Wednesday, July 21, 7:30 p.m.

Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War  BUY NOW

The true story made famous in Werner Herzog’s acclaimed film Rescue Dawn—the incredible drama of the pilot who overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to lead a mass escape from a P.O.W. camp deep in the Laotian jungle. 

In February, 1966, U.S. Navy pilot Dieter Dengler was shot down over “neutral Laos.” He crashed deep in territory controlled by North Vietnamese army regulars and the communist Pathet Lao who would eventually capture him and hold him prisoner in a fortified jungle prisoner-of-war camp.

But German-born Dengler was no ordinary prisoner. Already a legend in the Navy for his escape and evasion skills—amply demonstrated during training in the California desert—he would initiate, plan and lead an organized escape from the P.O.W. camp, becoming the longest-held American to escape captivity during the Vietnam War. Caught in a most desperate situation, imprisoned not only by the enemy but by the jungle itself, Dengler’s heroic impulse was to not only get himself out but to free all the other P.O.W.s—Americans, Thai, and Chinese—some of whom had been held for years.

In a surreal scene of brotherhood and celebration, Dengler returned to his aircraft carrier, the USS Ranger, six months after being shot down—emaciated, ravaged with strange tropical illnesses but very much alive and joyous to be so—only two weeks before the ship was due to leave the Gulf of Tonkin and return home.

Bruce Henderson is the author or coauthor of more than 20 nonfiction books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller And the Sea Will Tell (with Vincent Bugliosi) and Down to the Sea: An Epic Story of Naval Disaster and Heroism in World War II. During the Vietnam War, Henderson served as a U.S. Navy Seventh Fleet weatherman aboard the aircraft carrier Ranger (1965–67). A former newspaper and magazine writer, he now teaches nonfiction writing at Stanford University. He lives in Menlo Park, CA.