Calls are going out to President Donald Trump to bring the USS Pueblo with him when he returns from North Korea.
In addition author and journalist Greta Van Susteren calling for the ship's return, one of the most notable voices is that of Tom Massie, who was a 19-year-old seaman onboard the Pueblo when it was captured by North Korea 50 years ago.
“I would like to see it returned because it is a part of our history,” Massie, now 70 and living in Illinois, told the New York Post. He said the Trump-Kim summit may provide the best opportunity for that to happen.
The USS Pueblo was sailing in international waters off the coast of North Korea in the Sea of Japan when it was overwhelmed by approaching gun ships and North Korean fighter planes overhead.
Armed with only two .50 cal. machine guns, the ship and its crew held off for two excruciating hours while sailors belowdecks destroyed anything that may have been classified or could have been incriminating.
Massie and the other 82 crew members signed on for what was to have been a three-week cruise on the puny 117-foot Pueblo, designated as a research vessel but in actuality a U.S. spy ship.
“I took the job because I wanted know what the North Koreans did and I wanted to see the enemy up close,” Ralph McClintock, who was then a U.S. Navy communications technician, told Fox News. “The mission was only supposed to last 22 days.”
Instead, Massie, McClintock, and the others on board spent the next 11 months in a North Korean prisoner of war camp where they were brutally tortured, both physically and mentally.
The year 1968 brought us “the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson announcing he wouldn’t seek re-election, RFK and MLK being killed, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Apollo 8 launch to name just a few,” Jack Cheevers, author of “Act of War,” told Fox News.
Accordingly, “The Pueblo fell through the cracks of history because it became a sideshow to everything that happened.”
Since its capture, the Pueblo has been moored in the Taedong River in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, where it’s kept on display for propaganda purposes.
On Friday Van Susteren tweeted her agreement that it should return home.
“NK captured the USS Pueblo 1968 and holds it in Pyongyang harbor (I was on it during one of my trips to NK)-perhaps NK will return our navy ship? It is time (actually ...past time...),” she wrote.
Others voiced their agreement as well:
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