Famous photo, then a week of beatings Medals a long time coming
North Korean captors severely beat a former Pierce County resident and his USS Pueblo crew mates 40 years ago in retaliation for a famous photograph that first appeared on the front page of The News Tribune.
Gathered around a table in Mao jackets for the propaganda photo, three of the seven naval enlisted men flashed what they told their captors was a “Hawaiian good-luck sign.”
But readers of the Oct. 10, 1968, edition of The News Tribune recognized it as an obscene gesture. So did those who later saw the photo in newspapers and magazines around the world.
Though The News Tribune did not point out the gestures of contempt, others, including Time magazine, did after The Associated Press distributed the photo. One of the published captions for the photo read: “The Navy has made fools of (North Korea).”
Angered and humiliated, the North Koreans holding the surviving 82 crew members of the Pueblo – one died when the intelligence ship was seized – struck back with what came to be known as “hell week” by the captives.
Charles Law, who attended Franklin Pierce High School in Midland for a short time before dropping out to enlist in the Navy in 1957, took the brunt of the beatings. The quartermaster had been chosen as the leader of the Pueblo’s 77 enlisted men when they were separated from Cmdr. Lloyd Bucher and the other officers on Jan. 23, 1968, the day North Korean forces attacked and seized the ship in international waters.
In an interview with The Associated Press following the crew’s release on Dec. 23, 1968, Law described being beaten with a 2-by-2 about 4 or 5 feet long.
“The guard was striking me across the shoulders and the back with it.” Law said. “His stick broke in half on one of the blows and he kept on using the two halves until it ended up in four pieces.
“He left and came back with a 4-by-4,” Law said, “and struck me a few blows on the vicinity of the shoulders and back … followed by a various assortment of kicks and fists to various parts of the body.”
Law, who was 27 at the time, estimated he absorbed between 250 and 300 blows.
Law later said his crew mates displayed the obscene gesture in the photo because they wanted to let Americans know that all was not well, despite what the North Koreans hoped to convey.
“We paid a hell of a price for it, but it was worth it,” Law said in a 1990 interview.
The beatings and malnutrition took their toll. Law shrank from 225 pounds to 126 during the crew’s 11 months of captivity, and he was declared legally blind.
“He would frequently take abuse for somebody in the crew who had broken the so-called rules of life that they ordered everyone to follow,” Bucher told the Los Angeles Times after Law’s death Sept. 25, 2001, in La Mesa, Calif.
Law had sent the photo to his uncle, Earl W. Hopkins, a building contractor who lived in Midland, along with a photo of himself playing cards and a letter.
Hopkins brought the photos and the letter into The News Tribune’s offices, then in downtown Tacoma. Dwight Jarrell, a burly, veteran newsman from Detroit, was assigned to interview Hopkins and write a story.
Hopkins and Jarrell discussed the obscene gestures displayed by three of the crewmen, but they wondered also whether they might be a distress signal.
Jarrell shared the photo with members of the newsroom as he and his bosses debated whether to call attention to the gestures. For some reason, they did not. But the photo ran on the front page, along with a story that focused mainly on Law’s letter.
“Dear Uncle Earl,” the letter began.
“It’s so formal,” Hopkins said at the time. “He usually called me ‘Bud.’ And so many other words are not the words I’d expect him to use normally. But it’s obvious his letter was censored and it’s reasonable, too, that he was writing for effect.”
In the three-page letter, Law asked his uncle for help in securing the release of the Pueblo crew.
“But instead of saying it in that fashion,” Hopkins said, “he urged me to do all possible ‘for our early repatriation.’” Law wouldn’t have written those words, his uncle said.
The letter, dated Aug. 28, didn’t arrive at Hopkins’ home until Oct. 1. It and the photos came in a 71/2-by-4-inch white envelope with a metered postmark dated Sept. 22 from New York. The State Department, the Navy and the Red Cross couldn’t explain how it got to New York or who sent it to Tacoma.
Paired with the photo and the story about Law in The News Tribune was an Associated Press dispatch from Seoul, South Korea, reporting that U.S. and North Korean negotiators had met at Panmunjon on Oct. 10 for the second straight day and that a substantial breakthrough was in the making on the release of the crew of the Pueblo, according to intelligence sources.
But it was another six weeks and many beatings in retaliation for the photo that Bucher described as “the most concentrated form of terror that I’ve ever seen or dreamed is possible” before the crew was released.
Law’s mother, Mara Faith Law, who’d moved to Chehalis from Midland, called his Dec. 23 release “the best Christmas present I’ve ever had.”
Jonathan Nesvig: 253-597-6118
When the USS Pueblo crew was captured on Jan. 23, 1968, the intelligence ship was in the Sea of Japan, where the converted cargo vessel was poorly equipped to defend against the 25 North Korean fighter jets, gunboats and torpedo boats that surrounded it.
As the crew feverishly destroyed sensitive documents, the ship was riddled with gunfire and easily overcome, according to news service reports.
Crew members were taken to a concrete bunker in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, where they were held before moving to somewhat better quarters outside the city.
When they weren’t exercising, eating or sleeping, they were forced to sit at small desks in a repentant pose – hands on thighs and heads bowed.
“We had to ask permission to light a cigarette or blow our noses,” quartermaster Charles Law later told a Navy court of inquiry.
As the leader of the enlisted men, Law communicated with Cmdr. Lloyd Bucher during exercise periods, exchanging information in the confusion of contact during games of football, basketball and volleyball, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Bucher, who along with the other officers had been separated from the crew, constantly relayed words of encouragement and defiance.
While in captivity, Law and the others expected the United States to retaliate.
“I thought we were going to die and the Korean War would get revved up again,” he told the New York Post in 2001.
Instead, the Pueblo and its crew came to symbolize troublesome questions of patriotism and duty.
Because the Pueblo wasn’t involved in a declared war or conflict, the U.S. government refused to designate Bucher and his crew prisoners of war.
When they came home, they were ordered to testify at an eight-week Navy Court of Inquiry during which they were questioned about the loss of the Pueblo and whether the captain and the crew had violated the U.S. military Code of Conduct by revealing more than name, rank and serial number, the Times reported.
Courts-martial were initially ordered for the top officers, but their discipline later was downgraded to reprimands. In the end, the secretary of the Navy vetoed any punishment.
Law, however, was cited by the naval court for his leadership and for “willingly accepting punishment intended for his shipmates.”
He was offered a medical discharge after doctors discovered large blind spots in both eyes from malnutrition, but he became a survival training instructor and served 10 more years.
After retiring, he worked in the San Diego area as a bartender and a bail bondsman.
In 1990, Law was among 63 Pueblo officers and crew members who received POW medals at a ceremony in San Diego. The Times reported that it had taken an act of Congress to get them.
This is one of a series of stories appearing during The News Tribune’s 125th year. Every Sunday we look at what happened during the same week sometime in the past 125 years. To suggest a week or an event for an upcoming story, e-mail your idea and any details to
randy.mccarthy@thenewstribune.com.
