Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (20 page)

If only he had his mirror, he was in the perfect spot to signal—the sun, still low in the eastern sky, was shining directly in his face. One Spad left its orbit and headed his way. He waved frantically. The Skyraider rocked its wings in the classic greeting from one pilot to another. Dieter’s heart soared. “So happy,” he could have yelled for joy. Then the Spad peeled off, and Dieter saw that it had been wagging its wings at an approaching C-54, which he knew to be an SAR command plane. His squadron mate had not seen him after all.

Dieter wanted to scream out, and he would have if the pilots above could somehow have heard him. It was “sickening” that rescuers were so close but had no idea he was here. Had he been able to stay near the crash site and avoid capture, they would now be pulling him out of the jungle. But he
had come close to being killed or captured, and the fact that he was still alive and free meant everything.

And then, he was spotted—not by the planes but by the Laotians who were looking for him. Two natives with machetes stepped from the tall grass and looked toward Dieter, who was still waving the pole trying to signal the planes. From all the voices and commotion that immediately followed, he knew there were others behind them.

Dieter jumped down from the hut and ran for the river. Diving in, he swam to the other side. Scrambling up the steep bank, he looked back only when he was hidden in the bushes. Several men—some with rifles—were gathered on the opposite bank. One of them pointed in Dieter’s direction. Someone had found a raft, and they were preparing to cross.

Dieter hurried away. As the terrain changed again, from woods to jungle, he pressed on, and no one seemed to be following him. He arrived at an elevated hut in the “middle of nowhere.” The front door was open. Dieter sat underneath the hut to catch his breath. To his surprise, he heard chickens clucking. He found them inside a bamboo cage. He took a fat hen and put it in his bag to roast over a fire later. He came to a second hut a short distance away. It was so hidden by foliage that he nearly bumped into it. As he passed, he grabbed a handful of ash in the outside fire pit. Dropping embers that burned the palm of his hand, he knew someone had been here recently.

It occurred to Dieter that he was taking too many chances. He had no business approaching huts or villages. He should he traveling “deeper in the bush,” even if it slowed him down. Right now, someone could be watching him without his knowing it. No sooner did that thought cross his mind than a woman dressed in black came around the corner of the nearest hut and stopped. She looked back, called out to someone, and a small child appeared. She scooped up the child in her arms and walked off.

Dieter had stepped into the foliage at the edge of the clearing to hide. He didn’t think the woman had seen him—at least, she didn’t act as if she had. But this was too close a call. His next thought was that he should not get caught with “stolen goods.” He let the chicken go.

Now that he was determined to avoid huts and stay off trails, the going was slower and more difficult. He worked his way through the jungle,
trying not to make any noise and watching for animal traps as he went. Since nearly falling into the trap the previous day, he had passed several others of various nefarious designs.

When Dieter arrived at an intersection of several trails, he checked to the left and right, and saw no one approaching. It was only twenty feet across, not far at all, he thought. Crouching low, he started to cross—

“Yute
,
yute
,
yute!”

When Dieter heard the shouted order, he knew it was meant for him. He stopped and turned slowly toward the commanding voice.

An M-1 rifle was pointed at his head.

Dieter smiled and nodded.

The man holding the rifle motioned for Dieter to come closer.

Dieter did, careful not to make any sudden moves.

The man yelled something over his shoulder, and the bush “came alive” with more Laotians in various states of dress and undress. Some obviously were local villagers, and they stood back, watching.

The man pointing the rifle wore aviator sunglasses, a U.S. Army fatigue jacket, rolled-up brown pants, and pastel-blue rubber boots like those an older woman might wear for a rainy-day stroll in Central Park. Because of the man’s western if “comically” mismatched attire, Dieter wondered if he was a friendly guerrilla. Just then, the man whipped out a .38 revolver from his waistband and waved it at Dieter, yelling menacingly. Dieter was sure this was the gun he had hidden under the log. Had these guys been the ones shooting at him near the crash site? Had they been tracking him for two days? Not friendlies, he decided. Pathet Lao.

“Nicht schiessen,”
Dieter said calmly, asking them in German not to shoot.

Someone clobbered Dieter on the back of his head with a rifle butt, knocking him to the ground. His attacker pressed the muzzle against Dieter’s neck. Dieter “waited for the bullet,” but instead was dragged to an area under a nearby tree and searched.

When one of the men found the potatoes Dieter had stolen, he hit his own forehead repeatedly with the palm of his hand, wailing something over and over. Dieter expected to be hit again but was not. It would be weeks before he learned that what he had taken from the hut were not potatoes but
opium balls. Had he been hungry enough to eat one, it probably would have killed him.

Motioning for Dieter to empty his rucksack, they let him keep almost everything, including the iodine tablets, his razor and blades in their dispenser, the pepperoni, and the water bottle. The leader pointed to Dieter’s watch, which he unhesitantly took off and handed over with a smile, as if offering it to a friend. He didn’t mind losing the timepiece as much as the compass. The man then pointed to Dieter’s gold ring. That was where Dieter drew the line. He was not giving up Marina’s ring. He firmly shook his head, and was kicked in the side for his refusal. The two men with rifles seemed to argue over the ring—at an impasse, they apparently settled the issue by letting Dieter keep it.

Dieter showed them his passport and other civilian identity papers. Pointing to himself, he chattered away in German. He soon realized that his cover story was not going to work when the oddly dressed leader and another man studied one of his papers upside down. Clearly, they were illiterate. No doubt they also didn’t know the difference between German, English, and Swahili. What they understood, however, was that he was a white man in their jungle kingdom, and therefore the enemy. The details could be sorted out later.

They motioned for Dieter to stand up and put out his hands. When he did, a length of rope was tied in a slip knot around one wrist, which was jerked up behind his back. The rope was looped around his neck, then tied around his other arm at waist level. A length of rope remained, which one of the men always had hold of. The leader gave the rope a vicious jerk, and off they went down the trail. A villager in a loincloth was their guide, and another villager brought up the rear; both carried machetes.

Dieter ignored the pain in his injured knee, but when his legs cramped after an hour of running he collapsed. Nearly done in from the heat and excursion, he was allowed water but couldn’t keep it down. When he could go no farther, the muzzle of a rifle was placed against his forehead. The man with his finger on the trigger motioned Dieter to get up. Dieter made it another mile before buckling again with cramps. The leader put down his weapons, knelt in front of Dieter, loosened the ropes, and began massaging his legs.

The two villagers, not even breathing hard, stood about ten feet away looking disgusted by this special treatment Dieter was receiving. It occurred to him that these people were in such good shape from a lifetime of hiking, climbing, and hunting in this unbearably hot, humid climate. Dieter was thankful he was not a smoker; otherwise, he would be “dead by now.”

The Pathet Lao seemed in a hurry to leave the area, and Dieter figured that their haste had to do with the planes heard from time to time flying overhead, sometimes quite low—even below treetop level over clearings. Dieter was sure these unusually low passes meant they were still looking for him. Whenever a plane approached—the Laotians had “real good ears” and always heard the drone before Dieter did—the men “stopped dead in their tracks.” He saw his captors quaking in fear of the planes; no doubt they had seen the damage that planes could inflict on ground targets. His captors would force Dieter to the ground and cover him with leaves, then do likewise themselves. No one moved until the planes were gone. They never crossed an open field, they never traveled when aircraft were in the area, and his captors never carried a rifle that wasn’t camouflaged with branches and leaves. They even stuck branches down the back of Dieter’s shirt, and camouflaged themselves in similar fashion. Dieter now understood why it was so difficult to see these guys from the air in the daytime.

Dieter began looking for opportunities to escape. The man working on his legs had placed the rifle and the .38 on the ground close by. Dieter debated with himself as to whether he should try something. He knew that to have any chance, he would have to kill them all. He decided against it for the time being, but then later chastised himself for “not having the guts” to act. After thirty minutes, he was trussed up again, jerked to his feet, and kicked to get him moving.

Dieter stumbled forward, in danger of falling with every lunging step as he struggled to keep up. For nearly seven hours—from his capture before noon until sunset—they went at double time. Their guide was changed regularly from one village to the next. Other men, many of them dressed in khaki uniforms, occasionally joined the group, until there were nine armed Laotians. Dieter worried that he had passed up his best chance for escape when he had only four natives to deal with.

They stopped for the night at a camp tucked under the jungle canopy. Already at the camp were more than a dozen armed Pathet Lao. The only one who looked like a real soldier was their leader. He wore a brown uniform, and his belt buckle had a red star. Approaching Dieter, he stood no more than a foot away and looked him up and down, apparently curious about his civilian clothes. Suddenly, he brought his hand up in a gesture like shooting a gun and made the accompanying sound. Dieter, whose nerves were on edge, flinched. Everyone laughed.

The uniformed leader wanted to see everything Dieter had with him. Dieter first showed the pictures in his wallet. The man nodded, and made a comment to someone behind him. Dieter spoke in German, pointing emphatically to himself, but that only seemed to confuse the issue. So far, Dieter had not come across even one person who could say a word in anything but the local language, so how could he expect these men to differentiate a German from an American? When Dieter got to the pepperoni, the uniformed man took a link, smelled it, and gave it back. Dieter took a bite and chewed happily. “Red Star” then grabbed it and took a big bite. He made a face, spat it out, and slapped Dieter on the side of the head. Then he helped himself to Dieter’s other dried foods and medical supplies, including the first aid kit. He also took Dieter’s passport and other papers, and placed them inside his small brown cap, which looked like the caps Dieter had seen Chinese soldiers wearing in photographs and movies.

Four wooden stakes were driven into the ground, and Dieter’s arms and legs were tied in spread-eagle fashion. With the guerrillas silently smoking their bamboo pipes not far away, Dieter, fatigued and hungry, and with sharp rocks and sticks poking into his back, was soon asleep. He dreamed of walking through an airport to catch a flight to the Black Forest, but all the planes had been “smashed to pieces.” He was convinced that the pieces would start to move around and reassemble themselves, and that his flight home would be on time. But the pieces stayed scattered on the ground, and he grew “more and more horrified.” When he awoke, his heart pounding, the sun was above the horizon.

Dieter’s face was a swollen mass of mosquito bites. He was barely able to open his eyes, and his body was crawling with ants. He hollered to be untied, but no one came for half an hour. When his restraints were released,
his arms were numb, and he rubbed them to get the circulation going. A handful of barely cooked rice was thrown onto the ground in front of him, as if he were a farm animal. He was given his water bottle, which had been refilled. His iodine pills had been taken away, but at this point he was no longer worried about cholera or dysentery; he would “drink anything.” Then he ate every kernel of rice off the ground.

As the group prepared to move out, Dieter noticed that his original escorts were gone. He was now in the company of a squad of heavily laden guerrillas with automatic weapons, bandoliers of ammunition, and hand grenades—long, thin Chinese-style grenades, usually about a dozen per man. Several Laotian women were also in the party, and each carried on her small frame a load that must have weighed fifty pounds. One native balanced a pole on his shoulder that had a large basket of rice at either end and two live chickens hanging upside down—that night’s dinner, no doubt. Another native carried on a wire a small pot that contained fiery charcoal embers, which would be added to during the day. Someone else had a long-handled bamboo fan that looked like a lawn rake. Smeared over its surface was sticky sap from a plant. As the party traversed the jungle, this man would reach up with his fan and catch a flying insect or tasty bug, then drop it onto the fire to cook. Once, Dieter turned around to see a small bird being barbecued for a midday snack.

They started out through a wooded region, then followed a trail into the jungle. The terrain was flat, and the canopy of foliage shielded them from the sun’s intense rays. Whenever they passed under direct sun, Dieter found the heat almost unbearable. He drank three bottles of water by mid-morning. In spite of the heavy loads being borne, the pace was nearly as quick as it had been the day before. They started off as a caravan of nineteen, eight in front of Dieter and ten behind him. Almost all were barefoot, and no one made a sound on the trail. It was the most disciplined and efficient marching Dieter had ever seen, with no malingerers or complainers.