Little Dieter Needs to Fly

- Come on in. -Nice to see you. - Yeah, good seeing you.

Listen, take off your jacket and your shirt and we'll see what it looks like.

We can put it on your back or your chest, wherever you want.

Well, actually l... you know, I couldn't have that on my body

because I hate to tell you but it was somewhat different.

In fact, it was quite a big difference.

You have to understand, I was just crawling along, I had one day to live.

I was on my knees and I was hallucinating.

And then, those enormous doors opened up.

Lots of horses kept galloping out and there wasn't death, there was...

Driving those horses, it was the angels.

And I had this vision. Death didn't want me. Death didn't really want me.

Men are often haunted by things that happen to them in life,

sometimes, you see these men walking the streets or driving in a car.

Their lives seem to be normal, but they are not.

When I'm driving my car I often hear the voices of my dead friends.

Sometimes, my friend Duane Martin calls me and tells me that his feet are cold.

Because of this, even on a warm sunny day, I keep my convertible top up.

I was shot down over Laos in 1966, in the early phase of the Vietnam war.

I never wanted to go to war.

I only got into this because I had one burning desire, and that was to fly.

But that there were people down there who suffered

and who died only became clear to me much later...

When I was their prisoner.

This is dieter dengler.

He came to America 40 years ago, and for the last 15 years

he has lived on mount tamalpais, north of San Francisco.

Yeah, this is a lot of fun.

You see, this really seems strange to most people, but to me it's very important.

It denotes freedom to be able to open or close a door.

When I was a prisoner, I couldn't open the door, and later on when I was dying

those big doors in the sky would open up.

And so... most people don't realize how important it is, and

the privilege that we have to be able to open or close a door.

So... anyway, that's a habit I got into and... so be it!

Well, this is the inside of my home.

But you see, when you come into my house right away

there are pictures of open doors.

That's been always very important to me and... it gives me a sense of freedom.

Walk into my house, when I built this house 15 years ago

I focused on having this open feeling.

This was very important to me that I am on top of the mountain,

I needed to find some kind of canyon.

Well, looking out here you see a b-51 mus... uh, spitfire.

Flying was always very important to me as a child

got little motors in there, don't know if they still work.

I can climb up there and see.

Yes, they do.

Anyway, again, just standing here you see that

I do have an open feeling in this house. There's a...

Large stove. I really enjoy to cook.

Food is very, very, very important to me. As you see, there's a lot of food.

The refrigerator is always packed full with food.

The cupboard is full of food. In fact, as I look in there it's half empty.

Not only that, below the house

I have emergency provisions that I put in there years ago,

that I'm kind of hoarding down there. Well, I'm really curious myself now

to see if everything is still in good shape down here.

Tear up this carpet here.

And those...

Those five gallon containers.

Yeah, everything seems to be... Still in good shape down here.

There is a 1000 pounds of rice.

There is a 1,200 pounds of flour and wheat.

There's 300 pounds of honey.

There's sugar down there. I tell you, I'll probably never need...

Any of this food, but I can sleep so much better knowing that it's down there.

Well, while I was in prison...

All we did talk about was food.

We talked about deep freezers,

and... refrigerators, stacking 'em up and

I decided I'm coming back home and I'm gonna build a restaurant.

A German type restaurant and I'm gonna stack it up and never be hungry again.

This is my mother.

She arrived in America after I had gained about 30 or 40 pounds.

I was in San Diego, in a hospital.

She...

Came on an airplane with... Boxes full of apples...

That she was passing around to all the passengers around her.

She turned the meal down,

in the airplanes, because she thought it cost her a lot of money.

And, she was truly starved.

This is my father.

I only know my father from pictures. He was killed in the war.

I miss not having a father. It was just then later on...

When I was in vietham and my friend Duane's head was... cut off

and the vietcongs were all around me, there was just shooting and yelling,

and... yeah, I was just running along down this trail.

And then I came to this river fork and...

Here was my father, clear as a picture in the middle of the river standing

and pointing with his arm, and just pointing and pointing...

For me, for the direction to go.

And I went behind the rocks and I worked my way up that riverbed.

I heard the vietcongs come by up the other side. They went up the other side,

and then later on, about five days later, I was rescued going up this other side.

So...

That was truly a miracle.

Below me, you see my home town, wildberg.

I was born there. My childhood years were... spent right here.

Down here you see the church and a few houses. The left was my house.

It's not there anymore, the bombers came and...

And wiped out this town.

The first airplane...

The first airplanes that I ever saw in my life, they came right over here.

They were fighters. They were... They dove down onto this small town.

They mad senseless attacks on this small village just like this.

And behind me... up there. That's kind of how it looked.

I had two brothers then and we were out on the top window, and we looked out.

And we watched all this, and I clearly remember one of the airplanes...

Came diving at our house, and it was so unusual because the cockpit was open.

The pilot had black goggles that were sitting on his forehead. He was looking.

He had actually turned around! He was looking in the window.

And the machine guns were just firing, because the... the flashes...

I kept seeing them coming out.

And the left wing tip just missed the house by two or three feet as it whipped by!

It was just a fraction of a second. It was like a... vison for me!

It was like an almighty being... That came out.

It's just something else that's very difficult to describe.

But I knew from that moment on that I wanted to be a pilot. I wanted to be a flier.

From that moment on little dieter needed to fly.

I have a few medals that I received.

That's an American fighter Ace medal.

Right over here is the purple heart, air medal...

Distinguished flying cross, and the Navy cross.

Up here in the corner, this sword is called the sword of loyola.

It was blessed by the pope, it's brought over here by a bishop.

Just two in existence. J. Edgar hoover got one and I was lucky to get the other one.

What does it mean for you to be a war hero?

Oh, I'm not a hero. Only people who are dead who are heroes.

And that's not a thing I want to be, and I don't think of myself as a hero.

No, only dead people are heroes.

If I start over here...

This picture was sent to me recently by a friend.

This is the last shot of my airplane after I took... when I took off for Vietnam.

And this is how the airplane looked two hours later.

And this is dieter dengler, six months later, after his rescue.

He was down to 85 pounds.

I knew hunger as a child.

I grew up in post-war Germany.

We lived in great poverty and I remember as children

going to bombed out buildings, where we tore off wallpaper.

My mother would cook the wallpaper and we would eat it...

Because there were nutrients in the glue.

As a child, dieter saw things around him

that just made no earthly sense at all.

Germany had been transformed into a dreamscape of the surreal.

And then, things got better.

Dieter remembers the first sausage in a display window.

It was the first one in years, and he stopped and stared at it.

Everyone else stopped too, but nobody could afford to buy it.

In post-war Germany, there was no aviation.

And therefore, it remained dieter's dream to become a pilot.

This is a very, very, very old...

Rare clock.

From age 14, dengler apprenticed as a tool and dye maker.

He learned how to build church clocks.

Not only did I learn to be a... church clock builder, I learned to be a blacksmith.

God! What a tough apprenticeship I had! How many hours did I stand right here?

How many times did I have that hammer on my side?

I had this boss who was... an old man.

He was a blacksmith, he had hands like that. Many times...

He would come up and hit me in the face. I would be just... l would be passing out.

We worked from seven in the morning till late at night.

Including weekends. We made 50 cents a month.

It was truly horrible, but we stuck with it.

And then, later on in vietham...

That's the first time I recognized it. What it meant really to me

and without this tough, tough, tough man

that beat us many, many times; I could have never made it.

He finished his apprenticeship at age 18.

Thirty minutes after his final exam dieter was already en route to America,

because his dream of being a pilot had never died.

This photo was taken the moment he left.

I left from right down here for America. I had 30 cents in my pocket...

I was two hours out of town, I was hungry.

I had two weeks to wait for my ship to leave and I hitchhiked...

Via Hamburg, to bremerhaven where the boat left.

I was climbing up the ladder, I got seasick right away.

In the back of the ship they were playing a German national song...

Tears were rolling down my eyes.

I stepped on the ship and got seasick. I was violently sick for 2 1/2 weeks.

But, I managed to go up in the kitchen or living room...

Not the living room, but where people were eating,

and there I got sandwiches and I got oranges. And I hoarded it all in my room.

And then, early in the morning there was an announcement that the

statue of Liberty was going to come in sight. I went in my room.

I took this large shirt from my grandfather, tied it with string below my knees

and filled it up with sandwiches, with oranges, all this food.

And I thought, we're just going to arrive, I'll walk off the ship.

But we had to go through customs. Well, I never heard of customs.

I was this little 18 year old boy, I never was out of my hometown.

One time for one day we went to a castle somewhere. We were extremely poor.

So, anyway I went through customs.

A lot of people were lined up. This customs agent came over.

The first thing, he grabbed my shirt. Pulled my shirt up

and all the sandwiches and all those oranges fell on the floor.

I got beet red because when I left my hometown people were laughing, they said:

"He's going to America. Money's gonna... He thinks money grows on the trees!"

They thought I'm gonna end up in jail, and now I knew...

They were right, I'm gonna end up in jail.