Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (11 page)

When Dieter was half a mile from his target in the Nevada desert, he pushed the throttle forward and brought the nose up to forty-five degrees.
With his finger on the release button on the stick, he waited, as he had been trained to do, until he was pulling 4 g’s, which he could read on the cockpit g-meter if he wanted to but knew by feel alone now. Then, at about 1,500 feet, he released the twenty-five-pound practice bomb loaded with a white-smoke charge. The maneuver—known as loft bombing—threw the bomb upward before it fell to earth, giving the pilot added time to get away before detonation. Dieter banked left 135 degrees into a “half Cuban eight,” allowing the nose to drop forty-five degrees before pulling to level flight at nearly maximum speed and heading in the opposite direction. The maneuver was a quick way to reverse course while picking up speed, but if a slowpoke Spad was trying to outrace a nuclear blast, it would be hopeless. With the practice run over, he climbed to a higher altitude for the flight back. At that point, a famished Dieter opened his box lunch and dug in.

Through all the training and “lots of demanding flights,” Dieter became “a capable pilot…not one we worried about,” according to Lieutenant Clarence “Skip” Armstrong, thirty, of West View, Pennsylvania. An experienced multiengine pilot who had recently transitioned to Skyraiders, Armstrong would be promoted to lieutenant commander a few days before VA-145 left for Southeast Asia. Years later, he would be CO of his own squadron, then of a carrier air wing, before taking command in 1980 of the aircraft carrier
Forrestal
(CVA-59). Although not an Annapolis graduate, Armstrong would be the only member of VA-145 from the
Ranger
cruise to make flag rank, and would retire as a rear admiral. During the months leading up to VA-145’s deployment to WestPac, Armstrong saw Dieter—“a mix of ideal military and bit of a wild guy”—and the other nuggets working hard and getting better.

The best pilot in VA-145 was widely acknowledged to be Lieutenant ( j.g.) Malcolm “Spook” Johns, twenty-eight, of Detroit, Michigan. Johns had decided to become a navy pilot at age eight, after seeing a newsreel of an F-6 Hellcat crash-landing on a carrier deck during World War II and hitting the ship’s island, which split open the plane’s fuselage, and the pilot “unbuckling and getting out like it was another day at the office.” A veteran of two earlier cruises, Johns, who had joined the navy in 1960, was due to get out in the fall of 1965 but voluntarily extended the length of his service to go on the
Ranger
cruise even though he had been passed over twice for
promotion to lieutenant for reasons other than his flying abilities, such as being a “square peg in a round hole” when it came to military discipline. Although he would proudly state, “I’m in the military but the military isn’t in me,” he decided to stick around for two reasons. First, he was an only child, and his squadron mates had become like “a band of brothers.” Second, one of his fondest dreams was to shoot down a MiG fighter in a dogfight. After what had happened that summer over North Vietnam, when a North Vietnamese MiG-17—a subsonic jet capable of more than 700 miles per hour, nearly three times the top speed of a Skyraider—had made the mistake of flying low in front of two Spads from the carrier
Midway
(CVA-41) and was raked by their 20 mm cannons and went down burning in a farm field, Spook hoped that the
Ranger
cruise might give him a chance to make his dream come true.

A self-described “wild man,” Johns thought the Spad was great, but it drove him crazy that some of the senior guys flew the airplane “like a bunch of old ladies.” In fact, when the previous CO, Mel Blixt, was checking him out to be a section leader, Spook engaged in aerobatics that resulted in his plane going into a violent spin. Observing from a distance, Blixt was aghast at what he considered reckless flying, and refused to let Spook lead his own section. Thereafter, Spook began calling Blixt “Cashmere,” as in cashmere sweater, because Blixt “sweated everything.” The name stuck.

With the wild streak they both possessed, it was not surprising that Spook and Dieter became buddies, although Spook, as the older, more experienced pilot, was the leader while Dieter tried to keep up like an eager little brother. They partied together in their free time, and tangled more than once in the air. On one night mission soon after he joined the squadron, Dieter was flying wingman for Cashmere, who had dropped down to 500 feet over the San Joaquin Valley on a practice run to “find Soviet T-34 tanks disguised as ’58 Buicks.” Because Dieter had not yet logged many night hours, the cautious Blixt advised him to stay above and behind Blixt’s plane at 3,000 feet. Lurking above them at 6,000 feet was Spook, who spotted a faint illumination atop Dieter’s fuselage coming from a running light. Spook decided to give Dieter a little scare, although in retrospect it “wasn’t the greatest idea in the world.” Spook flipped off his running lights and swooped down on his unsuspecting prey. Coming in from behind and
below, Spook pulled up in front of Dieter with fifty feet separating the planes, knowing the kind of turmoil his plane’s powerful prop wash would cause. This was called giving someone a hot nose or a thumping, and most pilots engaged in such play, although usually in daylight. Dieter, who had been cruising along with an open canopy, enjoying the night air, was startled by the roar of another plane coming out of nowhere and then suddenly finding himself in severe turbulence. As he pulled off, Spook flicked on his lights so Dieter could see who it was. Seconds later, tracer rounds lit up the night sky, and their bright trajectories passed close enough to Spook’s plane to scare the hell out of him. Dieter had drawn his .38 revolver—every navy pilot carried a handgun in a shoulder holster as part of his survival gear—and fired out of his open canopy. Later, the thought would cross Spook’s mind,
What if Dieter had hit me?
, but the fact was he did not. No harm, no foul, and Cashmere never found out.

Some of VA-145’s training in 1965 was conducted with other squadrons from Carrier Air Wing 14, a separate unit of aircraft, pilots, and maintenance personnel—1,500 officers and enlisted men—that would deploy aboard
Ranger
for the WestPac cruise. When they were added to
Ranger
’s 3,500-man crew—known as ship’s company—the carrier would leave for overseas with a full complement of 5,000 officers and men, and more than 100 aircraft.

During a weeklong stay at Fallon as the air wing’s squadrons worked on the large-scale coordinated attacks they would be conducting over Southeast Asia, Dieter thought more seriously about going to war. He decided that if he went down behind enemy lines he would “not be captured,” but would “shoot it out with them.” He had a favorite High Standard .22 semiautomatic pistol from his air force shooting days. The gun looked like a Colt .45, complete with a ten-round clip that slipped into the handgrip. He was a skilled shot with it but realized that if he fired it in the jungle, the sound could bring unwanted company. He found a gunsmith on the base, and worked with him making different detachable silencers for the gun. Keeping “the best one,” Dieter packed it away along with 250 rounds of soft-nosed ammunition.

Both in Fallon and in Alameda, Dieter spent lots of off-duty time with Lessard as they became buddies. They had met during flight training at
Corpus Christi. Lizard’s first impression was that Dieter was “a wild guy who loved to chase girls.” Of course, other Swordsmen said the same thing about Lizard. But although he was just as wild as Dieter and a self-described bad boy at many officers clubs, Lizard would “wear out eventually but Dieter would not.” Lessard’s course in life changed when he met Sharon Smith, the gorgeous daughter of a career navy officer. When she walked into the Alameda O club with her mother early one evening, it was love at first sight. Lizard immediately “started sobering up” because he thought she might be the real deal for him. They married six months later—that enchanted summer of 1965. The wedding ceremony was aboard
Ranger
and the reception at the nearby Hunters Point O club. The father of the bride, a navy captain who had recently served as executive officer of
Ranger
, invited all the brass—mid-grade to senior officers, including a few admirals—and Lizard had “all the hooligans to invite.” Not surprisingly, it turned into a raucous affair. The VA-145 pilots knew they were soon going to war and had “better have fun now,” as no one knew what the future held. Before it was over, a stationary bar at the club had been torn off its mounts and dragged outside so the thirsty in various states of dress could be served drinks without going inside; several Swordsmen had done the twist on the hood of Sharon’s father’s prized 1956 T-bird; one of the pilots was stopped by a highway patrolman while driving erratically across the Bay Bridge sans pants; and VA-145 was banned from the Hunters Point O club for the duration of their stay. This ban wasn’t a big deal, because they all agreed there were too many black shoes at Hunters Point—non-aviator naval officers wore black shoes and aviators wore brown shoes. They always had more fun at the Alameda O club—a club which they considered their own at the air station, and which was always filled with fellow pilots.

As the squadron faced going to war and the inevitable death of some of their own, Dieter came up with a plan for financial gain. Finding a life insurance policy that did not have a war exclusion, he met with an agent to get an estimate. Approaching several of the other bachelors in the squadron, he found four who agreed to go in with him. The deal was this: each man would have a $1 million policy insuring his life for six months, starting January 15, 1966. The other four would be his beneficiaries. The com
bined premium would be $9,000—or $1,800 per man. If one of the five died, the other four would split $1 million. Willing to join Dieter in the plan were Walt Bumgarner, Gary Hopps, John Tunnell, and one of the few Annapolis graduates in the squadron, Dave Maples. “Why not?” Bummy told Dieter. “We’ve little to lose and a lot to gain.” However, a couple of the senior officers’ wives heard about the plan and thought it “ghoulish,” and the squadron’s executive officer put the “kibosh on it.”

Although navy pilots tend to spend their free time with their squadron mates, particularly when they are away from home, that is not always the case. At Fallon, Spook, Lizard, and Dieter were soon joined by a fun-loving VF-143 pilot from their air wing: Lieutenant Wayne Bennett, twenty-six, of Akron, Ohio. Bennett flew the hottest fighter in the fleet: the $2.4 million swept-wing, twin-engine F-4 Phantom II.

A jet interceptor built by McDonnell Aircraft with a top speed of 1,472 miles per hour, the Phantom was a tandem two-seater. In the navy’s configuration, the pilot sat in front, and in the backseat was a radar intercept officer (RIO) responsible for monitoring various onboard systems, including an impressive array of missiles—both heat-seeking and radar-controlled for air-to-surface and air-to-air combat. One thing the F-4 Phantom lacked—much to the chagrin of the hotshot pilots who flew this supersonic war bird—was a gun of any type. The prevailing theory was that modern air-to-air combat against enemy aircraft would not be like the dogfights of the two world wars. Rather, a sophisticated high-speed missile-platform like the Phantom would blow an adversary out of the sky from miles away, without ever getting close enough to use guns. But as for the pilots who flew the F-4s, according to Bennett, “we didn’t believe dogfights were going to be obsolete.” While he was training with the F-4 RAG squadron before joining VF-143, Bennett heard for the first time during a briefing that practice dogfights were prohibited by navy policy; specifically, they were considered “too violent” for the sensitive and sophisticated air-intercept radar system the F-4 carried. He looked in absolute disbelief at the guy sitting next to him: “Who are they kidding?” Rules or no rules, Bennett and the other Phantom pilots found opportunities to mix it up in the sky with their F-4s. But without any instruction in the tactics of maneuvering individually
to attack or evade an adversary at close quarters, Bennett worried about how they would stack up against a MiG if they ever found themselves in a real dogfight.
^*

One weekend Bennett climbed into Spook’s new International Scout and tagged along with some Swordsmen for an excursion into the desert. Spook folded down the Scout’s top, giving it the look of a World War II German staff car, which the pilots “liked just fine.” They loaded up on cases of beer, stacked coolers with ice, and brought along their sidearms to take potshots at the jack rabbits. Even with four-wheel drive, it was rough going when they left the road and headed out over the rugged terrain filled with sand dunes and tumbleweed. Spook was a good driver and kept them out of trouble, but for most of the afternoon Dieter kept asking to drive. Spook kept saying no.

“You’ll get us stuck, Dieter.”

“Come on, Spook, let me drive.” Dieter went on pleading, in his lilting German accent that was getting more beery all the time, until Spook relented.

Letting Dieter take the wheel, Spook instructed him like a teenager being given the wheel for the first time, warning him not to go over the top of a dune or they might get stuck at the center of the frame with no traction.

It took no more than five minutes before they were stuck atop a high sand dune. Spook got out and circled the vehicle. With all four wheels in the air, the Scout squatted on its belly like a beached whale. Scowling, he came around to the driver’s side, where Dieter still sat, smiling impishly.

“Goddamn it, Dieter. No wonder Rommel lost North Africa.”

The pilots used their bare hands to dig the Scout off the hot dune.

Shortly before VA-145’s deployment, Dieter was promoted to lieutenant, junior grade. He also announced his engagement.

Considering his deserved reputation as an inveterate ladies man, his engagement came as a shock to some of his squadron mates. During flight school, Dieter had enjoyed countless liaisons and had broken more than a few hearts along the way from Pensacola to Corpus Christi. Later, he was known to “import women” to various bases—enthusiastic playmates like Rita, an Italian beauty who looked like a “young Elizabeth Taylor” and Bernadette, a pretty brunette college student majoring in German. Separately—neither appeared to know about the other—they (and others) accepted Dieter’s invitations to meet up in places like Fallon and Yuma when he flew there for training with his squadron.