The True Story of Rescue Dawn

In the winter of 1966, US Navy Pilot Dieter Dengler launched from the aircraft carrier USS Ranger in an agile Skyraider plane to fly along the tricky, sinuous border between North Vietnam and Laos. It was the very first mission Dengler would fly in Southeast Asia and it was about to become one of the greatest epics of survival in history.

When Dengler was shot down that day over the Ho Chi Minh Trail and his fellow squadron members saw the twisted wreckage of his plane, they knew his chances were grim. Dengler had crashed into a Laotian jungle sweltering with heat, teeming with poisonous insects and snakes, surrounded by unfriendly villages and ringed by utterly impassable limestone hills. Even if he’d managed to survive the plane’s fiery explosion and the endemic dangers of the jungle, he’d be an immediate target for Pathet Lao soldiers, the local equivalent of the Viet Cong, who considered a captured American a rare prize. The facts were not promising – indeed, those few Americans who had already been captured by the Pathet Lao in the early 60s had not been heard from again. (To this day, about 500 Americans remain missing or otherwise unaccounted for in Laos.)

At the time, the United States did not even acknowledge that it was conducting military operations in Laos, so Dengler was literally lost to the world. No one knew where he was and no one was likely to even attempt to rescue him. He quite likely would have died there, if it were not for the fact that he took matters into his own hands – buoyed by an internal light no matter how dark the external circumstances.

Part of Dengler’s defiant attitude towards his desperate situation – which put practical plans before fatalism at every turn – lay in his already astonishing personal history of survival, which began in childhood. Born in 1930s Germany, he had grown up in the remote Black Forest, amidst the horror of World War II. His father died fighting in Russia and Dieter’s own house was severely damaged by bombs. Even so, Dieter became obsessed with the Allied Aircraft that buzzed his bedroom at night. Though he knew the planes he admired could easily kill him, they were so magical in flight that he determined he would do whatever he had to do to one day learn how to fly.

Later, young Dieter suffered terribly from hunger and bewilderment in Germany’s grueling, surreal post-War conditions, but by then an unremitting determination towards survival had become deeply ingrained. He never reclaimed his childhood. By his teens, he was working full-time as a tool-and-die maker and blacksmith, beaten by his boss on a regular basis. Dieter was not yet an adult, but he had already seen the worst of humanity, which perhaps cushioned the shock of what was to come in Laos. He would later say that his experiences in Germany were his first lessons in survival.

Finally, at the age of 18, lured by the promise of an Air Force recruiting ad he saw in a magazine, Dieter arrived in America with empty pockets. He joined the Air Force right away, but as an uneducated immigrant, found himself not in pilot school but assigned to such mundane tasks as peeling potatoes. Still undeterred, he worked his way through college earned a spot as a Naval pilot. In the Navy, he was known for his playful sense of humor– marked as a renegade from the start.

But once Dengler crashed he would have to carefully await his opportunities to use his maverick spirit. Now that he was the Pathet Lao’s prized possession, Dengler was initiated into a daily ritual of interrogation and forced marches from village to village. Ultimately, he was brought to the a small prison camp where he was found two other American POWs – helicopter pilot Lt. Duane Martin and Eugene DeBruin, a civilian who worked for the CIA’s covert airlines, Air America. Dengler was elated to at last have companions, but horrified by their deteriorated condition, and their conditioned fatalism about the future. From day one, he told his new friends that he intended to escape, and it was only their warning that it would be suicidal to do until after the approaching monsoon season that kept him there that first night.

Over the ensuing months, Dengler and the others were subjected to torture, hunger, illness and what by all rights could have been an overwhelming mood of despair. But Dengler never gave an inch to doom. He was simply waiting patiently to make his move towards freedom. Finally, in Summer, came the day of Dengler’s long-awaited escape. In the ensuing hail of gunfire, only Dengler and Duane Martin managed to make their way into the jungle.

For Dengler and Martin, leaving the camp meant their troubles were only just beginning. Their feet were soon transformed to broken, bloody stumps and, already walking skeletons, they edged ever nearer to death, forced to rely on one another for the most basic yet profound of human needs – warmth, companionship and hope. They knew their one remote shot at survival was to craft a makeshift raft and float down the Mekong River towards Thailand. But the river, too, was filled with mercurial hazards, including raging rapids that nearly drowned them. After several harrowing days on the raft, Dieter and Duane found themselves near a small village. Unable to remain hidden, they were ambushed and Duane, after all that he had been through, lost his life there.

Dengler now struggled forth on his own, days if not hours from death, still forming SOS signals and hoping against all hope to be spotted by the rare US patrol. At last, his story took the turn for which he had persevered: a US Air Force plane flown by Air Force Col. Eugene Deatrick finally spotted Dengler. At first, Deatrick feared the figure waving and jumping frantically below might be a Viet Cong booby trap, but plagued by an instinctive feeling that the man was American, he called in a helicopter rescue, advising caution. The soldiers who pulled Dengler into their helicopter could barely believe what they found: a man weighing less than 90 pounds with a backpack stuffed with snake parts he thankfully would never have to eat for his next meal.

Dengler subsequently received the Navy Cross for extraordinary heroism. He continued to fly, returning to America to a career as a test pilot, and though he crashed four more times, he continued to beat the odds, until he succumbed after one last valiant battle against Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s Disease).