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.
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