
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 15, 1990                   TAG: 9004150023
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: Los Angeles Daily News
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

EX-CAPTIVES SAY MEDALS 2 DECADES LATE

For more than 20 years, the sailors who surrendered the USS Pueblo have been thorns in the side of a Navy that has wavered in its treatment of the men who suffered greatly at the hands of their North Korean captors.

The Navy's response has ranged from decorations to threats of court-martial to indifference - with former crewmen especially disappointed by a 1988 decision denying them the prisoner-of-war medals given to veterans from World War I to Vietnam.

"If anybody deserves it, these crewmen deserve it," said Peter Langenberg, now a lawyer from South Pasadena, Calif. "We were prisoners. It was no holiday."

But next month in San Diego, that slight will be corrected when the 79 surviving members of the Pueblo will receive medals to mark the 335 days they spent in captivity.

For Langenberg and his shipmates it will be a bittersweet moment - pleasure at the recognition and military honor, yet frustration and sadness that they were excluded in the first place.

"It's sort of a day late and a dollar short, but it's terrific," said Robert Chicca of Bonita, Calif., who was a Marine Corps Korean-language specialist on the ship. "I don't know. Until we're all dead, I guess we're going to be a thorn in the Navy's side."

On Jan. 23, 1968, North Korean gunboats and aircraft attacked the Pueblo, a freighter converted to intelligence-gathering ship operating in the Sea of Japan. Eleven crewmen were injured, one fatally.

Cmdr. Lloyd M. Bucher called for help before surrendering without firing a shot - the first capture of a U.S. ship since the War of 1812. The captured crew suffered a brutal 11-month confinement in North Korea.

Because the ship - armed only with machine guns - surrendered without firing, top military officials suggested that the ship's loss and crew's captivity were partly the fault of the commander and crew.

"To some extent it wasn't their most glorious chapter, so I can understand it," said Langenberg. "But to expect the ship to go out in a blaze of glory is kind of stupid. I don't think the Navy has a tradition of suicide."

The Defense Department ruled in 1988 that because the United States was not at war with North Korea when the Pueblo was taken, the crew did not qualify for prisoner-of-war medals.

The crewmen were interrogated, beaten and tortured periodically over the next 11 months before being released on Dec. 23, 1968.

"It was hell," said Bucher, now 62 and an artist in Poway, outside San Diego. "I'd say that's about as close to it as I can come. There was an enormous amount of brutality inflicted. It was not a fun year."

After nearly a year of confinement, the crew signed confessions of spying and trespassing. Release came after the U.S. government signed a similar confession.

by CNB