Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (23 page)

Through an “endless night” standing in cold water, Dieter thought a lot about his failed escape. He went over the things he had done wrong. He should not have gone up to the plateau without water. He should not have come down the same side he went up; there must have been water somewhere on the other side. He had to learn from his brief flight to freedom and not make the same mistakes again. Not caring what the guards heard or understood, Dieter mumbled aloud for anyone to hear:

“There
will
be a next time.”

On the evening of February 7, 1966,
a secret message was sent by
Ranger
CO Leo McCuddin to the secretary of the navy (SECNAV), the commander of naval aviation in the Pacific (COMNAVAIRPAC), the commander in chief in the Pacific (CINCPAC), and the commander of the Seventh Fleet (COMSEVENTHFLT), advising them that the search for Dieter Dengler had been terminated with negative results. “Evidence of death not conclusive. Status remains MIA,” the message said. McCuddin, the World War II ace who did not like giving up on a missing pilot, added, “Aircraft on Steel Tiger [Laos] missions will continue to monitor the area for signs of downed pilot.”

The first step in the bureaucratic process that followed involved Lieutenant Algimantas “Doc” Balciunas, twenty-nine, of Newark, New Jersey, one of two flight surgeons assigned to
Ranger
’s air wing. Balciunas had entered the navy in 1964 upon graduation from Georgetown Medical School and following a year of internship at Los Angeles County General Hospital. During the flight surgeon program at Pensacola, Balciunas soloed in a single-engine T-34 Mentor. He was also trained to handle the array of backseat duties in an F-4 Phantom as a radar intercept officer (RIO), and as such would fly twenty-four combat missions with the VF-142
Ghostriders aboard
Ranger
. His primary duty, however, was providing medical care to the pilots and other air wing personnel.

Balciunas knew Dieter from the extended time the squadrons spent at Alameda, Yuma, and Fallon preparing for their WestPac deployment, and the nights and weekends of liberty the aviators enjoyed in those locales. He had hoisted beers in honky-tonks and O clubs with Dieter, which made it all the more difficult when Balciunas received from a corpsman a copy of Dieter’s death certificate.

The typed form was considered a “rough copy” to be kept in the medical department’s files until higher-ups in Washington asked for a death certificate. Even though the document was left unsigned by the two parties whose signatures would be required—McCuddin and the ship’s senior medical officer—its factual declarations conveyed a finality that Balciunas hoped would prove to be unfounded:

Notwithstanding the navy’s need to produce such paperwork, Balciunas wasn’t about to give up on Dieter. He knew that Dieter was energetic, charming, bigger than life, and a hard charger who gave the impression he “could do anything.” Balciunas was convinced—as a friend, flight surgeon, and fellow aviator—that “if anyone could get out” from deep inside enemy territory, “Dieter would.”

With the loss of any carrier pilot, it became the responsibility of his roommate to pack his belongings. Dan Farkas began doing so ten days after the wreckage of Dieter’s plane was found, without any definitive word as to his fate. Farkas folded the uniforms and other clothes and put them in Dieter’s canvas seabag, which he took to VA-145’s locker room. Dieter’s other possessions were placed in his metal cruise box, which was locked up in a secure storage space. Dieter had told Farkas which things he wanted
sent to his mother and had given his roommate her address in Germany. The rest was to go to Marina. Farkas planned to send everything on when the ship returned to Alameda in six months.

When he finished clearing out Dieter’s belongings, Farkas sat on his own bunk. He realized how empty the corner stateroom now seemed—and quiet, too, without Dieter yapping excitedly in his characteristic staccato delivery. On February 2, the day the wreckage of Dieter’s aircraft was found and inspected, Farkas had written in his journal: “There was no blood [in the cockpit], and it seemed as if he walked away from the wreckage. We hope now that he’s making his way to friendly people, and that he’s not captured. Dieter was extremely well equipped for evasion and survival.” Still, at this point Farkas didn’t know how to feel, because he did not know if his roomie was dead or alive.

Six months earlier the fate of another friend of Farkas’s, Ensign Joseph Bates, twenty-five, of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, had been more certain. In the summer of 1965, Bates, a Cherokee Indian, had been on a nighttime training mission with his Spad squadron, VA-115. They had been practicing gunnery in the California desert, with the targets lit by flares dropped by parachute. When one chute failed to open and the flare fell to the ground still burning, Bates had homed in “with pilot fixation” on the bright light, probably believing the flare was airborne. He hit the ground while diving at nearly 400 miles per hour with cannons firing. There was little left of the plane or Joe Bates, whom Farkas knew to be a “squared-jawed character” who would “give you the shirt off his back.” Farkas escorted the body to Oklahoma, where the pilot was to be buried and where his Cherokee widow, Linda, lived with their six-month-old son. Wearing his wool dress blues in the heat of a Southwest summer, Farkas rode the train from Twenty nine Palms to Oklahoma City, unable to dispel the pitiful image of what little was left of his friend inside the casket riding in the baggage car. “Not much there,” the navy undertaker had said when he signed the remains over to Farkas, explaining that the family should be strongly advised not to open the casket: “Part of a hand wrapped in a flag and a ring finger with a wedding ring.”

Another squadron mate holding out hope for Dieter was his buddy Lizard Lessard. On the day Dieter went missing, Lessard noted in his jour
nal that he was not writing to his wife, Sharon, “in the hopes that I’ll have some good news.” After he and Stovall found the wreckage of Dieter’s plane, he again held off writing to Sharon, “hoping for good news.” The next day, February 3, Lessard and Stovall, along with the skipper, Hal Griffith, and his wingman, Walt “Bummy” Bumgarner, returned to Laos and searched for hours with “still no sign of Dieter.” That night, Lessard finally wrote to Sharon about “Dieter’s mishap.” On February 5 and 9, he wrote identical entries in his journal: “Still no word on Dieter.”

On February 10, the Swordsmen lost another pilot.

Lieutenant Gary Hopps, twenty-nine, of Rochester, New York, was a barrel-chested former high school and college football player who had graduated from the University of Rochester (New York) with a degree in economics and had received his wings in 1963 through the Aviation Officer Candidate Program. He was a veteran of thirty combat missions, most of them during VA-145’s previous WestPac cruise aboard
Constellation
. On the last day of his life, Hopps briefed for a mission as the third plane of a two-plane flight; this arrangement was common in case one of the other two Spads had mechanical problems and couldn’t launch. However, the other two planes were good to go that afternoon on their mission to drop, along a highway near Mu Gia Pass, time-delayed bombs set to detonate in the middle of the night when troops and matériel rolled southward. But rather than unload the ordnance from his plane, it was decided to launch Hopps anyway. Hopps was carrying bombs with live fuses, so the flight leader, Ken Hassett,
^*
had Hopps drop his bombs first on a “suspected truck park” in North Vietnam, which, although no vehicles could be observed under the jungle canopy from the air, had been reported as a “target of opportunity.” Hopps then followed the other two planes to Mu Gia Pass. Every squadron had a plane equipped with a mounted camera, as the navy wanted film of its missions in Vietnam; that day, Hopps happened to be VA-145’s cameraman. Hassett rolled in first, followed by his wingman, Lieutenant ( j.g.) Tom Dixon, who had trained with Dieter and witnessed
his escapes from the mock POW camp in Warner Springs. Hopps, no longer carrying bombs, followed Dixon down to film his run. Dixon released his bombs, and as he did he caught a brief flash behind him in his cockpit mirror. When Hassett and Dixon regrouped, Hopps was missing and didn’t respond to their radio calls. Dixon decided to go back over the highway, and he “got down really low” for a good look. He could see only the little fins from the back of the external fuel tanks the Spads carried—they were on the ground right near where Dixon had dropped his time-delayed bombs. As he pulled up, Dixon received fire from small to medium arms on the ground. It seemed apparent what must have happened: Hopps was “hit in the head” by a bullet or otherwise killed or rendered unconscious during his camera run and his aircraft flew “straight in.” Inasmuch as Hopps’s fatal mission was only to take footage “so the navy,” Spook Johns griped, “could do a remake of
Victory at Sea
,” it struck everyone as a “waste.” Two days later, VA-145’s backup camera—attached to a bomb rack under one wing—“mysteriously” fell off a Spad during recovery. It bounced down the deck and went over the side. The squadron’s second in command, Commander Donald Sparks, who had quietly ordered the “screws and bolts on the camera removed” so it would fall off with the first good jolt, let it be known that the next camera anyone put on a VA-145 Spad would fall off and go over the side, too. No new camera was ever installed.

“That’s two pilots lost out of twenty in the squadron in ten days,” Lessard wrote in his journal hours after Hopps went down. The reality hit home for everyone.

“At this rate,” Farkas opined, “we’ll run out of pilots.”

The shootdowns of Dieter and Hopps “engendered a whole new program” for VA-145’s bomb-run tactics; gone for good were the follow-the-leader attacks which made the last planes prey for enemy gunners on the ground. No one thought it coincidental that both Dieter and Hopps had been Tail End Charlies on their final missions. From then on, the Spads of VA-145 would come thundering in from different directions, crisscrossing over a target to confuse enemy gunners. In spite of earlier concerns, the new tactics did not lead to midair collisions, but surely saved lives.

On February 12,
Ranger
departed from Yankee Station after thirty-one days at sea, heading to Subic Bay for replenishment of stores, ammunition and fuel—and, most important to the crew, ten days of liberty in port.

That afternoon, with the cessation of flight operations and as the carrier steamed for the Philippines, a memorial service was held for Gary Hopps in hangar bay number one, located in the forward part of the hangar deck, where all work had come to a standstill for the solemn ceremony. Officers and enlisted men wore their dress whites, acceptable in the tropics—given the heat and humidity—for official functions. Pilots and enlisted men of VA-145 were present, along with Rear Admiral Weisner, Captain McCuddin, and the Protestant chaplain, Commander Robert Anderson. After the navy hymn was performed by the admiral’s “great-sounding” seventeen-member band, led by Musician Chief Petty Officer E. O. Delight, Hopps’s commanding officer, Hal Griffith, gave the eulogy.

“Gary and I both reported to VA-145 on January 10, 1964,” said Griffith, his demeanor, posture, and deep voice radiating the desirable quality known as command presence. “I soon learned that he was an outstanding naval officer and pilot. Gary was a man that one could depend on to get the job done. During the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, and on missions during current operations requiring combat alertness, Gary distinguished himself repeatedly in aerial combat under enemy fire. His courage and devotion to duty were always in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service. His dedication and loyalty to his service and country shall serve as an inspiration to each and every one of us. We have all lost an outstanding shipmate and naval officer to the cause of freedom. We’ll miss him but will never forget his supreme sacrifice.”

Chaplain Anderson offered prayers, read scriptures from the Old and New Testaments, and offered a brief message of consolation. When he finished, seven ramrod-straight marines in dress blues with white gloves snapped an about-face and swung their M-1s to their shoulders. Aiming their weapons out the open sliding door of the forward starboard elevator, they fired three volleys that echoed throughout the hangar bay.

As a lone bugler played taps, McCuddin presented a folded U.S. flag to Griffith. The flag would be sent home to Milton and Gladys Hopps, in
Oakland, California, along with photographs of the service for their son and a personal letter from Griffith.

Before
Ranger
arrived at Subic Bay, most of VA-145’s pilots had already flown off and landed at nearby Cubi Point Naval Air Station, thereby getting a head start on drinking away the bad memories, which many Swordsmen set out to do.

A few days later, VA-145’s ready room was abuzz with news of the sighting of an American POW “about 12 miles” from where Dieter crashed. The message from CINCPAC in Pearl Harbor arrived printed—as all secret dispatches in the navy were—on pink paper. Although Dieter was not named and there was “nothing firm” as to his status, the location of a Caucasian male in the hands of the Pathet Lao supplied by a “good guy” on the ground caused most Swordsmen to assume there was a “90 percent chance” it was their missing pilot. Lizard Lessard was certain it meant Dieter was alive, “running around out there somewhere.”

That being the case, Lessard pulled out Dieter’s list of electronics and photography equipment he planned to buy at reduced prices at the navy exchanges in Subic Bay and Japan, which
Ranger
was scheduled to visit. When Lizard had helped Farkas pack up Dieter’s belongings from his stateroom, he had pocketed the list, unsure at the time what he would do with it. Now he knew: he would buy the things on Dieter’s list.

When Dieter escaped, he would want to have them to take home.