Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (35 page)

He continued, “Mr. Dengler was conspicuously courageous in not yielding to torture designed to obtain his signature on untrue statements calculated to reflect unfavorably on the United States. The things that he witnessed and that he endured while a prisoner, and in escaping his cruel captors, and finding a way back to a point of rescue, are ghastly and gruesome. While it is difficult to portray vividly the difficulties he overcame, it is not hard to express our admiration of his dauntless conduct, and I, for one, am proud to see that it was again demonstrated that the spirit of a courageous man is unquenchable.

“The Chair requested Mr. Dengler’s appearance here this morning only after being assured that his doctors gave their approval, and in looking at him, as laymen, you can understand why they did. In inviting him here I had two motivations: One, the Chair thought that Mr. Dengler’s conduct was deserving of the widest possible publicity and the warmest admiration; and, two, the Chair believes that by hearing firsthand of his experiences we may gain valuable information about the nature of the forces with which we are engaged in southeast Asia, the support they receive, and their motivations; I say, parenthetically, that Mr. Dengler is an American by choice instead of by birth.”

Invited to make a statement, Dieter kept it short, pointing out that this was his first trip to Washington. “My friend, Air Force Lt. Duane Martin, spent hours in the prison camp telling me about U.S. history and government procedures. I am truly delighted to be here and see our Congress in action.”

Then the questioning began, with Dieter—“his charming self,” Hill thought—enthralling another tough audience.

The next morning’s
Washington Post
reported:

Dieter was discharged from the hospital on October 7, 1966.

The next day, he and Marina eloped to Reno. During the ceremony at the Park Wedding Chapel, she switched the gold band he had worn throughout his ordeal from his right to his left hand.

Newly promoted Lt. Dieter Dengler with chestful of medals.
U.S. Navy.

On November 1, 1966, in a ceremony attended by hundreds of guests aboard the carrier
Kitty Hawk
(CVA-63), Vice Admiral Thomas F. Connelly bestowed four medals on Dieter: the Purple Heart, the Distinguished Flying Cross, an Air Medal, and the Navy Cross—the navy’s second-highest medal for combat heroism, second only to the Medal of
Honor. After reading aloud the Navy Cross citation, the admiral added: “I’ve heard the story in the fullest detail and I can say that this citation is a masterpiece of understatement.”

The navy taught Dieter how to fly jets,
which weren’t nearly as much fun for him as Spads. After spending a year and a half attached to a utility squadron at Miramar Naval Air Station in California flying A-4 Skyhawks—there was “no chance” the navy would have ever sent its most famous escaped POW back into combat—Dieter completed his military obligation in February 1968, and reentered civilian life.

Dieter soon made good on his declaration that he would “never be hungry again,” and bought a German-style restaurant near the top of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County north of San Francisco. On the menu of Mountain Home Inn, where one could dine outside on a sunny cobblestone patio overlooking the picturesque bay and its bridges, were all the specialties he loved: bratwurst, schnitzel, spaetzle, German pot roast, and goulash.

Marina and Dieter stayed married for four years. She was a “dedicated career woman,” focused on becoming a marine biologist. For his part, Dieter chafed at domestic routine—“buying furniture, having newspapers delivered and all the don’ts that come with marriage.” They gave each other their freedom in 1970, divorcing amicably without having had any children.

Dieter resided for a while with his brother, Martin, and Martin’s wife, Elaine, in Pacifica, near San Francisco. Dieter told his story of escape and survival in riveting detail to school classes and assemblies, Rotary Clubs, military groups, and anyone else who invited him to speak. At Dieter’s urging, the neighborhood kids would collect an assortment of worms and bugs. Sitting on the front porch, Dieter would sort through them, pointing out ones that were similar to those he ate in the jungle. Then he would plop them, one by one, into his mouth, chew pensively, and swallow. Martin once
saw Dieter bite into a nasty-looking black bug with a hard shell, then proclaim to the shocked young onlookers, “This one is the best! Get me more!”

Feeling at home atop Mount Tamalpais—in Laos he had always found it better to be “at the top of the mountain than the bottom”—Dieter bought an empty lot next to his restaurant and eventually built a 1,700-square-foot house with his own labor. Hidden beneath the kitchen floorboards was a storage area where he kept 1,000 pounds of rice, 1,200 pounds of flour, 300 pounds of honey, 200 pounds of sugar, and other provisions. He knew he would probably never need his emergency supply, but he found he “slept so much better knowing it’s there.”

Eventually struck with wanderlust, Dieter sold his restaurant and applied to the airlines. Taking a physical for TWA, he was asked to read a long list of medical ailments and mark yes or no as to whether he had ever had them. He placed a mark in the yes column for almost everything. When the doctor came into the examination room, he said it was obvious Dieter had put the checkmarks in the wrong column. “I’ve had all those things,” Dieter said. “You see, when I was a POW in Laos—” TWA hired Dieter anyway. He flew for ten years as a flight engineer on a Boeing 707. Taking advantage of his bachelorhood and an airline travel pass, Dieter saw the world. He would come off an incoming flight he had worked and stroll down the terminal at San Francisco International Airport, looking to see what flights were leaving for exotic destinations. Often, he hopped aboard an outgoing flight without bothering to go home.

He returned more than once to speak to the staff and students—mostly navy pilots—at the SERE command in San Diego, not only about his escape but also about the lessons he had learned regarding survival. He hoped to pass those lessons on to other pilots who one day might find themselves down in hostile country.

On a return trip to Germany, nearly twenty years after he had left, Dieter looked up his former boss, Mr. Perrot, who had been so tyrannical. Perrot wanted Dieter to know that he had passed his final test and had received his highest grade from Perrot himself. He apologized to Dieter for treating the apprentices so badly, saying he felt he needed to “rule with an iron hand” because the boys of that generation were growing up under such difficult circumstances during and after the war. But if he had it to do over
again, the old blacksmith said he would “do it differently.” He asked for Dieter’s forgiveness. A moved Dieter thanked him—for his disciplined training, and for helping Dieter become more capable, self-reliant, and, yes, “tough enough to survive.” Without those qualities embedded in him at an early age, Dieter told Perrot, he “wouldn’t be standing here now.”

An inveterate adventurer, Dieter had numerous close calls with death—“ten, at least,” by his count. He crashed his restored Stearman biplane in Idaho while doing an outside loop, considered one of the most dangerous aerobatic maneuvers. He crashed a helicopter, which “disintegrated” on impact, a couple of motorcycles, and a Jet Ski in the California delta (an accident in which he nearly drowned when he became trapped under a houseboat). Miraculously, he always “walked away without a scratch.” His mother, who prayed fervently for him while he was missing in the war, proclaimed, “It was God’s will.” She always told Dieter there were “lots of good spirits trying to protect him.”

On his world travels, he returned often to Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos, where he joined an organized trip in the late 1970s seeking information about POWs still unaccounted for. In spite of his own history in the region, he came to love the area and its people. He had seen, from closer up than most Americans—“the suffering of the villagers” during the war. He would come to regret that he was “sucked into a system” that resulted in so many lost lives on both sides.

All he had ever wanted to do was to fly, since that moment as a young boy when his heart first lifted to the skies. He had wanted to be the pilot he had seen from the window as a child, flying through the sky with such abandon and freedom. It did not occur to him until much later that he had become not only that pilot, but the bomber as well. He had “never wanted to bomb people,” precisely because he had “seen it up close” in Germany. He came to believe that the justification for U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia—to stop the spread of Communism—was flawed, and that the war itself was a terrible waste of lives. Although Dieter was not one to back down from a just fight and would have defended his home and new homeland, he would, for the remainder of his life, be “against war—any war.”

Dieter went to a VA-145 reunion in Washington, D.C., in 2000, and enjoyed seeing the guys with whom he had flown. He was spotted over in a
corner, speaking with his old antagonist, Ken Hassett. In a group picture taken later that evening, Hassett has an arm around Dieter’s shoulders. Both men are smiling.

That same year Dieter was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Realistic about his prognosis—he was experiencing a “rapid onset” of the disease—Dieter got busy remodeling his mountaintop home to suit his future needs. He built a lift from the living room to the upstairs bedroom, and ripped out the tub in the bathroom and made a shower that he would be able to roll himself into when he became wheelchair bound. He laid down plywood over the wall-to-wall carpet so he could roll easily from room to room.

After a second marriage and divorce, Dieter was now married to his third wife, Yukiko Ichihashi, a former United Airlines flight attendant of Japanese descent, with whom he seemed to enjoy the happiest years of his life. Dieter refused to wait for the inevitable. The couple flew to Europe; took a four-week motor-home trip through Washington, Idaho, and Montana; and sent Christmas cards with a picture of themselves on a deserted beach in Thailand. They kept going for as long as they could. Toward the end, Dieter told Yukiko how sorry he was that their time together was so short—as it turned out, only a little more than two years. But those years were filled with so much living—the joyous and unpredictable variety that followed Dieter around as if he had a special claim to it—that Yukiko told him they had “equaled what it takes some people twenty years to do and see.” She later explained: “Dieter was like a shooting star. All of a sudden he came into my life, then disappeared. Every day with him was a gift.”

Dieter had a request of his old buddy, Lizard Lessard, who stopped by for a visit. Dieter wanted to take a flight in his Cessna 182 that he kept parked at a nearby airfield. He would have to be lifted in and out of the plane, Dieter explained. That Lizard did, but once behind the controls, Dieter took over. With Lizard handling the radio because Dieter was becoming increasingly difficult to understand, they took off. They flew all afternoon. Dieter, the pilot, was in the sky that he so loved. It was his last flight.

As the end came near, Dieter lost the ability to eat or speak coherently (only Yukiko could still understand him). He feared ending up “a vegetable,” and told Yukiko that he felt “trapped like a tiger in a cage.” It was
worse than being in prison camp in Laos, he let her know, because this time he couldn’t get out. In an e-mail to a friend, typed with the one or two fingers he could still move, Dieter wrote: “I have looked death in the eye, so it is easier for me to handle.”

Early on the morning of February 7, 2001, a few months shy of the thirty-fifth anniversary of his escape from Laos, Dieter decided it was time to make his final escape. Yukiko helped dress him in a black long-sleeve shirt, a blue sleeveless vest, blue corduroy trousers, brown socks, and slippers. After he and Yukiko made their farewells, and without her assistance, he guided his electric wheelchair out the front door.

Alone, he rolled down his driveway and out onto Panoramic Highway, deserted at that hour. Three hundred feet up the hill was a fire station. He went into the driveway of the station and stopped. Bringing the barrel of a blue-steel revolver to his mouth, he pulled the trigger.

Dieter was buried on a cool day in March 2001 at Arlington, with full military honors, complete with a horse-drawn caisson, escort platoon, a colors team and band, a firing party, a bugler, and a flyover of U.S. Navy jets in the traditional missing-man formation for a lost pilot.