Pushkin.

Hello everyone, it's Jr.

In today's bonus episode, I'm excited to share a special interview with a friend of mine.

He's a pilot who spent nearly six years as a pow during the Vietnam War in Asel not far from the Medal of Honor recipient, but Day Captain Charlie Plumb is a retired US Navy fighter pilot who earned his wings in nineteen sixty five.

He went on to fly seventy four successful combat missions over North Vietnam, making over one hundred carrier landings.

Then came his fateful seventy fifth mission.

It was May nineteenth, nineteen teen sixty seven.

Charlie was flying an F four Phantom Jet off the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Katie Hawk.

His mission that day was a high risk alpha strike targeting a military complex south of Hanoi, known by pilots as Little Detroit.

He was just five days away from his scheduled return home when he was shot down.

If you listen to our last episode, you'll remember that while he was a pow, Bud Day expressed his courage through pure stoicism and steadfastness, a belief in upholding the code of conduct above all else.

But Charlie is a model for another kind of courage, a model based in forgiveness and unbelievable grace.

I wanted to talk to him to understand how a man who endured years of brutal captivity could return to Vietnam decades later and find common ground with the man who ordered his torture, something unimaginable to many, including by Day.

Here's our conversation.

So, Charlie, thank you so much for joining.

That is such a pleasure to have you on.

How are you doing.

I'm doing fine, Jr.

On this honor to be with you.

Well, thank you so much.

And I'd like to begin before we get into the nearly six years that you spent as a POW, I'd like to really get into why you wanted to join the military.

I was a farm kid from Kansas, never been out of the four states of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, never seen the ocean, and age seventeen, I knew I needed an education.

My parents were poor.

We didn't have running water in the house until I was seven years old.

So at age seventeen, I knew my parents couldn't afford college, and so I started looking for scholarships.

I sent my application to everybody I can think of, just a shotgun aer and lo and behold, I got an appointment to Annapolis, the Naval Academy.

Well I had no idea what they did in Annapolis.

I really did not.

And I like to tell you that I had great aspirations of being an admiral and commanding ships and squadrons around the world.

That's not true.

I needed an education, and this was a free one.

And so got on that greyhound bussem two days later.

Just like you, I was pledging to defend the Constitution United States against all enemies.

That's how I got into the military.

And so you joined the military.

How soon after was it for you where you realized, Okay, this is not just going to be maybe a free education.

There's going to be a little bit more involvement here.

The day I actually showed up at Annapolis, I didn't know how to salute or march or puld my socks.

You know, it was quite a transition, you know, from a farm kid from Kansas into a military uniform.

I looked back on those days and they were wonderful, but they were not easy.

You know, you find yourself deployed on missions seventy four missions talk us through seventy fifth.

I flew seventy four combat missions trying to protect the air group from enemy fighters, and I had a couple of ground support missions.

But those are very difficult flights for me because I knew I had to be accurate, and so we went lower and took more risks when we were supporting ground troops.

And so I was five days from the end of my tour of duty on that seventy fifth mission.

I mean, I felt like I was bulletproof, over confident probably, and felt like I really was the top gun.

It was a big, big deal.

It's a big strike called an Alpha strike.

We had three aircraft carriers, one of which I was on, the Kittiehawk, and five air force bases on these targets in Vietnam.

So I launched off the Kitty Hawk rendezvouoted twenty thousand feet, took on another three or four thousand pounds of jet fuel in an airborne tanker, and pointed the nose towards the beach.

Got in just south of Hanoi, the capital city, the most heavily defended city in the world.

At that time my role was fighter escort and we came up close to the target, thought we saw an enemy, and we skirted out to the side of the formation, which was my big mistake.

Hit by a surface to air missile.

It exploded some twelve thousand pounds of jet fuel I had in that airplane.

Sent that bird a topsy turvey endover and down towards the rice patty below.

I ejected, my copat had ejected, Our parachutes opened, and in ninety seconds I went from king of the skies to scum of the earth.

Spent the next and three in communist prison camps.

Wow, So you find yourself now as you're parachuting, What is going through your mind in that moment?

Talk me through what is about to happen.

I was in shock.

I truly was out of body, almost watching this whole thing happen.

And about that time I find myself about waist deep in a rice patty, and so my first thought was to my buddies.

I was a schedules officer in the squadron, and I had a book coded for the names of all the pilots and the missions that they were going on, and that kind of thing.

I did not want the enemy to get a hold of that book.

I pulled the book out of my pocket and ripped up the pages eight, about half of the pages the book.

I took my two way radio up because I could have called for help, but I was so far into enemy territory that I knew that any rescue would probably be disastrous for the guys in their helicopters coming in to get me.

So I made one call and said, see you guys at the end of the war, Please don't try to rescue me.

Tore the antenna off the radio, through it one way and through the radio the other way, and then I bowed my head and I said a prayer.

I prayed for my wife that she would understand this.

I mean, I can't even imagine finding yourself in that position and yet still have the awareness to take that book and to take that radio, to throw it an opposite end, to say your prayer just one of those things that I think as myself and listeners of this podcast are just in awe.

So what's transpired that has prepared you to have that type of awareness.

I don't remember actually thinking logically.

It was all almost automatic.

Of course, I had been trained.

I'd been through four different survival camps, but at the end of it, I think I learned more.

In the sand is four years old, you know.

I mean, you don't kick saying in the other guy's face if he's bigger than you are.

I mean, all those schools I don't think prepared me just as well as my upbringing.

I had a very strong family.

I was a very optimistic person.

I felt like there was some kind of master plan that I was involved in, and I might never know exactly what it was, but I felt like that somebody or something was in more control of this than I was.

So you land, how quickly did you find yourself now being taken prisoner?

I ejected into a very populated area, so I was captured immediately, they were right there.

I haulowed me into the prison camp, immediately interrogated, tortured for two days, and of course code of conduct.

As a lot of your listeners will know, rank, scherl number, data birth, that's all you're obliged to give to the enemy.

I flew the skies of Vietnam thinking I'm tough enough.

I will never give more the name, ranks, serial number to data birth.

I mean how old were you at this time when this is happening.

I was twenty four, Okay.

So after two days of the torture, they primarily a bunch of ropes and irons, and they waded us up like a human pretzel.

I buckled, and I never told them anything they could use.

I didn't know.

I was a junior officer.

They didn't tell me secrets.

But I certainly went farther than I had intended to go.

They tossed me into this little eight foot by eight foot prison cell, eight feet long and eight feet wide.

There's no window.

There's a door with a flap in the door so that a guard could come by at any moment and drop that flap and see what you were doing.

And of course we were supposed to be sitting on our board bed thinking about our sins against the North Vietnamese.

Inside the cell, we had a two gallon bucket he usually rusted out at the top with no top on it.

Largely this was our latrine.

You got to empty that bucket about every two or three days.

It was very nice at all.

They delivered two meals a day, about ten and two.

We got a cup of rice each time, and sometimes a cup of broth, and so I was alone and scared, and I felt very guilty.

Lucky for me, Well, it's more than luck.

I think it was providence.

A fellow two cells away passed a wire across a storeroom.

The cell between us was being used as a storeroom.

He passed this wire over the boxes, around the shovels, through the ropes of the storeroom, and into the little hole in my cell wall fourteen feet away.

The wire scratched on my concrete floor.

I thought it was a cricket at first, but I found it and I pulled on the wire and it pulled back, and then it disappeared, and man, I'm in real trouble.

Now they've tricked me.

The wire came back about an hour later with a note wrapped around the end of the wire.

The note was written on a dirty piece of toilet paper, and just blobs on this piece of toilet paper, and I could barely make it out, but it said, memorize this code, then eat this note.

Well, I'd volunteered for a lot of things in the Navy, but I didn't know it was going to come to this.

So I did it.

The codes of five y five matrix of the alphabet, indicating any letter would be represented by two numbers number of the line than the number of the row.

So A is one one, Z is five to five.

We left out K, substituted C for a K.

So a very cumbersome code.

But I started tugging on the wire and the guy on the other ends had designated various letters of the alphabet by certain numbers of tugs.

I talked for him for a while.

Bob Shoemaker passed me some very important information.

He said, you will find that you've joined the finest team you'll ever play on.

He said, barn None, I don't care where you go what you do.

This team of American fighter pilots like Jim Stockdale Medal of Honah winner and Bud Day Medal of Vannah winner, Leo Thurstness Medal of Vannah winner.

In fact, we had a total of five in that camp.

Our leadership in this prison camp is the best leadership you will ever see the rest of your life.

You will never see leadership like this.

Some of them have been there for over two years when I showed up.

Surely they know something that I don't know.

It's incredible.

I mean I think what I hear is when given purpose, right, we show up and respond right.

And I think that's what I hear is purpose.

Yeah, it was a mission that our leadership had established for us.

Everything you do, every answery you make in the torture room, everything you do has to be seen through a prism of return with honor.

And Shoemaker was telling me this.

I felt very ashamed.

How can I ever go home and face my family, my fellow fighter pilots, the community and admit that I had failed in my mission Because I did fail in my mission, and I didn't do what I came there to do and what I was proud to do when I did it.

Suddenly I am on the other side of this equation.

I'm a failure.

And I paced three steps one way and three steps the other in that eight foot by foot prison cell, feeling guilty about what I had done.

We're gonna tell make a quick break.

We're back with Captain Charlie Plumb.

He's just gotten in touch with other captured US airmen in the camp, using a secret code to talk to Bob Shoemaker, and he's realizing the gravity of telling the enemy the information he has.

But I was convinced that there were other fighter pilots in that prison camp, that they were all probably older and more mature, they were better fighter pilots, and they probably didn't stray from name, rank, sheryll, number, day to birth like I did.

That they had accomplished their mission and I had failed.

In mind, so pacing along, feeling sorry for myself and blaming everybody I could think of, I was blaming the enemy.

I was blaming the guards that tortured me.

I was blaming the mechanics that put the airplane together.

Thinking that at the end of the war, maybe I would go to some foreign country change my name because I didn't want anybody to know how terribly i'd failed.

And finally I said, Bob, I have a confession to make, and when I tell you what I did, you might not want to communicate with me anymore, because if our roles were reversed and you did what I did, I wouldn't want to talk to you either.

He said, would you do, Plumber, there's my call sign Plumber.

I said, I failed.

I broke.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but the torture was too great, and he tugged back on the wire through the wall.

He said, Hell, everybody broke.

There's not a man in his prison camp who was as strong as he wanted to be what he expected of himself.

So get over it.

We still have a war to fight.

We're going to pursue this war till our last dying breath.

I dropped the wire that somebody else had gone through this experience and falling down but then gotten right back up and pursued his mission.

And just their sharing with me, how they have responded to the guilt and the pain and the misery that they were going through with a strong sense of community, that we were helping each other out.

And so that was sort of the beginning of my understanding that I had to forgive myself for being so weak in the torture room.

You know, it seems like the opportunity to interact with the other prisoners in that particular camp is essentially what saved you.

That brotherhood and that camaraderie, and how no matter where you are, no matter what the conditions are, you're gonna be together, You're gonna stick together, You're gonna show up for one another.

Yeah.

Once I gained communication with the other guys, we spent hours and hours on the wall, tugging on wires or tapping on walls.

And I think it's a great lesson of life is lots of times we need help.

And your listeners will probably be surprised that in that prison kit, I remember many times my stomach hurt from laughing so hard.

There was just an awful lot of humor jokes, you know that.

We would tell We even numbered our jokes and you just come up with a number of The guy knew the joke you were talking about, and then he would add a pun to the end of the joke.

And when your birthday came, man, your buddies were giving you plates and plates of food and an orchestra of play.

And the birthday cake was always the shape of a big aircraft carrier with girls hopping out of the aircraft carrier.

It was all in our mind.

It was all tapping on walls, but you always look forward.

But it worked.

It worked.

We were saving the lives of each other, and we had a purpose in life.

We had a goal and to keep that goal and foremost in your mind, regardless of what you're going through.

I tell people all the time, Yes, the physical recovery was obviously challenging, and I'm not going to dismiss that overlook that, right, that's difficult.

But for me personally in my recovery and what I had to navigate the mental that's where it's at, and what are some of the daily things that you're saying to yourself to remember that you're on the offensive.

So Shoemaker passed along to me patriotic quotes and Bible verses and stories and jokes, and one of the little poems that he sent across really turned me around.

The poem is this acid does more harm in the vessel it stored, then on the side it's poured that wire was a revelation to me the first time that a young guard couldn't have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old.

He brought his girlfriend into my cell to show her how tough he was.

He hit me with his rifle button, kicked me with his steel toed boots, and she's back in the corner of my prisons, all laughing and enjoying how tough her boyfriend was.

And that was tough for me to overcome, but that I couldn't waller in this misery and pain because it wasn't doing me any good at all.

In fact, it was very harmful.

This acid that was within me wasn't hurting the enemy at all.

It was destroying me.

I thought, I'm not going to do this to myself.

I got to do something to make this worthwhile.

I found in that prison camp.

If you harbor this acid within you and you don't forgive people, you're on a downhill slope.

You're not going to make it.

And it's not hurting the enemy, It's gonna kill me.

It's gonna be more harmful than anything I spew out towards the enemy or anybody else.

I looked around that eight foot by eight foot cell, with the rats and the bugs and the filth.

That wait a minute, My restriction was not the eight feet between the walls.

It was the eight inches between my ears.

This was a mental game.

I was in this mental box.

I designed this box by myself, and I recognized immediately that I had to get out of that mental box.

That was the true restriction of what it was going through.

I'm gonna find some value in all of this pain.

And then I saw the value in forgiveness, and I found great pleasure and joy and peace in that action of forgiveness.

Now just took a while, but eventually I was ready to forgive the guards the torture me.

I was very forgive the camp commander.

I was, and after that life became a lot easier for me.

So here you are, twenty four years of life.

I mean, you were in captivity for nearly six years.

I mean over twenty one hundred days of doing this exercise, in this work.

I mean, is that enough to get you through everything that you endured for nearly three years?

So we had no books to read, the windows to look out, and no TV, telephone, we'd have any communication with the outside world at all, And so especially in solitary confinement, we were in our own heads, probably twenty hours a day.

That's all we had was ourselves.

So I went back through my life.

I decided to try to make an autobiography from the very beginning at three and a half years old, a step by step, every day, every book I'd ever read, every movie I sin, every teacher I ever had, every girl I ever dated.

How long do you think it took me to recapture every memory in my life?

About three months.

I felt like I had totally exhausted my entire memory database.

But in going back for the twenty four years that I had lived, I tried to pick out the positive parts.

Then I decided to plan the future.

I started to try to figure out what I'd do, what kids my wife and I would have together, where we would live, where we would vacation, what kind of cars we would drive, all this stuff for twenty years.

Well, that took another three months, and then I wasn't home.

So I went back through that future and replanned.

So anyway, I'm telling you all of the mental things that I came up with myself.

We're going to take a quick break, and when we're back, Charlie goes home.

When you came home, you were given sort of this hero's welcome.

How did that land with you after nearly six years as a pow and during everything you endured, coming home and being put up on this platform of I'm a.

Hero coming home was a wonderful event.

But we were sure surprised, and they had organized ticker tape praise.

They gave me a brand new Ford, We got lifetime tickets to World Series, and I think we had like two hundred major gifts.

One of my favorite was lazy boy gave me a recliner, a leather recliner.

Readers Digest had produced a set of books called While You Were Not Here, and each one of the books was one year of things that had happened while we were there, And so I got six volumes of this from nineteen sixty seven to nineteen seventy three.

It was a hero's welcome, but we didn't feel like heroes.

None of us felt like heroes at all.

The heroes were the guys that didn't come back.

The heroes are the civilians that waited for us and prayed for us.

And in a lot of cases, you know, I think my wife had it tougher than I did, but I knew I was alive every day.

I knew I was coming home every day.

They didn't know.

And about half of us came home for divorces.

My poor wife had so tough, and she found another guy, fell in love, and filed for divorce three months before I came home.

And so obviously another gut punch for me.

I'll never forget laying in that hospital room and Great Lakes Naval Hospital in Chicago and thinking to myself, how terrible this is, and I started blaming everybody I can think of, blame her boyfriend.

And it didn't take long until I said, wait a minute, Wait a minute, you hypocrypt You know that little poem about acid within you hurts you or it hurts anybody else.

Get over yourself.

Got a life to live, you know, Charlie.

There's something that keeps popping up to me, and I'm curious.

I keep hearing the word forgiveness throughout our conversation, and forgiveness continue to be a theme over the course of your life.

But there's another element of this that you had to really lean on.

Talk to us about what transpired ten years ago when you went back to Vietnam.

I was hounded by the guy who ran the history department of University of Hanoi.

He contacted me, Hey, I want you to come back.

We've got the camp commander who wants to see a prisoner of war before he dies.

He was in charge of all of our torture.

I was surprised that any camp commander who had been so ruthless would ever want to see me.

And I try to figure this out in my mind, is this some kind of a trick?

And so they pursued this because I refused to go back to Vietnam several times.

In fact, this went on for like three years because I didn't see any purpose.

This may be painful for me.

That's a pain that I don't need.

Why would ever go through this?

No, thank you.

And then when they inferred that he wanted to see me and that it might be because he was in his late eighties and wanted to apologize, Okay, maybe it's going to be good for him, and maybe this will be good for me.

Of course, when they invited my family to go with me for a vacation, I thought that would be interesting for my kids to see the prison cell that I was in because it's a museum now, So okay, I'll go do this.

But even before I met the guy, I really was confused and apprehensive.

I guess about what he was going to say to me.

Now, my kids, even though they know my philosophy in life, my kids thought Dad's gonna break loose and punch the guy.

He talks a big story, but this forgiveness thing, maybe he doesn't really believe it, especially when he comes face to face with the guy that tortured him.

Yeah, I can imagine and what did you feel when you saw him?

What happened?

So he had a little shack who was his little retirement home on a river.

So he came out.

He was nervous, was as nervous as I was.

I felt safe, I felt secure, but I had no I what I was walking into.

The guy brought out offered me his homemade beer, and it was in a plastic pepsicola bottle, and it was pretty good beer.

I talked to him for probably forty five minutes or an hour.

We got to know each other, and our backgrounds were similar enough to know that he had done some things like I had done some things which we were very proud of because we thought that we were in service to our country.

He had the same kind of military training I did, and he had pledged to defend his way of life just like I had.

And so we meet in a conflict where we don't agree on accepting the other's way of life.

But there's certain commonality with anyone you have a conflict with, if you research this thing, if you think about it enough, we're more alike than we are different.

He never told me he forgave me, and I never told him that I forgave him.

He never admitted any kind of mistake, but he would never admit to ever harming an American.

He wanted to hug me, and I hugged him back.

There was smiles and there was humor in our conversation.

I mean, we didn't leave as best friends, but I think we both felt very vulnerable to military guys from opposite sides of the war.

He'd fought for his country.

I fought for my country.

And it's so important that we connect and that we forgive and we honor the people, regardless of what they do to us, that we see value in anyone.

That's kind of my attitude.

That's what I live for.

I mean, that's that's incredible.

There's some components of that where I can identify with what you're saying.

I mean, but Day, when he came home, he was he was angry, like a lot of service members were.

Of course, you know, for you to access this element of forgiveness, to go meet this camp commander, it's very noble, my friend.

Well, thanks, certainly.

I respect Bud Day, not just for what he flew with the misties, but when we came home and he fought for us and other veterans with our healthcare.

So it wasn't just his military experience.

He served well after he came home.

People deal with the different ways, right.

You know, you agreeing to come on and have this conversation with me, this is still an extension of service.

I know you're a humble man, Jr.

And I got to throw the bouquet back to you because the challenge that you faced, those years of hospitalization and all of the surgery and all this stuff that he went through, you found a purpose.

I think that's vital in all of our lives, military or civilian.

If you can't figure out what your purpose is, you better try to find it.

I think that's just vital and not just survival, but even success in all that we do.

Yeah, that is so true, and thank you for that.

We have a lot of service members, a lot of veterans who are navigating, you know, the transition back home that are having a difficult time.

For those veterans who are listening right now, who feel like they've lost the connection, the purpose, the mission, if you will, and struggle on a daily basis on showing up as someone who has navigated a lot and has been around a lot of individuals that have had to equally navigate those things.

What is some advice that you can offer to those individuals that are listening.

Adversity is a horrible thing to waste.

You take the little struggles in life and you can make positive conclusions out of anything.

Ninety percent of the POWs and Vietnam stayed in the military, went back to flying airplanes and commanding fleets around the world.

Five hundred and ninety one guys came home.

So far, we have seventeen generals and seven admirals, most of us retired as senior grade military officers.

We have doctors and lawyers, and preachers and teachers and bishops and judges, and we have two ambassadors, two United States senators, a vice president are candidate, and a president are candidate.

All from five hundred and nine to one men.

Is because of the leadership we had and the team that they put together and the direction the purpose that we found in that prison.

And I'm not just talking about military stuff.

I'm talking about going through a divorce or losing your job.

Even today in my life, I'm eighty two years old, and I continue whenever I get upset about something, I think it's a puzzle.

I know there's some value that if I work hard enough, I can figure out what the advantage is in this adversity.

I've sort of become the poster boy for PTG post traumatic growth, the whole idea that you can go through it challenging experience and come out better.

How do you do this well.

It's part of an organization called Boulder Crest.

It's a free process for any veteran, any first responder.

I can go to one of three different ranches in Texas and Arizona and Virginia and go through this process or turning PTSD into PTG.

You have to decide on your own.

I'm gonna make this work.

I'm going to find some value in my adversity.

And it may take a while, it may take months or even years.

Then it becomes a whole lot easier.

Find a support group and it might be the guys at the VFW, it might be a PTA.

Find people that you can talk to and listen to that have the same kind of experiences that you do.

Because nothing would replace the little community, the podebic community that we had through very difficult communication, but it was vital in my existence.

To know that I was not alone.

Captain Charlie Plum, thank you for your service.

Thank you for continuing to serve, not only in the nearly six years you spent as a POW, but the years after you were a POW and were released, and you continue to tell your story and the story of the individuals that you served with.

What we've learned about a lot of these Metal of Hoanna recipients is they loved being a part of something.

And that's the beautiful thing about life, is not isolating yourself and still finding ways to connect and find that connection and find ways to show up.

And so I thank you, sir for this incredible conversation.

J R.

I respect you immensely and what you've been through and your journey even today in telling not only your story but my story.

Captain Plum, thank you again.

I love you, sir.

To keep up with Captain Charlie Plum, you can pick up his book I'm No Hero or visit his website Charlie Plum dot com.

If you write him, he'll answer your email himself.

If you're curious to learn more about post dramatic growth, check out the website Bouldercress dot org.

That's Boulder with a You after the Oh and for more on that prison, you can check out our episode about Bud Day.

Thanks for listening.

This episode of Metal of Honor Stories of Courage was produced by Jesse Shane.

Our editor is Ben Nadaf Hoffrey, Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorsky.

This episode was mixed by Sarah Bruguer.

Our executive producer is Constant.

The fact checking by Arthur Gomperts and original music by Eric Phillips.

Don't forget.

We want to hear from you.

Send us your personal story of courage or highlight someone else's bravery.

Email us at Medal of Honor at Pushkin dot fm.

You might hear your stories on future episodes of Metal of Honor, or see them on our social channels at Pushkin Pods.

I'm your host, JR.

Martinez