Bucher also found that he needed to stay alert for the North Korean’s rhetorical gear shifts, when he’d abruptly switch from an assault on the U.S. government to a personal attack on the captain.
“Why you use insincere, unusual English language in your confession?” he suddenly asked one day. “Do you not think we are aware of such tricks?”
The question was an odd one, especially coming from Super C, who had, after all, dictated Bucher’s confession and pressured him relentlessly to sign it. What lay behind the query? Maybe it meant that the U.S. media and public had reacted skeptically to the forced statement, as the skipper hoped they would, and that the North Koreans now understood their mistake. On the other hand, maybe it signified that communist language experts had blocked release of the confession because it sounded inauthentic. There was no way of telling.
The colonel threw so many curveballs, in fact, that Bucher often lay awake at night trying to suss out what they all meant. He replayed the tedious interrogations over and over in his head, trying to interpret every twist and nuance. What were all the questions Super C asked, and how had the skipper answered each one? Had he given away some important secret without knowing it? It was the kind of compulsive mental wheel-spinning that can drive an imprisoned man to madness. But the captain couldn’t stop it.
One thing was clear: It was Super C who ran this place. Guards jumped at his every command; prisoners were subject to his every whim. And having broken Bucher, he could turn his attention to crushing other Americans.
Like Schumacher.
The lieutenant had been beaten on January 26 and again, much more severely, the next day. Taken to the big interrogation room where the Pueblo officers had been threatened with a firing squad, Schumacher was ordered to kneel down and raise his arms over his head. Two guards cocked their AK-47s and pointed them at his temples, bayonets jabbing within inches of his face.
“What oceanographic measurements did you take?” an interpreter with fierce black eyes demanded in precise English.
The American officer responded with a defiant question of his own: “Why did you shoot at our ship?”
Like Bucher’s, Schumacher’s head was crowded with military secrets. He’d written the daily narrative of the Pueblo’s voyage, noting the positions of intercepted radar and radio stations. As the ship’s communications officer, he knew a fair amount about the code machines. And, perhaps most dangerously, he knew which communication technicians specialized in which electronic instruments.
Schumacher felt a strong obligation to protect the secrets entrusted to him—with his life if need be. Sitting alone in his ice-cold cell, he’d decided to adhere rigidly to the Code of Conduct for Members of the Armed Forces of the United States—the famous injunction that captured servicemen should reveal nothing to the enemy beyond name, rank, and serial number.
Yet as much as he wanted to obey the code, Schumacher knew his pain threshold wasn’t particularly high and it was only a matter of time before he cracked. Now, kneeling in the interrogation room with his upraised arms beginning to ache, he tried to keep from trembling. While the fierce-eyed interrogator and guards worked on him, five other North Koreans watched with detachment, like medical students observing an interesting new surgical procedure.
When Schumacher refused to talk about oceanographic activities, one guard began karate-kicking his elbow while the other kicked him in the chest. Pain shot down his arm like high voltage; he thought he’d suffocate from the boot strikes to his rib cage. The beating went on for at least 15 minutes, until his upper body felt as if it were on fire and his thoughts began to blur and break up like images on a badly tuned TV.
Schumacher couldn’t hold out much longer. It seemed silly to get kicked to pieces over such innocuous information. To cough it up was to violate the Code of Conduct, but did the code even apply in this nightmare situation? The United States and North Korea weren’t at war, so how could he be a POW? And what if the communists beat him into some grayed-out state of derangement in which he lost all control of his words and actions? Who knew what he might blurt then? He had to put an end to this insidious pounding.
“All right,” he said, breathing heavily. “Stop kicking me and I’ll tell you.”
He described how the Pueblo measured ocean temperatures and salinity. The North Koreans had begun to jimmy their way into his mind, and that terrified Schumacher. On January 28, he tried to commit suicide the same way Bucher had, using the water pail in his cell. But, like the skipper, Schumacher soon discovered he couldn’t drown himself in such a small amount of water.
The communists didn’t confine themselves to breaking only officers. The day after he tried to kill himself, Schumacher walked down the corridor and saw Harry Iredale, the junior oceanographer, kneeling in a room with his arms in the air.
At five feet, six inches tall, Iredale was one of the shortest members of the crew and quite self-conscious about it. What he called his “vertical deficiency” had made him the target of gibes for much of his life. The son of a pipe fitter, he was raised in a loving but, he felt, overprotective blue-collar family near Philadelphia. He channeled much of his energy into academics, racking up nearly straight As in high school (he got a single B). He also loved sports, particularly basketball, football, and volleyball. Teammates nicknamed him “Half Pint,” but Iredale could be a tigerish competitor.
Like some other crewmen, he tried to survive his first days in prison by drawing as little attention to himself as possible. On the third night, however, Iredale was rousted from bed at three a.m. and taken to a room with four or five guards gripping AK-47s. He refused to confess to violating North Korean waters and was ordered to his knees. An interpreter told him to pick up a wooden chair by its front legs and hold it over his head. After a few minutes his arms and shoulders began to throb with pain, then burn. When his arms sagged, guards kicked him in the sides and upper body. He struggled to maintain his balance but finally keeled over onto the sooty floor. The North Koreans began kicking his entire body except for his head.
Several times he picked up the chair, held it aloft as long as he could, dropped it, and curled into a ball as boots thudded into him. Even a much bigger and stronger man couldn’t have performed this cruel stunt very long. Iredale knew some details of the Pueblo’s mission, but he wasn’t familiar with eavesdropping equipment or most Navy intelligence operations. What could he reveal that was so bad? Absorbing this much pain and abuse for nothing, he told himself, was stupid and dangerous. He didn’t want to wind up dead or in a coma on the floor of this dirty, freezing room. After about 25 minutes of kicking, he agreed to confess.
An interpreter looked at him with contempt. “You’re a weakling,” he said. “You gave up too early.”
Since their arrival at the Barn, the sailors had subsisted on watery turnip soup, rice, stale bread, and sometimes a small hunk of foul-smelling fish they dubbed “sewer trout.” This miserable fare was served for breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day. Guards dropped off the rice outside the sailors’ doors in buckets that looked like they ordinarily were used to wash the floors.
At lunchtime on the day he signed his confession, Iredale got the same slop as his cellmates, but a much larger portion. The extra food deeply embarrassed him. “It looked like I was being rewarded,” he recalled. “It made me look bad.” Too hungry to reject the meal, he ate his usual amount and gave the rest to the other Americans. The whole experience left the bantam oceanographer twitching with anger.
By far the most harrowing punishment was inflicted on one of the Marine sergeants, Bob Hammond.