Lao Voices

In response to Darly’s post of the movie, Rescue Dawn. I got the chance to watch and listen to Dieter’s escape from a Lao POW in the documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. This so called documentary was also directed by Werner Herzog, from the movie Rescue Dawn and came out in 1997.

When Dieter’s plane was shot down over Laos in 1966, he survived and escaped the Lao prison camp near the border of Vietnam. All Dieter wanted to be was a pilot, until he found himself bombing over Laos and felt it was all “a strange barbaric dream.” Dieter is so full of optimism and courage. After the war, he lived in the Mt. Tamalpais area of northern California. He passed away in 2001 of Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

This is a portion of the interview with the director. By Andy Klein.

How did Dieter get to be so tough?

Just imagine you are growing up in a country where the 700 major cities are laid completely to waste, like Ground Zero in New York, but entire cities. And the starving so extreme that your mother would have the children rip the wallpaper from the walls of bombed-out buildings, so she could cook it because there were nutrients in the glue. That’s the background that prepared him, made him self-reliant and courageous … made him into what he ultimately was.

Dieter had such amazing optimism. Wouldn’t that sort of negative childhood have the opposite effect?

I wouldn’t call it a negative childhood. You have a negative childhood if you grow up in a dysfunctional household, with both parents drug addicts and violence in the family. Dieter … both Dieter and I … had a beautiful kind of childhood, even though the hardships were palpable for both of us.