Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (30 page)

They were both panting, struggling for breath.

“We can’t travel—over mountains,” Dieter said. “It’d take two days to get over this ridge. Let’s go back. Keep looking for a river.”

Duane commented that it was going to be a lot easier sliding down the mountain than it had been climbing up. And they did go back faster through mud and muck all the way to where the gully had ended, then retraced their steps a while longer before stopping for the night. The day had involved more exertion than any other since their escape, and at the same time they were rapidly deteriorating physically. And yet, when it was over, they had only ended up back where they had started.

Turning his head away, Dieter quietly let tears of frustration flow.

He had lost track of the date, and did not know it was July 4.

In the morning, Dieter and Duane awoke sore, sick, and dispirited.

Still retracing their steps, they were not paying much attention to where they were going; as a result, Duane nearly walked into three bright-coral bamboo vipers hanging from a bamboo cluster right in front of his face. The venomous snakes, considered among the deadliest in all of Southeast Asia, were coiled and ready to strike when Dieter yelled at Duane to duck, which he did at the last second.

At a fork in the creek, they headed away from the falls that they knew were upstream. Eventually, the creek widened and they came to a junction of several waterways. Easing themselves into the cold water, they waded to the opposite bank, hoping to find a bigger river flowing into the basin. Not far away, they came to a river about 300 feet wide.

Excited, they discussed building a raft in the morning and floating to Thailand or out to the ocean. Their spirits were lifted at the thought of no more walking. They built a solid shelter that night, even putting sides on it, and stayed warm and dry for the first time in a week.

Nonetheless, in the morning they both awakened in worse shape. Duane had a fever, chills, and nausea—another malaria attack was coming on.

Dieter had a deep, phlegmy cough and his lungs hurt every time he took a
breath. Lingering inside before going out to face the cold rain, they ate a little rice and knelt in prayer. Then they took apart their shelter, being careful to hide everything in the bush. For the next several hours they became master raft builders. Dieter cut down about twenty banana trees at the edge of the jungle and hauled them down to the river, while Duane worked at the water’s edge interlocking the trunks by driving thin bamboo poles through the soft, fleshy wood. It turned out they did too good a job, because when they tried to drag the solid raft into the water they couldn’t budge it. They had no choice but to cut it down in size, leaving room for only one man. Duane was “pretty sick now” from malaria, and Dieter helped him aboard. Duane was lying flat, and Dieter went in the water. Holding on at the back, he kicked to keep the raft going straight in the current. After about a quarter of a mile, they rounded a lazy bend.

The moment they did, they heard the thunder.

Duane yelled and jumped into the water, heading for shore.

Dieter swam his hardest and only barely avoided being swept over the waterfall. Worried, he called to Duane over the roar of the falls. Duane answered, and Dieter found him holding on to some overhanging brush. They helped each other out of the water, and went back to walking. They followed the river for another hour or so before stopping as the shadows grew longer. Too exhausted to build a shelter, they lay down on a rocky shelf and slept.

On their journey the next day down the winding river, they went through forests of vines and over steep rocky overhangs. Dieter was in the lead when he saw something move in front of them. About five feet away was a ferocious-looking lizard or water dragon three to four feet long. Its head was raised, and water dripped from its jaws.

Duane sighed, and Dieter took this to mean the same thing that was on his mind:
meat
. Dieter advanced slowly, raising the machete as the big lizard watched warily. From two feet away, Dieter swung with all his strength. The blow killed the lizard instantly. Dieter turned to see Duane “smiling the biggest grin” he had ever seen on his thin, sunken face. Dieter deftly skinned his kill, as he had done so many times on hunting trips, then sliced up the stringy, snow-white flesh, which they devoured raw. A few hundred
feet away they found a second course: a fig tree laden with fruit. Most of the figs were rotten and wormy, but they ate their fill of the sweet fruit and packed what they could fit into their rucksacks.

Dieter and Duane had both been experiencing blurred vision during the past few days, but immediately after they ate the extra food their vision cleared markedly. Their lucky day was not yet over, as they later came around a bend and nearly walked into the middle of a military camp, complete with barracks, a storage area, and huts scattered about. They hit the ground and crawled into the undergrowth. They observed the dilapidated camp for any signs of activity before deciding that it had been long deserted. They rushed to the nearest hut. Once inside, they sat in disbelief over their “good fortune.” First they had found food, and now they could spend the night off the ground with a roof over their heads. They ate more of the lizard and the wormy figs.

In their travels the next day, they found the jungle too dense to get through and the streams so clouded from all the rain that they couldn’t see the bottom and kept tripping. They had to walk along the banks, stretches of which were infested with leeches. Afterward, they took turns getting the slimy leeches off each other’s body. One leech tried to go up Dieter’s rectum, and Duane used two sticks like tweezers to work it out. Dieter found leeches on Duane’s back so filled with blood that they had turned red, and there were more in his scalp and beard.

That day they decided to get rid of the carbine, which had become too heavy. Duane bent the barrel between two large rocks, then hid the weapon under a log. Dieter tossed the ammunition into a shallow pool.

They spent the night on the ground, “right in the sand and the mud.” It rained nearly nonstop, and Duane was getting sicker. When he said he couldn’t keep going, Dieter tried to cheer him up. They slept fitfully after eating a small amount of rice and the last of the lizard. By first light in the morning, they spotted the roofs of three huts a few hundred feet away. After they crawled into the bush for cover, Dieter said he would check out the huts and told Duane to stay put.

Dieter crawled through high grass until he was close enough to reconnoiter. He had learned that during the rice-growing season Laotians built labor camps near paddy fields—rice accounted for 80 percent of Laos’s
agriculture—and after the crop was harvested they went home with the rice. This looked to be such a camp, now deserted.

Dieter went back for Duane, who had fallen asleep in wet leaves. Duane had a high fever, and Dieter was glad to be able to get a roof over his head. With Duane “fighting just to keep from passing out,” Dieter draped his arms over his shoulders. With much of Duane’s weight on Dieter’s back, they worked their way through the bush. Once inside a hut, Duane collapsed. His breathing was ragged and labored, and his eyes were sunk deeply into dark sockets.

“Dieter,” Duane said hoarsely. “I’m going to die, I know it. Promise me you’ll see that Dorcas is all right.”

“Sure, buddy, but you’re not going to die. Hell, I’m sick, too, but we’ll both be okay.”

When they heard planes that night, Dieter tried to start a fire. If they could attract the attention of the pilots with a bonfire, it might lead to an aerial search in the morning. As he had seen the natives do, Dieter split a long bamboo tube in half and laid one half on its side, supported by several sticks pushed into the ground. Inside the tube he placed bamboo scrapings. He cut a notch in the other half of the tube. He rubbed the notched half against the other half, and kept rubbing—back and forth, rapidly—trying to generate the friction needed to get the scrapings to smolder, so he could blow on them to get a flame that could be fed more dry tinder. But it was for naught, as he was too weak to keep rubbing the sticks at the speed required, and Duane was not of much help.

In the morning they were “all of a sudden not hungry anymore.” This was just as well, because there was little rice left. Deciding to head back to the river, they had gone about half a mile when they came across a well-constructed native raft made of bamboo. It was covered with rattan, indicating that someone was trying to conceal it. With a pointed bow and stern, it looked much like a canoe. Finding the launch gave them hope that the river was navigable. If so, that meant they could make some distance floating instead of walking. Deciding it would be safer to travel on the river at night, they went into the jungle about thirty feet away and found a place to wait for dark. It was still only mid-morning, so they had a full day of rest, which they both very much needed.

That night was “completely dark, no moon, no stars, nothing,” when they pushed the raft into the water. Dieter and Duane both climbed inside. To their surprise, they were sitting in several inches of water. While not watertight, the raft was “very buoyant” and stable. They had difficulty pushing off from shore, even with the long bamboo pole Dieter found in the raft. Once they got into the current, though, they started moving. They heard voices ashore, and knew they were passing a village. They silently floated past two more villages in the dark. Around midnight the moon rose, shining its silvery light across the water.

They heard the rapids before seeing them, and soon were among large rocks, which Dieter was able to keep them away from with the pole. The river began to narrow, and as it did the current quickened. They floated into a wide, slow-moving basin that seemed to offer a calmer ride. That serenity, however, was short-lived. They heard the now familiar thundering of a waterfall, and before they could react, the raft shot over the falls. They hung in the air “completely free of the water,” then the raft went down nose-first like a dive-bombing Spad. When they struck the water, Dieter, who was in front, was thrown free, and Duane came flying out close behind. They grabbed hold of the raft, and as it turned slowly in a large pool, they were able to climb back in. The raft had lost pieces of its frame, but it still floated. An hour later, another set of rapids and rocks did it in, and the raft started “splitting into pieces.” Before Dieter and Duane could get out, they skipped over more rocks. They heard someone yell, and saw that they had hit a fisherman standing in knee-deep water. When he saw the two ghostly apparitions in the raft, he dropped his net and ran screaming for shore.

As the sun began to rise, Dieter and Duane found a hiding place in dense foliage on the opposite side of the river. They occasionally heard voices on the other bank, and wondered if, based on the fisherman’s reported sighting of white men, a local search party had been organized to find them. Then, things quieted down. Although they had lain down in an area full of leeches, they didn’t have the strength to move and said “to hell with it.” They slept until early afternoon.

When he awakened, Dieter had a new plan. Now that they had been spotted floating down the river, that mode of transportation was too dangerous. He pointed to a ridge to the east, and said that on the other side was
North Vietnam, where there are “bigger rivers” than in landlocked Laos. From where they were, Dieter went on, it was more than 100 miles to Thailand. But once they got into Vietnam, they would be only twenty miles or so from the coast. The more he talked, the more excited they became about heading to the coast.

They even had the “mad idea” that once they reached the coast they could build a raft and float out to Dieter’s aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin. To the two desperate men gamely trying to hold onto hope, the “impossible seemed possible.”

They took off for the ridge. It had stopped raining and was hot, and a flying insect—a kind they hadn’t seen before, which had inch-long hind legs and was covered with white dots—seemed to be following them. The bugs did not bite them, but buzzed incessantly around their heads, obscuring their field of vision. Only when they got into jungle so dense that the large insects couldn’t follow did they lose these unwanted traveling companions.

It was a gentle slope up the ridge, and they made good time. When they reached the summit, a view of many miles stretched out before them. To the east was a succession of ridges like the one they had climbed, and about fifteen miles away was one taller than all the rest.

“That’s it!” Duane said joyously. “That’s the great divide! We get on top of that son of a gun and we’ll see the ocean.”

“Okay, let’s make it,” Dieter said.

The sun had dipped in the west behind them, and darkness came as they went down the other side of the ridge. Losing their footing, they did more “falling and falling” than walking or crawling, so much so that their clothes were ripped to shreds by the time they made it down. The first thing they saw at the base of the ridge was a creek—just a trickle of water only a couple of inches deep—and they both dropped face-first into the stream and drank until their thirst was satisfied.

They followed the creek, which soon led to a wide river.

“A new river,” Dieter announced. “Thank God.”

Their plan seemed to be working, and they felt they were making progress. They would follow this river to the next ridge, then head over that toward the coast. They even found lodging: a small abandoned village along the river. They crawled into a hut and went to sleep.

The next day they came across a cornfield. They jumped into the field like schoolchildren at a pumpkin patch, and “ate and ate,” probably “a hundred ears.” The meal gave them renewed strength. When they came to another ridge, they didn’t think twice about the climb, even in the heavy rain. It took them until mid-afternoon to go down the other side, this time without any pratfalls. Once down, they walked right into a garden of sugarcane. They enjoyed another meal, which replenished their energy, then loaded their rucksacks with their spoils.