Word: bucher
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Minimal Risk. In publishing Bucher: My Story and in assisting Journalist Trevor Armbrister to prepare A Matter of Accountability, Bucher rebels against the role of scapegoat that the Navy's board of inquiry tried to assign him and a few others. The commander succeeds to the extent that he shows his real adversary to have been a fantastically inefficient bureaucracy-the U.S. Navy. Armbrister's findings generally support Bucher. Yet these two densely detailed books also show, almost inadvertently, that Bucher himself was not the decisive officer he might have been...
Though they agree on all their major conclusions, Bucher and Armbrister confront Pueblo's story from different perspectives. Bucher views events through two narrow apertures: his own experience as a thoroughly conventional officer, and his status as the new skipper of a small, unimportant ship. Armbrister, who traveled and interviewed widely on the Pueblo story, provides a less intimate but much broader account...
Before setting out from Japan, Bucher asked Rear Admiral Frank Johnson, his boss, for TNT charges to scuttle the Pueblo in an emergency. The request went to a supply officer, who offered thermite instead. Bucher realized that carrying thermite, an incendiary substance, was both dangerous and contrary to Navy regulations. He could have made a fuss but decided against doing so. "All I could accomplish by pressing it further," he writes as apologia, "was to upset Admiral Johnson and his staff by giving them the impression they had a skipper on their hands who seemed obsessed with the capability...
...classified material and devices. Yet it possessed only rudimentary equipment for destroying its secrets in an emergency. The Pentagon had authorized Pueblo to carry a relatively large, 3-in. 50-cal. cannon. But tiny, overloaded Pueblo had neither the deck space for it nor qualified gunners to man it. Bucher settled for two ineffectual .50-cal. machine guns mounted in exposed positions...
Actually, Pueblo was never intended to fight. Its protection lay in international law or, in a crisis, possible help from elsewhere. Brigadier General John W. Harrell Jr., the Air Force commander in South Korea, was informed of Bucher's mission in advance and asked the Navy if planes should be kept on "strip alert" for a possible rescue operation; the Navy was not interested. While Pueblo was at sea, North Korea sent an assassination team to Seoul with President Chung Hee Park as the target. This graphic signal of Pyongyang's mood did not make the Navy...