Remember the Pueblo

ON THE INSIDE front cover of a glossy brochure describing Miramar Naval Air Station, there is a picture of one of the many military home-comings Miramar hosts every month. Five smiling and lei-draped young men--"MIG-killers returning from Vietnam," the brochure says--stride away from their parked fighter planes and towards the kind of reward that Miramar, with its bowling alleys and movie theaters, offers those who have earned a hero's welcome.

Although newsmen picked up that brochure on their way into Miramar last Christmas Eve, it was obvious that what they were coming to see would be different from the normal homecomings. The 82 Americans who had been in North Korea's prisons for about a year were returning. Men at the base had worked hard, all night, to give Miramar the red-carpet trappings of a heroic celebration. The crewmen's families were flown to San Diego and "Welcome Home" signs were up everywhere. But beneath the frenetic preparations was the sobering realization that there was something inglorious about the men's return.

If the men of the Pueblo were heroes, their kind of "heroism" was the most elemental--mere physical survival of the Korean captivity. If that was cause for celebration, what it showed to the rest of America was net. The men had to endure only because of the utter futility of America's efforts at releasing them.

The plight of the Pueblo had also become a symbol for all that is tawdry and cruel in the human spirit. On a Christmas Eve when men were making their first try for the moon, the circumstances of the crew's release quenched any euphoria about changed human nature. The depressing implications of a diplomatic world where pre-denied confessions are used and accepted were as great as the humanitarian cheer over the crew's release.

WORST OF ALL, the 82 men had become the objects and display models of a new kind of violence. Even in its national spasms of 1968, America at least seemed ashamed by its own violence and killing; it wanted to cure its violence at home and seemed more and more to regret the violence it inflicted overseas. And even though American violence continued, even though it was in many ways more brutal than the tortures the Pueblo crewmen endured, it lacked the chilling pride of the Korean punishment.

To some 200 people waiting at Miramar, the Pueblo crewmen weren't symbols of anything except a whole family; they were fathers and brothers and husbands, and their relatives wanted them back. The officers in charge of the homecoming at the base also put aside their concern for what the crew symbolized and concentrated on having a standard welcoming ceremony. Real red carpets were out on the runway, the officious M.P.'s were manning rope barricades to keep newsmen from swarming over the place where the men would arrive.

An hour before the men were due to land, Miramar's own marching band stepped up and began a series of hopelessly incongruous songs, like "Windy" or the Gillette Razor song. Midway into their third number ("The Girl Watcher's Theme"), the band stopped abruptly. Two planes were zooming in from the north; the crowd was suddenly silent and the families rushed up to the wire fence by the runway.

It was a false alarm. After an interminable five minutes when the planes were taxiing back to the crowd, the doors opened but the crewmen didn't get out. From one door stepped Senator Margaret Chase Smith, wearing a red dress and walking on crutches; out of the other plane came California's Governor Ronald Reagan and his family. A brief titter over Reagan subsided, and the crowd went back to its waiting. As the band broke into "76 Trombones," a voice came over the loudspeakers: "the planes bearing the men of the Pueblo are 40 miles away."

Low and from the west came two planes. The crowd was quiet again, quiet for ten minutes as the planes circled and finally lurched to a stop in front of the field.

WHEN THE doors opened and the men got out, the spell was broken--for an instant. After the silence there was a brief squeal of joy from wives and children seeing the man they were looking for, but then there was abrupt silence again. The men wore blue denim jackets with "USS Pueblo" written in faded letters on the back. They had blue denim caps and all were pale. They walked quietly, most without smiling, down the ramp and into the crowd. A few hugged wives and children, but it wasn't a wild kissing-the-soil scene from the end of World War II. Most of the men cried. The Navy had tried hard to round up the families of the crewmen, and had shipped nearly 200 people to Miramar. But that wasn't quite enough, and there were 20 or 30 crewmen who simply tried to disappear into the swirling crowd.

Before the men could leave, of course, there had to be speeches. Reagan's was mercifully brief, telling the men that the "last thing you need is a speech from me." But Reagan ended up with the rhetoric of a simpler kind of homecoming--welcoming "you valiant men"--and Sen. Smith drove it into the ground in her speech. After she was done, the proud little mayor of San Diego took ten minutes to tell the men how just really delighted his city was to host this happy reunion.

Then Captain Lloyd Bucher came to the microphone. A gentle man with a faint voice, Bucher was still crying as he began to speak. Reagan's daughter and two Navy officers standing behind Bucher began to cry as he spoke. He was sorry, Bucher said, for the trouble he caused the country by "losing one of its very fine ships." "We had been unfortunate by being in the wrong place with too many of them and too few of us to do anything about turning over a United States ship."

Bucher stepped away from the stand momentarily, and then returned wiping his eyes. "Several of our men were wounded during the loss of the ship," he said. "One of them was mortally wounded. His body has accompanied me on the plane since we left Korea yesterday."

During the speeches, few people had been watching the planes. The crowd now turned toward the planes, and saw six sailors bearing out a flag-covered coffin. "His last words," Bucher continued, "were that he was proud to have served in the United States Navy.... He was a hero in every sense of the word."

Bucher asked for a silent prayer and slipped back from the microphone. The ritual of bearing the casket from the plane to a hearse continued. It has become a familiar airport ritual, one that most Americans have shared on television. As each of the caskets has flown in--from Dallas and Los Angeles, and now from Korea--there is the same sense of numb rage against violence. There were 82 living people to go along with this casket, but the feeling was the same.