Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (26 page)

Days passed with little change in the routine of the prisoners except that their rice portions kept getting smaller, leaving them hungry and steadily losing weight. Dieter was shocked, when a guard let him look into a small mirror, at how his cheekbones protruded from his sunken face, and his “former ruddy complexion was now sallow.” The prisoners were always starved for protein. As they circled the compound during their brief periods outside, they could sometimes smell singed hair, which meant the guards were cooking over a fire an animal they had trapped or shot. The mouth of every prisoner watered in anticipation, although the guards seldom shared their bounty. One day, with a barbecue in progress, Thanee went to the fence and asked if there would be any meat that day for the prisoners. No, he was told, the two rats that had been caught were only for the guards. When Thanee told the others, all of them were disappointed except Dieter, who hadn’t “yet learned to like rat,” although that time would come. He had started eating his toothpaste—peppermint or spearmint—instead of “wasting it” brushing his teeth.

The prisoners tried to keep track of the days and dates, and otherwise bring some normality to their lives. Saturdays were designated hoot-and-holler nights, and they would find songs they could sing together. Every
Sunday they would have a religious service with “Reverend Duane” telling Bible stories, and leading discussions about God. Every other night Duane turned into a teacher of history, a subject he had majored in at college and hoped one day to teach at the Air Force Academy. He would talk for “hours and hours” about history, and the prisoners “loved it” because it gave them something else to think about. Alternating nights were designated as movie night, with everyone taking turns describing favorite films. Dieter enjoyed retelling the zany comedy
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
, starring Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Durante, and Phil Silvers. Invariably, he and his listeners would laugh until their sides ached.

Such activities were the only things that kept them going in captivity; if they just sat back and thought about home all the time it would drive them “nuts.” That said, they did set goals. Dieter’s was to “get free and come home and be married.” Duane wanted “nothing else but to see his wife and girls and have a hamburger.” Gene wanted to come home for a tall glass of cold beer, and talked incessantly about a lager’s color and taste, and the right amount of foam for a proper head.

When Dieter got to the camp he asked, “What about chess?” He made a chessboard using bamboo and rocks for the different pieces. After everyone learned the game, the prisoners played regularly, and competition heated up between them.

One day Prasit returned from speaking with the guards in the yard and said that Little Hitler had told him everyone was leaving the next day. “We’re going to be released!” Prasit said with a big smile.

Dieter pressed Prasit for more details, wanting to know if anything had been said about the Geneva peace talks or about the war being over.

The only thing Little Hitler had said, Prasit explained, was that everyone was leaving in the morning for the headquarters of the province chief in Yamalot. Prasit took this to mean they were to be released.

Gene commented that all Pathet Lao, especially “that little no-good son of a bitch” Little Hitler, were “lying bastards,” and that nothing they had told the prisoners had turned out to be true.

Although Duane was excited about the move to Yamalot, pointing out that as a regional headquarters it would have more food and medical supplies, Dieter well remembered Yamalot and the French-speaking province
chief. Yes, he had been given plentiful food and had received medical attention, but it had all been for the express purpose of getting him to sign a confession. The wily chief could well have the power in these parts to release prisoners, but given his own experiences at Yamalot Dieter had little faith in that outcome. Still, he knew that the village was much closer to the border of Thailand. If they did end up there, he resolved to escape the first day—with or without the rainy season.

Eventually, the entire group cheered up at the prospect of leaving. After a small portion of rice the next morning, everyone waited in the prison yard for the guards to finish their preparations for departure. Suddenly feeling dizzy, Dieter discovered that he was burning up. All the prisoners experienced the recurrent fever, chills, and nausea of malaria—not surprisingly, given the jungle’s infestation of mosquitoes. Dieter—like everyone else—no longer had any antimalaria pills. All the prisoners could do was wait out the troubling spells and try to stay hydrated and rested. Dieter cursed his bad luck; of all the times to be sick, it had to be today.

They were soon on the march, with five guards in front and ten following behind the prisoners. They passed military troops on the move, anti-aircraft gun emplacements, and large tractors carving out a road in the middle of the jungle. When the weak and woozy Dieter lagged, Gene pushed him on to save them both from the wrath of the nearest guard, one with prominent buckteeth who had earned the name Crazy Horse for his wild and violent ways.

At the top of a crest they took a trail that Dieter had been on previously. He recalled a junction a few hundred yards downhill, with one direction going to Yamalot. When they reached the fork, they did not head for Yamalot. Dieter counted his steps, in case he ever had to double back in the dark, and reached 6,336 paces from the junction to a fenced compound. The prisoners looked at one another, and it seemed to dawn on them at the same time that this was to be their new home, and they were not going to Yamalot to be released after all.

Gene had been right: the Pathet Lao guards were lying bastards, no doubt intent on breaking the spirit of the prisoners until they lost the will or the physical strength to escape.
Not this guy!
Dieter resolved.
It won’t work with this guy! Just wait, I’ll get out of here!

The prison camp looked new, and it was easy to believe what they were told: no prisoners had been kept here before. The site was better camouflaged by the encroaching jungle than the other camp and would be harder to spot from the air. The new camp was closely surrounded on all sides by woods and jungle, and to the south a high ridgeline was visible, covered with an emerald blanket of trees. The prison compound—a clearing studded with six or seven trees—was about forty by forty feet. It was enclosed by a fifteen-foot woven bamboo fence which had one guarded gate that opened onto a dirt path. To the left was a nearby stream and camp latrine, and to the right was the route to the village of Ban Hoeui Het several miles away. Outside the fence at either end of the compound was a thirty-foot guard tower that overlooked the yard from front to back. Also outside the walls were half a dozen guard huts, including one used for food preparation. Inside the stockade were two cells: identical log-and-bamboo huts with thatched, leaf-covered roofs. They were each eighteen feet long and six feet wide. The guards split the prisoners into two groups. Assigned to one hut were the three Thai and Y.C., and in the other hut, a few yards away, were the three Americans.

The separation was fine for everyone involved, as tension had been growing between the Americans and the Thai. Many of the disagreements among the prisoners were typical of men locked up in close quarters under adverse conditions. Dieter learned that Phisit and Y.C. had once had an argument and did not speak to each other for a year; and Y.C. and another Thai were now not talking to each other. Even the two U.S. pilots had clashed early on, owing to what Dieter perceived to be Duane’s “religious hard-headedness”—though Duane, a practicing Christian Scientist and teetotaler, had “mellowed” to the point where he promised to get drunk with Dieter when they got out. Duane had been raised to avoid modern medicine, but he now said if anything happened to him he wanted Dieter to see his wife, Dorcas, in Colorado, and tell her to be sure and take their two young daughters, Christine and Cheryl, to a doctor or hospital whenever they were sick because he had decided “that’s what they’re for.”

By the time they arrived at their new camp, the main issue of contention for the prisoners had become the escape plan, with everyone having his own idea of what would and would not work. The Air America crew had
previously escaped in May 1964, only to be recaptured six days later. They had not tried an escape since then.

Dieter’s plan was to steal weapons from the guards, kill them, and collect all the supplies in camp. After that, they would hold the camp and signal one of the planes that regularly flew overhead—Duane recognized the sound of a four-engine U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules transport, overhead most nights. If that didn’t work they would find a river, either steal a native boat or build a raft from bamboo and banana trees, and float down a tributary to South Vietnam or Thailand, traveling by night and hiding by day.

None of the other prisoners, Duane included, liked the idea of killing the guards. They discussed how under international law a prisoner of war who killed a guard while escaping could be executed upon recapture. The other prisoners did not want to take that chance. In fact, Phisit, the former paratrooper, was opposed to any escape attempt. He announced that he would not assist the others or join them in their planned escape. He said the whole idea was “crazy,” and that he didn’t intend to get himself killed because of an “escape-happy guy” like Dieter. When Dieter and Duane explained that U.S. military personnel taken prisoner were required by their code of conduct to resist and make every effort to escape, and upon their return home could be court-martialed for failing to do so, Phisit “listened and thought it was funny.”

For days, Duane argued with Phisit about the escape, to the point that the two men stopped talking to each other. When Phisit, in a huff, demanded that the escape be shelved because if all the other prisoners broke out he could be killed in retaliation, Dieter blew up. “Go to hell!” he yelled at Phisit. “I’m going even if I have to go alone! I’m not going to rot away the way you’ve done for three years.”

A year earlier, the Air America crewmen had been “forced to write a confession” stating that the Royal Thai government had sent them to “invade Laotian territory and kill Laotians.” Gene, as an American, had been singled out, and he “endured more pain” than the others. Passing out numerous times, he was brought back by having water thrown on him, then beaten more. Gene finally wrote out the incriminating statement and signed his name. Now, he was all for the escape, and the three Americans decided they would stick together in the jungle. In fact, they did not share with the
Asians their plans for evasion once they broke out. With Phisit staying behind after an escape, who knew what he might tell the guards? Also, if one of the other Asians escaped and was recaptured, the Americans had no faith that he wouldn’t “squeal loud and clear to save his own skin.”

While discussions continued as to what to do with the guards, everyone agreed on the timing of the escape: when the monsoons arrived. In addition to providing drinking water in the jungle, the rains would wash away their tracks, thwarting any search party of Pathet Lao, who were excellent trackers. Meanwhile, all the prisoners—“except Phisit”—began to save small amounts of their daily rice ration, which, per Dieter’s suggestion, they first dried for three days, moving it daily to a dry piece of material. Then it was placed in one of several sacks that Gene had sewn, using scraps torn from Dieter’s nylon bag and a needle Y.C. had found several prison camps ago. The rice was stored for two more days inside an extra waste container no one used; the prisoners knew that the guards would never look in such a taboo place. When they needed room to keep larger amounts of dried rice, Dieter cut down one of the long bamboo poles holding up the roof of the Americans’ hut—with Duane and Gene “singing to cover the noise.” Using a hardwood stick to break out the thin membranes in the stalk, Dieter opened a hollow area into which they poured the rice. He then plugged the end of the pole and carefully put it back under the roof. In the other hut, the rice-drying operation didn’t go as well, and there were so many close calls with the guards that all agreed the operation had to cease, or the escape plan would be jeopardized. Everyone at least had some rice to carry now.

The prisoners became keen observers of the camp routine, looking for any openings or opportunities they might exploit to break out of the compound. Each morning, a group of guards would take the prisoners one at a time to a nearby stream, where they would dump out their waste containers. Every three days they were allowed to wash their clothes and bathe in the same stream. The prisoners were not put back into their huts until after breakfast, and could spend the time walking within the perimeter of the compound. Most days, guards climbed into the two gun towers. At mealtime, all the guards gathered outside the compound walls in a kitchen hut where the food was prepared. This was the only time the guards were separated from their weapons. Even those on guard duty in the towers left
their guns behind, and others not on guard duty left the guns in their huts located outside the compound. Everyone went to the kitchen and put food onto the turtle shells used for plates, with most returning to the huts or towers to eat.

Inside their own hut, the Americans built a detailed model of the prison camp with twigs and sticks. Pebbles of varying shades and sizes represented different guards, and they began keeping track of every move made by the guards. In a matter of days, they knew each man’s routine, and could account for every weapon in the camp. When guards came to their hut, they quickly scattered the miniature model, leaving a harmless-looking collection of sticks and pebbles on the ground.

The wait for the rains continued. The monsoons did not arrive in mid-May, as the men from Air America said had happened the previous year. Dieter’s hope to be a free man by May 22—his twenty-eighth birthday—was dashed. The delay also caused a severe water shortage in the camp; the stream from which their drinking water came turned into a “little pool of stinking water filled with wriggling larvae.” Water was so scarce that the guards washed themselves and cleaned any game they caught in the water before giving it to the prisoners. When the prisoners filled their cups, they could not see the bottom for the dirt, algae, and worms. With their thirst “putting an end to queasiness,” the prisoners drank it anyway.