Captured by the Enemy: ‘Skip‘ Schumaker Learned about Torture Firsthand as a Young Officer of the U.S.S. Pueblo

When a North Korean submarine chaser fired on his ship with a 57 mm cannon on Jan. 23, 1968, F. Carl ‘Skip’ Schumacher and the crew of the U.S.S. Pueblo found themselves hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned.
“A cannon shell blew out all the windows on the bridge and since the skin of the ship was made of aluminum, it just went right through it,” Skip recalls.
The ordeal that followed resonates with today’s headlines. Torture and psychological torment is everywhere in the news these days, ranging from Islamic beheadings to abuses by U.S. soldiers at Abu Graib prison and Guantanamo Bay.
But when Schumacher casts his mind in the direction of such things, it’s with the experience of a man who’s “been there.” As a young Naval Reserve operations officer, he was one of 82 surviving U.S. seamen and intelligence personnel who were captured by the North Koreans and held for 11 tense months, during which they endured torture in the form of severe and frequent beatings.
Today, 36 years after his ordeal, Schumacher is a summer resident of Charlevoix. But the memories he shared last week with the public at the Charlevoix Public Library are still vivid.

NO SUPPORT, NO BACKUP
The Pueblo was one of three surveillance ships operating off the coast of North Korea during the Cold War and the war in Vietnam. The ship had orders to stay more than 13 miles off the North Korean coast in the Sea of Japan, since international law holds that territorial waters extend no more than 12 miles from shore. But the North Koreans attacked with the justification that they claimed all of what they called the Sea of Korea as their own territory.
“The Koreans were going to call us a spy ship even if we were a fishing trawler, so they were kind of surprised when they learned that we actually were one,” Schumacher says.
“The whole mission was based on the assumption that we could do the same thing the Russians did in their spy operations (the Russians were allies of North Korea). The Russians had trawlers off Cape Canaveral (Kennedy Space Center) and following our fleets in the South China Sea. We thought that if they could do it, we could too, tit for tat.
“But when the North Koreans opened fire, the first casualty was that assumption. We had no support, no backup, no nothing. Once they opened fire, we were on our own.”
The Pueblo was similar to a fishing trawler. Although it had two .50 caliber machine guns, neither was mounted at the time of the attack, nor was there any armor to shield them. In addition to the sub chaser, the Koreans had four PT boats and four MiG fighter jets. Aboard the Pueblo, the crew began burning secret documents and tossing others overboard in weighted canvas bags. Unfortunately, the water was only about 100 feet deep and the enemy was able to recover some of the material.
“One man was killed during the gun battle and three were seriously injured,” Schumacher recalls. “Eight others were incapacitated with wounds -- not just minor ones.”

PROPAGANDA PAWNS
The captives were taken to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, to become pawns in a propaganda campaign that captured the world’s attention.
“In retrospect, we were the first American hostages and we were treated as political hostages from day one. Commander Pete Bucher figured out within three days that for all purposes we were being held for propaganda.”
The captives were subjected to a bizarre range of treatment, “It went from severe beatings and broken bones to being treated as guests of North Korea,” Schumacher says. “They said, you are all spies, and the beatings were fairly severe.”
The prisoners were kept in two compounds. Officers were kept in isolation while the men were assigned eight to a room. “There were standard terror tactics. You had to adjust your thinking over the things you had no control over and those things you could control, being locked up like that without knowing what’s going to happen.”
The website, www.usspueblo.org, describes their prison diet: “Breakfast consisted of two slices of brown bread and rancid butter; lunch; initially turnip soup, later a tea saucer of rice for four people and sliced turnip; dinner; turnip soup, heavy with oil, and occasionally with remnants of a slaughtered pig, such as fatty skin with hair attached, or an eyeball, with a slice of bread. Sometimes “sewer trout” (rotting mackerel) was served instead of soup. A few special occasions were observed by giving the crew better food.”
Every six weeks or so, the website notes, the men of each room were “marched to the bathroom and given one basin of hot water with which to bathe.”
The crew decided to do whatever they could to undermine the Korean’s propa-ganda efforts. In one famous picture, many of the men posed giving the finger to North Korean cameramen as a signal to folks back home that all was not well.
“We told them it was a Hawaiian good luck sign, so they thought that was wonder-ful,” Schumacher says, adding that the captives also included clues in their letters home that the Koreans were sure to miss. The crew communicated their distress home through slang, corny and archaic language and false information.
“All that worked well until Time magazine published the photo and they found out what we were doing. That launched Hell Week, the worst set of beatings the crew received. People were coming back to their cells with cracked ribs and broken bones. It was mainly judo stuff -- the guards doing leg kicks and beating people with two-by-four boards of some sort.”

RELEASE & AFTERMATH
At the height of the torture, the crew was unexpectedly released on Dec. 23, 1968 as the result of direct negotiations between the U.S. and North Korea.
Did he think he’d be freed during his months of captivity?
“I always thought that we would,” Schumacher says. “I had a great deal of faith in the U.S. government and the Navy. I thought they’d do everything they could to get us released.”
Things went poorly at first for Captain Bucher, who was set up by the Navy as a fall guy, even though he encouraged the anti-propaganda tactics of the crew and had been beaten and subjected to Russian roulette terror by the enemy.
“Back in 1969, the Navy wanted to blame Bucher entirely for the incident,” Schumacher says, possibly to cover for its own blunders in not protecting the ship. A Navy court of inquiry recommended a court martial for Bucher and two other officers.
“The public and the press were outraged,” Schumacher says, adding that the Secretary of the Navy overturned the decision. “He said the crew of the Pueblo had done enough and that there was plenty of blame to go around.”
Captain Bucher’s career was eventually redeemed and he was named to the prestigious post of chief of the minesweeping staff in the Pacific, which was reponsible for clearing Haiphong
Harbor in Hanoi after the Vietnam War.
As for Schumacher, he went on to write a book on his experience in 1971, entitled “Bridge of No Return.” He earned a graduate degree at Harvard and went into business with a successful career in financial services in St. Louis. His connection with Northern Michigan dates back to his grandparents, and he returns here every summer.

Thoughts on Abu Graib and prisoner abuse
As a victim of beatings and psychological torment in North Korea, Skip Schumacher sees some distinctions in the way the men of the U.S.S. Pueblo were treated compared to prisoners at Abu Graib prison in Iraq.
“It certainly looks like there were excesses committed there by people who didn’t know what they were doing,” he says of the U.S. guards who abused Iraqi prisoners. “But it didn’t look like the abuse was designed for specific purposes. It looks like some kids were messing around. Why else would they have a camera recording what they were doing? That’s ludicrous. If this had been officially sanctioned, they wouldn’t have had cameras.”
Schumacher notes that the military Code of Conduct sets specific standards for behavior. “Where the problem comes is when it’s mistaught.”
He adds that in the Pueblo’s case, the North Koreans who did the beatings “weren’t looking for any specific information -- it was just propaganda.”
“What they do to make these guys cooperate in Iraq is a different equation because we need the information they have. They end up using some sort of specific interrogation techniques. Some of the information they obtain is very good. As the information becomes cumulative it becomes easier from the interrogator’s standpoint and less from the prisoner’s standpoint because it’s easier to tell if you’re getting the truth.”


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