Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (24 page)

When Dieter was lifted from the hellhole
in the cave, he found himself in the custody of soldiers of the North Vietnamese army. Although they proved to be equally brutal, he soon realized they were a “different breed” from the ragtag Pathet Lao.

The Vietnamese were dressed in dark-green uniforms accented with cravats made of white parachute material. Their military training was apparent; they were disciplined and precise, and their equipment was modern and in tip-top shape. The first thing they did was inspect the way Dieter had been tied up by his Laotian guards. They did not approve, and they retied the ropes more securely but less painfully. However, the more comfortable bindings came too late for Dieter’s left hand and arm, which were
still numb from Bastard’s tourniquet torture. He would have no feeling in either for months.

The party formed up to leave. Dieter was to be escorted by four North Vietnamese regulars—who were clearly “running the show”—and three armed Laotians. He was surprised when his boots, rucksack, and sleeping bag were returned to him, although it was made clear he was not to wear the boots but to hang them around his neck. Dieter stood under guard for several minutes on an incline overlooking a field of rice paddies. Below, more than 200 young recruits performed calisthenics, led by two North Vietnamese drill instructors. Jeeps made in the Soviet Union were parked next to several wooden structures that looked like barracks. Dieter wondered how this large military training camp had been missed by navy and air force planes.

It was a beautiful morning, with crystal blue sky visible through gaps in the emerald canopy. Dieter, still in a weakened state from the beatings, soon became exhausted. Walking barefoot on the trails turned the soles of his feet into a mass of open sores. Dieter realized why his captors didn’t want him to wear his boots: without footwear, he was less likely to dart off the trail into the thorn-blanketed jungle. With the North Vietnamese leading the way, the Laotians pushed and prodded him on. Thinking more about rest and getting off his feet than escape throughout a long day of hiking, Dieter was relieved when they stopped for the night at a bustling village.

The group was directed to a large hut, where a toothless old man was boiling rice in a big pot. Dieter was untied so he could eat, and the guards dropped their equipment and settled in one corner of the hut. The old man approached Dieter, pointing to his gold ring. Dieter shook his head, but the man kept making gestures as if he wanted to look at it. Dieter finally slipped the ring off and handed it to him. The old man turned so that the Vietnamese could not see him slip it on his finger, then started to walk away. Dieter called out to him, pointing to the ring and making it clear he wanted it back. Looking furtively at the soldiers, he took off the ring and gave it back to Dieter.

After the guards had received their food and were busy eating, the old man brought to Dieter a porcelain bowl heaping with steaming rice and
cooked greens. With hand signals he made it clear that Dieter’s choice was either “food for the ring or nothing to eat.” Famished and not wanting to make a scene that would involve the soldiers, Dieter handed over the ring. He shoveled the food into his mouth with his fingers, then licked the bowl clean.

As night fell, Dieter unfolded his sleeping bag, crawled inside, and zipped it up for protection from the mosquitoes. He said a “long prayer,” then dropped off to sleep and didn’t wake up until morning.

After eating a bowl of rice, Dieter was taken by three soldiers to a “construction of bamboo pieces” from which diverted river water ran out like a faucet at shoulder level. His bindings were removed so he could wash. The soldiers were in no hurry, so he took advantage of the opportunity. Stripping down, he was surprised at how many cuts, sores, and bruises covered his body. He washed off the “filth and blood” as best he could without soap, which was long gone, and used small rocks to scrub his clothes, which he put back on soaking wet.

As the group prepared to leave the village, the toothless man was paid in Laotian currency by one of the soldiers. Dieter saw his ring glinting on the man’s finger and pointed to it. The man shook his head and walked away, counting his money. Uncertain if he should bring the matter to the attention of the soldiers, Dieter kept quiet. He felt miserable, however, about losing his “only remaining link to home.”

After a couple of hours on the trail, the party stopped at a wide river. One soldier threw a Chinese hand grenade into the water, and everyone dropped to the ground to await the explosion. After it came, ten seconds later, dozens of dead fish floated to the surface. A fire was made, and everyone—Dieter included—cooked fish impaled on long sticks. Dieter tried the special Vietnamese seasoning: red ants rubbed on the fish, which gave it a peppery taste. It was Dieter’s best and most filling meal since his last visit to the officers’ mess aboard ship.

Still upset about his ring, Dieter showed the soldiers the whitish mark on his finger where it had been. He gestured toward the village, trying to convey that the old man who fed them had taken his ring. The soldiers spoke among themselves, then packed up everything. Much to Dieter’s surprise—as well as to the surprise of the Laotians traveling with them—the
North Vietnamese turned the group around, and they all headed back to the village, now at a much faster clip.

When they reached the village they went directly to the old man’s hut. Without a word being spoken he was grabbed by two soldiers, one on each arm. A third soldier, obviously in charge, whipped out a big knife from a sheath on his belt, pressed the old man’s hand down on a wooden block, and chopped off the finger with the ring. The old man screamed as blood spurted everywhere. The soldier picked up the severed finger, removed the ring, and put the ring on Dieter’s correct finger.

Dieter was horrified. Had he any idea of the punishment that would be administered, he would never have reported the incident. After being badly treated himself, he hated being the reason for another man’s suffering. He also understood that he could not mess around with the North Vietnamese. While they seemed honest and precise to a fault—the leader always checked his watch and marked in a little notebook the times they arrived at and departed from each village—they plainly did not value the well-being of anyone who got in the way of their assigned duties. Dieter knew that if he wasn’t careful he might be “cut up to bits,” too. He had already decided that if he tried to escape from the custody of the North Vietnamese, he had better be successful. He suspected that these hard-boiled jungle fighters would sooner shoot him than chase him.

On February 14, Dieter arrived at his first POW camp. It was near the village of Pa Kung. He would later learn that this was at 17 degrees 7 minutes north, and 106 degrees 14 minutes east—some eighty-five miles southeast of where he had crash-landed two weeks earlier. Dieter had been looking forward to arriving at the camp, believing that nothing could be worse than what he had already endured and wanting to share his misery with other Americans, particularly fellow pilots. He also hoped that a doctor might be present to look at his injured hand and arm.

The setting was not what he expected. He had thought that a POW camp, even one in Southeast Asia, would look more like the one in the “Steve McQueen movie”
The Great Escape
, with uniformed pilots milling about an expansive compound, hanging out their laundry to dry in the sun, tending their vegetable garden, and busily planning their next escape.

The North Vietnamese soldiers handed him over to a few half-dressed
Pathet Lao who jumped from their guard hut with weapons in hand. He was escorted to the entrance of a stockade encircled by tall bamboo fencing. At the gate, two guards watched him approach “down the sights” of their rifles. Inside the fence was a dusty yard with several huts. The hut he was taken to was made of logs and bamboo, with nothing inside other than spider nests and cobwebs. A swinging door was crisscrossed with wooden bars. Without any other openings, the interior was dark and stifling, and its rectangular shape brought to mind a coffin. After being shut inside, Dieter sat cross-legged at the door, peering out into the empty yard. The whole place seemed “dead and deserted.”

After the guards went away, someone whispered, “Hello.”

The voice seemed to be coming from next door.

Dieter slid over to a common wall between the huts, and answered at full volume. “Hey, anybody over there?”

The whisperer warned him to keep his voice down.

“I’m a navy pilot off the
Ranger
,” Dieter said softly.

It sounded as if two people on the other side were exchanging hushed comments. Dieter put one eye up to a small hole in a section of rattan between logs. He saw part of the face of a bearded white man.

“I’m an air force helicopter pilot. Name’s Duane.”

It was all Dieter could do to keep from shouting for joy. It was a relief to hear English and to know that he was with another U.S. pilot.

“How many are you?” Dieter asked.

Six in all, Duane answered.

“How long you been here?”

Duane said his helicopter had been shot down five months earlier. “Two and a half years for the others. They’re Air America.”

Two and a half years?
Dieter didn’t know how that could be possible, and thought they may have lost track of time. He knew Air America was a clandestine airline run by the CIA. The CIA recruited former military pilots for big money—rumored to be as much as $100,000 a year. In fact, when Dieter was in flight training word had spread that Air America’s recruiters were interviewing in a Pensacola motel.

“Did you say two and a half years?” Dieter asked.

“Shhh. Someone’s coming.”

The same guards who had escorted Dieter to the hut were returning, one carrying a long block of wood that he slipped through the bars of the door before entering. He pointed to Dieter’s bare feet, then to what the Laotians called a foot trap, which Dieter could now see had a matching top and bottom about three feet long and a foot high. An elongated hole had been chiseled out in the middle.

At first, Dieter had no idea what the man wanted.

The guard finally grabbed one of Dieter’s feet and pulled it toward the blocks. Realizing it was like a medieval foot block, Dieter yanked his foot back. A tug-of-war ensued.

“Not gonna get me in there, you bastard!”

The guard went outside, leaving another guard standing in the doorway. He picked up his carbine, which he had left leaning against the hut, and came back. Pointing his rifle at Dieter, he gestured to the foot blocks.

“Put it on,” Duane said calmly. “If you don’t, they’ll shoot you.”

The next thing Dieter knew, the muzzle of the gun was pressed against his forehead. Part of him wanted to make a stand right there, but Dieter knew it wasn’t the right place or time. He nodded, and pulled the foot blocks over to show that he was complying.

The guard put down his rifle and worked both of Dieter’s feet into the opening in the middle of the blocks. It was a tight fit; they had to go in sideways, one at a time, before Dieter could straighten them. The guard hammered home a wooden pin that went through the hole on the top, ran between Dieter’s feet, and went into a smaller hole at the bottom. Then the guards left, “slamming the door and laughing.”

Dieter stared in disbelief at his hobbled feet.

“Don’t worry about it,” Duane said. “You get used to it.”

That was exactly what Dieter did
not
intend to do. He did not want to get used to being hog-tied or beaten. He did not want to get used to being a prisoner. If those were the alternatives, he would rather have taken his chance atop the mountain even if it meant dying. Good as it was to have Americans here, he did not intend to stick around.

“Hey, you guys,” Dieter said defiantly. “It was nice knowing you, but I won’t be around by tomorrow. I’m getting out tonight.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Duane said. “You’ll never make it. Lack of water will
get you. You’ll dehydrate.” He explained that there was little water in Laos this time of year and that Dieter should wait a few months for the start of the summer monsoons, when heavy rainfall soaked the region.

Dieter knew about the pitfalls of lack of water. The last time he escaped, the Pathet Lao had simply staked out the nearest water hole and waited for him to show up. He didn’t want to make that mistake again. Duane’s caution reminded him of the most important lesson he had learned from his previous escape attempt: the jungle was the real prison.

When Dieter heard the guards outside, he dragged himself to the doorway and watched as the hut next door was opened. Motioning the prisoners out, a squad of guards stood aside with rifles at the ready.

The first one out Dieter recognized from the peephole. Duane had long, stringy brown hair and a full beard. He was wearing two-piece green fatigues with
MARTIN
sewed in block letters over one pocket, and
AIR FORCE
stitched above the other pocket. The first thing he did was look in Dieter’s direction. Dieter waved through the bars. Duane nodded, then began a measured walk through the yard and down a slight embankment that Dieter would later learn led to the latrine.

First Lieutenant Duane Martin, twenty-six, of Denver, Colorado, flew as copilot of an HH-43 Huskie, a rescue helicopter assigned to the U.S. Air Force’s Thirty-Eighth Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron at Nakhon Phanom Air Base, Thailand. On September 20, 1965, Martin and his pilot, Captain Thomas F. Curtis, and their crew—Airman Third Class Arthur N. Black and Airman First Class William A. Robinson—were scrambled to pick up a downed F-105 pilot who had been located twelve miles east of the Laos border inside the North Vietnamese province of Nghe Tinh. The copter dropped into a small bowl-shaped canyon about 800 feet deep and enclosed on all sides by steep slopes. It was hovering 100 feet above the downed pilot when enemy gunners lying in ambush opened fire from two sides of the canyon. Hit in the main rotor blade, the helicopter fell straight down, landing on its side. Martin, the last one to scramble out, headed up the opposite side of the canyon and hid in dense foliage. The three men from Martin’s crew, along with the F-105 pilot, were quickly rounded up by North Vietnamese troops. Martin evaded capture that day. He had an M-14 carbine and sidearm but no signal devices or emergency
radio. The only food he carried was a single chocolate bar. Rather than head farther into North Vietnam, Martin, who was a seasoned Colorado Rockies outdoorsman, went west, knowing he had to cross Laos to reach Thailand. Weeks later, Martin was wandering in mountainous terrain in Laos, weak and delirious, when he was found by a Hmong family who nursed him back to health. For a week Duane was breast-fed by a young mother “just to keep him alive.” Eventually, the Pathet Lao discovered his whereabouts, and he was carried on a litter “by two girls for six or seven days” until he was strong enough to walk on his own. He arrived at the prison camp on December 3, 1965.