Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (29 page)

Then, like a backwoods man on a squirrel hunt, he steadied himself and opened fire. He hit one more guard through the neck as the man ran away. Needing to reload, Dieter slammed home a new magazine. He shot another guard who was just entering the jungle. The guard dropped from sight but then sprang up holding one arm. Dieter kept “banging away” as the guard vanished ghostlike into the thick vegetation.

Duane came running up carrying a carbine he had found in a guard hut. “The clip—the clip,” he stammered, explaining that it had fallen out every time he tried to release the safety to fire the weapon.

Dieter showed him why—he had been pressing the clip release, not the safety.

At least one guard had gotten away. There was also still the missing seventh guard, who could be nearby. In spite of all the dead men sprawled
on the ground—guards who would never again abuse POWs—the outcome was disastrous, given that the plan had been to capture the guards without firing a shot and without letting anyone get away. The prisoners’ bold plan to hold the camp and make air contact was no longer feasible. They had no choice now. They would have to gather whatever supplies they could find and head into the jungle.

When Dieter went to retrieve his and Duane’s boots from where they had been hanging under a hut with the other shoes, they were gone. He knew exactly who had taken them: the Thai, who had gotten there first, and had also “picked clean” all the mosquito nets and anything else they thought they could use, without offering to share with the others. Carrying stuffed rucksacks, they had been the first to leave the camp.

Dieter and Gene had an emotional farewell. Gene had found the submachine gun in the guard hut, although when he stepped outside the shooting was over. He now had the weapon slung over one shoulder. As they shook hands, Dieter looked into Gene’s face and wanted to say that Gene should come with him and Duane instead of remaining behind near the camp. But Dieter knew Gene had his mind made up and would not leave his sick friend behind. Unable to find the words he wanted to say to his fellow American, Dieter shook Gene’s hand warmly.

“Go on, go on,” Gene implored him. “See you in the States.”

Dieter and Duane took off toward the west and Thailand, although because of the dense foliage, in an hour they had “no more reference” as to direction and could not see more than five feet ahead. In their weakened condition, and unaccustomed to exercise, they started “vomiting right away.” They were soon held up by a solid wall of bramble brush. The camp dog had followed them, barking, and they were afraid he would give them away. The dog had his own escape plan, however, and before disappearing into the woods he found a dugout corridor under the thicket; Dieter and Duane crawled through after him. A short time later they reached a ridge. Exhausted, they fell to the ground. When they had recovered, Duane wanted to offer a prayer. They came up on their knees, with eyes closed and hands folded before them.

“God, please help us now. Please let us live.”

ESCAPE FROM BAN HOEUI HET POW CAMP JUNE 1966

On their first full day of freedom, the monsoons arrived.

It rained until Dieter and Duane were drenched, and until the rice they had so carefully dried was soaked, along with everything else in their rucksacks. Then, “it really rained,” giving them their “first taste” of the slogging travel that lay ahead.

They found a gully in which to walk. Even with the heavy runoff, it was easier than going through dense jungle and woods. They stopped when they came to a banana tree. Whatever fruit had once hung from its limbs had been swiped by the monkeys, whose vibrant screeches and calls were a constant, along with the intermittent whirring of cicadas—veiled-winged insects up to two inches long—and the ever-present buzzing of mosquitoes. Dieter now tried something he had seen the natives do. With a machete taken from one of the dead guards, he chopped into the trunk of the banana tree and sliced out a section of its core. Eating small chunks of it, they found it not as soft and tasty as the fruit, of course, but moist and nourishing. Before leaving, they smeared mud over the trunk to hide the fresh white cuts in the tree.

The gully led to a shallow creek six or seven feet wide with narrow banks on each side. Normally, they would not have followed a creek for fear of being spotted, but after only a day of monsoons the number of waterways flowing through the area had already proliferated. For a while they walked in the water so as not to leave footprints or break vines and branches that expert trackers could follow. However, they hadn’t counted on the mosquitoes and leeches that were drawn to the water. Soon, their lower legs were spotted with the black bloodsuckers, and their arms and faces were covered with raised bites. Around 11:00
A.M
., they stopped to rest. Sitting on the bank, they flicked off the leeches with pieces of bamboo, then washed their bloody abrasions as best they could.

They walked along the creek bank, which was covered with sharp thorns. Their bare feet had already become swollen slabs of raw meat bleeding from cuts that went to the bone. Even walking in the creek had not helped, as the muddy water obscured the bottom and they kept stepping on
sharp rocks. Dieter cursed the three Thai for the hundredth but not last time for having taken their shoes, which he considered a cowardly, self-serving act that was nothing short of a betrayal of their fellow POWs.

Within an hour it was pouring so hard they could see only a few feet in front of them. They piled up some large fronds and crawled under them. As the rain dripped off the leaves, they opened their mouths and savored the freshest water they had tasted in a long time. They rested for an hour, by which time the rain had slackened. Continuing on, they had no idea how far they had come from the prison camp. The full day of exertion in their weakened state had taken its toll. Duane looked so emaciated that the sight of him frightened Dieter, who knew full well he was also looking at an image of himself. Whenever Duane said he could go no farther, Dieter implored him, “Just one more hour.” As dusk descended, Duane, his thin, bent frame close to collapsing with every step, was “gulping air like a distance runner.”

They went a short distance into the bush and fought off their fatigue long enough to build a lean-to. The rain and wind soon ripped apart their crude shelter, and did not let up. Soaked and chilled, they talked about how they at least had a dry floor to sleep on and a roof over their heads at the prison camp. Awakened countless times by the rain and cold, they held on to each other for warmth through the long night.

In the morning, they took the lean-to apart and scattered everything in the bushes. After eating a small portion of rice, they hiked along the creek all day in the rain, stopping periodically to listen for anyone following. At one point they realized that they were hemmed in on one side by a solid rock cliff that went straight up, and on the other by jungle so heavy it would “take three days just to go a hundred yards.”

It stopped raining briefly at midday, and the sun came out. Entering a clearing, Dieter moved quickly to get a directional fix. He pushed a long stick into the ground, then took a shorter one and placed it at the end of the shadow made by the longer stick. After about five minutes the end of the shadow had moved. He put another stick in the ground at that point and waited a while longer, then did the same thing a third time. He drew a line in the ground connecting the three shorter sticks, and this gave him “an exact east-west line.” The good news was that the creek they were following
was meandering in the direction they wanted to go, strengthening their hope that it would flow into a river heading west toward Thailand. They continued on, picking leeches off their legs whenever they stopped. Even more exhausted at the end of their second day of travel, they built a stronger lean-to by using vines to tie several bamboo poles to a tree, and a canopy of large banana leaves for a roof. They carpeted the ground with a cushion of leaves, and huddled together as the rain “thundered down from the sky.” Duane awakened several times, complaining of cold feet. Dieter rubbed them with his own bare feet.

At sunrise they ate more soggy rice, and although some of it had already turned green from mold it tasted delicious to the famished men. To stretch their supply of food, and needing strength for another long day, they searched under large boulders in the creek for anything edible. They found snails that looked nothing like escargots but turned out to be “pretty good.” They cut off the top end of the shell and sucked on it, then turned it around “real fast and sucked the big end,” which caused the loosened snail meat to “snap out” so it could then be bitten off.

That afternoon, they arrived at a waterfall that dropped thirty feet into a lagoon. It was a beautiful sight, with a thin veil of mist rising as the falls cascaded into a white-water pool. At another time and in a different world, it would have been Dieter’s ideal campsite. But to the weakened pilots, it was just another obstacle, with steep walls on either side that were vine-covered rock faces. They started down, holding onto the vines “just like ropes.” Duane, who was a few feet above Dieter, lost his grip halfway down and came crashing into Dieter. The two men tumbled into the churning water below.

Dieter felt himself being pulled down by the current. He had learned a lesson as a boy in Germany when he had fallen under a waterfall and had struggled against the powerful suction, running out of breath. A friend, who dived in and dragged him to safety, later told Dieter that the trick was not to try to surface immediately, but to swim away from the suction until it lessened. Since then, Dieter had used the same technique when caught in a riptide while surfing in the ocean; he swam parallel to the beach and out of the strong current before he turned for shore. Now, he frog-kicked hard underwater, moving away from the falls. As he did, the barrel of the M-1,
which was slung over his back on a leather strap, kept hitting his head. Just before he surfaced, his lungs felt as if they would burst. Duane was lying on a flat rock, coughing up water. Dieter floated over and climbed up next to him. After they had recovered, they looked at each other impishly. Realizing the irony of nearly drowning in the middle of the jungle, they “broke out in hysterical laughter.”

A few hundred yards away they came to a bigger waterfall. Standing on a rock ledge halfway down another wall of vines, Dieter decided to rid himself of the M-1 because he was tired of lugging the extra weight. Although he would have liked to use the gun to hunt for meat—they had glimpsed a small bear a couple of days earlier—even a single shot would have brought guerrillas down on them. Duane still had the lighter carbine, and Dieter proposed that they keep it for self-defense and take turns carrying it. Duane agreed. Dieter unloaded the M-1 and tossed the gun and ammo into the water below.

When they reach the bottom of the falls, they were too tired to continue or even build a shelter. They bedded down on a pile of leaves under a rocky overhang. The night turned bitterly cold, and again they huddled against each other.

They awakened in the morning trembling from the cold, and helped each other stand up. After being wet and cold for days, they were both badly congested. They continued along the creek, which narrowed into a slippery, rocky gully, over which they “half-walked [and] half-crawled.” Blocked by a pile of bamboo in the creek bed, they struggled to get around it. When the gully came to an abrupt end, so did the creek.

Facing a steep divide between cloud-covered mountaintops, they decided to hike over it with the hope there would be a valley with a river on the other side. The ascent, steeper than it looked, was covered by “thousands of years of jungle growth.” It was an inhospitable world, with no sun or sky visible through the green ceiling, and thick walls of trees and vines blocking their way. After a few hours they had advanced only about 300 feet in pouring rain. They could see that they would have to climb another 2,000 or 3,000 feet through the dense vegetation to get over the pass. They trudged on a while longer until Dieter called a halt.

“Duane, it’s no good,” he said. “We can’t hack this.”