Nation: THE RETURN OF THE PUEBLO'S CREW

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WHAT began as a bizarre incident on the high seas last January came to an end last week after an equally bizarre series of diplomatic maneuvers. Held captive in North Korea for eleven months, the crew members of the surveillance ship U.S.S. Pueblo were released and flown home to the U.S. The episode will not end there. The crewmen, some of whom said they had been beaten and tortured by their captors, now face a formal court of inquiry that will raise some serious questions. Did the Pueblo at any time stray into North Korean waters? Should the ship have been surrendered without a fight? Why did the men sign "confessions" that they had spied?

It was a chilly, hazy morning last week when the men walked one by one through light snow that dusted the 250-ft. Bridge of No Return from North to South Korea. In quilted blue coats, grey shirts, flannel trousers and white-soled black sneakers, the 82 surviving crew members filed over the bridge at ten-foot intervals. The body of the 83rd, Fireman Duane Hodges, mortally wounded during the hijacking by North Korean patrol boats, was brought to mid-bridge in a North Korean ambulance and his coffin transferred to a waiting U.S. truck.

Led by Pueblo's skipper, Commander Lloyd Bucher, who looked a decade older than his 41 years, they were bundled into three olive-drab U.S Army buses and driven to the United Nations Command's advance camp in the Korean demilitarized zone. They were fed and given field jackets and toilet kits. Eventually pronounced fit to travel to the U.S., they boarded two giant C-141

StarLifter transports near Seoul for the long flight to San Diego, where the Navy had assembled their families from all over the U.S. One day before Christmas, the big jets landed at Miramar Naval Air Station, taxiing up to nestle their big black noses against ropes holding back the crewmen's families. The men disembarked, Bucher in the lead. "It's so great. You'll never know how great it is," he called out as he limped toward his wife. Then he embraced her for a long moment, tears running down his cheeks. When Hodges' coffin was removed from the lead plane, the happy families abruptly fell silent while a band played the Navy Hymn.

Yes and No. The prisoners' long-sought release came only hours after the enactment of a scene that belongs in the weirder annals of diplomacy. In the one-story hut in Panmunjom that has seen hundreds of meetings since the 1953 truce that ended the Korean War, U.S. Army Major General Gilbert H. Woodward sat down opposite North Korean Major General Pak Chung Kuk. "The position of the U.S.," said General Woodward, the top U.N. member of the armistice commission, "has been that the ship was not engaged in illegal activities, that there is no convincing evidence that the ship at any time intruded into territorial waters claimed by North Korea, and that we could not apologize for actions we did not believe took place." He added: "My signature will not and cannot alter the facts. I will sign the document to free the crew and only to free the crew."