Dieter Dengler
[2] The family lived in extreme poverty; to survive, Dengler and his brothers scavenged scraps and leftovers from slaughtered sheep after neighbors' meals, and pulled down wallpaper adhered with wheatpaste from bombed-out buildings so their mother could boil it for nutrients."[3] Dengler's maternal grandfather, Hermann Schnürle, refused to vote for Adolf Hitler and was subsequently paraded around town with a placard around his neck, was spat upon, and was sent to a rock mine to work as a labourer for a year.[4] Dengler later credited his grandfather's resolve as a major inspiration while he was imprisoned in Laos and a factor in his refusal to sign a document penned by North Vietnam condemning American aggression in Southeast Asia.[5][failed verification] During World War II, Dengler saw an Allied fighter plane firing its guns as it flew through Wildberg; he credited this as the moment he knew he wanted to be a pilot.In 1956, upon turning 18 and completing his apprenticeship, Dengler hitchhiked to Hamburg and spent two weeks living on the street before leaving by ship to New York City.The pilots were forced to divert to their secondary target, a road intersection located west of the Mu Gia Pass in Laos, due to thunderstorms.He was tortured as a punishment for escaping: he was hung upside down by his ankles with a nest of biting ants over his face until he lost consciousness, then suspended in a well overnight so he would drown if he fell asleep.When he refused to sign a Pathet Lao document condemning the United States, slivers of bamboo were inserted under his fingernails and into incisions on his body.The other prisoners initially regarded Dengler's thick German accent and American allegiance with suspicion but eventually clued him in on their plans to escape.After several months, during which they survived largely on a single handful of rice a day among the six of them, one of the Thai prisoners overheard the guards talking about shooting the group in the jungle and making it look like an escape attempt.The plane again dropped flares and though the crew reported their sighting to the Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base, the fires were not recognized by intelligence as having been a signal from a survivor.Eugene Peyton Deatrick, the pilot of the lead plane and commander of the 1st Air Commando Squadron, spotted a flash of white while making a turn at the river's bend and backtracked.The portrayal of DeBruin was specifically criticized, as the film showed him to be delusional, unstable, and "sociopath[ic]," when friends, family, and the other prisoners characterized him as kind, intelligent, and a strong leader.[20][21][22] Herzog later acknowledged that DeBruin acted heroically during his imprisonment but defended his choices, saying he took "artistic liberty" based in part on conversations with Dengler years before about the "antagonistic relationships among the prisoners when under extreme duress.[24] Nigel Cawthorne's 1990 book The Bamboo Cage: The Full Story of the American Servicemen Still Missing in Vietnam expanded on the information in We Can Keep You Forever.[citation needed] Dengler was the focus of Bruce Henderson's 2010 book Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War.
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