True Films 3.0 - Kevin Kelly

Little Dieter Needs to Fly
Few lives are as dramatic as Dieter’s. Born dirt poor in Germany, he was
starved to eating wallpaper during the bombing of his village in WWII,
endured beatings as an apprentice blacksmith, arrived penniless in
America in the hopes of being a pilot, peeled potatoes for two years in
the Air Force, enrolled in the Navy, got to fly in Vietnam, was shot down
in Laos, endured torture and starvation in Vietnam, and escaped in a
series of unbelievable adventures to return to the US as a purple hearted
hero. This documentary by Werner Herzog retraces Dieter’s life, including
a journey back to Laos, where Dieter re-enacts his capture, and months
of torture in a mountain prisoner of war camp. Naturally, Dieter is quite
a character, and his charisma is evident in this excellent portrait of an
unusually observant and hardened survivor.
By Werner Herzog
2002, 74 min.
Available from Amazon
Rent from Netflix
Film footage from
Vietnam bombing runs
(above). Dieter returns
to the prisoner camp
which he escaped from
and sits in the leg stocks
(left). He shows how he
defeated their locks and
the way they escaped.
He also re-enacts his
rescue using clothes to
spell out SOS on river
rocks (bottom left). His
return to his shipmates
(bottom right) was
national news.
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