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.