Hacksaw Ridge was the film I selected to best represent Veterans Day in 2022. For Memorial Day this year my choice is Rescue Dawn. The film was adapted from the true story of Dieter Dengler who grew up in Germany during World War Two, but became enamored of the US Air Force as a child during the waning days of the war. The extreme poverty and other hardships that he and his family suffered during the war and it’s aftermath would galvanize Dengler into a tough, resilient, and resourceful man. These qualities would serve him well for the death defying challenges to come in the near future.
At only 18 years old, Dengler immigrated to the US in 1956 and within a year had joined the Air Force and went to basic training in Texas. He later studied aeronautics in California and was accepted to and completed the Aviation Cadet Training Program through the Navy. After finishing flight and attack pilot training he would soon be sent to Vietnam. By the time Dengler is in Vietnam in 1965, the United States is stepping into quicksand – slowly but surely getting sucked into a devious, murky conflict with no real hope of victory over the communists. However, Rescue Dawn doesn’t focus deeply on the sticky political motivations for US involvement in the war or present the wider conflict on an epic scale as numerous other films about the Vietnam War have done.
What we observe is a mind-blowing ordeal of survival in microcosm under dreadful prisoner-of-war circumstances. What Dengler and the five other men imprisoned with him suffer – is anguish you can feel in the pit of your stomach. By the time Dengler is shot down over the jungles of the neighboring country of Laos in February, 1966 the conflict has become a spreading morass where he and his fellow inmates are but a tiny part of the collateral damage. In Rescue Dawn Christian Bale takes on the full weight of Dengler’s military biography. Bale is well known for playing a wide variety of characters that now spans some forty years, beginning as a child actor in the 1980s. Many of his portrayals are intense characters in heavy dramas – with Rescue Dawn being no exception.
His portrayal of Dengler as the P.O.W. had to be one of the most trying roles an actor could take on as the viewer can tell that the jungle prison camp is actually on location in the middle of nowhere – not a backlot or soundstage simulating the tropical wilds. You can almost feel and smell the stench of humidity combined with the sore lack of sanitation. Dengler endured six months of grueling conditions including torture by sadistic guards, near starvation rations, chronic dysentery, broiling tropical heat, and psychological disintegration. Dengler’s fellow inmates included two other Americans and four Thai nationals who had been captured previously and had suffered through the camp’s wretched conditions for at least two prior to Dengler’s capture.
It’s also sobering to note that Dengler was one of only two U.S. airmen to escape capture during the Vietnam War and survive. In Rescue Dawn the circumstances of the escape are also a harrowing ordeal as Dengler and the other prisoners have to avoid civilian villages that are sympathetic to the Pathet Lao communists who were running the P.O.W. Camp and to not succumb to exposure in the thick jungles without adequate food and clothing. From watching Rescue Dawn it’s easy to realize that there is much to be grateful for as so many in our armed forces like Dieter Dengler sacrificed so much (many with their lives) trying to defend our freedoms as Americans or trying to secure those for less fortunate ones overseas.
