Hero Found: The Greatest POW Escape of the Vietnam War by Bruce Henderson

One of the squadron’s senior pilots, Commander Donald E. Sparks, thirty-seven, of Royal, Nebraska, a veteran of two Korean combat tours aboard the carrier Prince ton (CVA-37) and formerly a flight instructor at Pensacola, made it a point to test the flying skills of the new guys, known as nuggets in navy parlance. He had challenged Bumgarner to a game of “tail chase,” with Sparks flying lead and the nugget trying to stay on his tail, thereby simulating aerial combat. It did not turn out as Sparksplanned: the senior aviator was unable to shake Bumgarner, who stayed within fifty feet of Sparks’s tail throughout various turns, rolls, and dives. Sparks finally radioed, “Okay, you take the lead and see how you like it.” The stocky Bumgarner, who had displayed an innate confidence since his first flight in a Spad when he flew between the open spans of a drawbridge like a 1920s barnstormer, keyed his radio mike and said, “I’ll get rid of you in thirty seconds, sir.” As soon as Sparks got on his tail, Bumgarner pushed the stick all the way to the left and held it until he was pulling six g’s, then stomped down on the right rudder pedal. The Spad went into a snap roll and kept going—spinning faster and faster until it was rolling 300 degrees a second, twice as fast as its normal roll rate. Then he went hard right, pulling six g’s the other way, and came up right behind Sparks. “Get on my wing,” Sparks said sternly. “We’re heading back.”
    Now, Bumgarner was on the tail of a fellow nugget, who was desperately trying to lose him. The other pilot dived for the deck and Bumgarner followed, confident he could do with his airplane whatever this fellow did. They had started at 12,000 feet, and usually the guys in the squadron broke off play-fighting at 5,000 feet for safety’s sake, but the pilot in front did not pull up. As Bumgarner drew steadily closer all he could see out the front of his canopy was the big-ass tail of the Spad he was chasing. Then, in a nanosecond the guy pulled off and was gone. The only thing then filling Bummy’s field of vision was the ground. Pulling out of the dive at an altitude of only 200 feet, he realized he had chased the guy into a gorge surrounded by jagged, low-slung mountaintops. Coming close to “buying the farm,” Bumgarner realized: That hotshot was ready to wipe me off the side of a mountain rather than have me beat him .
    The hotshot who did not like to lose was Dieter Dengler.
     
    The A-1 Skyraider squadron that was to become VA-145 began in 1949 as a group of weekend warriors at Dallas Naval Air Station in Texas. Originally designated VA-702 and named the Rustlers, the reserve squadron was activated in 1950 for service in Korea. Redesignated VA-145 during its second Korean tour, the squadron changed its nickname to Swordsmen andadopted a gung-ho slogan: “Live by the sword, die by the Swordsmen.” Ironically, the first navy pilot to die in the next war would be a Swordsman.
    In the summer of 1964, as events unfolded in the waters off Southeast Asia that would lead to full-blown U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, VA-145 was deployed aboard the carrier Constellation (CVA-64) in the South China Sea.
    Late on the afternoon of August 2, 1964, the destroyer Maddox (DD-731), steaming in the Gulf of Tonkin gathering electronic intelligence outside the twelve-mile territorial line claimed by North Vietnam, was approached in international waters by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. What happened next would be the subject of conflicting reports: Maddox claimed to have opened fire with its guns only after evading a torpedo attack, but a top-secret report by the National Security Agency declassified in 2005 states that Maddox fired the first shots—“three rounds to warn off the communist boats,” which then returned fire. The U.S. ship was hit with a single machine-gun bullet that caused minor damage. A flight of F-8U Crusaders from Ticonderoga —already