Return With Honor: The Unbreakable Spirit of Captain Charlie Plumb

In this powerful episode, Captain Charlie Plumb shares his extraordinary journey from Navy fighter pilot to six-year prisoner of war in Vietnam. He reveals how faith, discipline, and the support of fellow POWs helped him survive unimaginable hardship and return with honor. Captain Plumb discusses the importance of forgiveness, finding your “why,” and turning adversity into growth. His story is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of hope.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So much of my life, you know, it's just sort
of accidental fun and game kinds of things that turn
out to mean something. Suddenly I felt a thump and
my instrument panel lit up like a Christmas tram. It
was just flashing red lights all over the panel.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
You land, and then you have some visitors.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
I knew they knew I was coming down because they
were shooting at me while I'm in the parachute, which
I thought it was not fair, you know what I mean,
they just knocked down. So it took a deep breath,
let about half of it out, tried to calm myself,

(00:41):
and I bowed my head and I said a prayer.
I knew I was going to see some pain in
my future, and I prayed that there might be some
value in the pain.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
Welcome back to The Sino Show host Sino McFarlane. Today's
guests isn't just a hero, He's living proof of what
the human spirit can endurance still rise. Captain Charlie Plump
flew seventy four combat missions as a Navy fighter pilot
before being shot down over Vietnam. He spent six years,

(01:18):
over two thousand days in a prison cell, beaten, starved, isolated,
but never broke it and he walked out. He didn't
just survive, he came back with a message about resilience,
faith and freedom that's changed.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
Lives all over the world.

Speaker 3 (01:32):
He's a warrior, a teacher, and a man who knows
what it means to turn pain into power. It's a
great honor to have you here, Captain.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
Wow, see I'm gonna meet this guy.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
You like that intro? Yeah, well I couldn't.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
This better than my mother used to talk about? Yeah, well, let's.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
Let let's start with Kansas, all right. Not grew up,
not a lot of money, no plumbing, I understood.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
I was seven years old where I actually sat down
on a toilet seat. Well, we had toilet seats, but
they were in you know, a little outhouse out back.
So yeah, at then have any plumbing until I was
seven years old. But yeah, I had a great childhood.
You know, we didn't know we were poor, and so
everybody got along and had a wonderful father, a great

(02:28):
World War two era guy, disciplinarian, wonderful, wonderful. My mother
was Saint Teresa. I absolutely put her up against anybody.
She wonderful Christian lady and taught me a lot about forgiveness.
And in fact, as you know, as a growing up kid,
I would see people offend my mother and mom, you know,

(02:53):
don't you realize that what that lady said about you?
Don't you want to fire back at her? Oh no, no, Son,
you just don't know what she's going through. You know,
she may just been diagnosed with cancer for all we know,
and so give her some grace. Well, so I learned, Chris.
I learned forgiveness of Christian principle, which is solid, but

(03:15):
I found that in a prison camp. It's also a
survival principle that if you harbor all this hate and
vitriol within you is hurting you more than you're mad
the person you're mad at.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
So you also, I believe, learned from your father self discipline.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
Self dim Yeah. My dad was. He was quite a
disciplinarian and I worked as his apprentice. He was a carpenter.
I worked as his apprentice in the summertime and tough,
tough guy. But he would say, you know, he would say, Son,
he said, you know, self discipline gives you options. I'm
thinking that can't be right, dad, you know, I mean,

(03:55):
discipline of itself is restrictive. You know, it's it's something
that you know, it gives you guide rails. You don't
want discipline, but I found again in a prison camp
that discipline really does give you options.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
Got it. And then Captain you moved to uh to
a bigger city.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
Correct, we did a little town. I grew up in
three hundred and twenty five people, uh And yeah, it
was really tiny town right on the river, but a
great a great place to grow up, you know. Just
but we then we moved into a suburb of Kansas City.
So I traded my little one room schoolhouse for I

(04:38):
think we had like six or seven hundred in my
high school graduating class. And so that that was quite
a transition for me, just you know, making making that move.
But still even then, see, I'd never been out of
the four states of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri. I'd never
ridden in an airplane, never seen the ocean. I you know,

(05:02):
I was really pretty limited in my span in my knowledge.

Speaker 3 (05:09):
But you were you were an athlete, you performed in
the band or right, you did plays, You're pretty right.

Speaker 2 (05:16):
Were you high achiever? Even then?

Speaker 1 (05:18):
I'm not sure a high achiever, but I did a
lot of things, and I stayed very active. I worked.
You know, I as a kid, I always had some
kind of a job. It was, you know, throwing newspapers
or you know, picking corn or hoe in gardens and
stuff like that. So I, you know, I was a

(05:44):
pretty motivated kid.

Speaker 3 (05:46):
And then somehow you got into the academy.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
Yeah, how did that happen? That was amazing. Well, my
parents couldn't afford to send me to college, so I
had to start looking for scholarships. I knew, I knew
I needed to go to school, so I did the
old shotgun approach. Man. I just sent my resume that
everybody could think of, and I got an appointment to Annapolis,
the Naval Academy. I didn't I honestly did not know

(06:15):
what they did at the Naval Academy. I knew nothing
about the Army Navy game, or inner service rivalries or
any of that. But you know, and I'd like to
sit here and say, hey, you know, I had this
great goal, this dream of being an admiral or flying
an airplane or commanding a ship. But that's not true.

(06:37):
I needed an education, and that was the only way
I was going to get one was with some kind
of scholarship.

Speaker 2 (06:43):
Wow, and Walkes what was that when he got on
the camp? But what was that like for you?

Speaker 1 (06:48):
Just? You know, yeah, it was well, first of all,
gone on the greyhound bus in Kansas City, Kansas, and
two days later, I was lifting my right hand and
pledging to defend the Constitution United States against all enemies
foreign and domestic. And I had no earthly idea what
I was doing or what kind of what it was

(07:10):
going to take to fulfill that commitment. So uh, but
you know, and I'm gonna fish out of water. I
was just thrown into this thing, you know. Of course,
you know, shaved my head and and started yelling at me.
I was pretty uncomfortable, you know, for the first year

(07:32):
I was there, pretty uncomfortable. But you know, I got
into this the scheme. Uh. I really saw the value
again of the discipline of it all. And and of course,
you know, they they make you feel like you're part

(07:54):
of a valuable team and and you know, and and
most MOTI guys say, you know, yeah, I'm fighting for
my country, but mostly I'm fighting for the guy I'm
next to, because uh, and that's pretty much true. And
at the Naval Academy. It was really true. You were
all on sports teams. It was mandatory to be on

(08:14):
sports teams, and uh, we were all, you know, very
highly motivated.

Speaker 3 (08:20):
And did kat during that time? Did you have we
do you have healthy self esteem? Did you believe in
yourself or did you?

Speaker 1 (08:27):
Yeah? You know, I think I've always had pretty healthy
self esteem. I I don't I don't remember having any
great goals in mind. Uh, but I was confident in
who I was and what I was doing. Uh. And I,
you know, I think my my personality is sort of

(08:47):
an introverted but uh, but I'm always ready to, you know,
to to get involved and to do new things and
take risks. Uh and Uh, I guess I pretty much
got that from my dad because he was a risk taker.
And at the Naval Academy, you know, you really have

(09:08):
to step out and and and do things you don't
know how to do, sort of fake it till you
make it. I still do that today.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
What was it like the first time you stepped in
one of those planes.

Speaker 1 (09:28):
Well, the at the Naval Academy during the summertime, you
get a sampling of what you might do. So the
Naval Academy produces marines, and so one of the summers
we spent playing marines, you know, you know, we take
these these boats and go into the beaches and storm

(09:51):
the beach with the marines. One of the summers was aviation,
so we went down to Pensacola, Florida and learned I
fly airplane. Well, we didn't learn to fly. We'd got rides,
I guess, were up maybe a dozen times. I would
be taken up in an airplane and I was fascinated
by flight. I just couldn't understand how this works. You know,

(10:12):
I kept, I remember, kept looking for some kind of
a pole that was holding the airplane in the sky
because I didn't understand the lift. So I was really naive.
But I was fascinated by flight, and uh and and
still am today. As a matter of fact, I still fly.
I have two little airplanes and uh and it's it's

(10:33):
it's just fascinating for me to fly. When I finally
got my wings, went home back to my mother, you know,
great Christian lady, and she said, son, I have a
question for you. I said, what's that? Mom? She said,
when when you fly up there so high, do you
feel closer to God? Yeah? I'm thinking, silly lady, Oh,

(10:56):
God's not necessarily up there in the sky. But I'll
tell you this, Still, longer I live, the more I
understand the wisdom of that, because from five thousand feet
you don't see the evil on the ground, you know,
you don't see the filth, you don't see the crime.
You're up there and it's just it's all peaceful and beautiful.

(11:16):
And I think you are closer to God when you fly.
Oh that's beautiful. Yeah, Mom was onto something.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
When did you start doing missions?

Speaker 4 (11:23):
Then?

Speaker 2 (11:23):
What year was that? And walk us through those first missions? Then?

Speaker 1 (11:26):
Sure, I was in flight training or four years as
a Naval academy, graduated with an engineering degree and a
commission in the Navy, and then eighteen months in flight
training because it you know, it takes a while to
learn to fly and then land on an aircraft carrier.
That's a pretty tricky thing, you know that. I mean,
the Air Force has these runways that twelve thousand feet long,

(11:51):
and we got a runaways that three hundred feet long,
and so you're learning to land on this boat. You know,
it's floating out there in the ocean, and so that
took another six months just to figure out how to
do that. So got my wings of gold, married my
high school sweetheart, and we came out to California to

(12:13):
fly the hottest airplane in the world, the F four
Phantom Jet. This is breaking all the records. This is
fourteen hundred miles an hour in an airplane that could
go to eighty thousand feet. And in fact, it was
designed during the Cold War as a high altitude supersonic interceptor.

(12:36):
Our enemy, we thought was the Russian high altitude bombers,
and so this airplane was built to take off from
the aircraft carrier and fly to sixty seventy eighty thousand
feet and shoot down the Russian bombers and then make
a slow turn and come back and land on the
aircraft carrier. That was all about Well, of course, we

(12:58):
got into Vietnam and we weren't fighting the Russian bombers anymore.
We're fighting these pescid little MiGs and never got above
thirty thousand. I was trained in an astronaut suit because
we were find so high, and we took all these
astronaut suits with us to Vietnam and never got above
thirty thousand feet. Never put these things on so in

(13:22):
any case, so eighteen months of fight train reported to
Pensacola and that's when that's when I flew the first
adversary of flight for the top gun school. Have I
told you that story? No?

Speaker 2 (13:39):
No, but I'm dying to hear that story. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:42):
Well, there's so much of my life, you know, it's
just sort of accidental fun and game kinds of things
that turn out to mean something. So I'm assigned this
wonderful airplane with my buddy Crooki. Crooking and I came
out to San Diego, you know, with our brand new

(14:05):
wings of gold and just full of excitement and and
and reported into the Replacement Air Group, the RAG and
ready to fly, and found out there was a six
month wait to fly this airplane. You know, they just
said too many students and not enough airplanes, so it

(14:27):
was six months. We were going to have to twiddle
our thumbs. Well, So Crooking and I are walking down
the flight line me or mar Naval Air Station, and
we ran into Instrument Training Squadron. Okay, these these are
the guys that train pilots to fly in clouds in
soup where you can't see your horizon. You know, you're

(14:47):
you're you're flying blind, stricken on instruments. And the way
you do this is they've got well we call it
a bag. It's well, it is a bag as a
matter of fact, it's just a curtain that covers all
of your windscreen. You can't see out because you got
this curtain and you're kind of in there in your
little tent, so all you can see is your instrument

(15:07):
panel and so uh and that's how you learn to
fly in the soup. Uh. And so the instrument training
squad well, these guys were flying the F nine F Cougar.
Now that was the airplane that we flew in flight training.
We were qualified to fly this jet and uh, and
it was it was not a supersonic jet like the fantoms. Uh.

(15:31):
It was it was old and slow, but you know
it was it was a jet and it was a maneuverbal.
So Crooking and I signed on to this instrument training
squadron just the fly airplanes. But it got really boring.
And so we'd saved a few hundred pounds of jet
fuel and and we would lurk off the coasts of

(15:52):
San Diego and when these phantoms would come off of
the runway, we would pounce on these guys. Okay, highly illegal.
We were not supposed to be dog fighting with this,
you know, the supersonic jets. Okay, but it was fun
and we would wipe these guys out because they didn't

(16:13):
know how to dog fight. Their mission was to fly
to seventy thousand feet shooting down the Russian bombers and
then come back in Milana. They didn't know how to
They didn't know how to jink and jive and do
all the stuff that's fun, and so we really had
a good time until, oh my god, one day we

(16:35):
came back after a very successful mission, you know, I
mean we really killed them, and we were high fiving
and you know, playing the role, and walked into the
reading room and on the bulletin board it says, Plumb
and Crooky report to the commanding officer of the Replacement
Air Squadron of the f Force Squadron immediately. So he

(16:59):
got two twenty three year old kids in sweaty flight suits.
Because when you're pulling g's and dog fighting, you know,
you really get sweaty and bloody eyeballs. That's another thing
that happens to you when you're pulling a lot of g's.
Your blood keeps running to your head and you get
buddy eyeballs. And we're knocking on the door of the

(17:20):
commanding officer of the F four Phantom squadron. Come in,
we hear this guy. We open the door there he said,
so okay, behind this big wooden desk, he's got his readers,
his readers on. He's looking over the top of his readers.
Old guy thirty two, thirty three probably so oh. He's

(17:42):
wearing a sweaty flight suit with bloody eyeballs too, which
should have been our first indication. He looks it up.
He's he of the guys out there and the F
nine cougars fighting the Phantoms. Yes, sir, we are. You
know that's illegal. Can court marks for you guys for
doing that? Ye? Yes, we understand. He said. Did you

(18:06):
did you follow an F four Phantom through an entire loop? Yes,
sir we did. Did you have your guns trained on
the F four the entire time? Yet, Yes, sir, we did.
He said, I was in that F four, He said,
I was looking back at you, guys. I just came
back from Vietnam. You look an off lot like Meg

(18:28):
the enemy MiGs we've been fighting over there. We don't
know how to fight them. You want to come back
tomorrow and dog fight with us. Suddenly we were legal,
and so we had to take off about thirty minutes
before because they were so much faster than we were.
We would go out seventy eighty miles off the coast,

(18:50):
turn around and face the phantoms because because we were
just about the size and the shape and the speed
of the enemy MiGs uh and so and so. That
started a syllabus within that squadron, and then it's fun
off to its own squadron they called the Navy Fighter
Weapons School, which later came became Top Gun.

Speaker 2 (19:13):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (19:14):
Wow, wow wow.

Speaker 2 (19:15):
I felt like I was in the movie right now
here in this story.

Speaker 1 (19:19):
So it was all a big mistake.

Speaker 2 (19:21):
Well that's let me ask you that I love it.

Speaker 3 (19:23):
What I mean, that's a pretty What gave me the
gumption to do something like that?

Speaker 2 (19:28):
You just like, let's just were you? I mean, what
made you do that?

Speaker 1 (19:31):
Is this kind of your character? You know? I think, yeah,
it it's part of the persona I think of a
fighter pilot. We're always looking for fun things to do.
We're always you know, we're always right on the edge
and trying to new stuff and taking new risks and
that kind of thing. But it was a fun you know, basically,

(19:51):
it was a playing. It was just you know, we
were kids. We were out in our little motor scooters.

Speaker 2 (19:59):
Walked the eye and through. When you've got the mission
to go to Vietnam.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
Well, uh, I joined the squadron when they came back
from Vietnam. And and they they had a tour over there,
and they lost several people and they came back and
they needed replacements. Well I was one of the replacements
of some of the guys that got killed.

Speaker 4 (20:23):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (20:23):
But I mean I was fine with that because I
was trained to do what I was gonna do. And
and you know, they didn't make a gun big enough
to shoot down Charlie Plumb. That's the way I felt,
uh And and and so I was. I was pretty positive.
So I got on the aircraft carrier KIDOK, of course

(20:45):
I I I qualified to land on the aircraft carriers,
and so I went that far. And then I I
launched on the Kittihawk aircraft carrier in San Diego. And
never forget standing on the flight deck waving at my
new wife.

Speaker 4 (21:05):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (21:06):
She was on the pier looking up at me, and
again I promised her I'd be back in eight months,
another commitment that I had trouble fulfilling. Uh. And in fact,
it was her birthday. Wow, Yeah, the fifth of November.
So it was stuff on her, tough on me too,

(21:28):
but man, you know, I was I was motivated. I
had my tail on fire man. I was ready to go.
And she was very supportive, you know, of me, and
and and so I mean it was it was. It
was a good marriage, uh for sure. So off we
sailed towards Vietnam. We we joined another aircraft carrier. There

(21:54):
are two stations in Vietnam, we called Yankees Station and
Dixie Station. The Yankee was up north and Dixie was
out south, and so we operated from those. This is
about oh anywhere from probably forty to sixty miles off
the coast of Vietnam.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (22:15):
And we're flying missions into Vietnam from the aircraft carriers.
And our typical tenure would be four would be four weeks.
We'd be on station for four weeks and then another
aircraft carrier would leave us and we'd take a week

(22:35):
off and then we'd come back for four weeks. So
it was pretty much four weeks on and then a
week off, and then four weeks back on. And we
were going day and night. It was really busy out there.
We were flying. I mean, any pilot would probably fly
three times a day, wow and night. We were flying

(22:57):
day and night missions. So it was a busy time.
And not only you had your obligation as a fighter pilot,
but we also had collateral duties. And so when you
weren't up in the air flying, you know, you were
down you know. We you know, we were officers, and

(23:17):
so we had a crew of men and they were
either mechanics or you know, maybe they would be station
keepers or maybe it would be secretaries of that kind
of thing. Off the ship. It was all male at
the time. The Kidiok was about five thousand men on
board the ship and about one hundred and twenty airplanes

(23:40):
and just just the coordination of men and machines. You know,
we're talking about first of all, we're talking about supersonic airplanes.
We're talking about weapons, you know, explosives, We're talking about
hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel that's very flammable.

(24:02):
I mean, it's I mean, it is. It is quite
a dance on those aircraft carriers. Just amazing. And it's
pretty dangerous too, And I thought, in fact, I thought
the most dangerous part of my mission frequently was walking
to my airplane across the deck of this aircraft carrier.
Because you've got propellers that are whirling, you've got jets

(24:25):
that are turning up, and airplanes that are moving all
which different ways, and a jet blast can blow you
right off the ship a propeller. If you get hit
by a propeller, you know you're a goner. You can
slip and own this ship. You know, keeps turning. Every
time his ship turns, you know, it will it will bank.

(24:47):
It will bank maybe ten or fifteen degrees. And so
sometimes you're walking uphill, sometimes you're walking downhill, and especially
if it's raining, then it's slippery, and so it's a
pretty treacherous outfit an aircraft carrier. Wow. So that was
my that was my life for you know, for the

(25:09):
first seven months I was there.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
Right and then and then the and then and then
then everything kind of turned around.

Speaker 1 (25:20):
Captain Yeah, did my uh you know, I mean, I
I remember just really being a happy guy flying those missions.
And I mean, I'm twenty four years old. I'm in
command of the hottest airplane in the world. I got
I got two throttles in my left hand, and I

(25:40):
can push these throttles into the afterburners. I can go
fourteen hundred miles an hour. I found that was a
long way from the old John Deere tractor. Yes, it was.
I'd come a long way by right right and on
my right hand. You know, I got my stick here
with a trigger on it, and I can pull the
trigger and release the missiles from under my under my wings,

(26:02):
and I can knock down enemy airplanes. I can't even see,
you know. I mean, I just I felt I felt
like a top. Then I felt like I was the
best of the best. That that of all the people
in the world, you know, they're probably not one one
hundredth of one percent of anybody can do what I
can do. And that's the way I felt.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:23):
Wow, So you know, maybe a little overconfident.

Speaker 3 (26:27):
Right, So you just you just felt like nothing's going
to stop me, nothing's gonna happen. I'm just the best
of the best. I'm committed to this. I'm on a mission, right,
That's right. I wow, you know. I mean, I well,
the night before I was shot down, let me tell
you about that. It was kind of interesting.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
We were so close to the end of our tour
of duty, you know, I mean, we were just almost home,
thinking about what we're going to do when we get home,
back to my wife, who of course I hadn't seen
in months and months.

Speaker 4 (26:59):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
And so we all got together in the ready room,
you know, watched the movie and gather around and tell
lies to each other, you know, what fighter pilots do.
And and we were gathering about probably six or seven guys,
and one of our fellows was he was a Purdue
graduate and a very smart guy, and he would show

(27:23):
up with this little handheld calculator and he would have
prefigured the probabilities that any one of us would be
shot down and captured the next day. Popular guy.

Speaker 2 (27:36):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (27:38):
No, it was all a joke, you know, I mean,
it was all just fun games. And he would say, there, Jerry,
you know, you know, ready to watch it. Man, you
got a point o nine to three today and you
never know, and Charlie, you are looking better, and you know,
so we laughed and laughed, and then for some reason,
I can't explain it. But the conversation took a serious turn.

(28:02):
And maybe it was because we were so close to
the end of our tour. Maybe it's because we lost
about probably a fourth of our pilots killed or captured
by this time. But for whatever reason, it took a
serious turn, and we we've been began to ask each other, Okay,

(28:24):
what happens if you get shot down tomorrow and captured?
And to a man, I believe it was seven guys
admitted to the other six, if I'm shot down and
capture tomorrow, you know, send my stuff back to my
wife and tell her to get on with her life
because I ain't coming back. You know, I've heard about

(28:45):
the disease. I've heard about the torture. I've heard about
you know, the guillotine that they've gotten that French prison.
And so to a man, we all kind have agreed
that if we were shot down and captured, it was
fate worths and death that we weren't weren't coming back,

(29:09):
uh And And I think that was the first time
I can remember having a negative attitude towards what we
were doing there, or at least personally not feeling so confident,
you know, so wow. The next morning was a big strike.
It was what we call an alpha strike, the biggest,

(29:31):
you know, the biggest coordination of of airplanes. We had
three aircraft carriers and five air force bases all converging
on targets in North Vietnam. We didn't know it at
the time, but it was Ho Chi Minh's birthday. He
was the president of North Vietnam. Puts him in uh

(29:55):
and uh and I think what they thought was that
every nobody would be celebrating President's Day over there, and
that we would you catch them, you know when celebration,
and but boy, it wasn't the case at all. Man.
They knew we were coming, and they hit us hard.

(30:18):
There were eight f four phantoms shot down that day,
air Force and Navy. Uh and I was one of them.
And uh so it was a target just south of
the capital city of Hanoi, and uh I was. I
was at the fighter role. We the airplane was built

(30:39):
as a fighter, you know, air to air. We had
missiles to shoot down other airplanes. But when they found
out that we weren't shooting down Russian bombers anymore, they
put extra racks on our airplanes and put rockets and
bombs and missiles and stuff on the on the airplane

(30:59):
and so so it's been half of our time as
fighters and half of our time as bombers. So this
particular two week period, I was in the role of
an air to air fighter, so I just had the
missiles to shoot down other airplanes. So my job on
this particular flight was to support the bomb group. So

(31:22):
I was out on the corner of the big bomb group.
There must have been well, probably thirty five or forty
airplanes in this whole group. And I remember, first of all,
you take off and then you rendezvous at twenty five
thousand feet or sod to take on more fuel so

(31:44):
you have enough fuel to get in and out. So
you've got a tanker, an airborne tanker up there, an
airplane flying around that streams the hose about a six
inch rubber hose. On the end of the hose is
a big basket, and so you have a probe on
your airplane. You plug into this hose to take on fuel,

(32:06):
which is another pre tricky maneuver, but that's what we did.
You know, every mission, we'd go up and and take
on some fuel. So that's what I did. And then
you know, I joined the rest of the the squadron,
the organization and could see the beach. I remember looking

(32:26):
and seeing I don't know, probably one hundred airplanes out there,
and I'm thinking, man, I am so proud to be
a part of an you know, of such a force
of this, a force for freedom, a force for our
way of life. And uh uh as as we all
approached the beach, you know, before before all the all

(32:49):
the flat the flak and the and the small arms
fire and the MiGs and everything else came up at
us because they pretty much owned the land and we
owned the water in that war. And so when you're
out over the water, you know, you could breathe deeply.
But once you got over the land, they had all

(33:10):
their bases there, they had their anti aircraft missiles there,
they had anti aircraft guns there. Everything just lit up
once you went over the beach. So that's what happened,
went over the beach, went up towards Hanoi, which was
our target. I was on the edge of the of
the flight and I and all I knew was and

(33:33):
then of course I got my stick. Is how you
control an airplane with his stick? And it froze. I
could not move my stick, so I had no control
of the airplane. The airplane, for whatever reason, I rolled
into an upside down position. Now they get out of

(33:57):
a jet airplane was with an ejection seat, and that's
like a rocket under your chair, and you set that
rocket off and you shoot your chair and yourself out
the top of the airplane. We were upside down, and
so I figured that to eject from that altitude at
that speed, it was gonna plant my cop Pott and

(34:18):
me about ten feet below the level of the rights
Patty blow us. And so I had to turn an
airplane upright, but I have no control of my stick. Well,
the other control you have an airplane as a rudder.
A rudder is not normally used to turn an airplane over.
But I am leaving proof that if you hit a
rudder hard enough and you say a prayer loud enough

(34:41):
and the airplane shuddered, it rolled back upright where I
could eject my coal, Pott could eject, our pair of
shoes opened, and we came floating down over enemy territory.

Speaker 3 (34:54):
What's going through your mind when you're trying to turn
the plane and you're what's going through your mind then
and you think and yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:02):
It's all adrenaline, you know, you I don't. I don't
think I had a serious thought. Is I'm just I'm
just moving and reacting as I had been trained to
get the airplane in a position where we can eject
from the airplane. And uh, so I knew how to

(35:25):
turn turn the air upright, and I knew that the
sick wasn't working and the only thing, the only control
I had. I had nothing else but a rudder. And
the rudder is is actually it's a hydraulic rudder, but
it has a manual. It's it's hydraulically boosted, but it's
a manual rudder. And so I knew that I could

(35:46):
get that I might get some action out of this rudder.
And uh but I mean it was so fast. I mean,
it was just an instantaneous movement. It wasn't even a thought.
It was just you know, It's just I didn't, I
didn't think about it.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
You land, and then you have some visitors.

Speaker 1 (36:09):
I knew they knew I was coming down because they
were shooting at me while I'm in the parachute, which
I thought was not fair, you know what I mean?
They just knocked DOWNE.

Speaker 2 (36:26):
They're shooting.

Speaker 1 (36:27):
They're shooting at me. Yeah, I got the bullet snap
and past my ears. Ah, So what could I do?
I took a deep breath, let about half of it out,
try to calm myself, and I bowed my head and

(36:48):
in said a prayer. I knew, I knew I was
going to see some pain in my future, and I
prayed that there might be some value in the pain.
And then I prayed for my wife because I knew

(37:08):
this is not going to go well with her, and
it didn't, and I prayed that she might have the strength,
you know, to hang in there, to whatever she needed
to do, because it was my war, not hers, you know.
I mean I was a volunteerier. I mean, she was

(37:29):
very supportive. She loved me, and she supported what she
supported my passion. But to me, it was you know,
to me, it was fun and games, and to her
it was pretty serious stuff. So I guess I shouldn't
say fun of games. But I enjoyed what I did.
You know, I really felt I felt good about my

(37:52):
role in the military and in life. I really felt
like that I was I was accomplishing something. And for her,
she was just pretty much tag tag along, trying to
support me.

Speaker 3 (38:10):
Even as you're descending from her crashing plane, you're being
shot out, you're saying a prayer for somebody else.

Speaker 1 (38:17):
Yeah, well, yeah, I guess that's true. I had thought
about that, but again, you know, I mean that I
was really concerned. Yeah, uh, because I you know, I
mean and and and over the the years, over the
six years I was there, I felt like I didn't
really prepare her for this, you know, because she, I mean,

(38:44):
she knew that I really enjoyed what I did, and
she supported that in every way. But we never ever
had a conversation about, hey, what if I didn't come home,
you know, what if I uh and and you know,
we were in the middle of the war. Other guys
are being shot down and we knew it, and it
was tough, tough, tough on her. One of the really

(39:05):
tough parts was they had they had a wives group.
You know, we were all male, and so it was
all guys, and it was all our wives back home.
And these wives groups would get together every week and
they would make cookies for us and send us cookies
and pictures and letters and tapes and all this stuff

(39:30):
and we'd hear from our wives just well, I mean
every time you had a supply ship would come with
the letters and stuff. I mean, we didn't have the
communications that we have today with the internet and stuff.
But when one of the guys WO was killed or captured,

(39:52):
the other wives really didn't know how to process this.
And so the widow or the out that didn't know
if she was with or not was sort of she
wasn't ousted intentionally, but it was just she somehow just
was was not supported by the group like you would

(40:14):
hope that she would be. And so and I think
primarily you said, I didn't know what to say. I mean,
how do you comfort someone who see I was missing
an action for a long time, and so she didn't
know if I was a live dad, And so how
do you approach this person that doesn't know if her
husband is a live dad. So it was tough, so

(40:36):
tough on her that she left San Diego and went
back to Kansas where her parents, my parents were, and
so she had the support of her family back there.
But every day I knew I was alive, you know,
she didn't. I knew I was going home someday and

(40:58):
be better than ever, and she didn't know these things,
and she she had some physical problems connected to, you know,
to to my being shot down. I have a brother
ten years younger than I am, who, over over those years,
was about the same age that my wife and I

(41:21):
had dated. Okay, so, and we look a lot alike.
And my brother would go over to mow her lawn
in Kansas and she would break out in serious hives,
I mean emergency room hives. She would be in the
hospital for two or three days because she saw somebody
that looked like me. Uh and and in fact, the
doctor eventually restricted her from overseeing my brother because it's

(41:47):
just had that effect on her. So it was you know,
I mean, I think, you know, we think about military
and the tough thing that the fighters go through, but boy,
the families are back here. You're going through at least
as much difficulty as we were at Well.

Speaker 3 (42:03):
We're gonna get We're gonna talk about her in a
little bit, okay, okay, okay more, But that's you're capturing now.

Speaker 1 (42:12):
I am captured. I am tortured for military information, but
more than that, primarily political propaganda. They wanted me to
say bad things about America and good things about communism. Uh,
and so it was. Uh, it was a difficult time.

(42:35):
Ropes and irons and whips primarily were were their torture techniques.
There was some waterboarding. I was ever waterboarded while I
was there, but there was some of that that was done.
Some guys were faced a firing squad and then it
was all kind of a hoax.

Speaker 4 (42:55):
You know.

Speaker 1 (42:55):
They would put a pistol up to their head and
ask them questions and if they didn't answer what they
would pull the trigger. But there was no bullet in
the chamber, so which it's a click. As far as
I know, nobody was ever executed in the prison camp. Uh.
We lost We lost about twenty seven guys, but primarily

(43:19):
from disease. I had. Actually a couple of guys were
tortured to death, but nobody was you know, it was
put in front of a firing squad and killed that
I know of.

Speaker 3 (43:32):
It's incredible what you did in there, though. Can you
talk about the tapping.

Speaker 1 (43:37):
Sure, we were restricted from communicating with anybody else, and
originally when they had enough space, we were all in
solitary confinement cells. We're in jail cells. It wasn't it
wasn't the Hogan's Heroes pow camp that you think of,
you know, ironically, our training was based on World War

(44:00):
two and Korean War pow camps. But and we saw
none of that. It was all a jail, and so
were we were locked in there, no windows, you know,
a big door with a flap in the door where
you know they could come and open the flap and

(44:22):
see me anytime. So pretty lonely, you know, for the
first several weeks, until a guy slipped a note on
a actually it's a piece of wire that he pushed
out of a hole in his cell wall across a

(44:45):
storeroom between our two prison cells and into the little
hole in my cell wall fourteen feet away. This guy,
Bob Shoemaker, who was he was shot down two years
before I was. He was in there over eight years. Yeah,
And so in fact, you know, our in our era,

(45:09):
fighter pilots were astronauts. We the whole astronaut program started
with fighter pilots. And I marched in Kennedy's inaugural parade
in the nineteen sixty one, and then I came back
and marched in his funeral in sixty three. But between

(45:33):
those two times, six Joint sixty three. He announced that
we're going to put a man on the moon this decade.
And uh, and all of us who were in flight
training or you know pilots, Hey, that's me and we all,
you know, we all signed up for the astronaut program.
And I was in the original stages, just the physical stuff.

(45:54):
But this guy, Bob Schoemaker, that was the first one
to communicate with me. He had orders to NASA. He
he had gone through the whole thing, and when he
was finished with his tour of booty, he was going
to go right to to Dallas and the Space Center Houston.
I guess, uh and uh So anyway, so he's in

(46:18):
a cell on the other side of a store room
for me, and he passed this wire through and it
scratched on my concrete floor. I thought it was a
cricket at first. And then he passed a note with
this code on it. Uh. The note was written on
a piece of toilet paper. We never had pencils or paper,

(46:39):
but we had toilet paper, which was kind of like
wrapping paper. And we were right in ink made from
ashes or brick dust with a bamboo pin, you know,
you sort of hone a piece of bamboo down and
make a little notch in it, and you can make
it like a like like fountain pen. And that's how

(47:03):
he wrote this note. And the note said, memorize this code,
then eat this note. So the code was a five
x five box of the alphabet, five lines, five rows A, B,
C the across the top, then F, G, H, I, J.

(47:23):
We left out K just to make it come out even.
Five lines and five rows UH. The numbers down the
side and across the top, indicating any letter would be
represented by two numbers number of the line than the
number of the rope. So a first line, first row Z,

(47:48):
so you know one one tug, one more tug. That's
an A Z, fifth line, fifth row, five tugs. See
you know, you think your email is cumbersome. You try,
you try, you try this. That's great, But it worked,
and that code was a lifesaver. It absolutely if you

(48:14):
if you didn't have communication with the other guys in
that prison camp, you probably weren't going to make it.
It was just that vital that that you have a
support group, that you have people that care about you
and enough to pass the wires through a hole in

(48:35):
the wall to communicate with you and to the point
that the guy was put in the far corner of
the prison camp and couldn't communicate with somebody else. If
I was a goner, the guy probably was not going
to make it.

Speaker 2 (48:48):
And some of those messages were just simple keep the
faith right.

Speaker 1 (48:51):
Oh, yeah, that was. That was a lot of a
lot of.

Speaker 2 (48:54):
That, A lot of messages like that.

Speaker 1 (48:56):
Well we passed around Bible versus and patriotic quotes and
yeah it was. It was a lot of you know, positive,
positive stimulation and stuff.

Speaker 2 (49:05):
You know, you formed a workout routine.

Speaker 1 (49:08):
We did that. But back to the communications, because I
think that really applies to you and your audience here
is because I think sometimes we, particularly as guys, are
a little reluctant, you know, to open up to people, uh,
to communicate with people, to share to you know, to
share our our bad news and to share our pain

(49:32):
with people. But in the prison camp, it would just
it was just vital. It was just uh, life or
death that you had to communicate with somebody and you
and we did it any anyway we could. This five
y five tap code thing we would use, like if
a guy would uh was assigned to chop wood out

(49:55):
in the woodpile in the middle of the camp. He
would chop in this code chop chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop,
chop chop chop job. He would spell out a message
and it was our That was our radio station because

(50:16):
it could be heard by everybody in the camp. And
everybody in the camp knew what we call the tap code,
and and so everybody in the camp could could listen
to to you know, to the eye chop in wood.
And the enemy never picked that up. They never figured
that out. Uh wow, because it was just, I mean,

(50:38):
so so far out. It was so far removed from
from their thinking, and pretty much from our thinking too.
I mean, who would ever guess, you know, the numbers
of chops, you know, would come up some kind of
And when we found out that most of the Vietnamese
had tuberculosis and they were always coughing and bidding, uh,

(51:01):
we just and we could do the same thing. We
couldn't We couldn't speak a word, but we could all
cough and spit another POWs could hear us. And so
we made a code out of these silly gatural noises.
So we designated various letters of the alphabet or abbreviations
to be represented by combinations of cough sneezes, spits, or wheezes.

(51:26):
So you'd wake up in the morning, you're the guy's
next door go that means good morning, how are you?

Speaker 2 (51:34):
Oh that's so beautiful. Wow wow wow wow wow wow.
And that kept you alive in many ways.

Speaker 1 (51:41):
Right, Oh, yeah, that kept us to get well. And
so of course we had we had great leaders in
at prison camp. Uh. In fact, one of the first
messages that Bob Shoemaker sent to me, just tugging on
this wire in these in the numbers to represent letters

(52:02):
he would say. He said to me one time, he said,
you don't know it yet, but you've just joined the
best team you'll ever play on. Bar none. He said,
you don't know this yet, but you will see the
best American leadership in this prison camp that you will
ever see the rest of your life. Bar none. Uh.

(52:24):
He said. Our leaderships have redefined our mission here. They
have They have redefined who we are and how we're
supposed to respond. He said. Our leaders tell us that
we are not victims at all. We are not being oppressed,
we are not being put upon I said, so, so

(52:48):
pull up your big boy pants. We've got a war
to fight. That turned the whole thing around. Oh yeah,
it was. Now. I got to tell you this as
a junior officer, you know, because I was I was
really a lieutenant junior grade. You know, I'm twenty four
years old, and I'm thinking this is this is craziness,
you know. I mean, I'm I'm in a prison cell,

(53:11):
for goodness sake. And the guy says that I'm supposed
to be on the offensive here. Uh and I'm not
a victim here, and uh and and I really kind
of I kind of didn't believe it and kind of
ignored it at first to think, you know that that

(53:31):
I that I had some control of my destiny. Uh
and and so but in with the leadership and the
formation of the teams that we put together, we had
we had so much power as a team, even as
subjugated as we were in a prison camp, we had power.

Speaker 2 (53:55):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (53:56):
One of the things that the leadership did was established
levels of resistance, and it as I recall, like five
different levels, and level five was total chaos. You know,
We're gonna break out, We're gonna kill guards, we're gonna
you know, we never got to that, thankfully. But Level

(54:16):
one of resistance was refusing to bow to the guards.
That was one of the things that they they taught
us from there being. Anytime we saw a guard or
any other Vietnamese, we had to do a very low,
ceremonious bow, you know, an oriental kind of a bow

(54:37):
to these people. And it had to be good. You're
gonna get hitting the belly with a rifle butt if
you didn't bow properly, and so and so that was
so we did, you know, I mean, that's that's what
we did. We all if a guard would come to
the door and open the hats in the door and
look in, we all reported the door and we bow

(55:00):
to the guard. No. So level one of resistance was
refusing to bow. Sounds pretty stupid, right, But I'll tell
you this. When the guards get up, you know, at
six o'clock in the morning, and they start opening all
these hatches and nobody bows, and they think we don't
have any communication with each other. They think we don't

(55:21):
have any organization, no no rank in this camp. Uh
and and suddenly two hundred guys in individual cells suddenly
refuse to bow, and they have the same mindset and
it scared them to death. They did not know how

(55:42):
to handle that. So so you know, kind of you know,
kind of a very simple maneuver. But again, the leadership
had the vision of of keeping us together and giving
us power, uh and strength through unity.

Speaker 2 (56:00):
That's incredible. Yeah, that is absolutely amazing.

Speaker 3 (56:03):
And then you know, you're doing push ups and sit
ups and you're walking around your cell and you got
a mile in.

Speaker 2 (56:10):
Oh yeah, and then you worked your way up hundreds
of miles.

Speaker 1 (56:14):
Yeah yeah, oh yeah.

Speaker 3 (56:16):
So talk about that because you knew, you knew that
you had to keep your mind going, you knew you
had to take care of your body, right yep, And
so you started doing these extracises in your cell.

Speaker 1 (56:25):
Yes. And you know, with our communication this technique, we
would challenge other cells. How many push ups can you guys?
Do you know? How many setups can you guys do?
The sit up challenge was over ten thousand straight sit ups? Wow?
Is that amazing?

Speaker 2 (56:45):
Wow?

Speaker 1 (56:45):
The push up challenge was several hundred. One guy could
do twenty seven unsupported handstand pushups. He would go into handstand.
He had pushups from a handstand position. And so but
I mean, but you're right. It was all an effort
to stay physically and mentally active. We taught each other

(57:07):
courses that we'd learned in college or high school. Uh,
because you know, we were we were all college graduates,
and we had masters and PhDs in in that that
prison camp, and so guys would would teach the rest
of us again with just with with a tap code,
tugging on wires or tapping on walls or if you

(57:30):
had a if you had a cell mate, you know,
we we taught each other languages and mathematics, and I
taught of course on sailing. Really yeah, naval academy. I'm
ow to sale. So I'm teaching these Air Force guys
in the cell next to mine how to sail, and
I'm in doing it just by tapping on the walls

(57:52):
and you know, describing all this stuff to them, and
and it was all it was all pretty much just
a way to while away the time, because it took
a lot of time with his code to ever explain
to somebody how to jibe and tack and set the
sail and weigh the anchor and all this stuff. So

(58:15):
it was really cool because about I don't know, maybe
a month after I came home.

Speaker 4 (58:18):
I get this call from this guy, Charlie. I just
I just readed a sailboat. I can sail, I can sail.
So he had from what I had taught him in
the Frost game. Wow, he just jumped in a boat
and took that off and sail.

Speaker 3 (58:34):
I wish I want people because this is a book
that everyone should have in your your amazing book.

Speaker 2 (58:38):
I'm no hero. This is a must read for anything.
It's just an absolute must read.

Speaker 1 (58:45):
You know what.

Speaker 2 (58:46):
So many things just knocked me down, but one of
them was and why.

Speaker 3 (58:51):
I think it relates to the audience about the power
of your mind and what you can do. I just
love the image of you reciting Bible quotes, Bible versus
and then playing the piano. I mean, I just I
couldn't stop crying. What talk to us about that? As
though you were actually playing the piano.

Speaker 1 (59:09):
It was kind of weird because you know, as a kid,
I was a bit of a musician. I played the
trumpet and in the French horn and a guitar, and
so I knew a little bit about music. Uh and
and I knew that my span was octave plus one.
I could I could span nine notes. So I knew
what the keyboard was supposed to look like, you know,

(59:32):
where the black keys were supposed to go and the
white keys and all that stuff. And so I thought, uh,
you know, maybe I can learn to play the piano here.
And so I scratched out on my board bed a keyboard.
I guess it was maybe three octaves, and I started
to do scales on on this keyboard, and I dude,

(59:56):
doublets and triplets and chords. You know, I could put
my hand down. I knew a little bit about major
chords and minor chords and seventh chords, and so I
knew enough about chords to try to figure this stuff out.
And the weird part of this was that if I

(01:00:18):
would put my hand down playing a certain chord but
I had one finger wrong, I could hear the discord.
I could hear the fact that my finger was and
I'm on a wood, you know, I'm on a blank
of wood here. There's no music coming out of this,
but I could actually hear the mistake that I was
making with this. And so and then I moved into

(01:00:44):
a roommate with a guy that knew how to play
the piano, and so he taught me a lot more
than I already knew at that time. I've just you know,
basic songs and stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:00:54):
Wow, that is amazing.

Speaker 3 (01:00:57):
I mean, just so many part of the the mantras
you guys had, we returned with honor, right?

Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
Can you talk about that? Captain?

Speaker 1 (01:01:05):
Sure? That was the motto, the slogan that our leadership
came up with. Uh. And Jim Stockdale was our hero
over there. He was a Navy commander and he was
he was a we call him CAG CG. He was

(01:01:27):
a commander of the Air Group, which was a big deal.
He was he commanded all the airplanes on that ship. Uh.
And so he was a CAG and he was a
Navy commander, but he had already been promoted a captain,
but he hadn't pinned on his captain bars. And so
he was he was the SRO, the senior residing officer,
which was an important thing. Whenever we moved to a

(01:01:50):
new camp and we'd get communication with everybody in the camp,
that was the first question we asked, was what's your
data rank and what's your lineal number? Because we needed
to know who was senior to whom, and that was
just really important to all of us that we knew
who was in charge and so and so this guy,

(01:02:13):
Jim Stockdale was he was a Navy commander and just
promoted a captain and a CAG, which was way about
any of our levels, you know we I mean, we
had some guys in here who were squadron commanders, when
never a commander of the air group. Uh. And so
he was a CAAG. So he took control and uh

(01:02:35):
when they and and and the enemy knew that he
was trying to lead the rest of us. And he
and he was really beaten up because he was the leader,
and he took he took punishment for the rest of us.
And many times and in one case they wanted him

(01:02:55):
to being the senior guy. They wanted him to see
a delegation. These delegations would come over from eastern Europe
or in fact some from the United States. Jane Fonda
was a part of a delegation. You know, she was
a very famous movie actress, and she came over there
as part of delegation. So they they told Stockdale that

(01:03:18):
he was going to see a delegation, and they tortured
him to say good things about the communism and bad
things about capitalism, And so he took a stool that
he had in his room and he battered his face
so that he would be so ugly that they wouldn't
show him on film and nearly killed him as a

(01:03:41):
matter of fact, because he battered himself up so violently.
But so that was Jim Stockdale. But he was the
one who came up with this motto, return with honor.
He said, every decision you make, you want to see
through this prism is this honorable? Am I going to
return with honor? Uh? And those you know, those three

(01:04:06):
simple words became our motto. We commissioned Jim died several
years ago, but we commissioned a destroyer in San Diego.
Just you know it's it's it's been six right years ago. Uh,
And my wife and my son and I went to
San Diego and we rode that destroyer and it's called

(01:04:29):
the US S. Stockdale. It's named after Jim Stockdale. And
we rode that destroyer overnight up to PORTWAYANIMI uh here
close to LA to commission the ship. And so I
spoke to the crew of the destroyer there about Jim.

(01:04:50):
Jim Stockdale. The name's sake on the bow of the
ship of this destroyer return with honor.

Speaker 4 (01:04:58):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:04:59):
That's utiful. Yeah, yeah, you're really beautiful. Wow wow wow wow. Okay,
let's talk about the why. You had to have a
why right about and people will want to know how
did they not break you? What?

Speaker 2 (01:05:10):
How did you keep your light on? How did you?
And you talk about you how to have a why?

Speaker 1 (01:05:15):
You have to have a why. We all need why.

Speaker 2 (01:05:18):
We all need a why.

Speaker 4 (01:05:22):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:05:22):
I I worked with a lot of disabled veterans and
our suicide rate in the veteran community is ridiculous. It's
like twenty to a day. Veterans are killing themselves. My
and that's sort of the baseline of my theory is
that when you're in uniform, you know your why. You

(01:05:45):
know you have a job to do, You've got a
mission to accomplish. If you don't know your why, you
ask your drill instructor that guy that d I will
tell you here why. When you take that uniform off,
you sort of lose the why. If you don't recapture
a why in your life, you're going to be susceptible

(01:06:10):
to drugs and alcohol and suicide and all these other
bad things that happen to people that don't have why.
Well in the prison camp and why was really was
really easy. It was returned with honor. It was to
get out of that hell hole. And that was our
that was our why. And so every waking minute, you know,
we thought about what it was going to be like

(01:06:32):
to be free again, and how are we going to
get there, and how we're going to prepare ourselves for
that moment that we walk out of this prison. So
what's the why? Okay, the why is to is to
return with honor and to return as whole physically and

(01:06:52):
mentally able people that could go back and continue to serve.
You know, ninety percent the p and ws and Vietnam
stayed in the military. They continue to serve after an
experience like that, and so so that was part of
our Hawaii was just the service. I think the other

(01:07:13):
the other why, maybe which might be more important, was
to serve the other guys because we all felt very
obligated to keep our comrades alive and and and healthy
and happy and h and we did everything we could.

(01:07:36):
You know, we threw great parties. We had big birthday
parties for for you know, guys' birthday came up, and
we'd have these parties with great tables of food, you know,
lobster and steak and and wine and all this stuff.
And we'd have a band, you know, playing music over here,

(01:07:56):
and and the for the navy guys, of course, the
birthday came was always a big aircraft carrier, you know,
a cake that was made in the shape of an
aircraft carrier. And then we've been a scantily clad women
pop out of the air. And of course it was
all on our mind. Yes, we were just there. We
were just tapping on walls and tapping, Hey, today's your birthday.

(01:08:19):
Here's what's going to happen.

Speaker 2 (01:08:21):
Wow, that's beautiful. And then what day it does happen?

Speaker 1 (01:08:24):
And we thought about that a lot. Man. We I
always wondered while I was there, how would we respond.
How would a bunch of crusty, old grown men respond
when they were set free? Would we cry? Would we cheer?
Would we hug and kiss everybody around us? You know?

(01:08:44):
I wondered for years and years, and then how we
would find out? They tried to trick us many times.
We kind of got used to this. Hey, sign this
confession and we'll send you home. You know. And of
course it was all just blooney. They were they weren't
gonna do that. So but the day finally came the

(01:09:04):
first real indication. Well, first of all, we got better food.

Speaker 4 (01:09:09):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:09:09):
They were gonna try to fatten us up, because we
were all pretty skinny. And they let us outside into
the sunshine for a while. Boy, that hurt my eyes,
you know, I just could not adjust the bright lights
for a while. But the idea was to put some
color in her skin, because you know. And and then

(01:09:31):
they came in with a piece of this toilet paper,
this wrapping paper stuff, and said, put your your bare
foot on this. Of course we didn't have any shoes anyway,
but we put our foot and they took a pencil
and they traced around our foot on this wrapping paper.
We're gonna get some shoes, and so they took these

(01:09:54):
imprints and went out and made other shoes for us,
and so uh and and then they gave us a
pair of trousers with a zipper. Now, if you haven't
seen a zipper in six years, you just run that
zipper up and down and.

Speaker 2 (01:10:13):
That's uh.

Speaker 1 (01:10:17):
And a jacket uh and uh, a little kind of
a little carrying case, you know, as if we had
something to carry home. And uh so you know, we
we we knew it was going a big deal. Then
the camp commander we called this guy the rat. He
was a rat, He looked like a rat, he acted

(01:10:39):
like a rat. Anyway, we called him the rat. The
rat comes in opens the cell door wider than it
ever been opened, because he'd usually just kind of peek
in there, and there were a lot of us in
that Cell's still a small cell and would probably had
a dozen guys in that cell. And he tried to smile.

(01:11:01):
We've never seen the rat smile. Tried to smile, and
then it's broken English. She said, Uh, the war's over.
We're trading prisoners. Uh, file out of here, get on
the bus. We're going to the airport. And nobody moved,
nobody cried, nobody hugged. If we just couldn't believe it,

(01:11:22):
nobody huggedn't kiss anybody else. So our senior man. You know,
we've always got a senior guy, and every every cell
and every cell block in every camp, everybody knew who
the senior guy was. This is Jim Perry from eight Mile, Alabama.
Sen your Southern guy. He set up and he said,
he faced the camp commander, and he did his low

(01:11:42):
ceremonious bow, and then he said, sir, we're not going
home until all the sick, injured, and enlisted men have
left this camp. Well, the rat couldn't believe this. He
was incredulous. The rat said, wait a minute, period, you
don't understand my English. I'm offering you your freedom. And

(01:12:03):
Pierry said, freedom is vital to us. It's what we've
been hoping for for years. But we will not accept
freedom without our integrity. You send the guys home that
need American medical aid, send the enlisted guys home, and
then you will send us home. By our order of shootdown,

(01:12:27):
the guys who have been here the longest should go
home the first. So we said, now we knew those rules.
Those rules were part of the original thing I learned
from the senior officers. You know, we were not going
to We're not going to go home out of order.
We're going to go home second, injured enlisted guys, and
then pilots. By the date of shootdown. The oldest guys

(01:12:50):
are going first. Uh. And we all knew that. But
and so Pierry was just announcing the camp commander what
we were doing. The camp commander stomped out of there.
He was really upset. He slammed the cell door cloth.
He said, you guys are going to cause an international incident.
So we got all these dignitaries here, we're ready for

(01:13:11):
the release, and you guys are are not conforming. So
he ran after the head shed and he came back
with a print out and it was the manifest the
first planeload of guys. It was also our prayer list,
the guys who've been praying for they're sick and injured

(01:13:33):
and enlisted guys among us. So they went on the
first plane and that was going to be our turn.
And so we we called Cadence out and marched to
the bus and got on the bus over the dike.
We could from the top of the dyke we could
see the runway and we knew this runway, you know,

(01:13:54):
we'd flown over there a lot of times. But this
time it's got an Air Force cargo jet on the
runway ready to take us home. So still no response.
Nobody cried, nobody cheered, nobody to kiss anybody else. It
wasn't until we actually got a board that airplane. It
wasn't until we rolled down the runway. It wasn't really

(01:14:16):
until we lifted off enemy soil whilst well finally broke
loose and started hugging and kissing the Air Force nurses
on the board. Oh wow, O man, we're on our
way home. And what a joyful ride that was.

Speaker 2 (01:14:35):
Wow. And then you land and you get a heroes
welcome everywhere you go.

Speaker 1 (01:14:40):
Yeah, that was kind of surprise because we didn't feel
like heroes. You know, we had failed in our mission.
We had not only had we not accomplished the task
that we'd set out to do as fight upon us,
but we had surrendered. And now surrender is not in

(01:15:05):
the top gun playbook, right, and we felt very guilty
about that. It was really kind of unusual that when
we came home to all these ticker tape parades and
all the gifts, and everybody was, you know, everybody was
blotting us as heroes, and we really pretty much denied that. Well,

(01:15:27):
you know, I wrote my book right after it came home,
and the title of the book is I'm No Hero,
And I explained in there that we really, you know,
we just and most military military guys will tell you this.
You know, you call a military guy a hero, and
most of them, especially have been in combat, will tell you, man,

(01:15:48):
you know that that that doesn't describe me. Man, I'm
not the hero. You know. The guys that that that
that marched out of here with with broken limbs and
arms and heads, and guys that died here, you know,
they're the ones that ought to be saluting his heroes
because you know, we made it back. But we certainly
have nothing to be proud of other than we just

(01:16:11):
had the grits to survive. Of course, the first the
first guy saw was this psychiatrist. They thought we'd we'd
be bas in basca. They thought we'd be vegetables. They
thought we'd they thought, you know, I mean, what can
you expect the guys six seven, eight and a half

(01:16:32):
years in a prison camp, how can he possibly come home?
Would be halfway normal? And so they'd pretty much written
us off. They had our families briefed to institutionalize us
the rest of our lives if necessary. Yeah, that's what
And that's what they told my wife, That's what they
told my mom and dad was Hey, you know, this

(01:16:53):
guy's gonna require an awful lot of you know, therapy,
you know, when he gets home. Well, so, of course
I wanted to call my wife to tell her I
was free, and she didn't answer. So I called my

(01:17:13):
parents and my father was so broken up he couldn't
he couldn't talk to me. He passed the fun of
my mom. My mom said, son had give ten years
of my life. I didn't have to tell you this,
and I'm sure she would have. She said, your wife
hung along for five years. And then just three months
ago she filed for divorce. She's engaged to be married

(01:17:35):
to a boyfriend of hers, her fiance, they're just waiting,
you know, for the approval to get married. And she
said she sued for divorce under the auspices of in abandonment.
You know that you abandoned her. And Mom said the

(01:17:58):
judge would not the judge wouldn't allow that, but you
still have to come back here and face the fact
that she wants to be married to another guy. Wow,
I mean, what a shock. And so the psychiatrist says,
you don't seem to show a lot of physical emotion
about what you just heard. I said, well, I'm sad,

(01:18:22):
but I just said free. I mean, it's tough to
piss me off. I've got a doorknob on the inside
of my door knock, she said. He said, well, let
me let me tell you this. As a psychiatrist, I
will tell you that you really need to show some

(01:18:42):
physical emotion. You need to scream, you need to yell.
You need to go back to your hospital room and
kick down the door and tear up the pillow and
show some physical response to what you what you're going through,
he said. He said, you have the right to be bitter.

(01:19:02):
I said, Doc, I have the right to have diarrhea.
I said, thank you, but I choose not to be bitter.
And you know, life goes on. I just just been
through a challenging time in my life. I got another
one right here. But I'll make it through this, so
thank you very much. And the other guys did the

(01:19:23):
same thing. Nearly half of us came back to divorces.
The ladies had such a tough time, and the war
just went on and on and on and on. There
was just no solution. Now, we didn't have any children,
which was a blessing because but a lot of guys did.
Some of the guys in the prison camp had wives

(01:19:45):
that delivered kids while they were the first few months
they were in prison, and they didn't know it. They
didn't know as a boy or a girl.

Speaker 2 (01:19:52):
Wow, And.

Speaker 1 (01:19:54):
So it was just really tough on the ladies.

Speaker 2 (01:19:57):
And Captain you.

Speaker 3 (01:19:57):
Don't believe in PTSD, well, no, I love that. What
you have a different acronym for it? Correct, Well, yeah,
I do.

Speaker 1 (01:20:06):
As a matter of fact, a lot of people PTSD
is real. I mean there is used to call it
shell shock. When you go through a traumatic experience. Yeah,
you're going to have you can have some problems. But
my approach is that you still have control. You know,

(01:20:26):
you don't have to live with a memory like that.
And so you know, back to my support of veterans
that are troubled and have PTSD or claim they do,
and we want to commit suicide. Another psychiatrist twenty five

(01:20:47):
years ago studied the Vietnam POWs study us and try
to figure out why we came back so healthy mentally
and physically that we came back healthier than the fighter
pilus that didn't get shot down. So that experience actually
provided growth. So he came up with this normorgan of

(01:21:12):
PTG instead of PTSD. He's got PTG post traumatic growth.
The whole idea that you can go through a challenging
situation and come back better and not better. And so
we have three campuses throughout the country. It's called Boulder
Crest and Boulder Crest has three ranches where we rehabilitate

(01:21:36):
soldiers and veterans with PTSD and turn it into PTG.
And the whole idea that yes, you know, if you
put your mind to it, you can actually benefit from adversity.
And one of my mottos that I tell my audiences
is adversity is a horrible thing to waste. The whole

(01:21:58):
idea that if you if you take on the role
of a victim, uh yeah, you're you're going to play
that role and you're gonna be the victim. Well, when
you blame other people for your problem, you actually give
away control of your life. You're blaming somebody else for
something that's happening to you. So you so you don't

(01:22:22):
have any responsibility for its hammering to you. You give
it to somebody else. And and and and so this
is I mean, this is the challenge that that we
think that's causing a lot of suicides in the veterans
is that they blame other people of the problem, and
and and totally believe that they are incapable of of

(01:22:43):
of of deciding their own destiny. Uh and they and
they and they and they give away the power to
you know, to to other people or other things. And
uh and so we're we've we've we've been in business
for ten years. Bouldercrest been in business for ten years,
and we have rehabilitated about one hundred and sixty thousand veterans.

(01:23:07):
Uh and and it's it's gone, it's still going strong's
there's no cost to the veteran, you know, it's all
it's all donations.

Speaker 3 (01:23:18):
Forgiveness that your mother taught you and her boy you
forgave your captors. Yep, can you talk about that's very
powerful for my audience.

Speaker 2 (01:23:25):
How do you forgive somebody who tortured you, who laughed
at you, who did all these things to make you,
you know, just feel horrific about yourself.

Speaker 1 (01:23:33):
It's a selfish thing, you know. It's for my benefit
to forgive amen. Yeah, right, And obviously it's a great
Christian principle. But well, let me tell you this, Okay,
Bob Schumaker, that passed me the wire and taught me
the code, and he's passing me maiba versus and patriotic
quotes and and this in this poem that really can

(01:23:59):
turn me around. And the poem is this acid does
more harm in the vessel that's stored then on the
subject it's poured. What that meant to me was on
the vessel. And I've got this acid within me, and
I'm spouting out to the guards and the enemies and
the people that tortured me. Okay, but this is doing

(01:24:22):
more harm in the vessels. It's doing me more harm
then the guards that tortured me. You know, they don't care.
They're happy. They're happy that I'm that I'm yelling and
screaming about about them, But I'm killing myself. When I
heard that and tried to digest that and then put

(01:24:45):
that together with Christian principles and my mom's forgiveness, I
talked to myself, then this is really a simple thing,
and it is in fact a selfish thing. I am
protecting myself by forgiving other people. And I believe that today.
You know, I live my life in this mode of forgiveness.

(01:25:09):
And and obviously, I mean I'm not even thinking about
the driver that cut me off, you know, on the
one oh one, I'm I'm thinking about, Hey, I don't
this is this is detrimental to me and my psyche,
just having these feelings of hate. It's just it's not

(01:25:31):
worth it at all. And as long as I can
control that, and I and I and I and I
can you know, I can I control these things? I don't,
you know. I sure I get upset about stuff and
and you know, I get frustrated with people. But when
I put it in the context of okay, so what's

(01:25:54):
this doing to me? How does this affect Charlie Plumb?
And it makes it so much easier to forgive.

Speaker 2 (01:26:04):
Let's close with the parachute Packer's story. Okay, yeah, I
love that story.

Speaker 1 (01:26:09):
Several years after I came home from Vietnam, I was
in a restaurant in Kansas City, where I used to live,
and about two tables over, a guy kept looking at me.
I caught his eye, but I didn't recognize this gent,
but he kept looking at me. He finally got up

(01:26:30):
from his table, walked over to my table, pointed at
me with kind of a serious look on his face,
and he said, you're Captain Plumb and I looked up
and I said, yes, sir, I'm Captain Plumb. He said,
you're that guy. I know you. You flew jet fighters
in Vietnam off the aircraft carrier kidiok. You you were

(01:26:53):
shot down, you parachuted in the enemy hands, and you
spent nearly six years as a prisoner of war. And
I said, how in the world did you know all
that about me? He said, I'm the guy that packed
your parachute.

Speaker 2 (01:27:06):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:27:07):
Yeah, of course I was dumbfounded, you know. I mean,
I could stagger to my feet, reached out a very
grateful hand of thanks. He came up with just the
proper words. He grabbed my hand, pumped my arm, and
he said, I guess it worked. I said, yes, sir,
indeed it did. And I must tell you I've said

(01:27:28):
a lot of prayers of thanks for your nimble fingers,
but I had no idea ever have the opportunity of
expressing my gratitude in person. He said, were all the
panels there?

Speaker 2 (01:27:41):
Wow?

Speaker 1 (01:27:42):
I said, well, I appreciate your concern, and you did
your job. There were fifteen of eighteen panels. That was enough.
And the torn panels were my fault. I ejected from
that F four Phantom jet six hundred miles an hour
close to the ground. I was well outside the parameters
of that parish. You did your job packing it. I

(01:28:04):
didn't do my job as using it, I said. But
let me ask you a question, I said, you keep
track of all the parachutes you pack? Do you know
of all the lives you've saved? So this is the
most important part of that conversation that night, and the
one that that I think about a lot, he said.
He said, No, I don't keep track of all the

(01:28:26):
parachutes I packed. He said. It's enough gratification for me
just to know that I've served, just to know that
I've helped somebody out along the life's rocky road. He said,
I don't know many of the people that use my parachute,
but I'm happy that I was able to do that
in that in that capacity. So I use that as

(01:28:48):
kind of a metaphor and asking an audience, well, who
packs your parachute? You know? And uh, you know, how
how did how did you learn the baseline stuff you
operate today? Did you learn that from a coach or
from a preacher, or from a mom or a dad
or a big sister? Where did that come from? And

(01:29:11):
when you figure that out, who packed your parachute? My
next question is have you thank them lately? You know,
have you have you gone back and said, hey, I
really appreciate you, know what you what you taught me.
And then, of course the other the other question was, okay,
who who looks to you for that kind of strength?
If you're going to be a servant, you know, if

(01:29:33):
you're if you're going to pack some parachutes, then who
is it that looks to you for strength and time
of need? So that's the message. That's a heck of
a message. Final thoughts, Captain, anything else you want to say,
I really appreciate what you do here. I mean, you're
touching an awful lot of people, and everybody you touch

(01:29:54):
touches more people. And this the whole addiction process, it
is just such a it's a calamity, not just not
just here you know, in your in your little surrounder
surrounded people, but nationwide it's just, uh, it's just quite

(01:30:18):
a tragedy. And so I really appreciate the job that
you do. Thank you here in your work, thank you,
thank you. And today's nine to eleven.

Speaker 2 (01:30:27):
It's nine to eleven and you took time out and
thank you. I want to say thank you for spending
time with me today. It meant the world to me.

Speaker 1 (01:30:35):
Well, thank you for that, and thanks for sharing my story.

Speaker 3 (01:30:38):
It's an incredible story. Please read that book and I
can't wait for one to listen to this show. Thank you,
capt absolutely thanks. The Sales Show is a production of
iHeart Podcasts, posted by me Cina McFarlane, produced by pod
People in twenty eighth. Av Our lead producer is Keith Carlick.
Our executive prouser is Lindcy Hoffman. Marketing lee it is

(01:31:00):
Ashley Weaver. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see
you next week.