Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (8 page)

Dieter and the other students in his Skyraider class went through several weeks of A-1 ground school, learning about the instruments, engine, emergency procedures, flight characteristics, fuel loads, and even how to start the plane. Then, they went to the flight line.

The A-1 Skyraider was not like the forgiving, less-powerful trainers they had been flying. Big and powerful, the Spad had to be flown with a sure hand. With throttle, mixture, rudder, aerodynamic, and torque characteristics to monitor, the pilot had his hands full with an airplane that could be unforgiving if he made an error in judgment. The problems could begin as early as ignition-on, as the Spad’s engine was known for difficult starts. Pushing the starter button, the pilot turned the engine through four complete rotations of the four-bladed propeller. Then, on a thumbs-up from the crew chief, he flipped the magneto switch to turn on the ignition, waited one second, pressed the primer button for a richer fuel mixture, and
as the engine caught adjusted the mixture. If this process was done too quickly, the engine would backfire and possibly damage the fuel induction system. Too big a backfire would require shutting the plane down until the engine could be inspected. If the pilot eased the throttle forward too slowly, the engine would die and have to be restarted, usually with an auxiliary power unit to save its battery. Even when everything went right with the start-up, a hallmark of the Spad was the smoke clouds pouring from the engine cowling like an old locomotive chugging uphill.

Unlike their first flights in T-34s and T-28s, newly assigned Spad pilots were on their own from the beginning, as there was only a single seat in the cockpit. The instructors, however, did not let them go far. In fact, their first ride in the plane was called a “taxi and abort.” They rolled down the runway until they got up to takeoff speed—with the plane’s tail in the air but the main landing gear on the ground—before aborting the takeoff. Unless they had a foot down on the right rudder pedal when they were at full power, the plane would veer to the left, owing to the torque caused by the propeller, which spun counterclockwise and sent back a strong prop wash against the tail and rudder. On the runway, the plane would go off only into the dirt infield. The problem was that the Spad would do the same thing in the air, a dangerous tendency that could lead to a 180-degree snap roll to the left and possible loss of control. The flight instructors began by showing the students how and when to use right rudder to avert sudden and disastrous turns to the left.

Even taxiing an A-1 was tricky. Unlike the trainers the students had flown, which sat parallel to the ground on tricycle landing gear, the Skyraider was a “tail dragger” with a main gear under each wing and a smaller wheel under the tail. The tail-down, nose-up attitude meant that a pilot could not see what was in front of him while he was on the ground, even though the plane had a bubble canopy—first designed during World War II—to provide better all-around visibility in the air. The only way to see ahead while on the ground was for the pilot to steer in S patterns and look out to each side as he went down the taxiway.

Once Dieter showed he could handle the taxi-and-abort exercise, he took off in a flight of three other Skyraiders, two flown by students and one by an instructor. Cautioned at first not to go higher than 500 feet because
other aircraft were approaching the field at 1,000 feet, the Spads flew low over a drawbridge, then headed out over the Gulf. The instructor had them climb to 8,000 feet and level off. When they were forty miles south of Corpus Christi, the instructor told one student to begin orbiting, and took the others with him farther south. Every twenty miles he left another student orbiting at 8,000 feet.

In the air, Dieter felt at home in the Skyraider. The layout of the cockpit instruments—similar to that in many World War II aircraft—was basic and made the instruments easy to read. The stick and throttle both felt solid and reliable; and the aircraft was responsive, with a big engine under the hood. As Dieter orbited, awaiting further directions, he had an idea that he was going to have some fun flying a Spad. He couldn’t wait to have his first dogfight with another student.

The instructor had a different experience in mind.

One at a time, as the instructor observed from nearby, each student was told to lower his landing gear and flaps as if for landing. The students were directed to hold their altitude and pull slowly back on the throttle until they were descending at 700 feet per minute. Then, they were to take their feet off both rudder pedals and place them flat on the floor. “Now jam the throttle all the way forward to the stop.” Amid the thunderous roar of the super-charged engine, the plane snap-rolled to the left and in a second was inverted. With plenty of altitude there was no problem dropping the nose, regaining speed, and pulling up into level flight. But that was the point: it took altitude and time. Back at the base, the instructor analyzed the exercise aloud, explaining that if they were on final approach to a carrier—with wheels and flaps down and descending toward the flight deck—and were suddenly waved off and went to full throttle without adding hard right rudder, the same thing would happen. Only then, with insufficient altitude to recover, they would snap-roll inverted into the ocean. And so went the vital lesson of “the right leg thing.” A Spad pilot soon developed muscles that made his right leg bigger and stronger than his left leg.

By his third month of advanced flight training, Dieter was practicing aerial bombing at a military range situated on a deserted section of Padre Island—the world’s longest barrier island, stretching for 130 miles off the southern coast of Texas. His Skyraider carried nonexplosive Mark 76
practice bombs, weighing twenty-five pounds apiece and loaded with a smoke cartridge to mark the point of impact. While it was usually impossible for a pilot to see his own hits or misses, his bombing accuracy was scored by a range observer on the ground. The technique being practiced was one the Skyraider had been designed to perform: dive-bombing, in which the plane made a nearly vertical dive at the target and released its bombs on target at high speed. Used during World War II, the technique allowed the pilot to place bombs accurately without a complicated, precision bombsight while limiting exposure to antiaircraft fire, which was generally more effective against horizontal bomb runs.

One morning when Dieter reached Padre Island, it was obscured by scattered clouds. Nevertheless, he rolled his plane into a dive and waited to break out of the clouds—and waited. He was soon in a screaming dive. When he broke through the overcast, he was much too low. He dropped his bomb and yanked back hard on the stick to bring the plane out of the steep dive, pulling five g’s as he did.

“That was scary—I barely made it,” Dieter admitted later to a fellow flight student, Doug Haines, twenty-four, a recent graduate of Iowa State University. Naval ROTC graduates like Haines—already commissioned officers—were trained separately from NAVCAD students at Pensacola, and Haines and Dieter had not met before Corpus Christi. Hearing about Dieter’s nearly fatal dive through the clouds, Haines considered it “pure undisciplined behavior” because they had been warned not to dive through an overcast—and the former ROTC platoon leader decided that the guy with the strange-sounding name and accent had a broad streak of the dare-devil. Still, from what Haines had seen in training, Dieter gave every indication of being a “good navy pilot,” which to Haines meant he had to be “pretty sharp.”

The final test for students in advanced flight training was a round of carrier qualifications on
Lexington
in the type of aircraft they would fly when they were assigned to a squadron. By then, Dieter and Haines each had about 100 hours in a Skyraider. After four touch-and-goes, they were cleared for six arrested landings. This time after each trap they were positioned in line with a steam catapult—their plane’s nose gear bridled to the shuttle that ran on a track nearly to the end of the ramp—and launched off
the flight deck. With throttles pushed forward to the maximum revolutions per minute, seven-ton Spads were fired into the air from zero to more than 100 miles per hour within 300 feet in 2.5 seconds, an experience akin to the “the fastest roller-coaster ride…times ten.”

Dieter and Haines passed their carrier qualifications, and each had his coveted naval aviator wings of gold pinned on at a ceremony on August 14, 1964. At the same time—having made it through the NAVCAD program—Dieter was commissioned a new ensign, the lowest officer ranking in the navy.

A month later, the two classmates from Corpus Christi happened to be assigned adjacent lockers at Lemoore Naval Air Station in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley, where they joined VA-122, the A-1 Skyraider training squadron that provided replacement pilots and enlisted maintenance personnel to the Pacific fleet as needed. The VA-122 squadron was known as the west coast RAG squadron, for Replacement Air Group.

One Monday morning not long afterward, following a weekend liberty in San Francisco, Dieter was at his locker getting ready to fly. He said he had something to show Haines. Unzipping the front of his flight suit, Dieter revealed that he was wearing a pair of women’s strawberry-print panties. As Haines stared, aghast, wondering if the panties were a kind of trophy, Dieter explained nonchalantly that he had not had any clean underwear with him over the weekend and had helped himself to “some of hers.” By then, Haines was of the opinion that Dieter was “167 degrees off from conventional.” Of course, Haines was married—“stable and steady”—and Dieter was racing around in his Porsche with a different beautiful woman every weekend “like the wild man he was.” As Haines came to hear more stories about Dieter’s hardscrabble upbringing in postwar Germany, he began to understand why “Dieter’s mind didn’t work quite like most people’s minds.”

In mid-January 1965, Dieter, Haines, and a group of other pilots from the Skyraider RAG squadron were loaded onto a navy bus and driven south to North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego for a six-day survival, evasion, resistance, and escape (SERE) course designed to teach aviators how to live off the land and avoid capture, as well as what was expected of them if they ever became prisoners of war.

The course began in a classroom, with instructors focusing on real-world applications of the Code of Conduct for the Armed Forces of the United States. The pilots learned the code’s six articles, which they would be expected to honor as prisoners of war no matter how uncertain or hostile the environment, and while resisting their captor’s efforts to exploit them.

The SERE instructors—mostly navy chiefs and senior petty officers—were equal parts guide, mentor, psychologist, and tormentor. All were highly skilled and well trained, and considered it their personal duty to teach every naval aviator how to survive behind enemy lines during wartime conditions. They proudly wore the SERE uniform patch—a knife slashing through barbed wire in enemy territory—and embraced the program’s motto: “We train the best for the worst.” The tenets of the course were based on the experiences of surviving U.S. POWs in World War II and Korea.

For a field exercise called “Sea Survival,” the pilots were taken to nearby Coronado beach. They were fitted with parachute harnesses and the survival gear they would most likely have with them after bailing out of an airplane, and were taken by boat in small groups to a platform in the bay. Each man jumped into the ocean, and was dragged by the boat to simulate being dragged across the water by a parachute. The pilot freed himself from the parachute harness, inflated his raft, and signaled for rescue. Eventually a helicopter swooped in, dropped a line with a rescue harness, and hauled the pilots up one by one, depositing them ashore. After being shown how to “go hunting for seafood,” which consisted mostly of scraping mussels off rocks, they spent a long night on the beach.

In the morning they were loaded onto another bus. An hour and a half later they reached the Navy Remote Training Site at Warner Springs in the foothills of Palomar Mountain northwest of San Diego. For two days they camped out and learned wilderness survival skills, such as emergency first aid, land navigation, camouflage techniques, constructing a shelter using parachute material, procuring and purifying water, building fires with a variety of starting tools and techniques, communication protocols, ground-to-air signaling using parachute panels and smoke flares, and making improvised
tools. With the instructors they hiked through tall grass, brush, cactus, and dense groves of pine and fir trees. They were shown how to trap and field-dress rabbits and other small game, which they cooked over an open fire. As the pilots were not being provided with food other than a few potatoes to throw into a pot of boiling water at the end of the day, most were willing to sample the variety of edible plants pointed out to them, but fewer were hungry or daring enough to bite into the lizards, snakes, and insects that were recommended as good sources of protein.