Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (16 page)

Spad moves forward for catapult launch.
U.S. Navy.

Thirty-six hours later,
Ranger
rendezvoused at Yankee Station with Task Force 77, the Seventh Fleet’s strike force, consisting of three other carriers—
Kitty Hawk
(CVA-63),
Hancock
(CVA-19), and
Hornet
(CVA-12)—a dozen destroyers, and two guided-missile cruisers,
Topeka
(CLG-8) and
Oklahoma City
(CLG-5), the latter being the flag ship for the commander of the Seventh Fleet, Vice Admiral John J. Hyland. Each carrier was escorted by two or three smaller ships, and together they formed a carrier division commanded by a rear admiral from the flag bridge of the carrier. In a celebratory show of force, two dozen A-4 Skyhawks from several carriers flew low over the ships in a formation shaped like the number 77, and pictures were snapped. Soon thereafter, the task force dispersed, with the carriers and their escorts separated by twenty or so miles in order to run back and forth into the wind for flight operations without interfering with another carrier. To launch and recover aircraft, a carrier required a bow-to-stern wind of thirty-five miles per hour over its flight deck; this was achieved through the ship’s speed as it headed directly into the force of the prevailing wind. (The less wind, the faster the ship’s own speed had to be in order to compensate.) To achieve these optimum conditions, a carrier was constantly in search of a strong breeze and room to maneuver. As the war against North Vietnam progressed, a Yankee Station carrier involved in daily flight operations would steam 10,000 to 12,000 miles monthly in an operational area that was only about 100 miles in length and breadth—a virtual small lake for an oceangoing navy.

One deck below the flight deck in squadron ready rooms where pilots changed into their flight gear and received mission briefings—or gathered when off duty just to shoot the breeze over mugs of coffee—the pilots received the “straight scoop” that in a few days they would start bombing North Vietnam after a monthlong moratorium. In the VA-145 ready room, the pilots agreed that they would be paying the price for the bombing halt. Lessard thought that the “white shirts” in Washington had accomplished nothing with the cease-fire except to give North Vietnam time to “restock and reload” and “get ready to shoot down more U.S. planes” with the latest Soviet and Chinese military hardware, including MiGs and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and anti-aircraft batteries (AAA). Off-duty pilots from every squadron crowded into the air intelligence offices until the space was
jammed, wanting the latest information on roads, known missile sites, and anything else noteworthy. Maps and charts were pulled out, copied, cut, glued, and then marked with colored pens and pencils.

As Task Force 77 was poised to unleash its air wings against North Vietnam, VA-145 flew missions south of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that ran along the seventeenth parallel between North and South Vietnam. The DMZ had been established in 1954 as a buffer between the communist-held state in the north and the fledging democracy in the south following the end of the French Indochina War. Although the term DMZ implied an absence of military activity along the border, nothing was farther from the truth: there was a constant flow of fighters and matériel through the DMZ from the north to the south. The mission to disrupt those communist supply lines by bombing and strafing targets of opportunities along roads and bridges was ideal for the slow, low-flying, heavily armed Spads. Their pilots could spot things in the jungle that jets—known as fast movers—zoomed past without seeing.

On one daylight bombing run near the DMZ, Dieter completed his run but did not see Hassett, so he orbited nearby and waited. Dieter kept circling even though enemy guns on the ground were “shooting like gangbusters” in his direction. Hassett finally came up on the radio. He was nearly seventy miles away—safely over the water—having left the target and his wingman “without saying a word.” When they got back to the ready room, Hassett lit into Dieter, blaming him. Dieter took it for as long as he could, then said that he could not read Hassett’s mind. Dieter said it was wrong of Hassett not to have radioed his intention to head back. The discussion became heated as the two pilots, who did not like each other, “had it out.” When Hassett saw Dieter’s clenched fists at his side, he ordered all the other pilots to clear the room and directed Ensign Robert Herrmann, thirty-three, of Brooklyn, New York, a former enlisted man who was the squadron’s assistant maintenance officer, to stay as a witness. Then Hassett told Dieter, “If you want to take a swing, be my guest. I’ll kick your ass, then court-martial you.”

As much as he wanted to slug the guy, Dieter kept his fists at his side. He told Hassett to find another wingman. “I’m not flying with you anymore.”

Back in his stateroom, a “red-faced” Dieter fumed about Hassett. He told his roomate, Dan Farkas, what had happened, adding: “I could kill that son-of-a-bitch.”

Farkas, who had never seen Dieter so upset, advised him to back off with Hassett or he could end up in serious trouble. Whether around the ready room or participating in happy hours, Farky had always found Dieter “more of a jolly guy, not a fighter.” Dieter had told Farky that he had fought as a kid in Germany, often over food, but didn’t look for fights now.

That evening, Dieter was summoned back to the ready room, where Hassett was waiting. He said Dieter was “restricted to the ship for the rest of the cruise,” meaning that whenever
Ranger
visited a port of call, Dieter would be confined to the ship. The thought occurred to Dieter that if Hassett’s threat stood, he would just have to “sneak out” whenever they reached port.

Not informed of Hassett’s threat to restrict Dieter to the ship was the one man who would have had to approve such a punitive measure: VA-145 CO, Hal Griffith. He knew Dieter was “not one to fall in line and follow orders” and that he was “a little reckless,” and yet Griffith considered the spirited young officer a capable pilot. Also, Griffith was always being asked by officers from other squadrons about Dieter’s escapes from SERE—now the stuff of navy legend—and Griffith retold the young pilot’s story regularly, like a proud papa.

Word quickly spread of the heated words between Hassett and Dieter. Other junior officers made it clear they would not willingly switch sections to fly Hassett’s wing. Not only was Hassett the most unpopular senior officer in VA-145, he was considered by more than a few to be the squadron’s worst pilot, someone who “led with his rank rather than with his knowledge and skill.”

Dieter and Hassett, with bad blood between them, were stuck with each other. While still bothered by Hassett’s words and actions, Dieter knew that for his own good he had to let it go and forget the matter.

Early on January 27, off the coast of Vietnam, Dieter wrote to Marina, explaining that she might have difficulty reading the letter because he was flying with one hand and writing on his lap with the other. “Not many girlfriends will be able to say that they got a letter written over Vietnam at 6,000 feet…. I got the idea of writing to you just a few minutes ago when the sun came up. I have never seen anything like it. The sun is so big and so red and golden it is frightening in a way. The clouds are thick cumulus, and
a warm wind is from the south…. The coast is only 30 miles away. We knew when the jets hit the coast because the whole sky lit up from anti-aircraft guns…. This morning’s mission is exceptionally easy. We are protecting a seaplane which is airborne in case a pilot goes down over water. While the seaplane makes the pickup, we are here to shoot at whatever tries to stop the rescue…. So far no one got shot down today. We just circle and wait for somebody to call.” Dieter wrote about his issues with Hassett. Then, warning her not to tell anyone, he explained some of the “rules of engagement” dictated by Washington that the pilots had to follow. They could hit only certain targets within 200 feet of a road; and many targets, even military ones, required special clearance. “If a MiG jumps me, and now we are talking about a pilot’s life, I have to radio and get clearance to shoot. I could go on and on.” In closing, he said he’d like to “fly this air mail letter and deliver it myself.”

In his stateroom on the ship four days earlier, Dieter had written a missive of another kind to Marina—one he hoped would never be sent.

When Task Force 77 received the go-ahead to bomb
North Vietnam at the end of January 1966, bad weather delayed the attack for two days. Then, at 8:30
A.M
. on January 31,
Ranger
commenced combat air operations.

The resumption of the air war over North Vietnam was a continuation of a top-secret operation, Rolling Thunder, which had begun ten months earlier. The latest rules of engagement handed down by Washington identified “armed reconnaissance against moving targets” as the primary objective, with secondary targets being “bridges, truck parks and storage areas.” Missing from the approved target list was any major city or port—neither Hanoi, the capital, nor Haiphong, the port through which flowed most of the Soviet-bloc weapons and matériel being used against American forces in the war, was listed.

The weather was still marginal. As dozens of warplanes from
Ranger
and
Kitty Hawk
approached North Vietnam, a heavy cloud layer blanketed the Gulf of Tonkin and the coastline.

Leading six Spads from VA-145 was Hal Griffith, the Korean combat veteran who had been in the air above the Gulf of Tonkin during the defining “non-incident” in August 1964. His wingman was Bummy Bumgarner, young and capable but thinking,
We shouldn’t even be here in this weather
,
because they had to keep descending to remain under the solid cloud cover. Coming in low made them vulnerable to small-arms fire as well as antiaircraft batteries, and also placed them in danger of being hit by shrapnel from their own bombs. The mission called for the Spads to attack a highway bridge and staging area.

Crossing over the coast into North Vietnam, Bumgarner was thankful to be flying the heavily-armored Skyraider that “could take hits” with its aluminum plating and added exterior steel around the cockpit and engine.

Loaded with 250-pounders left over from World War II and newer 1,000-pound bombs, the Spads rolled in fifty miles north of the DMZ over their target ten miles inland. Ten seconds behind Griffith, Bumgarner released his ordnance from 1,500 feet while in a shallow glide. As he did, he could see gun flashes on the ground and knew the bad guys were “firing back good.” By the time Bumgarner finished his run, his plane had taken several hits. With a big hole in the intake pipe and “all kinds of other things wrong,” the engine started running rough.

Using VA-145’s call sign,
Electron
, Bumgarner radioed Griffith that he was heading out to the gulf to assess the damage. Diverting the other aircraft to alternative targets, Griffith flew out with Bumgarner and looked over his plane, finding numerous holes but “no fluid coming out.”

When Bumgarner pulled the power back, the engine smoothed out.

Over the radio came word of a
Ranger
aircraft going down farther north, near the mouth of a river south of Dong Hoi, and an urgent request for assistance. Two VA-145 Spads that were closest to the location answered the call for a RESCAP, a combat air patrol to protect downed pilots and rescue forces in seaplanes or helicopters from enemy attack.

Griffith said that since Bumgarner’s aircraft was flying okay now, they would start heading north and see if they could be of any assistance. As they flew parallel to the coast, they spotted smoke rising inland about five miles away.

“I’m going in closer to see what I can see,” Griffith said.

The CO didn’t tell Bumgarner to come with him, but as wingman Bumgarner was responsible for going wherever his flight leader went. So they headed in toward the coast, with Bumgarner behind Griffith. As they got closer, they climbed into the clouds. Griffith radioed they would hide
in the overcast, then roll underneath it to get a quick look, and come back up to the clouds.

Bumgarner had clipped to a knee board attached to his thigh a map marked with information from the morning briefing, with some thirty red dots signifying known antiaircraft batteries along that section of coastline. Some of the dots were circled, which meant the batteries were radar-controlled. He knew that hiding in the clouds wouldn’t provide any protection from radar-controlled guns.

Seconds later, Bumgarner lost sight of Griffith. The next thing he knew the “whole world below him was on fire” from antiaircraft shells bursting amid the puffy clouds. The sickening thuds from multiple hits to his aircraft might as well have been punches to his solar plexus. Bumgarner pushed the throttle forward to full power, and the engine began sputtering again. Without normal power, he pulled back the stick and brought the nose up forty degrees, hoping to use his airspeed to climb out of this mess. He got to about 6,000 feet, then had to drop the nose to keep the plane from stalling out and diving for the deck. He reduced power to the gasping engine.

“
Electron Lead
, engine took some hits and I’m shot up pretty bad,” Bumgarner radioed. Since they were on a tactical frequency used and monitored by all the pilots on the strike that morning, Bumgarner hoped his voice didn’t betray the fear he was feeling. “Might not make it back, Skipper.”

Griffith responded that his plane was badly damaged, and he didn’t know how much longer he could stay airborne.

Okay, he wins
, thought Bumgarner, who knew he would have to go to the skipper’s aid, and just hope that his own plane kept flying.

After numerous hits to his aircraft, Griffith had lost control, rolled inverted, and went into a dive. When he emerged from the clouds he was still upside down. Only “superb airmanship” enabled him to pull out of the deadly dive and roll the damaged plane upright.

When Bumgarner found Griffith, the young pilot saw that an eight-foot section of the CO’s left wing was gone. Griffith was struggling to hold level flight even as he kept the stick all the way over to the right, as he had to do to prevent the plane from rolling to the left, where there was now less wing
surface to provide lift. Bumgarner eyed the two 2,000-pound bombs, one under each wing. They were the heaviest bombs carried by a Skyraider. “Skipper, why don’t you drop the bomb off your left rack? That might balance you out.”

Griffith released the heavy bomb, lessening the imbalance.

Taking another look at Griffith’s plane, Bumgarner reported that the left horizontal stabilizer was “just hanging on,” with a hole in it “bigger than a basketball.” He added that any G-load at all “might snap it off.”

Although by then they were well out into the gulf and away from enemy shore guns, attempting to land on the carrier with a badly damaged plane was out of the question. For such an eventuality, carrier pilots were assigned at their pre-mission briefings an alternative place to land, known as a bingo field. There could at times be two or three bingo fields, in case weather, location, or other circumstances favored landing at one over another. For the carriers at Yankee Station, the Da Nang Air Base was the bingo field of choice. Da Nang had two 10,000-foot asphalt runways, and was a major base for U.S. Air Force and Marine Corps squadrons and various support personnel.

“Let’s take it to Da Nang,” Griffith radioed.

Da Nang was less than 100 miles away, and they made it in half an hour.

After Griffith landed, Bumgarner turned around and flew back to the ship; in retrospect, a “really stupid” decision, given the damage to his plane. But the shot-up Spad took him safely back. Upon inspection, a total of thirty-seven holes were found in the engine, wings, fuselage, and tail. Bumgarner would be given the engine intake pipe with an impressive hole in it and an eighteen-inch piece of wingtip that had to be replaced, as souvenirs of his first visit to North Vietnam.

In the VA-145 ready room to greet the returning pilots was Dieter, who as squadron duty officer that day had stayed aboard ship. Normally, Dieter hated being the duty officer because it required remaining in the ready room all day and night if necessary until the squadron’s planes were finished flying. That morning, however, when it was apparent that the strike against North Vietnam was launching in spite of the adverse weather, he reveled in being “lucky to have the duty,” not exactly what the guys suiting up to fly
wanted to hear. It turned into a long duty day for Dieter—stuck in a room situated right below where landing aircraft first hit the flight deck. Each time one hit the deck it was “like an explosion” overhead, and by the end of the day his nerves had “just about had it.” On top of that, the squadron was scheduled to send more planes out that night—one section was to drop time-delayed bombs along a highway—and Dieter would not be leaving the room until after that group returned, too. He would use some of the waiting time to write a letter to Marina, telling her he was on the schedule to fly early in the morning. With his duty that night, he wrote he might only have time to change clothes before he went on a five-hour mission over North Vietnam. He closed with: “I have your picture and I keep looking at it. I love you.”

Many of the other pilots who hadn’t flown that day were also in the crowded ready room, including Norm “Lizard” Lessard. They all hung on each graphic detail of what their squadron mates had gone through. Exhausted, and in flight suits stained with sweat, the returning Spad pilots filed into the room one by one and told harrowing stories about coming back with holes in their planes. Bumgarner captivated the listeners with his own story, and with the story of how the CO’s plane was so shot up that it had to be flown to Da Nang. A couple of hours later, Griffith himself walked into the ready room, having made the one-hour flight to the ship in
Ranger
’s snub-nosed twin-propeller C1A carrier onboard delivery (COD) plane. Griffith looked haggard but relieved, and confessed that when his damaged plane dived out of control, inverted, through the heavy clouds, he had “thought that was the end.”

Looking around the room, Lessard figured that the group could be divided into two camps: those who had flown that day and were thankful to have made it back, and those—like himself and Dieter—who had stayed aboard and were “scared shitless” about what they would encounter when it was their turn.

Although the pilots had been told that no strikes would be launched against North Vietnam unless the ceiling was at least 2,500 feet, waves of planes were launched and flown when cloud layers were far below that minimum—even as low as 500 feet—giving the pilots fewer options for their bombing runs and giving enemy gunners lower-flying and easier targets to
hit. The official daily operations briefing sent to the chief of naval operations in Washington reported: “Low ceilings and nearly complete cloud cover curtailed the effectiveness of the first day’s strikes and pilots report heavy and accurate AAA fire throughout most of the armed reconnaissance area.”

In Lessard’s opinion, which he noted in the daily journal he kept, “They caught us with our pants down when we tried to surprise them by flying in that damn weather…. A lot more people will get hurt before this crazy war is over.”

A
Kitty Hawk
F-4 and an air force F-105 were reported down, and the fate of their pilots was unknown. One bit of good news was that the
Ranger
pilot who had been shot down—and had been the object of the RESCAP near Dong Hoi that Griffith and Bumgarner tried to reach—was successfully rescued.

The downed pilot, Lieutenant Commander Sylvester G. Chumley, thirty-one, of Clovis, New Mexico, had been leading a division of four A-4 Skyhawks from VA-55. By the time they reached their target—the Dong Hoi bridge—they were streaking underneath a solid 800-foot overcast, with little room to maneuver. These were “not sublime conditions” for launching a coordinated attack. So Chumley ordered the planes to separate, and told each pilot to make his own runs on the target. Chumley was pulling up from his fifth and last bombing run on the bridge when an anti-aircraft battery nailed him. It was no doubt a direct hit on the engine, because everything stopped—the turbine, instruments, and radio. The plane tried to roll right but Chumley fought to keep it level. He made it into the overcast, but the whole time the deathly silent jet was rapidly decelerating. When he came out on top of the solid cloud cover he had no idea if he was over land or water. There was a greater likelihood of rescue if he punched out when he knew he was over the gulf—feet wet as opposed to the dreaded feet dry—but with nothing working in the plane, he had little choice. When the plane lurched to the right, out of control, and dropped earthward, he reached above his head and pulled the handle for the ejection seat. He was fired from the cockpit after the canopy blew clear, and his parachute opened normally. He was soon floating down through the clouds, without the slightest notion of what was below. He emerged from
the overcast above water, but only about “two football fields” from shore. He “quietly went into the water,” hoping not to attract any unwanted attention. Releasing the harness on his chute, he inflated his life vest but not his life raft. He knew that the yellow raft would be easy to spot from shore; also, he didn’t want to drift in that direction. Instead, he started “swimming toward California,” alternating between the breaststroke and back-stroke, pulling the folded-up raft behind him. Before he went far, he saw a fishing boat leaving shore, heading his way. Like other
Ranger
pilots, Chumley had been briefed as to how downed pilots had a price on their heads, and that operators of fishing boats could expect to be paid hundreds of dollars by the North Vietnamese military if they captured a U.S. pilot. At this point, he knew he had been spotted and swam even harder. After being located by two A-4s flown by his squadron CO and wingman, who then radioed his position, Chumley heard the distinctive roar of powerful reciprocating engines. He looked up to see two Spads diving out of the clouds and wagging their wings, as in a World War II movie. They thundered toward the fishing boat closing on Chumley. One and then the other opened up with 20 mm cannon fire, raking the boat, which wheeled around and limped back toward shore. Not long afterward, a U.S. Air Force HU-16 Albatross amphibious flying boat landed close to Chumley, and he swam the remaining distance to its open hatch. As he did, a mortar round fired from shore dropped right in front of him, sending up a tall spout of water but failing to explode. He was hauled aboard the seaplane, which quickly turned for open water and took off. With only minor cuts and bruises, Chumley was delivered to Da Nang, where he spent the night before returning to the ship the following day.