Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (13 page)

As one of the U.S. Navy’s mightiest warships steamed
across the world’s largest ocean carrying the planes and pilots of Carrier Air Wing 14, Dieter worked on his plans for survival, evasion, and escape in enemy territory.

After taking inventory of his standard survival kit, he added beef jerky, dried pepperoni, sugared nuts, and some other high-protein food. He visited an air wing physician and got extra medical supplies, including salt pills to prevent dehydration, pep pills for energy, and tablets to ward off the effects of malaria.

Understanding that the steamy jungle would be a breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitoes, Dieter decided he needed some extra protection. He asked for a poncho, but was told none was available. He also could not get a big mosquito net. So he went to the ship’s parachute-rigging shop, and talked one of the riggers into working with him. Two sheets of green nylon “about a foot longer” than Dieter were sewed together with a zipper at the top. The rigger fashioned armholes for sleeves, which ended in mittens. Snipping out a large circular hole near the top, he stitched mosquito netting over the opening. Using it as a sleeping bag, Dieter could zip himself completely inside at night—or if he was on foot he could wear it as a poncho by turning it over and putting his head and arms inside. He folded
up the garment tightly, and duct-taped it inside the back of a survival vest of his own design. Inside the vest he had shroud cutters for freeing himself from a tangled parachute, medical soap for cleansing wounds, an extra fishing line and hooks, a flint and stone for starting fires, a big-bladed knife, and his small signal mirror.

Dieter next turned to customizing the Swiss climbing boots he had recently purchased, convinced they were what he needed to traverse long distances over difficult terrain. With a knife he sliced into the front of each sole, and peeled back the flap. Inside one he placed an extra navy ID card he had been given days earlier after falsely reporting losing his. Inside the other he placed the Geneva Convention card, which active-duty military personnel carried, stipulating humane treatment for prisoners of war under a 1949 treaty. Then he glued the soles back together. Next, he sliced open the leather tongue of each boot. Each was stitched back together on the parachute rigger’s sewing machine with a folded $100 bill inside. Dieter figured the money could come in handy if he was ever in a position to buy his way out of trouble.

If he went down in enemy territory and was stopped and questioned by communist forces, his plan was to pass himself off as a German citizen working in Indochina. To that end, he carried the old German passport he had used for entry to the United States eight years earlier, his birth certificate, and papers identifying him—at age eighteen—as a machinist from Calw. He tucked into his gear a cheap plastic wallet containing two pictures: one of his mother, looking like the German matron she was, and the other of himself on a motorcycle bearing a European license plate.

He also had a set of civilian clothes: a light blue shirt, tan trousers, and a lightweight green jacket. As he would be wearing his own Swiss boots rather than regulation flight boots, he would be able to do a quick change to civilian attire. His plan to establish a false identity included changing the name on some of his gear, such as the navigation bag with all his maps. Should he crash, he planned to leave them behind so the bad guys would be searching for a U.S. pilot named Wilson, while Dieter Dengler, a German civilian who rode motorcycles, was allowed to go on
his way. If the ruse failed, he would cut open the soles of his boots and show his navy ID so as to be afforded POW status, which was preferable to being shot as a spy.

Dieter decided some target practice was in order, too. However, there were not many places to shoot a gun on a ship without drawing undue attention.

Dan “Farky” Farkas opened the door to the corner stateroom he shared with Dieter on the 03 level one deck below
Ranger
’s flight deck—Farkas had pulled rank by virtue of his slightly senior date of commissioning to get the desirable top bunk. As Farkas entered, he heard muffled thuds and was shocked to see Dieter sitting in his bunk shooting his .22 pistol at a wooden chock set up inside an open wall safe, which each stateroom had for safekeeping of valuables. Each muted pop was followed by a thud as the slug embedded itself in the wood, or a clang as it reverberated inside the steel safe.

“Dieter, are you nuts? If you miss—”

“I never miss.” Dieter held up the gun to show the silencer. “It works.”

Farky had to admit that from a few feet away there was little sound.

As Dieter’s roommate, Farkas was a captive audience and heard most of Dieter’s strategies for survival, but since Farkas “wasn’t into getting shot down” he didn’t always pay attention. Dieter went on at length about a lot of scenarios, including passing himself off as a German missionary because “they wouldn’t kill a minister.” When Farkas asked if he had a Bible, Dieter produced a pocket-size one in German. Farkas did think Dieter’s “gear for survival was perfect,” and picked up a few tips for his own.

For Lieutenant ( j.g.) Dennis “Denny” Enstam, twenty-six, of Kensington, Connecticut, Dieter’s extensive preparation during their Pacific crossing was amusing as well as amazing to observe. An experienced pilot and a veteran of the
Constellation
cruise, Enstam had heard plenty of pilots talking about what they would do if they went down over enemy territory. But Dieter, whom Enstam had come to know as “independent, stubborn, and very innovative,” wasn’t just “talking or playing” he was dead serious, spending “many hours a day making equipment to take with him and packing his bags.”

Shortly after 5:00
P.M
. on January 9, 1965,
Ranger
’s sea and anchor detail threw the first mooring line to the Leyte pier at Cubi Point Naval Air Station, Subic Bay, Philippines, site of one of the largest U.S. Navy bases in the Pacific. Within twenty minutes the carrier was secured to the pier by a dozen lines to starboard, and the officer of the deck (OOD) had shifted his watch from the bridge to the quarterdeck, where a temporary gangway was swung into place by a crane connecting the ship to the pier. Only officers were allowed to pass over the quarterdeck. At another location on the ship’s starboard side, a brow was swung into place to be used by enlisted crewmen for coming and going.

First off the brow were a chief petty officer and ninety-one enlisted men in his charge who would serve on temporary shore patrol duty that night to help police the few thousand
Ranger
sailors polishing their shoes and changing into dress whites to descend at sunset on Olongapo, a city whose myriad bars offering cheap beer, welcoming hostesses, and knockoff rock bands that performed all the popular hits of the day made it a favorite liberty port.

First to board via the quarterdeck, minutes after the carrier’s arrival, was Rear Admiral Maurice “Mickey” Weisner, forty-eight, of Nashville, Tennessee, commander of Carrier Division One, who would fly his flag in
Ranger
and assume tactical command of the carrier, its air wing, and various escorts. Weisner could be excused for being overly eager: he was one of the navy’s newest admirals; the two silver stars on his collar were only five weeks old. Also, this was to be his first sea duty in nearly four years, after being stuck behind a succession of desks in Washington, D.C. A 1941 graduate of Annapolis, he had soon found himself in the midst of the war in the Pacific; he was assistant navigator of the aircraft carrier
Wasp
(CV-7) when it was hit by three Japanese torpedoes and sunk in the fall of 1942. He subsequently entered flight training and returned to the Pacific as a patrol-bomber pilot. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for sinking a Japanese destroyer escort in the Battle of the Philippines in 1944.

Ranger
(CVA-61), launched in 1956 at Newport News, Virginia, was one of four supercarriers of the
Forrestal
class, and the first U.S. aircraft
carrier built from the keel up with an angled flight deck, which allowed concurrent launch and recovery operations. This class of higher-tonnage carriers (80,000 tons fully loaded), with a flight deck longer than three football fields placed end to end, was more than twice the size of the biggest World War II carriers (
Essex
class), and provided the navy with fast-strike seagoing platforms for large air wings of 100 or more planes. The angled flight deck, invented in the early 1950s by the British navy, improved flight operations and provided pilots with an added margin of safety. The runway was canted at an angle portside across the ship’s deck to point out over the water, so that if an aircraft missed the arresting cables, the pilot only needed to increase engine power to maximum to get airborne again. The pilots were not in danger, as those on older carriers had been, of crashing into fueled, armed planes parked forward on the flight deck. Such fiery chaos fouled the deck, halted flight operations, and knocked a carrier out of action. The new carriers were more forgiving and efficient: planes caught one of the arresting-gear cables on the angled deck and stopped—or missed all the cables and took off down the angled deck to go around for another attempt. (The angled-deck design is used in today’s
Nimitz
-class nuclear-powered carriers, which have grown to 100,000 tons, and also in the next generation of supercarriers currently being built.)

Ranger
was considered a choice command for an aviation captain—only designated naval aviators command aircraft carriers—with hopes of one day becoming an admiral. A ship’s CO, known colloquially as the skipper and the old man, was responsible for keeping his ship and crew in fighting shape. In the chain of command,
Ranger
’s CO reported to Rear Admiral Weisner, who answered to a more senior admiral in command of Task Force 77, the main striking arm of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, consisting of three to five carriers supported by cruisers and destroyers.

Ranger
’s skipper was Captain Leo B. McCuddin, forty-eight, of Reno, Nevada. A 1939 graduate of the University of Nevada, he had been studying law at the University of Arizona in Tucson when he received an appointment as an naval aviation cadet in the spring of 1941. He was commissioned an ensign upon graduation from flight training four months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. An F6F Hellcat ace who shot down six Japanese aircraft over Formosa and the Philippines, scored a direct hit on a
Japanese battleship with a 1,000-pound bomb, and blew up a Japanese destroyer with eight five-inch rockets in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, McCuddin was awarded the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and twelve Air Medals. After the war, the navy sent him back to law school. He graduated from Georgetown University Law School, then served two years as a lawyer on the judge advocate general’s staff before returning to sea. His previous assignments included combat service in Korea, stints on four carriers, command of a fighter squadron, and command of a carrier air group.

When he assumed command of
Ranger
in February 1965, taking over from an unpopular captain who had “managed by fear” and “misused and abused” officers and enlisted men alike, McCuddin found the ship’s morale “in the tank.” Over the next ten months—five of them spent at San Francisco’s Hunter Point shipyard as
Ranger
underwent an extensive over-haul—about half of the 3,500-man crew departed and were replaced by new personnel. The transition aided McCuddin in putting his own stamp on the ship, and making it clear to all hands—from experienced division officers down to the lowest apprentice sailors—that a “new guy was in charge” and things were going to be different. A big part of that difference was showing that it was possible to have fun while working hard, something McCuddin excelled at in his own life. First came the faux leopard-skin cover for the captain’s thronelike chair on the bridge, showing all hands that their new captain had a sense of humor. It also did not escape notice that the new captain drove an MG roadster, which he kept parked near
Ranger
’s pier. (Before the ship left for WestPac, the sports car would be hoisted aboard by crane and kept under wraps at one end of the hanger deck.) Before long, his “famous red MG” had a reputation for “winning many races” against the San Francisco police. McCuddin engaged in regular monologues over the ship’s 1MC general announcing system, which transmitted to all internal spaces as well as topside areas—congratulating a new father or handing out kudos to a division or department, often followed with the delivery of a cake. In his chatty talks he emphasized communication with family, and reminded everyone how important it was to set up allotments that would be sent home each payday so that spouses and kids had enough to live on or for the bachelors to save. He also announced that all
crew members could visit the bridge—all they had to do was check in with the boatswain’s mate of the watch. A lot of young sailors took him up on the offer, particularly those who worked many decks below in the engineering spaces that in the tropics could reach temperatures of 120 degrees. Thanks to a suggestion made by Lieutenant (j.g.) John Moore, twenty-six, of Catskill, New York, a collector of classical music, and enthusiastically endorsed by the new skipper, a musical theme was recorded to be played over the ship’s speakers whenever
Ranger
left the dock and when it came alongside other ships at sea: the cavalry charge finale of Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” which had been used for
The Lone Ranger
on radio and television. Then came the idea of having a woman join the crew,
^*
which, in McCuddin’s view, “really caught on” and resulted in “lots of ideas from the crew on how to have some fun with her.”
She
was actually a life-size department store mannequin—a gift to the crew from McCuddin’s wife, Billie, and other officers’ wives. Arriving in early December, prior to
Ranger
’s departure, the mannequin was named in a shipwide contest held during the Pacific crossing. The winning name: Kuddles McKudden. Officially enlisted in the navy by the ship’s career information team, Kuddles soon had her own ID card, liberty card, and overnight pass. New outfits and costume jewelry were sent to the bridge by officers and sailors after shopping trips. During long periods at sea, Kuddles would be written to forlornly “like Dear Abby.” Many of the helpful responses, signed Kuddles, were written by the CO. After a faux leopard stole matching the skipper’s chair was delivered, Kuddles often was photographed with it draped over her shoulders. Pictured in
Navy News Magazine
wearing the leopard stole over a black cocktail dress, she stood beside McCuddin in his leopard chair, which had slung over one arm a western-style holster holding his .357 Magnum with custom wood grip. An avid hunter and fisherman, McCuddin often took potshots off the outside flying bridge a few paces from his chair. The caption read: “The same leopard? Miss Kuddles McKudden
and
Ranger
Commanding Officer, Captain Leo B. McCuddin, discuss this possibility on the ship’s navigation bridge during a lull in the day’s operations…. The crew knows that all is well when Kuddles is on the bridge.” The article concluded: “In short, Miss Kuddles has been the biggest morale factor to this ship since the advent of the motion picture.” And so the legend of Kuddles grew. Most important—given the Herculean task before them—was the perceptible “unexcelled morale” on
Ranger
, observed during shakedown sea trials off the California coast and operational readiness inspections. The crews of supply ships that came alongside
Ranger
for underway replenishments were shocked to see a dolled-up woman perched on the carrier’s flying bridge, and then to hear a female voice (taped by a USO entertainer) over the loudspeaker: “Ahoy on
Sacramento
. Stand by for shot lines!”