He steeled himself for another pounding. The major, however, only asked a few more questions and banished him to his room. More food was brought in, but the captain didn’t eat. The hall outside echoed with the sounds of doors being opened and slammed shut, followed by violent scuffling and screams. The other Americans evidently were being worked over, one by one. The skipper paced back and forth, his helplessness gnawing at him.
“Stop beating my men, you bastards!” he shrieked at his closed door. “Stop beating my men and let us out of here!”
Jesus God, Bucher, he thought, get hold of yourself. He couldn’t let the communists think he was cracking; that’s just what they wanted. He made himself step back from the door.
The faint glow of daylight on his covered window gradually faded to black. The deadline for executing the American officers came and went. It had all been a bluff. But the North Koreans weren’t finished with Bucher.
His next interrogation came at about eight p.m., in a small, dingy room on the second floor. For the second time he faced the angry colonel, now accompanied by several guards and interpreters. One interpreter held a semiautomatic handgun.
Sitting behind a plain wooden desk, the colonel wore a well-made military greatcoat and a fur hat against the penetrating cold. He was tall, thin, and well-groomed. His jet-black hair was combed straight back, without a part, and his eyes glittered behind green-tinted glasses. Bucher began to think he was the real power in the prison. The crewmen later nicknamed him “Super C.” Although they didn’t know it at the time, the communist officer had been implicated in the deaths of 200 American POWs during the Korean War.
Super C seemed calm at first, almost amiable. He told Bucher that North Korea wanted only peace, and for peace to be preserved, the captain must admit his spying forthwith. He again presented Bucher with the typed confession he’d already spurned twice that day.
“Sign it and you will all shortly be returned home without more unpleasantness between us,” the colonel cajoled through an interpreter.
Bucher was strongly tempted but still refused. Super C’s affability vanished. He pounded the desk with his fist and screeched insults.
“You have exactly two minutes to decide to sign, sonabitchi,” he yelled, “or be shot!”
Two guards pushed Bucher to his knees facing a wall. The interpreter with the pistol cocked it close to the captain’s ear.
Bucher figured he’d soon be lying in a puddle of his own blood. He was determined not to show the terror that gripped him. His mind raced with thoughts of what it felt like to be shot in the head. Would there be horrible pain as the bullet pierced his brain, or just a split-second explosion as the world went black? He desperately sought a way to distract himself from what was about to happen.
“I love you, Rose,” he said quietly. Then again: “I love you, Rose.” He murmured his devotion to his wife over and over as the seconds ticked away.
Super C again asked whether he was ready to sign. The skipper shook his head and whispered for the last time, “I love you, Rose.”
“Kill the sonabitchi!”
The metallic snap of the hammer made Bucher’s body jerk. But the gun didn’t go off.
Super C acted surprised. “That was a misfire,” the interpreter said. “Very lucky! So then take another two minutes—a last chance to confess without trusting to luck again.”
But when the triggerman jacked back the slide to reload, no ejected dud hit the floor. Through his fear and exhaustion Bucher realized the gun wasn’t loaded. He’d been played, subjected to the old interrogation trick of mock execution. That knowledge helped him get through the next two minutes. When the time ran out, he still wouldn’t put his name on the confession.
“You are not worth a good bullet,” snarled Super C. “Beat him to death!”
Every Korean in the room except the colonel set to viciously kicking, punching, and karate-chopping Bucher. They concentrated on his stomach, testicles, and the small of his back. When the captain tried to protect his middle, they went for his head and neck. When he tried to cover his upper body, they pummeled his crotch and kidneys. As he later wrote of the ordeaclass="underline" “They drowned out my screams with furious curses and kept beating, beating, beating until I was a retching, winded wreck being whipped back and forth between them like a rag doll in the hands of a gang of frenzied psychotic children.” Mercifully, he blacked out.
The battered commander came to on the bed in his cell. His eyesight seemed tinged with blood; his kidneys and testicles felt swollen and raw. The slightest movement sent pain flaring through his body. He sensed some bones had been broken, but when he swung out of his rack he realized none were. The only part of his body not throbbing was his face.
Bucher staggered to his feet and called out, “Benjo!”—the Japanese word for toilet. A guard appeared and escorted him at rifle-point to the malodorous latrine. When he tried to urinate, more blood came out. On the way back to his room, the guard yelled at him to assume the penitential head-down position. Bucher still had enough moxie to holler back, “Fuck you, bud—leave me alone!”
He sat down heavily on the chair in his cell. His muscles and internal organs felt as if they were seizing up from all the blows they’d absorbed. About 30 minutes later a stocky communist lieutenant banged through the door and shouted, “Get up! Out now! Move quick!”
A pair of guards had to help the skipper down the stairs to the ground floor. At the bottom stood Super C, wrapped in his luxurious greatcoat, smoking a cigarette.
“Now we must show you how we treat spies in our country,” his interpreter said.
Ice-cold night air washed over Bucher, chilling his sweaty body. He was bundled into the back of a car between the two guards. The rear windows were covered and an opaque screen separated the backseats from the front.
Ten minutes later the car stopped outside a large concrete building similar to the one where the crew was being held. Bucher was ushered out of the vehicle and down a staircase into a barren basement.
Before him was a horrifying sight. The limp body of a man hung from a wall, held up by a leather strap around his chest. The man had been brutally tortured and looked barely alive. A welter of dark bruises covered his shirtless torso. One of his arms was broken and a jagged bone had sliced through the skin. His face was a bloody mush. An eyeball had been knocked almost out of his head; it dangled from its socket amid an ooze of dark fluid. In his agony the man had chewed his bottom lip to shreds. To maximize the shock value of the scene, the North Koreans had trained two spotlights on the unconscious man, who frothed at the mouth and occasionally twitched.
Revulsion coursed through Bucher. He thought the victim was one of his men until the interpreter announced he was a South Korean spy. “Look at his just punishment!” the interpreter trilled. The captain couldn’t take his eyes off the mangled creature. He felt trapped in a waking nightmare that just kept getting worse. His shock intensified until he lapsed into some sort of blackout.
The skipper had no memory of leaving the torture chamber. When he came to, he found himself back in the room where he’d first met Super C, staring into the communist’s unforgiving eyes.
“So now you have seen for yourself how we treat spies,” his interpreter said. “Perhaps you will reconsider your refusal to confess.”
Numbly, reflexively, stubbornly, Bucher replied that he would not.
Guards promptly bashed him out of his chair, kicked him across the floor, and rammed him into a wall. Super C ordered them to drop the reeling American back in the chair.