Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (32 page)

Duane’s hideous screams were cut short when the blade fell again, chopping through the back of his neck.

A stunned Dieter watched as his friend’s dismembered head fell onto the trail, and blood spurted from his neck in “long, pulsating leaps.”

Dieter jumped up as the villager swung the machete at him. He ducked under the blow and threw his hands forward. The villager turned and ran up the trail. Dieter stumbled off in the direction he and Duane had come. He ran through the gully on wobbly legs, and when he made the turn at the cluster of bamboo he stepped off the trail. He had gone only about twenty feet into the jungle when several villagers with machetes ran past on the trail in the direction he had been going.

The “reality and horror” of the situation were still catching up with Dieter, but he knew one thing: he had to run for his life. Only minutes before he had been crawling, unsure that he could even walk, and now he was
fully charged, with his body and wits firing on all cylinders. He could feel blood coursing through him and was aware of every beat of his heart, which was so off the chart he thought it “might explode.” He dropped into another gully and ran for about 300 yards before reaching dense jungle. Looking back, he realized he had left deep footprints in the mud. He carefully backed up in his own footprints for a distance before leaping onto a rock. Then he moved off in another direction by stepping on rocks and piles of leaves so as not to leave prints. Getting through the dense jungle was hellish, but that didn’t matter anymore. He stopped every ten seconds or so to listen for anyone approaching, and was careful not to break off branches that would give away his movements to an experienced tracker.

After about forty-five minutes he came to a wide trail. He stopped and listened but didn’t see or hear anything. He quickly jumped across and went about ten feet into the bush, where he sat on his haunches to rest.

“It wasn’t ten seconds” before five natives, all armed with rifles, hurried past on the trail. One of them, a woman, stopped right where Dieter had crossed the trail. She faced the other way, searching the bush for any signs of movement, as the others continued down the path.

Dieter recognized that they were setting up a search perimeter, and that by “sheer chance and God’s help” he had slipped through with “seconds and ten feet to spare.” For a while he worried that the sentry would hear his rapid, deep breathing and alert the others, but she didn’t. He began to inch away until he was far enough out of the search area to believe that he had slipped away.

He recognized the area he and Duane had traveled through, and headed for the abandoned village where they had tried so hard to signal the planes. When he reached it, he flopped down on the ground in front of the fire pit, and dug carefully through the ash, trying to find a burning ember. He did, at the very bottom, and added dry tinder until it was a roaring fire. He had a new plan. Since the one plane hadn’t done anything about their waving torches, he was going to give anyone flying over “a show they wouldn’t forget.” He went around the huts tearing off bamboo and other flammables, making a big stack next to the fire pit, and waited.

That night, it was clear again and the stars were out.

And the C-130 came again.

Dieter threw all the fuel he had gathered onto the fire, then ran around like a pyromaniac lighting all the huts until “everything was burning.” He wasn’t worried about villagers or search parties, because he knew they were scared of the dark. Besides, he was so angry he didn’t give a damn. He was pissed off at the damn C-130 pilots for not seeing him and Duane the night before, and he was mad at the choppers for not coming to their rescue while Duane was alive.

The pilots overhead “saw it all right.” They made sharp turns over the burning village, and dropped twenty to thirty flares by parachute.

As they did, Dieter screamed at them like a banshee.

In little time, the village burned to the ground, and then the plane left. What would the pilots report this time? Dieter wondered. A village in southern Laos on fire? So what? Who cared? No way they would send a rescue chopper just to check out a burning village.

Dieter, now with no floor under him and no roof over his head, collapsed at the place in the bush where he had hidden Duane when he went to find the ammunition. Everything seemed much different now—colder, darker, lonelier. Dieter sobbed for his dead friend, and for himself, and for the other guys who must not have made it—after all the years of abuse they had endured. He thought of good and kind Gene, trying to take care of poor Y.C. None of it was fair.

He was awakened in the morning by a spattering of rain. He filled up on river water, then found a few small snails to eat. He went searching for a parachute dropped by the C-130 to see if there was anything he could use. His wildest hope was that they had dropped a survival radio or a signal mirror, but all he found with a spent aerial flare was the white canopy of a smaller-size parachute. He picked it up and kept going. Climbing up a hill opposite the burned-out camp, he laid out a “good SOS” in the open using the panels from the chute. Then, he sat and waited for the planes. They came all right—he counted “thirty or forty” of them during the day, as they crisscrossed the sky at thousands of feet in altitude, heading to and from more important places. That night he slept next to his distress signal, which no one saw. In the morning, he rolled up the parachute and put it inside his rucksack.

Back at the river, he heard voices. He quickly moved into the bush for cover. In a few minutes a line of men came out of the jungle. They were a platoon of Pathet Lao, seventeen in all, and each one carried a rifle and machete. They had come from the burned-out village, and were obviously searching for the runaway
Americali
.

He watched them as they looked for footprints and studied the terrain. These guys knew what they were doing. They were following Dieter’s exact path even though the footprints by the river were nearly washed away. Dieter continued to watch them, and when they left, he started following behind them.

For some reason, it seemed better to follow the trackers than have them follow him. So, Dieter stayed a safe distance back. There was something else at work here, too. Dieter was getting so weak, and knew he was close to dying, that he had somehow “lost all fear.” It seemed “strange and interesting” to watch the trackers track him. Where would it end? Somewhere, he knew, and soon.

Later in the day, Dieter received an unexpected bonus.

After the squad had stopped for a meal and then left, Dieter came out of the bushes and scrutinized the campsite. He found about “twenty grains of rice, a couple of red peppers, a green pepper, a couple of fish heads and a fish bone.” Ravenous, he ate everything. Then, his stomach fuller than it had been in days, he crawled back into the bushes and went to sleep.

The next day he had trouble walking. He kept getting dizzy and had to sit down before he fell down. His kidneys and lungs were hurting, and he was coughing up blood. He wasn’t sure where he was going, but he thought he should keep moving. And then he passed out. That’s when Duane first came to him.
Dieter, my legs are cold. My feet are cold.

The rest of the day he lapsed into and out of consciousness, and the visions kept coming to him.

The prison camp, with all the shackled men he knew…

A golden door in the sky opening and a chariot racing out…

His father, Reinhold, wanting to help, pointing the way…

Then he saw a black bear. He soon realized from the smell that it was real. The bear watched him from a distance, and followed him, not in a
threatening manner, but waiting. Waiting, Dieter knew, for him to lie down and die. Waiting for a meal. Somehow, it didn’t bother Dieter.

Many of his conscious thoughts were those of a man making peace.

Was Marina still waiting for him?

Would his mother have to wait seven years for him to be declared dead before she could collect his $10,000 military life insurance?

Would all the people he had ever wronged forgive him?

His thirst drove him back to the river, and the bear followed.

Dieter slipped on the rocks and tumbled into the water. He was so weak he nearly drowned before he was able to climb up on a large flat rock. He saw the bear on the opposite bank, watching him, standing on his hind legs, as if trying to decide whether this was the moment to come for the meal.

Starved and weak, Dieter had very little physical strength left. Dying would be easier than staying alive, and he knew he was close to crossing over. And yet he was not ready to give up. While there was no physical or logical reason for it, his will to live had not yet been extinguished.

Across from him, in the hollow of another rock, Dieter saw a brightly colored snake. Without giving any thought to whether or not it was poisonous, he reached for the snake, taking the head in one hand and the tail in the other. Pulling the snake taut, he bit it in half. The “long brown liver” was hanging out as both ends of the snake coiled around his hands. Dieter ate the liver first, then kept eating until one half of the snake was gone. The other half he put in his rucksack.

He lay on the rock to rest for a minute, or for an hour.

He heard the sound of an approaching truck in the background.

Listening closer, he realized that the familiar sound was not a truck at all.

It was a Spad, coming down low, very low, over the river.

JULY
20, 1966

So far that morning nothing had gone right
for U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Eugene P. Deatrick, forty-two, of Morgantown, West Virginia. Twice, he and his wingman had taken off from Pleiku Air Base in South Vietnam on an armed reconnaissance mission to Laos, only to be forced back. First, there had been trouble with Deatrick’s radio; then his wingman’s plane developed a mechanical problem. As maintenance personnel worked on the plane, Deatrick suggested that they grab an early lunch at the cafeteria. Afterward, they returned to the flight line, because Gene Deatrick was determined to get in a mission that day, “one way or the other.”

The genial, pipe-smoking Deatrick had been commanding officer of the 1st Air Commando Squadron only four months. After serving as an aide to a four-star general, Howell Estes Jr., for seven years—“the general would never get rid of me because he liked my wife, Zane, so much”—Deatrick pushed for a transfer to Vietnam, convinced that this was his “last chance to go fight.” World War II had ended by the time he graduated, in 1946, from the U.S. Military Academy, and he had been an experimental test
pilot in California and Ohio during the Korean War. He was determined not to miss another war. Ironically, after his years of test-piloting the air force’s hottest new jets, Deatrick’s first combat command was a squadron of A-1 Skyraiders. It didn’t take the jet jockey long to become a fan of the old propeller planes, which, like him, had just missed World War II. Deatrick came to regard the rugged Spad as “a hell of a plane.” That his squadron would not lose a single aircraft from engine failure amazed Deatrick. A couple of planes were shot down, but the pilots either bailed out or survived crash landings.

Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Deatrick, the Spad pilot who spotted Dieter at the river in Southern Laos.
U.S. Air Force

When they were finally on their way that morning, Deatrick and his wingman headed across the Thai border to Laos. The area they had been assigned was considered “open,” a term that, to Deatrick, meant “we can shoot anything we see because there are no friendlies in the area.” They had flown over Laos under such orders before and mostly “worked the trails,” catching troops and sometimes vehicles in the open when they were lucky, and otherwise leaving deep bomb craters in roads and river crossings.

About an hour into the flight, they had seen all the usual sights—jungle, scattered woods, and a few rice paddies—but no targets of opportunity. In fact, for the last half hour they hadn’t seen a road, a village, or any other signs of life. Deciding to descend and explore a large canyon with a river running through it, Deatrick left his wingman just under the 2,000-foot cloud layer. At that higher altitude, his wingman would have better communication with the outside world via his VHF radio.

Deatrick, a barnstormer at heart, made sure he did “all the buzzing down low” whenever possible. He dropped to a couple of hundred feet. When he came to a sharp bend in the river, he banked ninety degrees to follow it. For the few seconds that his left wing was pointed straight down, he was able to get an unobstructed look at the ground directly below. When he did, he saw what appeared to be a “merry little fisherman” on the river, waving. Passing over at 150 miles per hour, Deatrick went by in a flash and flew upriver for five minutes before something—“I’ll never know what”—told him to go back and take another look. He came in steeply banked again so he could look down at the ground. The same guy was on a big, flat rock in the river. He seemed to be waving something white, which Deatrick took to be “fishing nets.” On the first pass, the plane could have easily surprised the man in the river, but for him to still be there struck Deatrick as odd. Natives in enemy territory generally did not wave to Spads “fully loaded” with bombs and rockets. More often, they ran like hell for cover.

Given his speed and low altitude, Deatrick was again over the scene only briefly. He now asked what his wingman could make out from the higher vantage point. Circling above, the wingman reported: “It looks like there’s an SOS written on a rock.”

Deatrick gained some altitude and radioed to the airborne command aircraft for the southern Laos region—a four-engine Lockheed HC-130 orbiting near the Laotian–North Vietnamese border. Call sign
Crown
, the HC-130, a new search-and-rescue (SAR) version of the C-130 Hercules transport, with a crew of seven, was responsible for assembling and managing SAR efforts looking for downed flyers, and for serving as a communications link between the SAR units and other commands.

Identifying himself by his call sign,
Hobo 25
, Deatrick asked: “Anyone been shot down in this area?”

“Negative,” the
Crown
air controller reported.

“Nothing? Air force, navy, marines, Thai, Vietnamese?”

“No one is down today.”

Damn, this is just not my day
, Deatrick thought. Here he was over an area in which “everything is considered the enemy” and he’s got a man in a river waving like a fool and laying out an SOS—but
Crown
says there are no downed pilots. Deatrick knew about the enemy’s tactics to try to “suck in and take out” rescue helicopters. This could well be a trap. The fisherman could have a grenade under his clothing and wait to be hoisted up to a chopper before pulling the pin. Deatrick knew that if he was duped into calling in a helicopter and it went down, he could lose the combat command he had waited so long to get.

Deatrick got back to
Crown
. “Here’s the situation. We’ve got a nut down here who has an SOS written on a rock.”

“What does he look like?”
Crown
asked.

Deatrick had to bite his tongue not to laugh at the question. “Look, I think we ought to try to get this guy out,” he said, explaining that he would stay on the scene to direct a rescue helicopter. He had made his recommendation, but he could be overruled by higher-ups.

After several conversations between
Crown
and other commands—including a general as far away as Saigon, Deatrick later heard—
Crown
advised Deatrick that a helicopter was en route.

Now, Deatrick could only wait. He and his wingman made wide circles so as not to pinpoint the man in the river to any enemy forces in the area, “in case he was one of our own.” Meanwhile Deatrick hoped that his air force career wasn’t about to “go down the drain.”

U.S. Air Force Captain William “Skip” Cowell, thirty-four, of Honolulu, Hawaii, was sitting in a large tent at the Quang Tri forward combat base near the DMZ in South Vietnam with the crew of his Jolly Green Giant helicopter, awaiting just such a rescue operation.

When the radio call came from
Crown
, Cowell, his copilot, and two crewmen hurried to their Sikorsky-built helicopter, which had already
been prepared for flight, with an auxiliary power unit attached to start the engines. Doing the “quick-call checklist,” Cowell fired up the two General Electric turbo engines that provided 3,000 horsepower to the five-blade rotor system. Although the helicopter was unarmed, the two crewmen in back—an engineer and a pararescueman—had handguns and carbines, which they could fire from the open cabin door.

Taking off within three minutes, Cowell spiraled the helicopter straight up at seventy miles per hour to gain altitude so as not to fly low over the surrounding rice paddies, where enemy snipers might be lying in wait. Going straight up is not something a helicopter pilot likes to do, because if the engine suddenly loses power the copter will drop straight to the ground. Only when a helicopter has forward speed is it able to autorotate the rotor blades—turning them by the action of air moving up through them rather than by engine power—and thereby allow a powerless helicopter to glide forward as it descends for a safe landing. At 5,000 feet, Cowell lowered the nose to pick up speed and set the dual overhead throttles to cruise speed (140 miles per hour). During their two-minute upward spiral, Cowell had turned to the heading given by
Crown
, so as soon as they were going forward they were on their way to southern Laos.

The helicopter was soon met by two Spads from Gene Deatrick’s squadron. Knowing that the planes were on a coastal reconnaissance just north of the DMZ, Deatrick had radioed the pilots and arranged for them to escort the helicopter.

Cowell, who had been flying helicopter rescue missions into North Vietnam and Laos for ten months, liked to look out and see Spads. They were the one combat plane that could fly about as slow as a Jolly Green. Always heavily armed and ready to mix it up, Spads “put the fear of God” into anyone on the ground wanting to harm a helicopter, which was most vulnerable when hovering during a rescue pickup.

So far, Cowell had rescued seven downed pilots. He remembered every one of those missions, and also the ones that weren’t successful. Only two months earlier, his and another helicopter had been sent to a location in the Plain of Jars in northern Laos to pick up a downed air force F-105 pilot. When Cowell got there he was told the pilot was hiding by a “red-blossom tree.” Cowell made two passes over a red tree but didn’t see anyone. On the third
pass, he hovered above the tree. That’s when the trap was sprung by the enemy, who opened up with gunfire from several locations. It turned out that the F-105 pilot had been killed and was being used as a decoy. The enemy shot out one of the Jolly Green’s engines, which caught fire. As Cowell fought to keep control, a bullet—one of thirty-two that hit the helicopter—tore into the bottom of a rudder pedal, knocking his foot off it. Two Spads, one after the other, swooped underneath the helicopter with cannons blazing. The enemy guns were quieted long enough for the crippled helicopter to get away. When they returned to base, the pilot of the backup helicopter said he had seen enough and turned in his wings.

When Deatrick saw the Jolly Green Giant approaching, he radioed that he would take Cowell to the man in the river. Following Deatrick on a low-level pass, Cowell spotted the man on a flat rock with an SOS next to him. At least he was in the open; pickups through dense jungle were trickier, involving lowering a jungle penetrator on a 250-foot cable through the canopy of vegetation. Too, the helicopter had not drawn any ground fire on the first pass. Cowell went upriver a few hundred feet and dropped his two external fuel tanks, making the helicopter lighter and easier to maneuver. Then he came back over the man in the river, setting up a hover 200 feet overhead. The hoist operator lowered the penetrator, which had three metal paddles that folded up. When lowered, the paddles deployed three prongs for seats, complete with a safety belt for what was usually a rough ride up to a hovering helicopter whose whirling blades caused a powerful downdraft.

One thing that struck Cowell as unusual was that they did not have any idea whom they were picking up, since no aircraft were reported down in southern Laos that day. Although Spad pilots had “a lot of credibility” with SAR commanders and helicopter pilots whenever they asked for a rescue pickup, Cowell wondered why he and his crew had been dispatched out here in the absence of any reports of a pilot down.

Cowell received word over his headset from the hoist operator that the penetrator had reached the man but that he seemed to be having trouble opening it up. Finally, the man pulled down one of the paddles and sat on it. With the man hanging on “for dear life,” the hoist operator began hauling him up. Some sixty seconds passed. Then: “We’ve got him!” With
that, Cowell pushed the helicopter’s nose forward, adjusted the throttle, and climbed out over the river.

In the back of the helicopter, Airman First Class Mike Leonard, twenty-one, of Lawler, Iowa, had reached out and pulled the man into the cabin. Leonard, a husky pararescueman, immediately searched under the filthy man’s tattered clothing for any weapons or explosives, and found none. He couldn’t tell if the man was white or Asian, but at least he was unarmed. Leonard reached into the man’s rucksack. When he pulled out a half-eaten snake, he jumped back and nearly fell out of the helicopter’s open door.

Leonard could not make out much of what the man was saying—he had an accent and was “a little excited.” The guy “went to pieces,” grabbing hold of one of Leonard’s legs and crying, “Oh my God, I’m alive!” When he started to shake violently and show symptoms of shock—clammy skin and shallow breathing—he was wrapped in a blanket. Although clearly weak and woozy, the man would not let go of Leonard’s leg.

Cowell was heading back to their forward base when his engineer came forward and said the man in back was in “pretty bad shape.” He recommended going to Da Nang, which, unlike the forward base, had a fully equipped hospital. Cowell radioed
Crown
, passing along the report of his passenger’s condition and asking to proceed 150 miles south to Da Nang. His request was denied. He was told to return to his forward base, and that his passenger would have to wait for medical evacuation to a hospital.

A few minutes later, the engineer was back with a note printed on a piece of paper torn from a flight log. “This is our guy,” he hollered over the noise of the whirling rotor blades. “Shot down in February. Been a POW since.”