On a riverbank in Laos on the morning of July 20th, 1966, a barefoot man stood on a rock waving a strip of white parachute at an American plane.
He was a US Navy pilot born and raised in Germany.
3 weeks earlier, he and six other prisoners had broken out of a jungle camp.
He was the only one anyone had found.
And the pilot circling above him now had to decide whether the man on that rock was someone to rescue or a trap.
His name was Deer Dangler.
This is the full story of his war.
It runs from the day his Navy Skyraider went down in Laos, the country just west of Vietnam, to the ground where his story ended.
It’s the story of a breakout by seven men who had almost nothing left, of 23 days in a jungle that kept turning them back.
And of the prisoner, a Hollywood film turned into a villain who may have been the bravest man in that camp.
If you’ve seen that film, set most of it aside.
The movie shows six prisoners in the hut.
There were seven.
It shows one American as unstable, a man who nearly wrecked the escape.
The men who actually shared that hut with him described someone completely different.
And the gap between those two versions says a great deal about who gets to tell a war story and who never [clears throat] comes home to tell their own.
Keep the name Gene De Bruan in mind.
He comes back when it matters most.
But this story doesn’t start in a prison camp.
It starts in a cockpit with the weather closing in over the Gulf of Tonkan and with a 27-year-old pilot who had wanted to fly since the day an airplane passed his window.
At first light on February 1st, 1966, the aircraft carrier USS Ranger was steaming in the Gulf of Tonkan, the sea off the coast of North Vietnam.
It was her first day of combat flying from a spot the Navy called Yankee Station.
Lieutenant Junior Grade Deer Dangler strapped into an A1 Skyraider.
It was a heavy propeller-driven attack plane built for carrying a huge load low and slow.
The pilots called it the spad.
He flew with attack squadron 145, the swordsman.
Four spads launched together that morning.
Their job was to strike North Vietnamese supply traffic moving south.
The weather had other plans.
Cloud closed over the primary target.
So, the flight turned west toward an alternate target across the border in Laos.
Laos was officially neutral.
An international agreement signed in Geneva in 1962 said foreign troops had to leave it.
In practice, North Vietnamese forces moved men and supplies through its eastern hills along the network of roads and footpaths the Americans called the Ho Chi Min Trail.
American aircraft struck that network almost every day.
Almost nobody back home was told.
Near a village called Ban Patung, the force spads rolled in one after another.
Dangler was the last to dive.
That was the worst place to be.
By the time the last plane comes down, every gun crew below is awake and waiting.
His Skyraider was hit by groundfire.
The engine faltered.
He was too low to bail out, so he picked a clearing and put the airplane down.
The trees took both wings.
The fuselage slid to a stop and deer Dangler climbed out alone in a country where his government would not admit it was fighting.
He had wanted this life for a very long time.
He was born on May 22nd, 1938 in Vilbeck, a small town on the edge of the Black Forest in southern Germany.
His father was called up into the army and did not come home from the war.
His mother raised her boys on almost nothing.
They picked through scraps for food.
One day during the war, an Allied fighter flew past the Dangler house so low that the boy could see the pilot in the cockpit.
He never forgot that face.
Decades later, a documentary about his life would take its title from the way he described that moment.
Little deer needs to fly.
After the war, he apprenticed as a blacksmith and machinist.
At 18, he left for America with almost nothing in his pockets.
He enlisted in the US Air Force, hoping it would teach him to fly.
It taught him to work on engines instead.
His enlistment ran out before he ever reached a flying class.
So he went to college in California, then joined the Navy as an aviation cadet.
This time it worked.
Now on a hillside in Laos, he did exactly what the Navy had trained him to do.
He moved away from the wreck and he hid.
The next day, a US Air Force helicopter crew found the crash site.
They photographed the wreckage from the air.
The cockpit was empty.
Dangler was already gone.
Someone had found him first.
Dangler evaded for hours.
Then Pathet Laauo soldiers caught up with him.
The Pathet Lao were the communist movement fighting the royal government of Laos, closely allied with North Vietnam.
To them, he was an enemy airman who had come uninvited into their country.
They marched him from village to village.
At one stop, his capttors put a document in front of him.
It was a statement condemning the United States.
They wanted his signature.
Dangler refused.
He had chosen America himself.
He was not going to sign it away on a piece of paper.
Within days, he slipped away from his guards during the march.
He was caught again.
What followed was harsh treatment meant to break him.
He still didn’t sign.
Weeks later, he was walked into a small prison camp deep in the jungle.
A few bamboo huts, a fence, a rotation of guards, and inside six men who had been waiting far longer than he had.
The first was Gene De Bruan from Kakana, Wisconsin.
Before the war, he had been a smoke jumper, a firefighter who parachuted into wildfires in the mountains of Montana.
Then he took a job as a cargo kicker for Air America, an airline that it later emerged was secretly run by the CIA.
A cargo kicker shoves supplies out of an open cargo door over a drop zone.
On the 5th of September 1963, De Bruins C46 transport was brought down over Laos.
Five men parachuted out.
All five were taken prisoner.
All five were in this camp.
There was Picidi Indradat from Thailand who could follow what the guards were saying.
There were Praset Pomsuan and Praset Tani also from Thailand.
And there was YC Toe, a radio operator from Hong Kong.
He was quiet and often sick.
By the time Dangler arrived, those five had been prisoners for well over 2 years.
The sixth man was Lieutenant Dwayne Martin, a US Air Force rescue helicopter pilot.
His whole job had been pulling downed airmen out of places exactly like this one.
Now he was the one waiting for a helicopter.
Dangler was the newcomer, and he was loud.
He was restless, practical, and very good with his hands.
The others had learned patience over years.
He had learned it over weeks, and not very well.
He did have one strange advantage.
According to squadron legend, he was the only student ever to gain weight during Navy survival training.
He had grown up hungry.
He ate whatever they put in front of him and asked for more.
Here, there was no more.
Keep the name Picidi Indradat in mind too.
He comes back at the very end of this story in a way none of these men could have imagined.
The days had a shape.
Rice in the morning if there was rice, long hours of heat in the hut, talk in English, Thai, and scraps of Lao about food, home, and the war outside.
Seven men, one hut, and a rice ration that was getting smaller every single week.
By the spring of 1966, the food in that camp was running out.
It wasn’t only the prisoners.
The guards were hungry, too.
Supplies came in less often.
Everyone in that clearing, prisoner and guard alike, was slowly running out of food at the same time.
For the prisoners, that changed everything.
Every week they waited, they got weaker.
And every week, a long walk through the jungle became a little less possible.
They talked about escape constantly.
De Bruan and the Thai men had already tried it once years earlier and had been recaptured.
They knew exactly what failure cost.
Dangler had tried and failed once too on the march.
Between them, the men in that hut had collected a lot of hard lessons about how escapes go wrong.
So this time, the plan had to be right.
It needed three things.
First, a way out of the hut.
At night, the prisoners were locked into wooden foot blocks and handcuffs.
Dangler, the former machinist, studied the locks.
Over weeks, he worked out how to open the handcuffs.
The men practiced slipping them off and back on again so the guards would never notice anything had changed.
Second, timing.
The prisoners watched the guards day after day, and they learned the routine.
At meal times, the guards gathered to eat.
For those few minutes, their rifles were not in their hands.
Third, a destination.
The goal was the Mikong River, the great river that forms much of the border between Laos and Thailand.
Across it lay Thailand, an American ally, and safety.
Between the camp and the Mikong lay mountains, jungle, rivers, and the path at Lao.
Then came the argument.
Some of the men wanted to wait for the monsoon.
When the rains came, there would be water in every stream and on every leaf.
Nobody survives a jungle march without water.
Others, Dangler among them, wanted to go now before they were too weak to walk at all.
By most accounts, Gene De Bruan was the man who kept the group from breaking apart over that question.
He listened.
He calmed tempers.
Piccidi would later describe him as the peacemaker of the hut.
Then Picidi heard something that ended the argument.
Because he could follow the guards conversations, he picked up what they were discussing among themselves.
With food running so short, they were talking about abandoning the camp altogether.
And the prisoners became convinced of something worse.
If the guards walked away from that camp, they would not leave seven witnesses behind to tell anyone about it.
Whether that was really the plan, nobody can say for certain now.
But the men in that hut believed it.
And from that moment, waiting was no longer a choice anyone could make.
They set the date, the 29th of June, 1966.
They divided the jobs.
They agreed on groups.
And they agreed that once they were outside the fence, they would scatter in different directions.
That way, the Patet Lao could not catch everyone at once.
What none of them could see was the flaw buried inside their own plan.
The monsoon had arrived.
The rain they had argued about, the rain they had counted on to keep them alive, was already falling on the hills around that camp.
And it was about to become the most dangerous thing in that jungle.
Nobody in that hut knew it yet, but the monsoon would decide more about their escape than any of the guards.
Think about that from the guard’s side for a moment.
They were hungry, far from home, guarding men they could barely feed in a war most of the world was never told about.
Nobody in that clearing was where they wanted to be.
On the afternoon of June 29th, the guards sat down to eat.
The handcuffs came off one last time.
The prisoners slipped out of the hut through the opening they had prepared quietly, one at a time.
Nobody looked up from the meal.
Dangler and Paciti moved toward the hut where the guards kept their rifles.
The idea was simple.
If the prisoners held the weapons, the guards would have no choice.
Seven men could walk out of that camp without anyone getting hurt.
That was the plan.
It went wrong at the guard hut.
Dangler’s Navy cross citation written later describes the next minutes in a single careful phrase.
It says that an unplanned situation developed.
What that phrase covers is this.
The guards did not stand aside.
In the confusion that followed, several of them lost their lives and the camp dissolved into chaos.
Accounts differ about exactly who did what in those minutes.
Dangler’s own book tells it one way.
Picidi Indraat and Gene De Bruins family tell it another.
We’ll come back to that because it matters more than it sounds.
What everyone agrees on is what happened next.
The seven men ran as planned.
They split up.
Pacidi went with Praset Prumuan and Praset Tani.
The three time men together.
Gene de Bruan went with YC toe and deer Dangler went with Dwayne Martin.
The split made sense on paper.
Three small groups are harder to track than one large one.
If the Patet Laauo found one group, the others might still get through.
But it also meant something none of them said out loud.
From this moment on, nobody would know what had happened to anyone else.
Seven men, three groups, three directions into the trees.
It was the last time all seven were together.
Dangler and Martin pushed downhill away from the camp as fast as two starving men could move.
They had no proper shoes.
Their feet were wrapped in rags or bare.
Behind them, they could hear shouting.
Ahead of them, there was nothing but green.
They kept moving until dark.
Then they kept moving in the dark.
Every snapped branch sounded like a search party.
Every village they passed meant a detour.
They slept in short shifts, if they slept at all.
Martin was weak.
He had been held longer than Dangler.
His body had less left in it.
Dangler would push ahead then wait.
Push ahead then wait.
They made an odd pair.
One was a German-born Navy pilot who never stopped talking about food.
The other was an Air Force rescue pilot who had spent his career saving men like Dangler.
Now they only had each other.
They talked as they walked.
When they dared to talk at all, about home, about what they would eat first, about the Meong and how far it might be.
Nobody knew.
Not one of them had a map.
On the second day, the rain came properly.
Not a shower, a monsoon rain, the kind that turns a hillside into a slide and a stream into a river in under an hour.
It soaked everything they had, which was almost nothing.
It erased their tracks, which helped.
And it erased the sky, which didn’t.
Without the sun, they couldn’t tell which way was west.
Without west, they couldn’t find the Meong.
The camp sat somewhere in the hills of eastern Laos.
The Mikong lay far to the west.
In good health with a map and boots, that walk would take weeks.
They had none of those things.
They had escaped the camp.
Now they had to escape Laos.
And the jungle was already starting to win.
Here is something worth stopping on.
They were free.
For the first time in months, for Martin nearly a year, nobody was guarding them.
No foot blocks, no handcuffs, no roll call.
Whatever happened next, it would happen because of choices they made themselves.
That was the payoff of every week of planning, every lock Dangler studied, every meal the guards ate while the prisoners watched.
Seven men had walked out of a jungle prison that was supposed to hold them until they died there.
It had worked, and Dangler, the machinist from the Black Forest, started solving the next problem.
Water runs downhill.
Streams join rivers.
And in that part of Laos, the rivers eventually find the Mikong.
So the two men followed the water.
They found a stream, then a bigger one.
When it was deep enough, they built a raft from bamboo and vines and let the current do the walking for them.
For a while, it was almost beautiful.
The jungle slid past.
Their bare feet finally got a rest.
Every bend in the river felt like a mile closer to Thailand.
They traveled mostly at dusk and in the early morning when there were fewer eyes on the water.
In the heat of the day, they pulled the raft into the reeds and lay still.
Dangler, ever the mechanic, kept repairing the lashings with whatever vines he could find.
Then the river turned.
Rapids forced them ashore.
The raft broke up and they built another.
The river bent back on itself again and again.
Some days after hours of floating, they seemed to be no farther from the camp than when they started.
Every bend promised the Meong.
Every bend delivered more jungle.
They ate what they could find.
Berries, leaves, anything that moved slowly enough to catch.
Dangler had a talent for this.
Martin was [clears throat] fading.
The boy who had picked through scraps in the black forest was now picking through a jungle.
In a strange way, his whole childhood had trained him for this.
He knew how to keep going on almost nothing.
He had done it before.
Martin had not.
And every day, Dangler watched his friend get a little slower.
The leeches found them in the wet grass.
Their clothes rotted on their backs.
The rain came every afternoon, then most of the night.
Somewhere out there, the other five men were facing the same jungle.
And there were still people in those hills, villages along the river banks, pathets.
More than once, the two men lay flat in the undergrowth while voices passed a few yards away.
At night, they heard aircraft overhead.
American aircraft, close enough to hear, far too high to see two men in the trees below.
Picture that.
Your own side flying right over you.
Every night with no idea you’re there.
Dangler started thinking about how to change that.
He knew how air crews searched.
He had been one of them.
A pilot at altitude at night sees almost nothing on the ground unless something on the ground is burning.
What they needed was a signal, something big, something bright enough to be seen from several thousand ft in the dark through the rain.
What they needed was a fire.
And about 2 weeks after the breakout, they found exactly the place to build one.
It was a village abandoned, a cluster of empty huts on stilts standing in the rain.
For the first time in days, they had a roof.
They had dry wood.
And they had a plan.
That night, they heard the drone of a big American transport plane, a C130, flying over the valley.
In Dangler’s telling, the two men set the huts al light and ran out into the open.
The fire caught.
The flames climbed into the dark, and the plane saw it.
It circled.
Then it began dropping flares.
They hung under small parachutes, burning so bright the whole valley turned white.
Dangler and Martin stood in that light, waving their arms, certain it was over.
Someone knew they were there.
A helicopter would come at first light.
It had to.
They waited all night.
They waited all morning.
Nobody came.
To this day, nobody can say exactly why.
Maybe the crew reported it and nobody acted.
Maybe they thought it was a ground signal from the other side.
Maybe the reports simply got lost in a war that produced thousands of them.
Whatever the reason, the two men were exactly where they had been, only weaker and with no village left to shelter in.
Martin was in bad shape now, starving, sick, and running out of the will to keep going on berries and river water.
Dangler wasn’t much better.
He had lost so much weight his ribs showed through his shirt, what was left of it.
He had an idea.
There was an inhabited village nearby.
They could go to it.
They could ask for food.
Dangler thought it was too dangerous.
He said so.
They had come too far to walk into a village now.
But Martin could not keep going like this.
And Dangler would not leave him.
So on the morning of July 17th, 1966, 18 days after the breakout, the two men started walking toward the village.
If you’ve stayed with Deer and Dwayne this far, take a second and hit subscribe.
It’s how stories like this one keep getting told properly.
Because what happened on the trail to that village is the part of this story deer Dangler found hardest to talk about for the rest of his life.
And it’s also the moment that set up everything that happened next.
They reached the edge of the village.
A man from the village saw them.
He came at them.
Dwayne Martin died there on that trail.
Dangler got away into the trees.
And for the first time since February, Deer Dangler was completely alone.
He kept moving.
There was nothing else to do.
The days that followed blurred together.
Fever, rain, hunger.
Past the point where hunger hurts.
He later said he began seeing things in the jungle that were not there.
At times he talked to Martin as if Martin were still walking beside him.
He had a strip of white parachute cloth and he kept it with him.
White was the one color that did not belong in that jungle.
He reached a river.
He followed it.
He found a large rock in the open close to the water where the trees gave way to sky.
It was a gamble.
Out in the open, any patrol could see him, but so could any aircraft.
After 3 weeks of hiding from everyone, he chose to be seen, and he waited.
3 days after Martin’s death, on the morning of July 20th, 1966, two Air Force A1 Skyraiders came up that river valley.
They were the same type of aircraft Dangler had been flying when he went down.
The lead aircraft belonged to Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Dietrich.
He commanded an Air Force A1 squadron flying out of South Vietnam.
He was a veteran.
He was not looking for anyone that morning.
He was on a different mission entirely.
Dietrich was in a banking turn when he caught a flash of white below him.
He came around for a second look.
A man on a rock by the river, waving something white over his head wildly with whatever strength he had left.
Dietri’s wingman told him to forget it.
He had good reasons.
Downed pilots were known to be used as bait to draw rescue aircraft into ambushes.
A man waving on a riverbank in Laos could be a trap set by North Vietnamese or Pathatlau forces.
Every pilot in Southeast Asia had heard those stories.
Dietrich had heard them, too.
He circled again.
He looked at that figure on the rock.
Too thin, too desperate.
Nobody setting a trap would send out a man who looked like that.
And he made a decision that a lot of pilots would not have made.
He called in a rescue helicopter.
Now Dangler had to hold on.
The sky raiders stayed overhead, circling, keeping watch.
Every minute they stayed was another minute someone on the ground might notice them.
Then the sound changed.
An Air Force rescue helicopter flying out of Udor in Thailand came up the valley.
The crews called these big helicopters Jolly Greens.
It hovered over the river.
A cable came down.
Dangler grabbed it and he did not let go.
The crew hauled him in and then they did something he had not expected.
They pinned him to the floor of the helicopter and searched him.
They didn’t know who he was.
He was bearded, filthy, and a third of his old weight.
He could have been anyone.
According to the crew, they found the remains of a snake tucked into his sock.
He had been saving it to eat later.
He told them he was an American, a Navy pilot, Lieutenant Der Dangler.
They had no idea that name had been missing for nearly 6 months.
Years later, Dangler described the plane that found him.
That angel, he said, was a beautiful sight.
He was free.
He weighed 98 lb.
And somewhere behind him in that same jungle, the other men from the hut were still out there.
The men who escaped that camp came out of the war very differently.
Dangler was flown to Daang, the big American base on the central coast of South Vietnam.
The doctors started trying to put weight back on a man who had almost none to spare.
Then his squadron heard he was alive.
The swordsman didn’t wait for paperwork.
The way the story is told in the squadron, his friends got him out of that hospital and back to their ship, more or less with permission.
On July 22nd, 1966, deer Dangler sat in the admiral stateoom aboard USS Ranger, surrounded by the men who had listed him missing.
He was home, or as close to home as the war allowed.
From there, he went to the Naval Hospital in San Diego and spent two months recovering under his physician, Captain Alden Holmes.
Slowly, the weight came back.
The fevers faded.
But the question that followed him out of that jungle never faded.
What happened to the others?
He told the debriefing officers everything he could.
The location of the camp, as best he could describe it, the names, the groups, the directions they had run.
But Laos was officially a place where Americans were not fighting.
Sending search teams deep into Pathatlau territory looking for men who might already be gone was not a simple order to give.
The answer came in pieces over months and years.
Praset Prsuan and Praset Tani did not come home.
The two men who shared a name and a hut and a breakout are not known to have reached safety.
YC toe the quiet radio operator from Hong Kong was never seen by Americans again.
Then there was Picidi Indradat.
After the breakout, Picidi was recaptured.
He spent months more as a prisoner.
And then in January 1967, Le Oceanian government troops reached the place where he was being held and brought him out.
He had been a prisoner for 3 years, 4 months, and 4 days.
He went back to work for Air America.
He kept flying over the same country that had held him until the American withdrawal in 1975.
Two men from that hut came home.
Deer Dangler and Pacidi Indradat.
And that leaves one name.
Remember the plan back in the hut?
YC Toe was supposed to go with the three Thai men.
On the day of the breakout, he was too sick to keep up with them.
So, Gene De Bruan made a choice.
He stayed with Toe.
He gave up a faster group and a better chance so a sick man from another country would not be left alone in that jungle.
The former smoke jumper from Wisconsin had spent his career jumping toward danger so other people wouldn’t have to face it.
On the last day anyone saw him, he did the same thing one more time.
Neither of them was ever found.
Reports about what happened to Gene De Bruan vary to this day.
He is still officially classified as missing in action.
When Pacidi Indraat was asked years later about the man who chose to stay, his answer was simple.
The finest man I have ever met.
There’s a line in the De Bruan family’s records that almost nobody quotes.
In 1969, Jean’s brother, Jerry, wrote to the CIA asking about his brother’s status.
The AY’s reply, now declassified, is a single page.
It is polite.
It answers almost nothing.
Jerry De Bruan kept writing for decades.
He wrote to agencies, to officials, to anyone who might know something.
The answers rarely changed.
His brother was missing.
Nobody could say more.
So did Dangler in his own way.
In 1979, he published his account, Escape from Laos.
In it, De Bruan appears as a friend, but an eccentric one.
Pacidi who knew De Bruan for almost three years remembered a strong leader and a peacemaker.
Two survivors, two memories of the same man.
Even the official record can’t fully agree with itself.
The prisoners broke out on the 29th of June.
Dangler’s Navy cross citation dates the escape to the 30th of June.
Then came the films.
In 1997, the German director Verer Herzog took Dangler back to Laos for the documentary Little Deer Needs to Fly.
Dangler walked the jungle again.
He even found the engine of his old Skyraider still lying in the hills where he had put it down in 1966.
It was the first time most of the world heard his story told at length.
In the documentary, Dangler tells it himself in his own words and his own accent, standing in the places where it happened.
Herzog then turned the story into a feature film, Rescue Dawn, with Christian Bale as Dangler.
That’s the film most people know, and it’s the one the survivors objected to.
It shows six prisoners, not seven.
It shows Gene De Bruan as unstable and selfish, a man ready to sell out the others.
De Bruan’s family protested publicly.
So did Pacidi Indradat, the only other man who had actually been in that hut.
Both said the film did not show what really happened, including the risks Pacidi himself took on the day of the breakout.
Herzog reportedly said later that he learned of De Bruan’s heroism only after the film was finished.
The man who chose to stay with a sick friend, became on screen, the man who couldn’t be trusted.
As for Dangler, he left the Navy, became a test pilot, and kept flying for most of his life.
Friends noticed one habit he never lost.
He kept food stored around his home.
When someone asked why, he reportedly gave a short answer.
So, I will never be hungry again.
Deer Dangler died in February 2001 in California after a long illness.
He was 62.
He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.
As the ceremony ended, Navy jets flew low over the hill.
Think back to the very beginning.
A small boy in a German town watching a plane fly past his window so close he could see the pilot’s face.
Back then, that plane belonged to the enemy.
60 years later, American planes flew over him one last time.
This time, they were his own.
But the story has a second ground.
In the hills of Laos, the engine of his Skyraider is still out there in the place he found it again in 1997.
Somewhere in those same hills is the answer to what happened to Gene De Bruan and YC2.
Nobody has found it.
And in Bangkok in January 2016, Picidi Indraat died, the last man from that hut.
At his funeral, he was dressed in a t-shirt from the Missoula Smoke Jumpers, the firefighters Gene De Bruan had once jumped with.
Two men made it out of that jungle.
One spent his life telling the story.
The other spent his life making sure a friend’s part in it wasn’t forgotten.
So, when you hear a war story and somebody comes out of it the hero, it’s worth asking who isn’t here to tell their side.
Thank you for watching and for staying with Deer, Dwayne, Jean, Pacidi, and the others all the way from that bamboo hut to Arlington.
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