Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (12 page)

However, Dieter’s brother Martin and his closest friends knew all about Dieter and Marina Adamich: how they had met when they were students at San Mateo Junior College, and how he had fallen head over heels for the petite, blue-eyed platinum blond who was as smart as she was beautiful. Since then, Marina had been “in one category and all the other women in another.” Dieter had, in spite of the geographic distance between them during his training and later assignments, “never stopped pursuing” Marina. He marveled at her combination of looks and intelligence, and he had long told his family and closest friends that he hoped one day to make her his wife and mother of his children. The daughter of a commander in the royal Yugoslav navy, she was a science-major graduate of the College of Notre Dame in Belmont, California, and at age twenty-three was working as a chemistry research assistant at Stanford University. When Dieter asked if she would marry him when he returned from Vietnam, she said yes. Following an old German custom for an engaged couple, they exchanged matching gold wedding bands to be worn on the right hand until their wedding day, when each would switch the ring to the left hand.

On the morning of December 10, 1965, Marina waited on the balcony of her apartment in Telegraph Hill with a signal mirror Dieter had given her. Soon, the big ship came into sight as it pulled away from Pier Three at
Alameda Naval Air Station and was nudged by tugboats into San Francisco Bay.

At 9:29
A.M
., the aircraft carrier
Ranger
passed under the Bay Bridge.

Marina saw the signal then, coming from the carrier’s flight deck, the perimeter of which was lined with hundreds of sailors in dress blues.

Dieter, using his own signal mirror, was telling her good-bye.

Marina signaled back, hoping she was catching the sun’s reflection in her mirror. She kept signaling, and so did Dieter, as the ship steamed slowly past the hilly city by the bay, and slipped under the Golden Gate Bridge—heading, like other ships before it, for a war on the far side of the Pacific.

Five hours later, two Spads circled lazily overhead.

They had been launched from
Ranger
, now nearly 100 miles off the coast and steaming on a northwesterly course. With no specific orders, the two VA-145 pilots decided to take a last look at the San Francisco Bay Area.

When it was time to head back, one of the planes dropped low over the bay dotted with sailboats as they approached the Golden Gate Bridge.

“I’ve wanted to do this for years,” Spook Johns radioed to his wingman.

“You’re really going to do it, aren’t you?” said David “Mapes” Maples, the Nashville native and 1963 graduate of Annapolis, who had recently been promoted to lieutenant, junior grade. He had already decided that he was
not
going to fly under the famous span, no matter what Spook did.

Spook aimed for mid-span. As he cleared the undercarriage of the big orange bridge, people on the walkway waved. He rolled the Spad victoriously.

“What can they do to me, Mapes? Send me to Vietnam?”

Dieter with his squadron mates from VA-145 in admiral’s stateroom aboard
Ranger
, July 22, 1966.
U.S. Navy.