Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (27 page)

With the prison camp receiving decreased rations of rice from local villages, the guards organized supply missions to other regions to bring back larger quantities of rice. Typically, the round-trip took at least two weeks. On the journey back, the guards and village porters carrying the loads would eat much of the rice. By the time they returned to camp, there was often only enough to last a week or ten days. Rather than restrict their own portions, the guards ate heartily while cutting back further on the prisoners’ rations. When the camp ran low on rice before the next supply party had returned, the guards organized hunting parties, which often returned empty-handed. While the Pathet Lao were excellent trackers in the jungle, many of them “didn’t know beans about handling a weapon.” When they managed to bag a deer—the species in Southeast Asia were known as muntjac, or barking deer, and they did “bark like a dog”—word spread rapidly and villagers showed up for their share, which custom decreed they were
entitled to, since this was their valley. By the time everyone divvied up the meat, usually only the stomach and intestines were left. The gut was sliced open and its contents—mostly undigested grasses—were dumped onto a big banana leaf, which was brought to the prisoners, who wolfed everything down. Once the leftovers included a deer skull, and Dieter hungrily dug out and ate one of the eyeballs.

The guards would keep any leftover meat for several days until it was too rotten to eat. A guard would then bring it to the prisoners, holding a towel over his nose and mouth. Thrown onto the ground, the putrid meat was so moldy it was green; it sat there “moving and bubbling” with crawling maggots. The first time Dieter “chowed down” with the others, he vomited. After that—realizing he would die if he didn’t eat—he helped divide it into equal portions for everyone, and kept his own portion down. Not bothering to pick out the maggots, he pulverized them with his teeth before swallowing.

Other unwanted parts of a deer, such as its testicles and penis, were cut off and thrown to the prisoners, who did not waste them. The guards were able to collect tadpoles in the creek with nets. Although Laotians preferred their meat raw, they cooked the tadpoles in a big pot until the mixture was as “black and thick as highway tar.” When they brought leftovers to prisoners, it “stunk like heck” but they ate every bite.

The prisoners were getting only a handful of rice daily, plus whatever they could forage. There were rats under the floor of the hut, but they were too fast to catch. One day a snake slithered under the hut; lifting up a floor-board, the prisoners lay on their bellies and watched with eager anticipation. When it struck a rat, the snake was brought up into the hut coiled around a stick. The rat was pried from the jaws of the snake, which was then placed back under the hut to continue its hunting services. The prisoners sliced the rat into equal pieces. Everyone, including Dieter, who had been slow to come around to the idea of eating rat meat, partook of the bonus meal. Rats and snakes became their constant companions. Rats would scamper over them in the dark at night, and snakes were always dropping down from the rattan roof. Dieter awakened one morning to see a snake disappearing down the waistband of his pants, and he calmly waited until it came out his pants leg.

The prisoners felt “dizzy all the time” at the slightest exertion. The hut had three steps down to the ground, and often they “just collapsed right there” trying to get down. Besides suffering from malaria and untold other tropical diseases and parasites, they had bouts of dysentery, which left them acutely dehydrated. As they awaited the rains, they all grew weaker by the day. Dieter began to wonder how many of them would have the physical strength to pull off an escape. Although he had agreed to wait for the rains, he came to realize he had been in a “much better position” to escape when he first arrived. He had been stronger at that time, and familiar with the trails, distances, directions, and terrain. Also, for the first couple of days in camp, he still had his hiking boots, which had subsequently been taken by the guards, who hung them under a hut outside the compound with the other prisoners’ shoes. One vital aspect of the escape plan called for recovering their shoes so they would have protection from the thorns and barbs that covered the jungle floor.

The lack of food put the guards on edge. They became meaner, and quicker to beat the prisoners, who worried that the guards might look for an excuse to kill them so as not to have to feed them. The prisoners lost most of their privileges, such as being taken to the stream in the morning and walking freely around the compound. On many days there was no going outside for any reason, not even to the latrine. The guards began locking the prisoners in foot blocks during the day. With the guards in and out of the compound during the day, the prisoners were loath to unlock the blocks and free themselves. They sat in one place all day, “sweltering in the mosquito-ridden heat” and gagging on the fumes of their excrement.

Whenever he had a chance, Dieter made a point of massaging his injured hand and arm, trying to restore the circulation. For a long time it seemed hopeless. Then, one day the unexpected happened: some fingers moved. He undertook a regimen of lifting, stretching, and clenching exercises, and in a week could lift his hand. In two weeks, he could lift it twice in a row. Soon, his left hand and arm—though still weak—were as functional as his right.

Phisit got along with most of the guards and had previously won “special favors”—such as more time outside the compound, coming and going between huts, and extra food—for serving as their medic. He now saw that
the guards were getting desperate. No longer concerned only about being punished in the event of a successful escape, Phisit worried that he would not be spared if the guards decided to eliminate the prisoners to end the burden of feeding them. Phisit told the other prisoners he would escape with them on one condition: they must take the guards’ guns and be ready to shoot the guards. This was what Dieter had wanted all along, and he agreed. However, the other prisoners were still uncertain about killing the guards.

That attitude changed one night when a group of guards, including Little Hitler and Crazy Horse, taunted the prisoners with a form of Russian roulette. Their rifles—some loaded, some empty—were pointed at the heads of the prisoners. With every click of a trigger, the prisoners would jump with fright, causing much merriment among the guards. That experience solidified the prisoners’ final plans for escape. A shaken Duane told Dieter he would go along with the breakout even if it meant killing the guards. The Thai prisoner Prasit seethed: “Just leave me Little Hitler. I want him for myself. That’s all I ask.”

Everyone concurred that the sound of gunfire would bring reinforcements to the camp, so the idea of dragging the most dangerous and despicable guards into the jungle and strangling them began to catch on. They could keep a couple of the other guards alive for information about the jungle topography or to trade as hostages.

The days proceeded slowly. From the time they awakened at about 5:00

A.M
. until they were locked up for the night twelve hours later felt more like forty hours. The nights, when they were finally able to sleep, were the nearest thing they had to freedom. In their dreams, they could envision good things, although at times even their dreams were tainted by their circumstance. Dieter often dreamed of escape. In one nocturnal vision, the whole U.S. Navy came to his rescue, but, alas, without a happy ending. He waved and shouted to a sea filled with ships, but they didn’t hear him and “kept on going somewhere else.” He awoke in a panic, his heart racing. Whenever he needed extra strength, he thought about his grandfather, remembering the strength of character and willpower the baker had shown in his time of hardship and suffering. Hermann Schnuerle had survived imprisonment by the Nazis; Dieter willed himself to get through his own ordeal.

By mid-June the rains had still not come. Realizing that they were becoming weaker every day, Dieter and Duane decided to make their try before July 4, with or without the monsoons. That seemed to the U.S. pilots an appropriate date to “either be free or dead.”

A few days later, Thanee overheard the guards discussing what to do with the prisoners. It was decided that they should be shot, and their bodies dragged into the jungle to make it look as if they had been killed while trying to escape. With their demise, the prison camp would be empty and the guards could return home to their villages, where there was more food.

“That’s it!” Dieter exclaimed. “That’s the signal. I’m getting out of this joint.”

As it happened, Little Hitler and nine other guards were away on a rice-gathering mission, leaving seven guards behind. That meant seven prisoners versus seven guards: “even odds for once,” Dieter pointed out.

Without a voice of dissent, the prisoners came to a decision.

They would carry out the escape plan right away.

On March 1, 1966—
one month to the day after Dieter’s shootdown—
Ranger
lost three aviators “at almost the same time.”

Lieutenant ( j.g.) Donald J. Woloszyk, twenty-four, of Alpena, Michigan, was flying an A-4 Skyhawk assigned to a reconnaissance mission over North Vietnam. His brother, Ken, twenty-one, an Aviation Electronics Technician Third Class, was working in flight-deck control when his brother’s plane was launched.

Woloszyk’s flight leader was engaged in a series of steep turns in poor visibility to check a winding road for targets of opportunity when Woloszyk reported losing sight of him and advised that he was climbing above the cloud cover. His location at the time was seven miles inland from the coast. Upon hearing this report, the flight leader climbed above the clouds but did not see his wingman. No hostile fire was reported, although antiaircraft batteries were known to be in the area.

When
Ranger
turned into the wind to recover its aircraft from that afternoon’s launch, Ken Woloszyk was visiting a friend in primary flight control—equivalent to the control tower at an airport—located high in the ship’s island superstructure with a commanding view of the flight deck below. He saw that his brother’s call sign,
Garfish 401
, was not written in
grease pencil on the air boss’s window, where a list was kept of all the aircraft in the landing pattern. At the time, no one could tell him why his brother wasn’t lining up to land with the rest of his squadron. When Don Woloszyk was reported missing by his flight leader, a three-day search was undertaken, but no sign of the missing pilot or his plane was ever found. It would be years before Ken Woloszyk heard anything about his brother’s probable fate: “Supposedly he crashed in a farmer’s field, and was found with a broken back and died in the field.” No remains were ever returned.

While Woloszyk was losing his way in poor visibility, three F-4 Phantoms from
Ranger
were airborne in the same deteriorating weather on a coastal reconnaissance mission—known as a coastal recce in naval aviation parlance—off North Vietnam, about forty miles south of the port of Haiphong.

The commanding officer of VF-143, Commander Walter Spangenberg, Jr., thirty-nine, of Seattle, Washington, was in the lead and had the other two planes in a “tight right echelon” formation with only half a wingspan separating the aircraft. Although Spangenberg had graduated in the top 15 percent of his class at Annapolis (1948) and was the skipper of a “superlative fighter squadron”—VF-143 was known throughout the fleet as the Pukin’ Dogs, for its insignia of a winged black panther that resembled a vomiting canine—he was considered a weak stick (a poor aviator) by his own pilots. Flying in tight formation under a low cloud base with limited visibility, Spangenberg ordered a 180-degree turn to the right to reverse course. The tight formation itself—a parade formation good for air shows and other ceremonial events—that Spangenberg had ordered was badly chosen for a coastal recce in reduced visibility over enemy territory; most flight leaders on such missions preferred a combat-cruise formation with 100 feet separating the aircraft. In the low-altitude maneuver ordered by Spangenberg, it was the leader’s responsibility not to fly the formation into the water, as the other two pilots would be too busy staying “glued to the lead”—trying not to hit the plane only a few feet in front—to watch their altimeters. The lowest plane on the inside of the turn—“not an easy position to fly”—was particularly vulnerable in such a low-altitude turn; it would have to decelerate quickly while flying a shorter-radius turn than the leader in order to stay in formation. The pilot in that position that day was
an “extremely good stick” on his second WestPac cruise, Lieutenant William Frawley, twenty-seven, of Brockton, Massachusetts. A “typical Irish kid from South Boston,” Frawley was “a Southie all the way” in personality and accent, and one of the most popular pilots in his squadron. The radar intercept officer (RIO) in the backseat of Frawley’s Phantom was Lieutenant ( j.g.) William Christensen, twenty-five, of Great Falls, Montana. One of the new crop of RIOs to join the squadron, Christensen was a “big, blond, bright, easygoing kid from America’s heartland.” (For safety and training reasons, VF-143 attempted to pair an experienced pilot with a new RIO, or a new pilot with an experienced RIO.) In the backseat, Christensen should have been monitoring the instruments and calling out the plane’s altitude as a caution to Frawley. Why Christensen apparently did not do so before they flew into the sea could never be determined, although it was speculated that he could have had “his head buried in the radar looking for enemy contacts.” It was thought that a more experienced RIO would have noticed the loss of altitude as the flight descended in the turn. Indeed, the RIO in the middle plane did yell out when he realized they were only fifty feet off the water; his pilot urgently pulled up and out of the formation and climbed above the cloud cover. From interviews conducted on
Ranger
, it was clear that Spangenberg took the formation too low while turning. At the point when the other RIO called out the warning, Frawley and Christensen, flying the inside and lowest position in the turn, were “almost certainly in the water.” Although interviews were conducted with the four returning aviators, an unofficial inquiry into the cause of the accident was kept quiet, owing to the fact that it involved a squadron CO in a combat environment. Then, the incident was “just covered up” in the interest of maintaining the squadron’s morale so early in a combat cruise. Frawley’s roommate, the VF-143 pilot Wayne Bennett, who had hung out with Dieter and Spook in Fallon and elsewhere, packed up his friend’s belongings. He also wrote a letter to Frawley’s wife, Barb, telling her that under the circumstances she needed to understand that “we are not going to find him and he wasn’t taken prisoner. Bill is gone.” The remains of Frawley and Christensen were never recovered.

In mid-April, the first of two incidents happened that would mean not only the end of the war for Spad pilot Spook Johns, but also the end of his
naval service. The first incident, which Spook was positive formed the provoking circumstances that would soon cause him to be removed from the ship, involved VA-145’s operations officer, Ken Hassett, with whom Spook had argued with about continuing to look for Dieter on the day he disappeared.

Hassett was leading a flight of four Spads in attacking an enemy supply depot near the DMZ. After expending their bombs and rockets, they went down to make strafing runs with their 20 mm cannons. Spook’s guns jammed, and this made him “pissed off.” For several more runs Spook followed Hassett down just to make sure the bad guys “kept their heads down,” as the enemy had no way of knowing his guns were jammed. On one pass after another, Hassett badly missed the target. Spook kept trying to get him to adjust his errant aim: “You’re shooting low” and “You’re still low.” When Hassett said they were heading back to the ship, the four planes came together in formation. By this time, Spook was so disgusted with Hassett’s poor marksmanship and their wasted efforts that he was “steaming in the cockpit.” In full view of Hassett he did an aileron roll, an aerobatic maneuver in which the aircraft is rolled a full 360 degrees about its longitudinal axis with no change in altitude or heading. One of the other pilots broke radio silence to exclaim, “Oh, my God!”

Aboard ship, Hassett chewed Spook out in front of others. Then it was Spook’s turn; he belittled the senior officer for missing the target every time. “You couldn’t hit your ass with a banjo!”

The second incident happened a few days later. Spook was flying as wingman for Lieutenant Commander John Tunnell, thirty-two, of Vista, California. A graduate of San Diego State College, Tunnell was “fit and friendly” and “almost movie-star handsome.”

With
Ranger
operating off Dixie Station after eight days in port, the air wing’s pilots were warming up on targets in South Vietnam before returning to Yankee Station off North Vietnam.

As was customary in the south, Tunnell and Spook were working with a U.S. Air Force forward air controller (FAC) so as not to hit friendly forces or villages. The FAC, call sign
Cobra Four
, had them bombing a target under the jungle canopy at the Cambodian border. After one run, Spook pulled up and felt a “quick stutter” from the engine. Given the reliability of
the Spad’s powerful engine, he didn’t think much of it and went down for another run. As he pulled off that run, the engine started acting up.

Spook radioed that he had a “rough runner” and was heading for Tan Son Nhut, an airport at Saigon that was the alternative field for
Ranger
pilots that day if they couldn’t get back to the carrier operating 100 miles off the coast of South Vietnam.

No sooner had Spook made the announcement than his engine quit. He was able to restart it, but then it died again. What he did not know at the time was that a faulty alternating air-door motor was causing the engine to overheat. Whenever the engine quit, it would start to cool down, and Spook could restart it. But then it would heat up again and die. He dropped his remaining bombs and external fuel tanks, then trimmed the plane for a long glide. He was at 800 feet and steadily losing altitude, with about twelve miles to go to Saigon. He realized he wasn’t going to make it.

Spook looked down and spotted a dirt runway a mile or so in front of him. He radioed the FAC, who he knew was following.

“
Cobra Four
, are those guys down there friendly?”

“Yeah. That’s my field.”

“Good, because I’ve gotta put in here.”

“You better go gear up because you’ve only got eight hundred feet and a minefield on each end of the runway.”

Spook decided to take the FAC’s advice. He maintained a fast-clip glide speed of 140 miles per hour until he was sure he was going to make the runway; then he dropped his flaps and popped his dive brakes to lose speed and altitude. The powerless Spad fell from the sky and skidded on its belly for 200 feet, throwing up a plume of dust. A vehicle quickly pulled the plane off the runway so the FAC could land his Cessna L-19 Bird Dog observation plane.

At the field’s control shack, Spook got on the radio to Tunnell, who was circling above, to say he was okay.

“Good job,” Tunnell said. “See you back on the ship.”

The propeller had been “eaten up” by the earth, and the trailing edge of the flaps had “curled up,” but otherwise there was little damage to the Spad. After a new engine and propeller were installed and the flaps repaired, the plane was flown back to
Ranger
three days later, ready for more missions.

Spook’s Spad after his wheels-up emergency landing.
U.S Navy.

Spook Johns, on the other hand, had flown his last mission. He was taken that day by helicopter to Saigon, where he spent the night, and was delivered back to
Ranger
the following day. When he stepped onto the flight deck, Spook was told that his presence was required for a debriefing of his mission. He found waiting for him not the usual air intelligence officers with their maps and photographs, but a “bunch of ranking guys” from the air wing and admiral’s staff. He told them the circumstance leading up to his emergency landing, and was dismissed with no antagonistic questions or comments. That’s why he was blindsided when VA-145’s CO, Hal Griffith, stepped into his stateroom a short time later and announced that Spook’s career as a naval aviator was finished.

“I don’t want you flying our airplanes anymore,” Griffith said. “You’re done.”

Spook reeled at this news. As a veteran of two earlier cruises, he had had only two weeks left before he was due to get out of the navy in the fall of 1965, but extended his naval service for a year so he could go on the
Ranger
cruise, much to the delight of Griffith, who was happy to keep the experienced pilot. And just last month, Griffith had suggested that Spook stay in and make the navy a career. When Spook pointed out he had been passed over twice for promotion to lieutenant, Griffith said he knew someone who had been passed over twice and still made commander. Spook said he wanted to finish the cruise, get out of the navy, and find a well-paying job with an airline. Ironically, Griffith had also recently pinned on Spook his fifth Air Medal for “meritorious achievement while participating in aerial flight.” And now he was now being told by the same man that he was
done flying
? Griffith said Spook would be permanent duty officer in the ready room until
Ranger
returned to port. He would then be flown home on the first available transport.

Spook suddenly got it:
Hassett had ratted him out to the skipper for that wild-ass aileron roll
. That, combined with a little insubordination thrown in for good measure, as well as his always being on the “borderline of trouble” for countless antics in and out of the air, no doubt had done him in. Spook knew he had made the right decision in declaring an emergency and making a gear-up landing, which had resulted in repairable damage to the plane. Would the powers that be have preferred him to end up in the minefield? Or to try for Saigon and crash in the jungle? Or to head for the carrier and crash at sea? Or to crack up on the flight deck? Or to say screw the airplane and bail out to save his own skin?