Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War (9 page)

At the end of three days the pilots were “pretty miserable.” Unaware of the next ordeal they were about to face, they were relieved when they were loaded onto a waiting bus. They hardly had time to settle into the hard seats before the bus stopped at the top of a bluff, and they were ordered out.

The “survival and evasion” portion of SERE was to conclude with another test. The pilots were directed to head downhill through what looked like a couple of miles of chaparral scrubland dotted with bushes and trees. If they reached the end of the course without being captured they would be rewarded with a sandwich and carton of milk, which sounded very good. The instructors who had been with them the last few days departed on the bus.

On their own to try to evade capture, the men took off running. They had entered the last phase of SERE, “resistance and escape.” One by one they were captured by trainers posing as enemy soldiers, complete with a red star on their caps. Rooted out from under bushes, inside shallow burrows, and behind trees, the pilots were taken to a set of low-slung buildings surrounded by guard towers and razor-topped fences. With atypical institutional humor, the navy had called this mock POW camp “Freedom Village.”

Among those shepherded into the main compound, Ensign Tom Dixon, twenty-two, of Syracuse, New York, a recent flight school graduate and Spad pilot who had been in the RAG squadron only a few days and didn’t know many of the other guys, was surprised to see one pilot sitting off by himself having a sandwich and a carton of milk. Grinning like the Cheshire cat, the fellow left no doubt that he was thoroughly enjoying his private picnic.

As the rest of the pilots were being gathered up like “lumps of coal,”
Dixon thought it inconceivable that anyone could have gone undetected through an area with so few places to hide while being hunted by expert trainers who had to know every square foot of their own course.

“Who’s that?” Dixon asked one of his fellow POWs.

“Dieter Dengler. He made it down without getting caught.”

After his repast, Dieter slipped away for a few minutes without anyone seeing him, before joining the other pilots. Ordered to strip to their skivvies and socks, they were made to crawl on their stomachs under rolls of barbed wire while being sprayed down with high-pressure hoses. By the time they made it through that ordeal and got their dark green flight suits back on, they were soaked, and freezing to the bone. Not long afterward, each man was locked in a small, dark box—“one size too small for everyone”—and left to fight the demons of claustrophobia.

When it was time for interrogations, the exhausted pilots were taken one by one to a special room located a short distance outside the main compound. The rules allowed for the pilots to be slapped with an open hand and verbally abused by the guards, some of whom had distinct sadistic leanings. When it was Dieter’s turn to be questioned under a blinding spotlight, he found himself facing several guards. He was asked to identify his unit and the type of aircraft he flew. When he refused to provide the information, a guard slapped him on the face. After this drill was repeated several times, all but one guard left the room. When that guard turned his back, Dieter pulled out from his sock a short length of pipe he had found in an unlocked workshop near where he had been left earlier to eat his sandwich. Using the shop’s grinder, he had quickly made a sharp end on the pipe, turning it into an improvised shiv. He now sprang forward, grabbing the guard from behind and placing the pipe next to his head.

“I’ve got a knife at your throat,” Dieter said.

Under the rules of the mock POW camp, any sharp instrument pulled on a guard by a prisoner was construed to be a deadly weapon. The guard would be considered dead or incapacitated—as in most war games—and would stand aside for the prisoner to continue with any plan he had for escape.

“Okay,” said the guard. “What do you want me to do?”

“Take off your uniform.”

When Dieter stepped outside in the dark, he was dressed like a guard. He headed for the building where he knew the camp food was prepared. In the back he found what he was looking for: the garbage cans. He picked over the leftovers, finding apple cores, old pieces of bread, and chunks of hamburger, then hid in the bushes and ate with abandon. Scrounging for food was something he had done most of his life, and he didn’t see any reason to stop now, especially since food was being used as a reward here. When he got too cold, he turned himself in.

When the POW exercise ended the next day, Dieter was ready to make his third escape in twelve hours. The first to escape multiple times from the navy’s simulated POW camp at Warner Springs, he was also the only SERE graduate to gain weight during the rigorous program. Asked by the trainers—as well as his fellow pilots—how and why he had been able to excel in the survival course, Dieter told about growing up in Germany during tough times when he had to do “such things to stay alive.” By the end of SERE, Dieter had “gained three pounds,” while everyone else lost weight. Dieter credited this to his eating “everything the guards threw away.”

Another Spad pilot who went through SERE at the same time, Ensign Dave Maples, twenty-four, of Nashville, Tennessee, considered Dieter “in a class all by himself” when it came to escaping and in the process “exasperating” the guards. His fellow pilots “loved his successes,” and everyone was “astounded and amazed at how well he did.”

As word of his SERE escapes spread, Dieter, although so junior he had not yet flown a single mission with the fleet or even been assigned to a regular squadron, began to “make his name” among navy pilots.

In a letter of January 28, 1965, to the RAG squadron’s commanding officer with a copy to Dieter’s personnel file, Captain L. W. Metzger, commander of the Fleet Airborne Training Unit that included SERE, commended the young pilot for his “exemplary conduct and motivation.” Further, “he expertly manufactured and cunningly utilized potential weapons to effect two different, ingenious and successful escapes from confinement…and had completed plans and was ready to attempt a third escape”
when the exercise ended. “Ensign Dengler is to be commended for his outstanding conduct during training. His persistent and successful efforts to escape directly contributed to the high morale of his fellow students. The ingenuity and foresight displayed by this officer exemplifies true American spirit and ideals.”

Ensign Walt “Bummy” Bumgarner,
twenty-four, of Orinda, California, the newest pilot in VA-145, a Skyraider squadron based at Alameda Naval Air Station in California, had his hands full as he tried to stay on the tail of a wildly gyrating Spad over the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada.

The two pilots had recently graduated from advanced flight training at Corpus Christi a few months apart. They were violating a navy policy then in effect that prohibited practice dogfights—as aerial combat between two aircraft first became known in the skies over France during World War I—because such maneuvers were deemed “too dangerous.”

Two months earlier and only days after joining the squadron, Bumgarner, a graduate of Diablo Valley Community College who received his commission through the NAVCAD program, had learned there was navy
policy
and there was navy
flying
. One of the squadron’s senior pilots, Commander Donald E. Sparks, thirty-seven, of Royal, Nebraska, a veteran of two Korean combat tours aboard the carrier
Prince ton
(CVA-37) and formerly a flight instructor at Pensacola, made it a point to test the flying skills of the new guys, known as nuggets in navy parlance. He had challenged Bumgarner to a game of “tail chase,” with Sparks flying lead and the nugget trying to stay on his tail, thereby simulating aerial combat. It did not turn out as Sparks
planned: the senior aviator was unable to shake Bumgarner, who stayed within fifty feet of Sparks’s tail throughout various turns, rolls, and dives. Sparks finally radioed, “Okay, you take the lead and see how you like it.” The stocky Bumgarner, who had displayed an innate confidence since his first flight in a Spad when he flew between the open spans of a drawbridge like a 1920s barnstormer, keyed his radio mike and said, “I’ll get rid of you in thirty seconds, sir.” As soon as Sparks got on his tail, Bumgarner pushed the stick all the way to the left and held it until he was pulling six g’s, then stomped down on the right rudder pedal. The Spad went into a snap roll and kept going—spinning faster and faster until it was rolling 300 degrees a second, twice as fast as its normal roll rate. Then he went hard right, pulling six g’s the other way, and came up right behind Sparks. “Get on my wing,” Sparks said sternly. “We’re heading back.”

Now, Bumgarner was on the tail of a fellow nugget, who was desperately trying to lose him. The other pilot dived for the deck and Bumgarner followed, confident he could do with his airplane whatever this fellow did. They had started at 12,000 feet, and usually the guys in the squadron broke off play-fighting at 5,000 feet for safety’s sake, but the pilot in front did not pull up. As Bumgarner drew steadily closer all he could see out the front of his canopy was the big-ass tail of the Spad he was chasing. Then, in a nanosecond the guy pulled off and was gone. The only thing then filling Bummy’s field of vision was the ground. Pulling out of the dive at an altitude of only 200 feet, he realized he had chased the guy into a gorge surrounded by jagged, low-slung mountaintops. Coming close to “buying the farm,” Bumgarner realized:
That hotshot was ready to wipe me off the side of a mountain rather than have me beat him
.

The hotshot who did not like to lose was Dieter Dengler.

The A-1 Skyraider squadron that was to become VA-145 began in 1949 as a group of weekend warriors at Dallas Naval Air Station in Texas. Originally designated VA-702 and named the Rustlers, the reserve squadron was activated in 1950 for service in Korea. Redesignated VA-145 during its second Korean tour, the squadron changed its nickname to Swordsmen and
adopted a gung-ho slogan: “Live by the sword, die by the Swordsmen.” Ironically, the first navy pilot to die in the next war would be a Swordsman.

In the summer of 1964, as events unfolded in the waters off Southeast Asia that would lead to full-blown U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, VA-145 was deployed aboard the carrier
Constellation
(CVA-64) in the South China Sea.

Late on the afternoon of August 2, 1964, the destroyer
Maddox
(DD-731), steaming in the Gulf of Tonkin gathering electronic intelligence outside the twelve-mile territorial line claimed by North Vietnam, was approached in international waters by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. What happened next would be the subject of conflicting reports:
Maddox
claimed to have opened fire with its guns only after evading a torpedo attack, but a top-secret report by the National Security Agency declassified in 2005 states that
Maddox
fired the first shots—“three rounds to warn off the communist boats,” which then returned fire. The U.S. ship was hit with a single machine-gun bullet that caused minor damage. A flight of F-8U Crusaders from
Ticonderoga
—already airborne—quickly showed up to assist
Maddox
. The planes attacked the retreating torpedo boats, leaving one dead in the water and two damaged.

Constellation
, meanwhile, was at anchor off Green Island in the port of Hong Kong. That same evening of August 2 found many VA-145 pilots partying at the Eagle’s Nest Bar at the top of the Hong Kong Hilton. About 9:00
P.M
., someone walked in and informed the group that all leave and liberty had been canceled and everyone was to report to the ship. It took another day to gather up all the ship’s crewmen and air wing personnel.
Constellation
got under way at 8:00
A.M
. on August 4 to rejoin
Ticonderoga
in the South China Sea.

Later that same day
Maddox
, now in the company of another destroyer,
Turner Joy
(DD-951), was back on patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin in gusty winds and choppy seas. That night at 8:41
P.M
. sonar and radar contacts were reported, possibly signaling another attack by North Vietnamese naval forces.

Launching at midnight when
Constellation
came within range in the South China Sea east of Hainan Island—where Chinese MiG fighters were known to be based—were four VA-145 Skyraiders led by Commander Harold
“Hal” Griffith, a seasoned aviator. Normally, the squadron’s commanding officer (CO) would lead such a high-stakes mission, but it had fallen by default to Griffith, the squadron’s executive officer (XO), or second in command. Upon the scheduled rotation of VA-145’s commanding officer to his next assignment, the previous XO, Commander Harold T. Gower, had been due to “fleet up” to CO. However, Gower experienced “some problems” during night carrier landing qualifications and thereafter turned in his wings, an ignoble end for any navy pilot but one which everyone knew could happen given the nerve-racking nature of the work. As a result, the same month Griffith had joined the squadron—January 1964—he was swiftly promoted to XO to replace Gower. Griffith had then expected he would become the next CO, but the bureau of personnel decided to bring in a more senior officer to take over. The new CO, Commander Melvin Blixt, had only recently reported aboard, and assumed command of VA-145 in Hong Kong just a couple of days earlier. Since Blixt had so little time in the squadron, Griffith was given the mission.

Griffith, thirty-eight, of Port Jefferson, New York, had joined the navy in 1943 at age seventeen. Instead of going to sea with the fleet in wartime, he was sent to Colgate University as a NAVCAD cadet. In January 1945 he entered flight training, during which one of his instructors was the famous baseball player and Marine Corps fighter pilot Ted Williams. By the time Griffith received his commission and wings, the war he had hoped to help win was over. He was among a large contingent of reserve pilots no longer needed who were released from active service. Called back to duty during Korea, Griffith was assigned to an east coast squadron, but he never saw action in what became known by navy pilots as the “west coast war,” as the west coast squadrons were the only ones deployed to the combat zone. After Korea, Griffith went to night school at the University of Maryland and earned his BS degree. He was then allowed to transfer from the reserves to regular navy, so he was at last on track to make the navy his career. Before VA-145, he had served as operations officer and then XO of VA-25, a Skyraider squadron aboard the carrier
Midway
(CVA-41). After missing the last two wars, Griffith was to lead the first missions in the new war.

Forming up in the dark, the Spads flew southwest across the moonlit sea until they cleared Hainan, thereby avoiding Chinese airspace. They then
turned north into the Gulf of Tonkin. Each was loaded with LAU-3 wing pods that fired nineteen high-explosive rockets individually, sequentially, or simultaneously, and full ammunition (200 rounds each) for their four 20 mm cannons.

As they neared the position of the two destroyers, Griffith switched to the radio frequency for
Maddox
, the flagship of Captain John J. Herrick, commander of the two-ship task force operating in the gulf, and checked in with the ship’s air controller. For the next two hours the Skyraiders circled into and out of a thin cloud layer between 3,000 and 4,000 feet, waiting to be directed by ship radar or sonar to “water targets,” but they never were.

For two hours preceding the arrival of Griffith’s flight, the destroyers had reported countless surface contacts on radar and sonar. There were also urgent reports of torpedoes in the water, causing the destroyers to take “wild evasive maneuvers,” which themselves caused sonar reports as sound waves reflected off the turbulence of the ships’ own propellers.
Turner Joy
had fired 300 rounds at elusive targets, but
Maddox
had not fired a single round;
Maddox
’s gunnery officer was unconvinced there were any targets. Jets from
Ticonderoga
, arriving well before Griffith’s Spads, had been vectored repeatedly to reported surface contacts, and each time dropped flares and searched the ocean for torpedo boats. “No boats,” the
Ticonderoga
flight leader, Commander James Stockdale (a future POW, admiral, and vice presidential candidate), reported upon returning to the aircraft carrier, “no boat wakes, no ricochets off boats, no boat gunfire, no torpedo wakes—nothing but black sea and American firepower.” At 11:35
P.M
., the reported contacts stopped. Stockdale’s jets, low on fuel, left as Griffith’s Spads arrived.

For the two hours they orbited above, Griffith, like Stockdale, saw only the U.S. ships. The reported North Vietnamese attack this far out in the gulf struck Griffith as odd. After nightfall, the two destroyers had moved from twenty or so miles off North Vietnam’s coast to some sixty miles into the gulf. A torpedo boat capable of thirty to forty miles per hour would take two hours to reach the U.S. ships, and equal time to return to shore. Why would such boats risk it, given the presence of carrier-based airpower that could blow them out of the water? Coming that far out, in Griffith’s opinion, would have been foolish. The daytime attack on
Maddox
two days ear
lier—verified visually by the U.S. pilots from
Ticonderoga
and confirmed by the minor damage to
Maddox
caused by enemy gunfire—had taken place closer to shore. And if the torpedo boats did venture this far out to engage U.S. warships this night, why had the planes found no sign of them?

Unbeknownst to Griffith, Captain Herrick, aboard
Maddox
, was also having misgivings about what had happened that night. Shortly before 12:30
A.M
., Herrick, after reviewing the communications log and radar and sonar data, wired Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp Jr., commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, Pearl Harbor, stating: “
ENTIRE ACTION LEAVES MANY DOUBTS…NEVER POSITIVELY IDENTIFIED A [ENEMY] BOAT AS SUCH
.” Herrick recommended aerial reconnaissance in daylight and a “
COMPLETE EVALUATION BEFORE ANY FURTHER ACTION
.” Sharp immediately called the Pentagon, and relayed his own concerns to Admiral Thomas Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense. Sharp, the top admiral in the Pacific, surmised that “over-eager sonar [and radar] operators” and “freak weather” could have caused false contacts, and emphasized the absence of visual confirmation of any hostile activity against U.S. forces in the gulf on the night of August 4.

As Griffith led his flight back, he had everyone drop the full rocket pods into the water, which planes carrying unused bombs and rockets routinely did before coming back aboard ship to prevent accidental explosions. About then, Griffith realized they had entered an electrical weather phenomenon known as Saint Elmo’s fire, which he had heard about but had never experienced. This static-electric phenomenon, named after the patron saint of sailors, lit up the leading edges and tips of their wings, canopies, and spinning props in a bright blue and violet glow. Eerily, the planes looked as if they were on fire.

Back in his stateroom aboard
Constellation
, Griffith hit the rack at 3:00
A.M
. Jolted awake an hour later, he was summoned to the ship’s Air Intelligence Center, where he learned that Operation Pierce Arrow, a retaliatory air strike against North Vietnam, had been ordered by President Johnson hours after the reported August 4 attacks on the two destroyers. Coming fully awake over a cup of strong coffee, Griffith broke out charts of North Vietnam’s craggy coastline and helped plan a coordinated assault on torpedo-boat bases near the coastal city of Hon Gai, eighty miles east of Hanoi.
Standing before the pilots in the ready room, Griffith, the Skyraiders strike leader, said they had been given the green light to attack any North Vietnamese torpedo boats that were in port or at sea. As they headed for the flight deck to launch, Griffith worried about the lack of intelligence concerning the air defenses they would encounter over North Vietnam. And he could not shake off the feeling that higher-ups in Washington were using what he knew to be a “non-incident” in the Gulf of Tonkin as an “excuse to go to war.” It occurred to him that this might have something to do with the current presidential election campaign, in which the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, was forcefully criticizing President Johnson for being soft on defense. Other pilots had their own troubling thoughts. Griffith learned that several
Constellation
A-4 pilots refused to participate in the strike because they “did not want to fly into a war,” and turned in their wings. It was one thing if a carrier pilot had a close call landing at night or in bad weather and lost his nerve, but Griffith and the other pilots did not respect individuals trained at great expense and effort by the navy who refused to fly because someone would be shooting at them. The dissident pilots were “quietly removed” from the ship the following week.