European Volunteers in Vietnam II

Dieter Dengler with a portrait of his father, an NCO in the Wehrmacht.

Last year I wrote about Swedish volunteers in Vietnam and mentioned that the US forces in Nam also had at least one German volunteer: Dieter Dengler. Yesterday I finally saw the movie about his great escape.

I picked up a DVD of "Rescue Dawn", the movie about Dieter Dengler´s escape, here in my local supermarket. Real cheap too. But the movie was not bad at all. In fact, it made an unusually strong impression on me. To sum it up I´d say I found it utterly exciting, most well cast and visually captivating.

I wanted to know more about the reality behind the film and that was how I found the above clip on Youtube. I am puzzled by the omission in the film of the episode with Dengler´s father. But then a number of things did not make it into the movie. That is understandable, a movie cannot portray everything, not even everything important. However, judging by this website, the director may have taken too many liberties and also missed vital points.