"Okay. Wait here."

Would he, when he returned, have the Master-at-Arms with him, and my orders for the 32nd Street Brig? Even if that happened, I rationalized, I'd done the right thing. Oh, sure the best right thing was not to have compromised the information in the first place, but the next best right thing was to give the commanders a chance to change the information, to re-establish communications security. Without it enemies could listen to maneuvering orders or jam the circuits or even send their own bogus, disruptive messages ... sink ships, win battles and wars. Would I finally see the other side of jail, know how it felt to be herded from place to unhappy place. I tried to picture myself in prison, some sort of martyr to the better glory of the Navy and wondered about ‘sacrifice'. Was it anything at all to do with morality or principle?

Or had I subconsciously created this ‘other' crisis in order to avoid the more personal one in which I would finally have to play the role of father and care-taker to small children and a bed-ridden wife? Until that moment I had never examined the nature of those fears. Certainly I was concerned for my wife. She'd been in serious pain a long time, keeping it mostly to herself, since I was gone so often. I'd failed to appreciate her skills and day-in-day-out compassion. Certainly I had not tried to learn them myself. Now I would have to perform those duties, and I had no clue how.

Although Carole and I had been married four years the actual time we'd been together was closer to eight or nine months, scattered about in odd days and short weeks. We were more like symbols to each other than real people with intense needs. People, we all understood, are fallible, but symbols, by definition, dare not fail.

Suddenly the Ops Boss was back, and alone. He handed me two hastily composed documents.

"This is an Op Immediate for Com-First-Fleet. Get it over to the Comm Center. Here are your emergency leave papers. Good luck. You've got less than two minutes to get off the ship."

I cleared the brow as the tractor hooked up to pull it away and line handlers began their work and was barely across the street when I heard "Underway. Shift colors."

The message was short, but all of the essentials were included. The only name mentioned was the fictional RM3 Jones. It took only a minute to get the message into the system and I left the base. Already immersed in the ‘what ifs' of Carole's upcoming emergency surgery, I forgot all about the morning nightmare.

_______________________

Carole's life was saved that afternoon, but not much else went according to plan. Navy doctors removed a pound of blood-clotted veins from her legs, and in the end she didn't lose either of them. Other, later specialists would call the procedure ‘botched' and the recovery period, estimated at six weeks, dragged on for more than a year. She was dogged by complications the rest of her life. Ironically, just a month later, the Navy announced a brand new treatment for thrombophlibitis, one which saved the veins and was hardly intrusive at all. It was quickly adopted all around the world. Our children were well behaved and cooperative, and probably much more worried than I realized. The hardest part for me was sitting beside Carole's hospital bed while she slept fitfully for days in a drugged stupor. But we had few recriminations and fewer options. The Navy, like other government agencies, could not be sued and the veins could never be replaced.
_______________________

A few months later, outbound from a fleet exercise around Pearl Harbor, headed for my third tour in the South China Sea, Chief West burst into Radio Central, his face dark with anger. "Get in Crypto," he hissed at me.

Shocked, I wondered what the hell I'd done to deserve the ‘wood-shed'. Many an ass-chewing, even violence had occurred inside, but this was my first (and only) trip there.

The space was so tiny confrontation was impossible to avoid. When the ‘Crypto Board' convened they had to leave the door open, a security violation, so that two men could be inside with the top secret ‘safe' open.

But West and I could stand in there, nose to nose, or rather, because I was so much taller than he, chin to chest. He closed the door and locked it.

"What the fuck went on here while I was on leave?" He shouted.

It took me a while to sort it out. When had he been on leave? Where was I? Then I remembered. "Hell if I know, Chief. I went on emergency leave, myself. There was the FleetEx, but I don't know ..." and then I realized what he must be talking about. "Oh, shit!"

"Yeh, Oh shit! Don't you think somebody should have told me about it? And now, today all I get is ‘Ask Estrup'. I'm askin' and you damn well better be tellin'!"

And so I told him, remembering as I went along. It was a bit more detailed than my report to the Ops Boss, but just as factual and bare.

West's anger cooled as I spoke. "I should have told you, Chief, but hell, by the time both of us got back it was Refresher Training, ORI, Local Ops and then the deployment workup. I just forgot."

He nodded. "So this is about three lines of a secret document ... a frequency plan, which is a few pages in a Communications Annex, which is a small part of the Operational Section of an inch-thick document called a Fleet Operating Order."

"Yeh, I guess so." I said, wondering what his point was.

"Jesus!" he muttered, finally seeing something fit together in his mind. He shook his head. "The XO wanted me to tell you one of the findings of the Fleet Commander's last exercise. His Security Group people, by telephone alone, got the entire OpOrder, three times over! Craig was the only unit, air, sea or shore, to report a security violation."

He unlocked the door and left.

I sat on my heels in the little room for a long time, evaluating this information. I did not know whether to laugh or cry when I recalled all of the derisive jokes I had been told about Soviet carelessness, drunkenness, sloth and stupidity. We all demonize our enemies in one way or another, but doing so we imagine ourselves so very good, so right that we are immune from those same faults. And yet, up and down the ranks, across all of the interlocking technical fields, we gave up secrets designed to protect us from deceit and penetration from within, from the rear. It was ‘Get thee behind me, Satan' all over again. Out of sight, out of mind. Yet those who look at us see a two headed monster, one so bright and anxious to do good, the right - the other a gross, evil thing we don't even recognize because we've blinded ourselves to it, even as it peers over our shoulder at the frightened, doubtful world.

Those civilians, sailors and marines knew better than to give up our carefully crafted tactical doctrines. They had to know! And yet something very deep in our society permitted, even encouraged us all to lie to ourselves as individuals and to each other. What was it?

Had the callers spoken a different language or with an ethnic accent, all of us would surely have been suspicious. Was it racism we expected to protect us? The White Man's Navy? Could a simple child's teaching be at fault, ask and ye shall receive? Was it our religion, the one which had already installed a French educated Catholic named Diem as President in Vietnam for no better reason than that he was a Christian. His first action, as a ‘Christian soldier' was to make holy war upon his only potential anti-communist allies, the Buddhists and Tongs, and to overturn the land reform instituted by Hanoi's government. Maybe our leaders felt better with a French Christian in charge, but it couldn't have made the Vietnamese forget France's long oppressive occupation of their homeland. Diem, we finally understood, was the wrong man for the job, but we did not accurately guess the reason why. It had not kept us from assassinating him and his family.

Nor, at that point, had I even asked that question. Not knowing the answers, my monitor was angry. It prodded and ridiculed me.

Alternately I felt ashamed, then proud and perversely vindicated. But mostly, by the time I returned to my duty station, I was worried and afraid for all of us.

---

A decade or so later North Korea's reckless action against Pueblo began to make more sense. In 1967 the Walker spy ring had begun selling our operational crypto logic key lists to the Soviets. All they needed to read our day-to-day mail was the crypto equipment and Pueblo carried more than most. But we didn't know about Walker then and felt quite secure by simply switching to another set of keys. How much did they learn? Enough to stay in the Great Game for twenty more years. As for voice security, which my own mistake had compromised, the Navy (and other Services) installed a voice encryption system in every operational unit. The National Security Agency, still the most advanced cryptology outfit in the world, could hardly have known that their highly complex, impossible-to-break codes were defeated by the simple expediency of buying and/or taking them by force ... Capitalism at its most basic.

Chief Warrant Officer Walker, his brother, a Lieutenant Commander, his son, a junior petty officer, and his best friend, a Chief Radioman, are all serving life sentences in federal prison. A film has been made about their exploits. USS Pueblo, unlike almost every other ship in service back then, has never been stricken from the rolls. She is still carried on the ‘ship's movement' lists as ‘INPORT WONSON', where she serves as a tourist attraction for visiting communist dignitaries and students. Several documentaries were made about Pueblo and her fated crew, too.