30 January 2004

Ranger 6 crashed into the moon forty years ago, one of the survey craft to help get us ready to land on the moon. My Uncle Jim designed the camera systems that sent the images back to earth digitally, prior to its lunar demise. It was quite a development, but he was very cagey about it, as though he were not supposed to talk about it.

There is something about the 30th of January. I don't know if digital imagery is as significant as Cromwell presiding over the ceremony at the Banqueting Hall in London, when he ordered Charles I to walk about a window onto a custom-constructed platform and had his head cut off. Or the birthdays of FDR and Dick Cheney, or the deaths of seven American troops in Afghanistan, or the ten dead in Jersalem in the bus attack. The present and the future get all jumbled up for me sometimes.

It is has been a busy week as January ends, The holidays are a dim memory and the new year is now nearly ten percent gone. You can almost feel the sap of the new year beginning to flow, a rhythm of rising activity consistent with the lengthening days.

There was another exit in this week, one that didn't make the obits in the major media. Commander Lloyd "Pete" Bucher died, and will make his last deployment to the headlands of Point Loma next week. It is a lovely place, overlooking downtown San Diego and Coronado where they held the inquest into his conduct, and Mexico looms blue to the south.

Pete was a two-time orphan who rose to command a converted Liberty ship, one of the an old World War II tubs chunked out by Henry Kaiser at the rate of one-a-day. It was a miracle of war production, and consequently we had hundreds of them left over in storage yards after the war.

We used them for all manner of things in the years after. They were like low-mileage used cars. We used to pull them out of storage and send them off to do little specialized jobs. The USS Liberty was one of them, on a passive listening mission like Pete's ship. They are still arguing about whether the Israelis killed 34 Americans and wounded another 172 by accident or malice. The dead don't care, but the wounded are still angry.

I was working an analytic problem a while back that required the re-activation of a ship called the USS Sphinx. It was not a Liberty ship, but an old tank landing craft suitable for loading self-contained vans aboard for custom collection missions. Sphinx was headed for the waters off the Latin American crisis of the moment. The guys that broke the temporary welds securing the bridge said they found old messages on the navigation desk from the early 1950s, the last time the ship was active. From the time of the Korean War.

Naval messages are odd things, their sensitivity only reflected moments in time, where a ship is, or what its intentions might be. We were cleaning house in Hawaii in the early 1980s. We don't plan very far ahead, and we certainly don't have room to maintain our history. So we were throwing things out to make room for other things we would shortly destroy. There were boxes and boxes of old messages and files stored under the computer decking and we pulled them up to shred and discard. We found the last message from Pete's ship in there. It was classified, thought he reason for it to be so had long passed. It was a scrap of chater between one of the operators on the ship and the technical operator in Hawaii. It read "Gotta go, Mate, they are kicking the doors down. Pueblo Out."

We gave Pete's ship to the North Koreans with only a modicum of fuss, and that was one of the problems with the whole affair. Pete only had a couple .50 caliber machine guns and some side arms to defend himself, though he thought there was a mighty military machine to come to his aid only minutes away. The North Korean boarding party was fierce and determined. MiGs covered the operation from the air. Of course that is subject to some dispute.

The Senate of the United States insists the ship was not a gift, but only an involuntary loan. In April of 2003 a declaration was read on the Senate floor and entered into the Congressional Record.

The North paid no attention to the declaration. The have a plan for Pueblo.

Pete died in Poway, a sprawling suburb on the heights above San Diego, far from the sparkling waters of the harbor. He had been sick for months. They say that the effects of malnutrition contributed to his eventual demise. His crew loved him.

Pete was wounded when the Pueblo was shelled, was beaten and tortured into signing a confession. During their captivity, crewmembers were beaten with lumber, burned on radiators, and had their dental work redone by the boots of North Korean soldiers.

The Navy likes closure and the apportionment of responsibility. It recommended that Pete face a general court-martial for a vaireity of crimes. They expected him to die, or to scuttle the ship, or something. Pete loved his crew almost beyond belief, and always took the punishment for their conduct first. Eventually the Secretary of the Navy determined that Pete had suffered enough, and let him finish his career and retire in 1973.

In the enabling language following the creation of the Prisoner of War Medal in 1985, Pete's crew was specifically excluded from eligibility. That wasn't fixed until 1990. They gave the Silver Star, the award shared by Wes Clark and current Democratic Front-runner John Kerry to the sole casualty of the incident, Duane Hodges.

Pueblo herself remained in North Korea for the next thirty years, mostly at Wonsan as a propaganda piece to celebrate the victory over the United States. All the classified equipment was exploited, and from the pictures it appears the North maintained the ship in good order. They did not repair the combat damage, though.

Wonsan is a long way from Pyongyang, the showpiece of the Worker's Paradise. Based on where she is now, it appears that sometime in December 1998, the Pueblo was relocated. It was not just moved somewhere else on the East Coast. They moved it to the Taedong River in the middle of he capital, on the west coast. That means, gentle readers, that the North took a still-commissioned vessel of the United States Navy into international waters and through the Tushima Strait and all the way North again, circumnavigating our ally the Republic of Korea. It was probably disguised, but from the pictures, it looks exactly like it always did.

Intelligence failures are much in the news these days, but for my money, this was collossal. We have always maintained the right to take Pueblo back, but it looks like we blew it a second time.

Pueblo is now a convenient stop for tourists visiting Pyongyang, and marks the spot where another American ship, the General Sherman, was sunk in 1866. Another illustrious victory over the Americans. For authenticity, the tourists are greeted by Senior Colonel Kim Joon Rok, commander of the first boarding party. He is a hard looking fellow still.

It was only in 1989 that the Pentagon agreed to give prisoner of war medals to Pete and his crew. Until then, the Department of Defense vehemently asserted that the crew of the Pueblo were "detainees" rather than POWs since there were no active hostilities. Of course, there was no peace, either. The Armistice in 1953 simply suspended the fighting pending the treaty that hasn't been negotiated yet.

We all have a little wait for closure on this, and Pete will not get his. I'm waiting for the decision on precedence for the Korean Service Medal authorized two years ago. The DoD has approved the design, but have not determined where it will fit in the hierarchy of American military decorations. I don't care much, one way or the other, but until they send me one and tell me where it goes, I cannot finish the medal-mount and put them away in the closet.

Pete will get full military honors at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery. It is one of the best views in the world. Of course, all the full grave sites are full. I stopped and asked one time on my way up to the Cabrillo National Monument at the tip of the Point. I was shopping for eternity, checking out some of the options.

The management said they were sorry, but full internment is no longer possible due to lack of space. There is plenty of room for urns, though, they said helpfully. Something to consider, when you are planning for the ages.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra