About a week after his arrival at the Barn, Hammond was taken for interrogation. The North Koreans demanded to know whether he spoke their tongue. The Marine figured they’d seen the notation in his service jacket for Korean language training, but he decided not to take the easy way out. Rather than confirm something the communists almost certainly knew, Hammond refused to say anything except his name, rank, and service number.
He, too, was forced to hold up a chair and then kicked in the hands, arms, and sides as it inevitably sank. The blows only made Hammond mad. “I was determined not to tell them anything at all, for as long as I could last,” he said. For the next six hours he was punched, kicked, and karate-chopped from head to toe by up to four soldiers at a time.
His hands and an arm soon went numb. When he couldn’t hold up the chair any longer, his tormentors slammed a two-by-four board behind his knees and made him squat down on it. Then they used him as a punching bag while an interpreter asked, over and over, whether he spoke Korean.
The Marine kept blacking out and toppling over. Usually the guards yanked him back into a squatting position. Sometimes they just kicked him while he sprawled semiconscious on the floor. Several times they picked him up by the shirt and dropped him, his head bouncing off the concrete. Once, a guard stepped on his throat and Hammond thought he’d suffocate. At another point, he was taken to a different room and beaten some more as a group of about ten Koreans—including some women—watched wordlessly.
Angered by his resistance, the guards dialed up the violence. They propped him against a wall in a sitting position and stomped several times on his groin. When he screamed, a rag was stuffed in his mouth. He was placed in a chair and guards hand-chopped his neck and head, closing his right eye and paralyzing his neck. Two soldiers held him upright as the interpreter clubbed the backs of his legs with the two-by-four. To make the whacks hurt more they made him take off his pants. Finally, he mumbled through swollen lips, “Okay, okay.” Then he was interrogated for 13 hours, during which he “wrote a brief confession and answered a lot of questions.”
Hammond’s condition shocked his cellmates when he returned. Fearless and obstinate, he’d absorbed an almost superhuman amount of punishment. “His face was beaten so that it was distorted,” remembered another enlisted man. “His body was swollen and his stomach was so black and blue it looked as though his intestines were spilling out.” For days Hammond vomited blood. He couldn’t eat. For almost a week he couldn’t get out of bed.
His only regret was not holding out longer.
After nine days at the Barn, Bucher still was wearing the same bloodstained, dirt-caked clothes he’d been captured in. The stink of his own unwashed body nearly made him retch. It was a miracle, he thought, that his wounds hadn’t become infected in this filthy pen. He often saw rats scurrying through the latrine. Whenever he lay down, tiny gray bugs swarmed out of his rice-husk mattress and bit him all over.
He thought endlessly about how to signal the U.S. government that the Pueblo had never entered North Korean waters, and that any statements to the contrary by him or his men were lies extracted under heavy duress. He also tried to find a way to reach out to his sailors, kept apart and isolated in their cells.
While a few men had been badly beaten, it was becoming apparent that the communists weren’t trying to kill them. In fact, the physical abuse seemed to be tapering off in frequency as well as severity. Whenever a guard worked over one of the Americans a bit too enthusiastically, an officer restrained him.
But the North Koreans never stopped stoking the climate of fear. One day, for example, an officer Bucher had never seen before burst into his room and shrieked, “Speak Korean? You speak Korean?” The question was a dangerous one, the captain figured, because the communists probably considered such fluency prima facie evidence of espionage.
Bucher denied that he or his men spoke anything but English. The next night, the sounds of a violent struggle erupted in the corridor outside his door. Alarmed, the captain wondered whether the North Koreans had zeroed in on Hammond and Chicca. Later Bucher glimpsed a badly beaten American being hustled past his cell door on a stretcher. Who it was, he couldn’t tell.
On a different night the skipper was brought before a North Korean in a blue naval uniform. Scowling grimly to emphasize his serious purpose, the man said through an interpreter that he was announcing “rules of life” that the prisoners must obey at all times. Violators would be severely punished. Bucher listened carefully as the communist went down the list:
1. The daily schedule will be strictly observed.
2. You will always display courtesy to the duty personnel when they enter your room.
3. You must not talk loudly or sing in your room.
4. You must not sit or lie on the floor or bed except during prescribed hours; otherwise you should sit on the chair.
5. You must wear your clothes at all times except when washing your face and in bed.
6. You must take care of your room, furniture, and all expendables issued to you.
7. You will keep your room and corridors clean at all times.
8. You will entertain yourself only with the culture provided.
9. If you have something to do, ask permission from the guards, who will escort you to the appropriate place.
Trudging back to his cell he mulled the implications of the new edicts. They suggested the North Koreans intended to keep their captives around for a while and wanted them to behave in an orderly, disciplined manner. In fact, the communist rules weren’t much different from those governing life in a U.S. military stockade.
The prospect of death receded even further in Bucher’s mind until one night when a North Korean lieutenant and two soldiers charged into his room at about 10:30 p.m. The officer trained a pistol on the captain, who’d taken off his clothes in preparation for bed.
“You must dress,” the officer snapped. “Must hurry!”
So this is it, Bucher thought, terrified. He’d be hooded, shoved against a wall, and shot.
“You will go now for bath,” the lieutenant explained, his stern expression not changing.
A bath? At this time of night? Now Bucher knew he was doomed. All he wanted was a quick end. If torture seemed imminent, he’d attack a guard or try to run away—anything to get himself killed fast. A feeling of calm resignation settled over him as he slowly put on his grimy clothes. The communist officer again urged him to move faster. He also handed him a sliver of soap and a ratty towel.
The guards hustled him down the stairs and out the front door into a crisp, clear winter’s night. The captain looked up appreciatively at the star-dusted black sky as he crunched through the snow toward a waiting bus. Two more guards got in behind him and the bus lurched off down the road.
Bucher guessed they were going to the dungeon where he’d seen the mutilated South Korean, but the bus stopped before traveling that far. Outlined against the darkness were three gloomy cement buildings. Several officers and soldiers stood outside, stamping their feet in the biting cold. The skipper was led into one of the buildings and told to take off his shoes—an odd way to get ready for execution, he thought.
Entering a white-tiled room, Bucher was met not by a row of riflemen but by soothing clouds of steam. Jesus, they really were taking him for a bath! A feeling of relief hit him so hard his legs nearly buckled. Stripping off his reeking clothes, he wanted to laugh out loud.
The scene became even more unreal when a platoon of cameramen barged in, grinning like madmen. They switched on klieg lights and recorded the naked captain, also beaming, as he stepped into a sunken tub filled with deliciously clean hot water. Knowing he was once more being used as a propaganda patsy, Bucher, still smiling, made a fist at the photographers and extended his index and little fingers. The gesture, easily recognized by American enlisted men and college students, meant “bullshit,” and the skipper hoped that anyone in the United States who saw a picture of him would understand his message. After the camera crew departed, he was allowed to spend a blissful hour in the tub.