Nation: In Pueblo's Wake

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Well-Behaved. That was a century and a half ago, when corsairs roamed the seas. How could it happen in 1968? And how could the U.S., with its vast might, fail to do anything to rescue Pueblo during the two hours it took to be towed into Wonsan?

It appeared at first that Bucher might have been remiss for not having summoned help immediately, for not fighting back, for not scuttling his ship when it was obvious that she was going to be captured and, finally, for not attempting earlier to destroy the gear and intelligence that fell into Communist hands.

Defense officials, however, supported Bucher's conduct on every point. He had been approached and signaled by several Communist PT boats in the past few days, saw nothing unusual in the one that turned up last week. And, as a Pentagon aide put it, "You don't wake up the President or the Secretary of Defense in Washington just because some patrol boat is circling you." Even when three more vessels showed up, Bucher still had good cause to assume that they were only trying to interfere with him. "What," asked one official, "if he had destroyed millions of dollars worth of gear and raised tensions by summoning a jet squadron to his aid, only to see those Korean boats fade away as they usually do?"

In fact, Pueblo's predecessor in the same waters, the U.S.S. Banner, was at one point surrounded and harassed by eleven Communist PT boats without being fired upon or boarded. Notwithstanding the Navy tradition of never giving up a ship without a fight, Bucher had orders to keep Pueblo's three .50-cal. machine guns under canvas. Be sides, had he unsheathed them, his ship would probably have been blown right out of the water.

Bucher lacked the explosive charges to scuttle the vessel; in addition, most or all of his crew almost certainly would have perished in the numbing water or under the Koreans' guns. As for destroying his equipment, by the time it became evident that the Koreans intend ed to board Pueblo, there simply was not sufficient time to get rid of everything. Some records were tossed overboard—and North Korean frogmen were later reported to be diving in an attempt to retrieve them. "From what we know," said Admiral Moorer, "Bucher behaved well."

No Help. In that case, were U.S. field commanders at fault for having failed to send planes to frighten off Pueblo's captors? Should they have sunk her rather than let the ship fall into probing Communist hands? Astonishingly, there were no planes in a position to help. Navy officials in Washington said that Enterprise's 90 or 100 jets would have been of no assistance, since she was nearly 800 miles away and the planes would have run too low on fuel to engage North Korean fighters. Only four U.S. warplanes in all of South Korea were on "strip alert" when Pueblo was boarded, and all of them—sitting at the U.S. airbases at Osan and Kunsan—were either armed with nuclear bombs or rigged for them. To have modified the planes for close-support missions would have taken from two to three hours, and by then Pueblo would have been tied up in Wonsan. A Defense Department official, questioning the lack of preparation for conventional warfare, observed that the lingering "mythology" of the cold war was to blame.