The bulk of the middle of the film consists of footage from a trip Herzog took with Dengler back to Laos and Thailand to recreate his ordeal three decades after the fact. He was subsequently rescued after being spotted by United States Air Force pilot Eugene Deatrick. After a period of torture and starvation spent handcuffed to six other prisoners in a bamboo POW camp, Dengler escaped. He was forced to crash-land his Skyraider in Laos.ĭengler was taken prisoner by the Pathet Lao and then turned over to soldiers of the Army of North Vietnam. Dengler was the last man in and was hit by anti-aircraft fire.
Visibility was poor due to weather, and upon rolling in on the target, Dengler and the remainder of his flight lost sight of one another. On the morning of 1 February, Lieutenant Dengler launched from Ranger with three other aircraft on an interdiction mission near the Laotian border. At the time, the squadron was equipped with the Douglas AD-6/A-1H Skyraider, a single-engine, propeller-driven attack plane. In 1966, Dengler served aboard USS Ranger with Attack Squadron 145. After completing flight training, he was assigned as a Douglas A-1 Skyraider pilot in Attack Squadron 65 aboard the aircraft carrier USS Constellation. Frustratingly, he was unable to gain a pilot's slot in that service, so he left the Air Force, attended college, and then joined the Navy. Dengler recounts an early memory of Allied fighter-bombers destroying his village and says he decided he wanted to be a pilot after seeing one of these pilots fly past his house.Īt the age of 18, Dengler emigrated to the United States, where he served a two-year enlistment in the United States Air Force.
Like Herzog, Dengler grew up in a Germany reduced to rubble by World War II, and Dengler's stories of hunger and deprivation in the years after the war echo similar stories from Herzog's past. Werner Herzog found a kindred spirit in the German-American Navy pilot and Vietnam veteran Dieter Dengler.