Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (31 page)

Dieter decided to scout around, and suggested that Duane rest.

When he came back, Dieter was devastated. What he had found had just about caused him to “drop dead,” and he knew it was going to have the same impact on poor Duane. There was no good way to say it.

“You know that first abandoned village we stayed at a few nights ago?”

Duane remembered the place where they couldn’t get a fire going.

“Well, it’s just across the river over there.”

Duane’s jaw dropped. “I don’t believe you!”

Dieter took him to a spot where they could see the village. They both looked at the familiar layout without saying anything. What more was there to say? Obviously, they had become disoriented. They had floated on the winding river at night, then crossed over a ridge. They thought they had found a new river, but it was the same one. They had followed it back around the same mountain to where they had been days earlier.

They sat in the dark, wrapped in despair, feeling as if they had come to “the end of the line.” Duane began crying softly, and Dieter soon joined him. The escape route that was to take them to the coast and freedom had instead kept them deep in Laos. Upriver was the prison camp, and not far away were the Pathet Lao, who were surely out looking for them. In between forces of evil were impenetrable jungles and mountainous terrain.

Suddenly, “an idea flashed” into Dieter’s mind. Okay, so they couldn’t walk or float out. There was another way—something they had thought of earlier but hadn’t done much about since. Being airlifted out was their best hope, and the only way for that to happen was to make contact with planes overhead. Almost nightly they still heard the C-130 transports. Making air contact had been their original plan—and a good one, Dieter thought—had they been able to hold the prison camp.

Dieter, his spirits already lifted, grabbed Duane’s arm.

“Duane, the ammo, the ammo!”

Duane looked as if Dieter had lost his mind.

When Duane had gotten rid of the carbine, Dieter had thrown the ammunition into a pool of water. Dieter explained that he would go back and find the cartridges. They could be taken apart for their gunpowder, which could be used to build a big fire—a signal fire.

Duane seemed drained and depressed, unable to bounce back. He was barely listening to Dieter. With another malaria attack coming on, Duane wanted only to get back to the hut, lie down, and sleep. On the way back, he threw up repeatedly. That night he kept waking up, shaking violently, and pleading with Dieter to cover him. Dieter held him closely to radiate body heat. In the morning, Duane was burning up with a high fever.

Dieter knew he couldn’t bring Duane to look for the ammo but didn’t want to leave him unattended in the hut, in case the Pathet Lao showed up. At sunrise, he woke Duane, half-dragged him into the bush, and covered him with wet leaves, leaving only his head visible. Duane lay “as still as a corpse,” and Dieter wondered whether his friend would be alive when he came back. He shook Duane’s limp hand, promising to return as soon as possible, and took off.

As Dieter went along the river, he could see that the water level had risen about ten feet, then receded even more. When he came to the spot where he had thrown away the ammo, he had no problem recognizing it. However, the pool of water was now a pit of mud. He dropped to his knees and began digging through the mire. He searched for more than an hour. Then, he saw the tail end of a single cartridge. He was so happy and relieved that he kissed the muddy cylinder, then dug around for more. By the time it was too dark to keep looking, he had found four cartridges. After washing the mud off himself in the river, he crawled into the bush and found a place to sleep.

In the middle of the night he was awakened by a strange noise. Fully alert, he stayed still. Something was creeping closer, and it had a foul odor. The next thing he knew a bear was sniffing him from inches away. Dieter let out a scream and jumped up. The bear let out a growl. They fell over each other and took off, running in opposite directions.

When Dieter returned, Duane was in the same position as before. Fearing the worse, Dieter rushed over and cradled Duane in his arms. Duane’s arms clasped him in return. The friends hugged, each grinning at the sight of the other. Duane was less feverish and more alert, and when Dieter told him about finding the cartridges, his eyes lit up.

That night, with clear skies and no rain, seemed ideal to try to make air contact. Dieter decided to get a fire going early enough so he could boil water and cook something for Duane. He prepared the fire pit outside, then set up his fire-making kit. After knocking off the top of a bullet against a rock, he poured out the powder and mixed it with the scrapings. To generate a spark, he rubbed the bamboo sticks together, hard. Duane helped out by blowing gently on any spark, but it still took six failed efforts before they could keep a small flame flickering. Then they carefully added more tinder, and also a few pieces of charcoal they had found in one of the huts. Soon, they had a nice bed of hot embers.

Dieter got a bamboo container from one of the huts and filled it halfway with water. Thinking about his mother’s early lessons in the Black Forest, when she had pointed the edible plants out to him—she had called them field salad—he picked some tapioca leaves, which he had seen the Laotians eat. He put them in the pot with a leftover piece of sugarcane, a handful of moldy rice, and tree bark. The “crude stew” boiled for about an hour and was delicious. They both ate well, and felt better after the hot meal.

Their plan was to stay awake next to the fire all night. As soon as they heard a plane, they would light the native torches Dieter had made, using green vines to wrap large, dry leaves around the end of long bamboo sticks. The dry leaves would light quickly over the fire. The plan was for Duane to wave his torch in an S pattern, and Dieter to wave an O—representing two-thirds of the international Morse code distress signal SOS. They hoped that any U.S. pilot seeing a fiery SO on the ground would be curious enough to want to take a closer look.

When the first plane flew over, they did not get the torches lit fast enough. Looking up at the crystal-clear sky—with no overcast or rain—they knew it was a perfect night for keeping a fire going and signaling aircraft. They only hoped they would have another chance. They did, not
long afterward; in fact, two more planes flew over in the next hour. They waved their torches, but to no avail.

Fatigue overcame them, and they both fell asleep. Awakened by the sound of C-130 engines, they jumped up. The fire had nearly burned out, but there were enough coals left to light the leafy torches. Duane wildly waved the S and Dieter the O. This time, instead of continuing on, the plane added power and turned. The pilot seemed to have seen them, and was setting up a circle pattern directly overhead.

Duane began yelling loud enough to bring every Pathet Lao within miles to their location. “He sees us! We’ll be safe! Oh, God, he sees us!”

Dieter admonished him to “shut up.”

“I’m sorry, Dieter,” Duane said in a softer voice. “He’s circling and taking a bearing and distance reading on this place.” Duane said that this was what an air force crew did to help a rescue helicopter find the location at daybreak.

The plane dropped two flares, one after the other. As they swung slowly to earth under parachutes, the flares lit up the night sky as if it were daytime. Duane and Dieter were both struck utterly silent as they watched, trying to come to grips with the fact that they had been seen—really seen—by the U.S. Air Force and would soon be rescued. Their spirits were not diminished when the plane left.
They had been seen!

To be on the safe side after all the commotion, they hid in the bush the rest of the night rather than going back to the hut. They tamped down the fire to make it less visible. However, Dieter went back about every hour to be sure it hadn’t gone out. They had used the last of the gunpowder to start the fire, and he didn’t want to take a chance on losing it in the event “something should foul up” in the morning.

Far too excited to sleep, they talked as if they were home free.

“We finally made it,” Duane said wistfully.

“In less than four hours, we’ll be in a chopper,” Dieter agreed.

Duane said he would put Dieter in the rescue hoist first because being a chopper pilot he knew how it worked. Then he’d come up after Dieter. When they got to Da Nang, which is where Duane said they would be taken by the chopper, he was going to have “scrambled eggs and ham for break
fast.” But before then, Duane told Dieter, “there’s always food on the chopper. So we can have something to eat right away!”

By morning, the overcast had returned, along with light rain. When no helicopter arrived, Duane said, “Don’t worry.” The ceiling was too low for a helicopter, he explained. They should give it some time.

Part of Dieter wasn’t accepting the weather as an excuse, because it didn’t look that bad to him. But like Duane, he wanted to keep believing.

By noon, they accepted reality: nobody was coming for them.

The God to whom they had given their deepest thanks during the night now didn’t seem so benevolent. They were angry, cussing the pilots who had flown over during the night but had apparently not reported the sighting and had probably sat around “dry and happy in a bar somewhere” talking about the “crazy villagers who waved torches.”

“You idiots!” Dieter yelled up to the empty, gloomy sky. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know we’ve broken out?”

Duane said the other prisoners—the Thai, Gene, and Y.C.—must have not made it either, or rescue aircraft would be out searching.

After a while, Duane moaned. “Goddammit, why don’t we just die.” He then lay on the ground as if that is exactly what he intended to do. And he did, in fact, become sicker as the day wore on, with a bad cough and a high fever. Dieter realized that Duane was nothing but “skin and bones.”

Dieter’s vision had started to blur again, and Duane had told him the whites of his eyes were yellow, a sign of jaundice. So were Duane’s. Dieter’s urine had been “black like tar” for days, and Duane reported his was, too. Dieter had been frightened while relieving himself a few days earlier to see that his feces were laced with wiggling little worms. When Dieter told Duane, he responded, “Yeah, mine’s been the same for the past three days.” Dieter’s lungs were hurting again. But he was not ready to lie down and die. He would keep fighting to get home, and he was determined to bring Duane back with him. That afternoon, Dieter took an empty container to the river, and returned with water, which he began dabbing on Duane to cool him down.

Duane pushed him away. “Leave me alone! I want to die here.”

“Hell, no. You’re going to get out of here when I get out of here.”

“Go on, Dieter. I don’t want you around here anymore. I want to die by myself. Just tell Dorcas everything. I’m going to die right here.”

“Nobody’s going to die here.” As Dieter said it, he wasn’t sure he believed it. He wasn’t even sure they would make it through the night.

In the morning, Duane was willing to take a gamble to stay alive.

They had skirted around a village as they came back up the river a couple of days earlier. From what they had seen, it looked peaceful, with locals tending to their gardens, orchards, and livestock.

“I’m going back there to get some food,” Duane announced. “Then I’ll try to get away.” He said he would bring back whatever food he got.

Dieter didn’t like the sound of it. “You don’t have the strength to make it there and get back. You’re not in any condition to pull it off.”

“It’s all there is left to do. We can’t go on like this anymore.”

There was logic in Duane’s argument. They were keeping the coals burning in the fire pit, and they could keep trying to signal aircraft on clear nights. But to do that they needed food to sustain themselves.

“Okay, Duane, but I’m going with you. We’re going to go through this thing together.”

It took them two hours to get to the outskirts of the village. Most of the time they stayed low, crawling. They stopped frequently to rest. It was not raining, so it was hot. They each had an empty bamboo container and their rucksacks to carry back their bounty. The first hut they came to had a Jersey cow grazing nearby. No one seemed to be around, so Dieter approached the cow slowly while whispering in a low voice. He went down to milk it but found it dry.

They continued on a trail through waist-high grass, proceeding side by side on their hands and knees. They were both “so exhausted” and “drained” by the physical exertion that Dieter wasn’t sure they could even stand at this point, let alone walk. When the trail narrowed, Duane moved ahead. Dieter whispered to him to be careful. Usually, such a caution was unnecessary. By nature, Duane always went slowly and carefully, whereas Dieter
was more aggressive in his moves—that was why Dieter thought they balanced each other and made a good team.

“The villagers have to be around somewhere,” Dieter added softly as the trail dipped into a small, muddy gully. When they came out of the gully, the path made a sharp right turn around a cluster of tall bamboo.

The next thing Dieter knew, there was a boy carrying water containers who had stopped a few feet off the trail and was watching them.

Dieter and Duane both smiled, and said,
“Sabay
.”

At the greeting, the boy nodded and went down the trail.

A few seconds later, Dieter heard someone on his right yell,
“Americali!”
The villagers, who had been nowhere to be found, suddenly seemed to be all around “running and screaming.” A wild-eyed young man in a loincloth jumped in front of Duane, swinging a long machete above his head with both hands.

Duane was on his knees, holding the palms and fingers of both hands together in front of him, in a pose of respectful salutation practiced by Buddhists.

“Sabay,”
said Dieter, also on his knees, clasping his hands together.

The villager hesitated, then dropped the blade on Duane. It landed deep in his thigh, slightly below the groin. Duane bent over, grabbing his leg as the man brought the bloody machete back above his head.