dinner party on Tuesday, 23 January 1968, when word came that the Pueblo had been captured and taken into Wonsan.
I knew a lot about these ships because we had copied the Soviet practice of using small electronic collecting vessels for a long time. I didn’t know specifically about the Pueblo or her skipper. Commander Lloyd Bucher, though, until this incident.
My first thought was, “How the hell could this have happened?” because these ships had instructions to stay in international waters. I was absolutely sure that the Pueblo had been doing this. The North Koreans and the Chinese had a habit of harassing our ships—cutting across our bows, setting up a collision course and then hanging on until the last minute, things like that. I figured that all the people involved knew about these things. There was a general feeling that the Communists would not do anything if you were staunch and held on and if you had the right of way. We just never anticipated that anyone would actually board and capture a vessel out on the high seas.
The only thing I could think to do was to send a high priority message to Commander Seventh Fleet, Vice Admiral William “Bush” Bringle, instructing him to get a destroyer up there to stand by off the North Korean coast. None of us knew what to do. If the incident was true as it had been related to me, the ship had already been captured and taken away. What could you do to make them give it back unless you wanted to start a war? I just knew we didn’t want to do that. The next morning, Commander in Chief Pacific, Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp, called and said, “Look, I admire your intention to get a ship up there to take military action if it’s feasible, but we’re not going to do anything. It’s already evolved. They’re going to try to solve this thing by other means,” so I pulled off the destroyer.
At the same time all of this was going on, the Enterprise (CVAN-65), which had been in Japan, was getting set to sail south to the Tonkin Gulf. Rear Admiral Horace H. Epes was the division commander riding the carrier. They began to receive messages of alarm from the Pueblo but didn’t do anything. Spin Epes has been criticized for that. And the whole system of protecting this little ship received flak: “How could you let a defenseless ship like that go where it went and not be better prepared to do something for it if it got into trouble?” Well, I don’t know what the hell the Soviets do about the trawler that’s right off Norfolk or San Francisco this very instant. The Pueblo had an identical role working for us. There isn’t any way that you can do anything for an intelligence-gathering ship unless you want to accompany it with a destroyer, which would defeat the purpose. Before the ship ever leaves port, the skipper knows he’s on a mission that could aggravate somebody. He should think about that. He doesn’t have to go if he doesn’t want to. There are plenty of guys willing to take his place.
The commanding officer needs to prepare himself almost to the point of silliness, imagining what might go wrong and having firm thoughts ahead of time about what to do if various things happen. You can’t wait until something goes wrong and then say, “Wow, I wonder what I can do now?”
I got as much information about Bucher as I could. He had been a submariner and had gone as far as executive officer in a submarine. The submarine force has always had a very effective kind of self-cleansing system. If you’re not a good submarine officer, you don’t ever become an executive officer. If you’re not a good exec, you never get command of a sub. They manage this within their own hierarchy. When Bucher was an exec, I guess he was found wanting in some way. He was, however, on a list which the Navy keeps current of people who are eligible for command. Of course, the lower you are on this list, the less prestigious a ship you get. So Bucher got command of the Pueblo.
Commander Bucher allowed his ship to be taken without resistance. He’d been fired on and one of his sailors was seriously wounded. I guess Bucher looked around his ship and saw this man bleeding like hell, so he decided that the jig was up. 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. He had all kinds of opportunities to observe what was a very threatening movement against his ship, but he must have assumed it was just another of these harassing movements. But I still can’t believe that he didn’t do anything. I remember a story about a Royal Navy ship in olden days. The captain called to the gunnery officer, “For god’s sake fire a gun, because I’m about to strike my colors.” He wanted to have it on the record that he had resisted before surrendering.
It’s incomprehensible to me that Bucher could see a large, armed vessel come in close, embark a bunch of men with flak jackets and rifles into one of three torpedo boats that had come out, and watch that boat come alongside, and do nothing. It’s difficult enough to bring a boat alongside when you want it to have access; otherwise it is near to impossible.
The Pueblo had some .50-caliber machine guns. The press later emphasized how pathetic they were to defend a ship. They don’t know much about guns to write that, because a .50-caliber machine gun is a mighty tough weapon to face if it’s operated properly. It will kill people left and right if you use it. The ship also had a bunch of pistols and rifles available, but Bucher didn’t pass them out. He didn’t do anything to avoid this thing. Of course, it’s all so clear in retrospect. There’s no one smarter than a Monday morning quarterback. I guess we all tend now to tell Bucher what he should have done. But he sure as hell should have done many things he didn’t, including resisting.
When the Navy gives a guy command of a ship, they don’t know ahead of time how he is going to act in an emergency or in time of war. You give command to the best people you have according to a lot of measuring sticks, and you expect that they’ll perform when they are called upon. But many of the best skippers have never had anything go wrong. They perform very well and move right up in the Navy to become flag officers, but they’ve never had a combat situation. Still, when something does happen, you measure an officer’s performance against the highest standards, and Bucher got a completely failing grade.
The Lack of Air Support
By Vice Admiral Kent L. Lee, U. S. Navy (Retired)
Commanding Officer, USS Enterprise (CVAN-65), July 1967 to August 1969
In January 1968 the Enterprise was in Pearl Harbor getting ready for an operational readiness inspection. Within two days after arrival we were told that the inspection had been canceled, and that we were to set sail for Sasebo, Japan. The Japanese were very sensitive about nuclear ships visiting their ports, but they had agreed to allow the Enterprise into Sasebo. It was decided that this was politically very important. The dates for the port visit had already been set, so we sailed off at best speed.
Along the way we hit a terrible storm, equal to some of the huge typhoons I had experienced during World War II. We Were forced to slow down to five or six knots and to switch headings until the ship rode more smoothly. As a result, we were 24 hours behind schedule in entering Sasebo.
On our last day at sea, Alexis Johnson, the U. S. ambassador to Japan, was flown to the carrier to brief us. He was aware of the nuances of our visit. We, in turn, spent a lot of time briefing the crew on what to expect in Sasebo, how important it was not to have an incident. I had a very fine crew in the Enterprise, and I’m proud to say we didn’t have a bit of trouble.
While we were in port, protesters came out by the thousands. The Japanese had beefed up the Sasebo police detachment in expectation of this. Each day was almost a choreographed exercise. The protesters would do whatever it took to attract the notice of the television cameras. and the police would hold them in check, going out of their way not to injure anyone.
After five days in port, our orders were to leave Sasebo and to join up with Task Force 77 after a brief stop in Subic Bay. On 23 January, we were in the channel outbound when we intercepted a very strange message. Some vessel named “Pueblo” was saying, “I’m being attacked. Help, help!” Well, there were two aspects to this: we didn’t know there was such a ship as the Pueblo, and we didn’t know that she was in the Sea of Japan. We didn’t know who, what, or where the Pueblo was.
We had Rear Admiral Horace H. “Spin” Epes, a Seventh Fleet task group commander, embarked. Epes’s chief of staff was my friend, Captain Frank Ault, former commanding officer of the Coral Sea (CVA-43) and one of the ablest officers in the Navy.
The Enterprise's deck was not spotted for launch. We’d been in port, and planes were being worked on. The flight deck was filled with airplanes, and maintenance was going on in the hangar deck. Two F-4s on the catapult could have been launched on air patrol in a very short time, and we might have come up with two backups, but as far as A-6s or the like, we had none armed and ready for launch.
It has been suggested that Admiral Epes should have launched on receipt of that first confusing message, since you can always recall the planes. If we’d sent up the F-4s and vectored them toward the Pueblo, they probably could have made it. After launching, we could have headed the Enterprise toward the site at best speed. All that would have looked good. It’s easy to say in hindsight what should have been done. But we waited for clarification of the message, and by the time we learned two or three hours later that the Pueblo was a U. S. Navy communications intelligence ship in the Sea of Japan, it was too late to launch.
The Pueblo reported to Commander Naval Forces Japan, Rear Admiral Frank L. Johnson, who had operational control over her. And Johnson reported to Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet rather than Commander Seventh Fleet. So even though she was in the Sea of Japan, the Pueblo was not one of Seventh Fleet’s ships. I don’t know how much knowledge Seventh Fleet had about her. I do know that we had zero, which was unfortunate. Our intelligence people should have been informed of everything out there.
After the messages were all sorted out, we were ordered to head up through Tsushima Strait into the Sea of Japan. We started low-grade flight operations, exercising our pilots and planes.
In the meantime, Soviet ships were pouring into the area. We saw Russian ships almost every day. We steamed up north, perhaps as far as Wonsan.
In mid-February we received new orders. One evening I was on the bridge. At 1930 I was informed that I had a telephone call in the tactical plot area behind the navigation bridge. To my surprise, it was my “old friend,” President Lyndon Johnson, on the line. I guess this would have been about 0730 Washington time. Johnson had visited the Enterprise off San Diego for Armed Forces weekend the previous November. He brought an entourage that included, among others. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas Moorer, and two women, one being Mrs. Johnson’s staff director, Liz Carpenter. There were also 30 or more from the media.
The President brought his own cooks and his own food and liquor. That first night when we walked into the flag mess for dinner, I was a little taken aback to find cocktails being served, but I must confess I joined right in and had a drink, and wine with my dinner.
We thought it would be a good idea to have a few enlisted men join us for dinner, so we selected four or five on the recommendation of their department heads. One fellow, a first class petty officer who was a machinery repairman, turned out to be from President Johnson’s hometown, Comfort, Texas. They hit it off just great. But an interesting item appeared in Drew Pearson’s column the next week. The article said that Johnson insisted on having these enlisted men to dinner much to the chagrin of the Navy, and that he specifically insisted on this man from Comfort. None of which was true.
Anyway, during his call to the ship off North Korea, President Johnson wanted to know about those fellows from the north. Were they giving us a problem? I told him no, that we were doing very well, and that I didn’t think there was any great danger. He told me then that he wanted us to turn south and head out of the Sea of Japan. The duty officer from one of the big commands was on the line, and after the President had hung up, he asked me if I understood what we were to do. I said yes, that we’d immediately turn the formation south and head toward Tsushima Strait. The watch officer said that an operational message would come in a few minutes to authenticate the President’s call. I turned the formation to head south.
With an admiral on board, I knew that I shouldn’t make such a dramatic change without his approval. Admiral Epes liked to have his movie every night, and instructions were firm that the admiral was not to be disturbed. I thought this message important enough, so I went down eight decks to the flag cabin and pulled aside the flag lieutenant. I told him what I needed, and he turned a little pale, but he agreed that the movie would be stopped. I told the admiral that the President had just called me and ordered us to head south out of the Sea of Japan. Admiral Epes was a bit startled that an order having to do with his task group came in this fashion. We continued on south toward Tsushima Strait.
Negotiating with the North Koreans
By Vice Admiral John V. Smith, U. S. Navy (Retired)
Senior member, Military Armistice Commission, United Nations Command, Korea, October 1967 to May 1968
One of the qualifications I found I needed whenever I negotiated with the North Koreans was a good bladder, because once a meeting started, no one was allowed to leave the room. I would drink nothing the night before, and no coffee or water the day of the meeting, and found that thus dehydrated, I could stand 11 hours. If I were to ever recommend that we adjourn for five minutes, the senior North Korean negotiator, my counterpart, would reply, “It’s obvious that you’re insincere about wanting to settle our disputes here at the table. You prefer to take a recess rather than work hard toward resolving the issues. I call the attention of the world to the fact that you care so little about peace in Korea that you prefer to recess.” In fact, what we were doing was simply arguing for the benefit of the world press, exchanging insults and getting nowhere.
These proceedings were unbelievably tedious, because everything you said had to be translated into Korean and Chinese. The Chinese representative was no longer there, because when they abolished rank in the Chinese Army, they had no major generals left who could meet the qualifications for a representative. But even so, they still translated into the third language.
There was psychology used in the meetings that made it seem almost a game. For instance, their flag was two inches higher on the table because we had given up on that race. But I used to take advantage of the fact that I smoked cigars and they didn’t have them. Their senior member, my opposite, smoked cigarettes constantly and I would blow cigar smoke in his face. If he was looking up at me, I would blow it past his ear. You couldn’t go too far. If he looked down, then I’d blow it in his face. Everybody could see that I was blowing it in his face and that would make him very nervous. Several times he would light another cigarette while the first one was still of sizable length burning in the ashtray. Then he’d have to try to poke the old one back down in the hole in the ashtray, while I watched with feigned interest.
When he’d get really angry at me for something, he’d break out a dog-eared paper which had been stapled and restapled because it had been juggled around so much. It started out: “Kennedy is a putrid corpse, and Johnson is a living corpse, headed for the same fate as Kennedy, and so are you headed for the same fate as Kennedy if you don’t watch out and behave yourself accordingly.” This insult passed as diplomacy.
We had meetings about once every two weeks. They were not automatically scheduled, and we had little interest in them because, normally, nothing was accomplished. The other side used them only for propaganda purposes. They’d come in with a chart showing, for instance, our alleged incursions across their boundary, and it was pure fiction. You couldn’t get any mileage by saying, “I’m telling the truth and you’re lying,” because he’d say, “Oh no. I’m telling the truth and you’re lying.” And if you talked for 20 minutes, a whole hour went by because of all this translating.
In January 1968 the North Koreans infiltrated the South with a 31-man team they had been training for five years with the intention of assassinating South Korean President Park Chung Hee. They planned to take off his head with a knife. If the plot had succeeded, the South Korean Army would have felt bound to make a punitive raid, and that would have brought on war. And the South would have been the aggressor this time, because, of course, the North planned to deny any involvement or knowledge of the assassination. The failed attempt took place on Sunday, 21 January. We managed to gather proof that the North Koreans had staged this attempt, and called a meeting for that Wednesday to present our evidence.
On Tuesday the 23rd, the day before this meeting, the Pueblo was captured and towed into Wonsan. The North Koreans knew that our ship had been operating off their coast, but they did nothing about it until it was obvious they weren't going to bring about war by their assassination attempt.
There was talk of a U. S. air strike to sink the ship to keep its valuable equipment out of North Korean hands. I’m convinced that the North wanted a war started by a South Korean or American attack. Fortunately, we didn’t grant their wish. Had our side attacked, the United Nations Command would’ve been abandoned by the rest of the world. We would have stood before the world as the aggressors. It would’ve been a miserable situation, and the North Koreans would probably have been in Seoul in three days. The Pueblo seizure showed North Korea’s willingness to risk war to obtain their own ends.
Before turning in Tuesday night, I sent a message to the Joint Chiefs of Staff asking that any specific guidance relative to the Pueblo seizure be received no later than 0800 Wednesday, so there was time to get it edited and translated. The reply, when it arrived, came at 0830 and said, in effect, that I should strongly protest this act and demand the return of the ship and her crew. It also gave me some warnings that I had to quote, but the rest of it had to be written, and time was running out. We quickly managed to get a pretty good translation and were just about to take off when we got a frantic message from the embassy telling us not to leave until we got a correction from Washington. Well, we went anyhow and told the embassy to telephone the corrections to Panmunjom, even though it meant the chance of interception. The correction turned out to be, “Delete ‘three machine guns,’ substitute ‘two’ as the armament of the Pueblo.”
I was told to go up there and represent the President of the United States. I read the statement, but otherwise I was mostly on my own. Fortunately, having been privy to a lot of information through the Chief of Naval Operations’s office, I was able to tell them that the Chinese and Soviets respect the 12-mile limit in international waters, and I suggested that the North Koreans had better check with them because they were coming across like barbarians. I said this as politely as possible, trying not to insult them. Their representative was polite most of the time at these meetings, but every now and then he’d try to browbeat me, and that made it a very ticklish situation.
I was then ordered into secret meetings with my opposite number in North Korea. The North made an informal offer through the neutral nations’ supervisory commission to meet with me. We arranged to meet with no publicity or outside witnesses. They cheated to an extent by having an armed thug stand around to make sure we didn’t pull a fast one and capture their guy. Such childish things! I was at considerable personal risk, but they had 83 hostages already.
From then on, we alternated between secret meetings where I could talk to them privately, quietly, in a rational atmosphere with politeness—and open meetings which continued as before. In the secret meetings I could say, “Would you repeat the last sentence?” And they’d say, “We’ll repeat the whole paragraph.” They had 83 hostages, and they wanted to see how much they could get out of it. We wanted the ship and crew back. So both sides wanted to meet.
The skipper of the Pueblo, Commander Lloyd Bucher, confessed to having been inside North Korean territorial waters within the preceding 24 hours while I was trying to make the point that, of course, he wasn’t. In the past, every time a helicopter had gotten lost, or a boat had strayed and been captured, we always had to sign a confession that, yes, we had violated their waters, land, or air space, and that we apologized and promised not to do it again, and would punish those responsible. All this in order to get the people—or even the bodies—back. They have a museum near Panmunjom where they displayed these confessions for all the Communist world to see. So there were precedents for the signing of the Pueblo confession. The North Koreans had a grand time and got great publicity out of what Commander Bucher said.
At various times I was in instantaneous communications with Washington. I could see some of the words that came over were practically from the President himself. The message would be, “Demand another meeting; demand another meeting.” That’s Lyndon Johnson for you, around-the-clock bargaining. Bui that isn’t the way you deal with Communists. There were times when I said things without knowing why I said them- and it turned out that what I said, with hindsight and in the light of subsequent events, was right. I attribute that to the Lord helping me in a very difficult spot, and I’m duly grateful.
One day after we had been meeting for a month or so, my deputy. Major General Liu, came to see me in Seoul. The South Koreans were worried that I might be told to sign a confession. He said, “I have been sent here by the minister of defense and the foreign minister to tell you that you can no longer use the soil of South Korea as a base for conducting these negotiations with the Communists.”
I said, “General Liu, my ambassador tells your President everything that happens at these meetings. Perhaps you don’t know that.”
And he said, “I repeat my message'' you can no longer use our country for these meetings.”
We ignored that order, but they made trouble for us. They staged riots outside the embassy—once so that I couldn’t get in to debrief a meeting which had to be reported to Washington. The South Koreans forced our Korean maid to report to their CIA whenever she thought I would miss lunch at home. So we alway5 cooked for two to fool her. Occasionally she’d show up with bruises on her face—I believe from the Korean CIA. I never knew when we might find armed guards around my helicopter.
My relief, Major General Gilbert H- Woodward, U. S. Army, came out on time and took over in May 1968. Seven months later General Woodward was told to sign a confession, and that’s how finally got the crew of the Pueblo back.
Release of the Crew
By Vice Admiral George P. Steele II, U. S. Navy (Retired)
Commander Naval Component, United Nations Command, Commander U. S. Naval Forces Korea, Chief, U. S. Naval Advisory Group, Korea, July 1968 to September 1970
The Pueblo crew had been taken before my watch, but in December 1968 when they were coming back, it was a big PR thing. The military had blood in its eye to try to get Commander Bucher and bring him to justice and find out what the hell happened. Commander in Chief Pacific Fleet, Admiral John Hyland, appointed Rear Admiral Ed Rosenberg as his representative to meet the crew when they were released, and I was to be Ed’s alternate, in case anything happened to him. I had known Ed when he was Secretary of the Navy William Franke’s executive assistant and they rode in my submarine, the Seadragon (SSN-584). I read into the voluminous background documents and classified message traffic oncerning Pueblo, a set of files a foot thick, and sure enough, the night before the crew’s release, he became violently ill in the air en route to Seoul. His plane had to make an emergency landing to get treatment for him. He was brought by ambulance to the U. S. Army hospital in Seoul that evening.
Ed had had cancer as a junior officer, and was placed on the retired list; but after many operations, he was apparently cured to the amazement of the medical profession. He then worked hard to be returned to active duty, and his gallant, successful fight against cancer was eventually rewarded by a special Act of Congress reinstating him on the active list of the Navy without loss of seniority or rank. I figured this latest illness was part of that. I went over to see him in the hospital. He had tubes coming out of his nose and his wrists, and he looked awful. I thought, “There’s no way this man is going to be able to do this.” So I gathered up the additional files that Ed had brought, and took charge. I sent a message saying that I was taking over the job, and I began getting myself horsed up. I had all the information; or I thought I had all the information. I knew there was a lot that Ed was carrying in his head, and I was a bit appalled because we had the full attention of the press, and every word weighed five pounds in a situation like this.
At about 0200—I was still up looking over all the stuff Ed had brought with him—I got word from the hospital that Ed had risen from the dead. He’d pulled out all the tubes and staggered from the hospital and someone had driven him over to the officers’ quarters, where he’d turned in. He was going to make it. Sure enough, at 0700, here comes Ed, looking white as a sheet and shaky—I never saw a braver, more aggressive guy when he had a job to do.
Ed and I went to see General Charles Bonesteel, Commander in Chief United Nations Command. I had to assist Ed as we climbed the stairs to the general’s office. I think that the general realized that it was a Navy show—Navy ship. Navy personnel—but he felt a little cut out of the pattern. He was supposed to provide only logistic support.
Then Ed flew up to Panmunjom and came back with the Pueblo crew to the advance camp where they initially brought them. I didn’t see Ed greet them; I was at the camp.
The crewmen were in fairly good condition. I had done an awful lot of preparation for them—clothes tailored to the right sizes, toilet kits, writing paper, newspapers and magazines, telephone circuits so they could call their families. We got them in and fed them a good meal. They were emotionally and physically exhausted by what they’d been through. They wanted to talk to their families. We let them alone for three or four hours, and then they were gone, and Ed Rosenberg with them.
It was during this rest period that Ed showed the signs of his illness. He was brought before the television cameras, and by this time, he was very emotional. But he was in trouble the minute he said that these guys were heroes. I knew that was not going to go over well. He was just so glad to see them, and he was so exhausted and still sick, that he just blurted it out. Of course, nobody knew that back home. All they saw were the cold words; they didn’t realize what this man had been through.
I knew that the crusty Navy hierarchy didn’t think they were heroes at all. Or rather, some of the crew members might have been, but certainly not Commander Bucher. I spoke with Bucher at the camp, and he was very apprehensive. I was guarded in what I said to him, but tried to make sure everybody was comfortable. I had my own thoughts about Bucher, but at this point he hadn’t been tried or convicted. I wasn’t mad at him or anybody else. I didn’t treat him like a returning hero; I treated him like a returning prisoner of war.
I don’t know why the guy didn’t go on until his ship was sunk. I know that the North Korean boats were faster, and that he couldn’t have gotten away, but he should have let them sink the ship under him and destroy that gear. I was appalled when Secretary of the Navy John Chafee threw out the recommendation of a court- martial.
