The Monday After: Pueblo captive remembered time as prisoner of North Koreans
"I'm really afraid we'll never get back all our POWs from North Vietnam."
Fifty years ago this month, at a time less than a decade after the USS Pueblo sailor had been taken prisoner when his ship was captured by North Korea, Lee Hayes of Carrollton was worried about his American military comrades taken prisoner during the Vietnam War.
"I hope and pray I'm wrong,” Hayes added, "but, historically, Communists have never released all of their war prisoners.
Hayes at the time was recalling for The Canton Repository what the newspaper termed the "11 torturous months" he spent as a prisoner of the North Korean Communists.
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"The young ex-sailor knows the agony of life in a Communist prison camp," the Repository reported in a front page article written by Gary Cunard published on Sunday, Feb. 4, 1973. "He was chief radioman on the USS Pueblo when it was captured by the North Koreans Jan. 23, 1968."
Hayes was released a little less than a year later, following months of beatings and public humiliation.
Capture was his destiny
The Repository writer noted that "the often-fickle finger of fate played a role in the Navy radioman's confinement and torture by the North Koreans." Hayes, who had spent two short tours of duty in Vietnam, was needed for service in his specialty on the Pueblo, he was told.
"There were two of us qualified but I was the lowest in rank and the other man didn't want to go," he explained 50 years ago.
The mission? Though reported to be a "spy ship," it was "routine monitoring and recording of radio messages, as well as some oceanographic work," that the Pueblo was charged with completing on the day it was captured, the Repository recalled. The Pueblo was well off shore during its surveillance cruise, Hayes insisted.
"We were never in North Korean waters," Hayes, a Columbus native and Carroll County resident, said in 1973. "We knew it and they knew it."
Still, the Pueblo – a small unarmed vessel that was unable to defend itself when shots were fired across its bow – was boarded by the North Korean forces. Sailors were blindfolded and taken off the ship.
"One of the worst things was that help was requested and could have arrived in plenty of time," said Hayes, who told the Repository that U.S. fighter planes were stationed in South Korea. Those planes could have arrived in minutes.
Help never came. One man was killed and 82 crew members were captured when the Koreans seized the Pueblo.
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Destroyed strategic systems
Before they were taken into custody, sailors aboard the Pueblo destroyed systems they didn't want to fall into enemy hands.
"According to U.S. reports, the Pueblo was in international waters almost 16 miles from shore, but the North Koreans turned their guns on the lightly armed vessel and demanded its surrender," said a "day-in-history" article posted at the website history.com. "The Americans attempted escape, and the North Koreans opened fire, wounding the commander and two others. With capture inevitable, the Americans stalled for time, destroying the classified information aboard while taking further fire."
North Korean captors questioned crew members about one particular piece of apparatus that had nothing to do with the crew's mission, other than personal hygiene.
"They wanted to know the purpose of the 'fancy machine' in the ship's crew quarters but when we told them it was merely for washing clothes, they refused to believe us."
The men were beaten for their honesty, Hayes said.
Capture followed by 'ritual' beatings
Ill-treatment of the sailors began almost immediately after they were brought to the North Korean mainland.
"Several sailors, including Mr. Hayes, were led through streets where young people armed with clubs beat and spat on them," the newspaper reported. "Small cells with straw spread on the floors then became 'home' for the Americans."
Beatings became almost ritualistic, the newspaper noted.
"The worst part was that you never knew when or why you were being beaten," Hayes remembered. "For a while, I kept thinking that it was only a dream and that I would wake up safely aboard ship."
But, Hayes was not at sea. He was a prisoner and something as simple as laughter during frequent indoctrinations could be a cause for beatings.
"The first day, they informed us that God was dead," Hayes told Cunard. "Then they explained the Russians had shot Him down with a rocket.
"When we broke out laughing, we were severely beaten."
Threats of execution were common
Every day seemed to turn into a life-and-death ordeal.
"The communists would say we were to be executed at 7 a.m. the following day but that time would come and go without anything happening," explained Hayes, noting he and other prisoners once were marched into the prison yard and pistols were aimed at their heads.
"When triggers were squeezed with agonizing slowness, the hammers slammed down on empty chambers," reported the Repository.
The crew initially refused to sign false confessions, and once, for a propaganda picture, they offered a middle-fingered gesture in a well-publicized image, explaining to the North Koreans that it was a "Hawaiian good luck sign."
"Once the North Koreans learned the truth, they punished the prisoners with beatings, cold temperatures and sleep deprivation," the history.com recollection said.
Hayes recalled for the Repository in 1973 that "they beat us for nine day us straight after that."
The prisoners malnourishing diet included what Hayes said was half-rotten fish that prisoners nicknamed "fillet of sewer trout."
"Faith was what helped me through," he recalled 50 years ago. "I guess most of us are religious in times of crisis."
Spoke of time in captivity
Hayes' personal injuries during captivity included a broken jaw and cracked ribs. He lost 30 pounds. The psychological trauma left scars that took time to heal.
"Sometimes, at night, I would realize I was still alive and would have a hard time believing it," he told the Repository in 1973. "You never know what you can survive until you have to."
Almost a year after their capture, the prisoners were released when the chief U.S. negotiator signed a statement saying the United States "sincerely apologizes" for letting the ship sail into North Korean territory. The words rang hollow.
"Even before he signed the statement," said a retrospective written by Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in 2001, "Maj. General Gilbert H. Woodward (the negotiator) repudiated it, saying he was signing it 'to free the crew and only to free the crew.'"
After his release late in 1968, Hayes spent more than two years traveling through the country making speeches – in excess of 850 appearances – about his North Korean ordeal. At the time he spoke to the Repository in 1973 he was working in the service department at Huebner Chevrolet in Carrollton and he still was addressing church and civic groups.
Much has been written and discussed through the years about the Pueblo incident. Perhaps none of the words has summed up the capture of the ship and its crew more succinctly than those of Korea expert and Ohio State University historian Mitchell Lerner, who wrote the book "The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy."
"The Pueblo was a good symbol of America's Cold War myopia," Lerner told National Public Radio in 2019 on its "All Things Considered" program. "(The crew members) were sent out there because the U.S. military said the Soviets run similar operations against us and we accept it and they accept it and no one ever said, 'Wait a minute, you're sending this ship to North Korea. That's not the Soviets.'
"They were just completely unprepared and outgunned, just a total disaster. And it was the men who paid the price."
Reach Gary at gary.brown.rep@gmail.com. On Twitter: @gbrownREP.
This article originally appeared on The Repository: The Monday After: Pueblo captive remembered time as prisoner of North Koreans
