Speaker 1: Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbas. Our guest in
Speaker 1: this edition is retired US Navy Captain and naval aviator
Speaker 1: Charles Plum. He is also a veteran of the Vietnam
Speaker 1: War and spent nearly six years there as a prisoner
Speaker 1: of war. And Captain Plum, thank you very much for
Speaker 1: being with us.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Where were you born and raised there?
Speaker 2: I was born in Gary, Indiana. During World War Two.
Speaker 2: My father was about to be drafted, so he moved
Speaker 2: to Kansas. So I grew up in a tiny town
Speaker 2: in Kansas.
Speaker 1: Why did you decide to attend the US Naval Academy
Speaker 1: and pursue service in the Navy.
Speaker 2: Quite honestly, it was an education. My parents were very
Speaker 2: poor and they couldn't afford to see me to college.
Speaker 2: So I started looking for scholarships. Did the old shotgun approach,
Speaker 2: you know, to everybody I could think of, lo and behold,
Speaker 2: I got an appointment to Annapolis.
Speaker 1: Out of those four years, prepare you for what would
Speaker 1: eventually come.
Speaker 2: You know, it was really good. Of course. There was
Speaker 2: a lot of discipline, a lot of military understanding, aerarchy,
Speaker 2: and a lot of trust with my fellow midsimate at
Speaker 2: the Naval Academy and then my fellow prisoners of war
Speaker 2: was really important for my survival.
Speaker 1: And then after commissioning you went to a flight school,
Speaker 1: and after that you were assigned to Miramar and what
Speaker 1: would eventually be known as Top Gun. Tell me a
Speaker 1: little bit about that and what it felt to know
Speaker 1: that you were really among the best.
Speaker 2: Well, I threw the first adversary of flights for the
Speaker 2: Top Gun School. It wasn't called Top Gun at the time.
Speaker 2: In fact, it was just just guys having fun flying airplanes.
Speaker 2: And then they decided that we were in the wrong war,
Speaker 2: that we were trained for the Cold War and flying
Speaker 2: high altitude super zonic interceptors. They have four Phantom a
Speaker 2: mock II airplane, and suddenly we were fighting these pesky
Speaker 2: little MiGs at low altitudes that could turn inside us.
Speaker 2: And we didn't have the training or the airplane to
Speaker 2: fight that war. And so we started to teach the
Speaker 2: pilots to dogfight the bassle the World War two and
Speaker 2: Korean War kinds of tactics. And so that's how the
Speaker 2: Top Gun School got started. And it was great fun
Speaker 2: and I did feel like, you know, I was the
Speaker 2: best of the best, and I was very proud, you know,
Speaker 2: to fly those airplanes and to go to war.
Speaker 1: You were also telling us just before we started recording
Speaker 1: about how you were assigned to two very important special
Speaker 1: events right here in Washington, the inauguration of President Kennedy
Speaker 1: and his funeral. What were those moments like for you?
Speaker 2: Well, his inauguration was very cold. It was a very
Speaker 2: cold day. And never forget that I was in the
Speaker 2: drum and Bugle Corps as a matter of fact, and
Speaker 2: so it was so cold that the valve on our
Speaker 2: bugle froze, and so you either had the valve in
Speaker 2: or the valve out. And so the commander of them
Speaker 2: the bugle corps said, oh, every other guy, freeze your
Speaker 2: valve in the open position and every other one in
Speaker 2: the closed positions. So you sort of played every other note.
Speaker 2: Came back three years later, as a matter of fact,
Speaker 2: to the tragic death of John Kennedy and marched in
Speaker 2: behind his cason.
Speaker 1: That's, of course, November of nineteen sixty three. It would
Speaker 1: be another year or so before Vietnam would ramp up
Speaker 1: in a significant way. You mentioned you were flying the
Speaker 1: F four. I have yet to meet a pilot who
Speaker 1: didn't love the F four, I assume that was consistent
Speaker 1: for you as well.
Speaker 2: The F four Phantom is a great airplane. One of
Speaker 2: the advantages has duplicate everything. Two engines, two hydraulic systems,
Speaker 2: two pneumatic systems. Everything was duplicated in the F four,
Speaker 2: so that when you started losing these things, you still
Speaker 2: had one left to bring you home. And I was
Speaker 2: shot up a lot of times.
Speaker 1: And so when were you deployed to Vietnam on.
Speaker 2: My wife's birthday, the fifth of November of nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 1: And what kind of missions were you flying there?
Speaker 2: We had two weeks as fighters, in two weeks as
Speaker 2: attack and so we alternated with our sister squadron. So
Speaker 2: for two weeks we would carry just air to air missiles,
Speaker 2: you know, fighting the enemy airplanes, and the other two
Speaker 2: weeks we would carry bombs in rockets to do air
Speaker 2: to ground missions.
Speaker 1: And on all those missions before the one we'll talk
Speaker 1: about in just a moment, did you come under much
Speaker 1: fire from the ground.
Speaker 2: Yes, quite a bit. There was first of all a
Speaker 2: lot of anti aircraft fire flak, and then small arms
Speaker 2: fire rifles, and then anti aircraft artillery and then probably
Speaker 2: the big one and the one that got me was
Speaker 2: surface to air missiles. So at the moment, at the
Speaker 2: time in sixty six and sixty seven, Hanoi was the
Speaker 2: most heavily defended city in the world. They had a
Speaker 2: lot of craptue to throw at us.
Speaker 1: Well, let's talk about May nineteenth, nineteen sixty seven. How
Speaker 1: did the day start and walk us through what happened.
Speaker 2: Nineteen May nineteen sixty seven started about three in the
Speaker 2: morning when I got a phone call in my cabin
Speaker 2: with the operations officer, and he I was the schedules officer,
Speaker 2: so I scheduled the pilots in the planes and the
Speaker 2: air crews to go on these missions. So he said,
Speaker 2: you know, we got this last minute call for a
Speaker 2: big time mission. Come down to the radio room. We've
Speaker 2: got a planet. So at o dark thirty, I showed
Speaker 2: up at the radio room started planning this mission. We
Speaker 2: were briefed for the targets. I was air to air
Speaker 2: at that time. I was carrying just missiles, sparrows and
Speaker 2: sidewinder missiles, and so we were to protect the attack fleet.
Speaker 2: And so we were on both sides of the guys
Speaker 2: with the bombs. So launched on the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk,
Speaker 2: rendezvous at twenty five thousand feet, plugged into an airborne tanker,
Speaker 2: which is a trigger in itself, and took on five
Speaker 2: pounds of jet fuel, pointed the nose that airplane towards
Speaker 2: the beach and that became That became my last flight.
Speaker 2: I remember though, we had three aircraft carriers and five
Speaker 2: air force bases on that day, nineteenth of May. I
Speaker 2: didn't know it at the time, but it was the
Speaker 2: birthday of their president, Ho Chi Minh, and I think
Speaker 2: that the psychological warfare guys thought we would catch them
Speaker 2: in celebration of their president's birthday. They knew we were coming.
Speaker 2: They were loaded and ready to go, and so there
Speaker 2: was just an awful lot with In fact, there were
Speaker 2: eight f four phantoms shot down that day. I was
Speaker 2: one of them.
Speaker 1: Take me through that moment.
Speaker 2: We were just short of the target. Things were looking
Speaker 2: pretty good. Saw a lot of flak in the air.
Speaker 2: I didn't see any missiles. I had dodged several missiles.
Speaker 2: If you can see a missile coming okay at you,
Speaker 2: and you can wait for it to get into maybe
Speaker 2: a quarter of a mile, you can out turn the missile.
Speaker 2: These missiles were twenty feet long and maybe twelve fourteen
Speaker 2: inches in diameter, so the very gangly missiles, and they
Speaker 2: can't turn very fast. I could turn inside the missile,
Speaker 2: but if you start your turn too soon, the missile
Speaker 2: has uh a lead pursuit on it, and it will
Speaker 2: lead you in your turn and knock you off in
Speaker 2: the middle of your turn. So you have to wait
Speaker 2: till the thing. It's like a bullfight, you know, the
Speaker 2: red flag, and when the bull comes close, you know
Speaker 2: you That's what we were after. So a quarter of
Speaker 2: a mile, make a big jink, and that thing will
Speaker 2: go by you. And I had done that six times
Speaker 2: during my seventy four missions. So this time I didn't
Speaker 2: see the missile. It came from behind.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: In fact, I didn't even know. I didn't even know
Speaker 2: what hit me until later in the war. All I
Speaker 2: knew was that my instrument panel lit up like a
Speaker 2: Christmas tree. I started losing everything. Engines unwound, hydraulic pressure failed,
Speaker 2: I couldn't control the airplace anymore. I was upside down.
Speaker 2: My radar intercept officer in the back, you know, is
Speaker 2: talking to me about what are we gonna do. The
Speaker 2: only manual control on an F four Phantom is the rudder.
Speaker 2: It's hydraulic assist, but you have some power manually. My
Speaker 2: hydraulics were gone. I hit the rudder as hard as
Speaker 2: I could, set a prayer as loud as I could,
Speaker 2: shut it upright where I could eject my back seater,
Speaker 2: could eject, our parachutes open, and we came floating down
Speaker 2: over into my territory.
Speaker 1: What happened when you touched the ground?
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, before I touched the ground, they
Speaker 2: were shooting at me. I thought that was unfair. You know,
Speaker 2: they just knocked down this multi gazellion dollar airplane. Now
Speaker 2: they're trying to kill the pilot. So and I found
Speaker 2: out that when you're dodging bullets, it's tough to come
Speaker 2: up with a long range plan. So I took a
Speaker 2: deep breath, let about half of it out, bowed my head,
Speaker 2: and set a prayer a little extra strength that day
Speaker 2: from above. I knew there was gonna be some pain
Speaker 2: in my future. I prayed that there might be some
Speaker 2: value in the pain. I prayed for my wife because
Speaker 2: I knew it would really be tough on her. We
Speaker 2: were both twenty four years old. We'd been married, let's
Speaker 2: see by that time two years. So it was gonna
Speaker 2: be tough. As I said, I was the flight officer,
Speaker 2: and so I had all the schedule in my in
Speaker 2: the little book in my pocket. I had a schedule
Speaker 2: in a book in my pocket. I pulled it out,
Speaker 2: ripped the pages of the names of the pilots, and
Speaker 2: I ate the pages from this book because I didn't
Speaker 2: want the enemy to capture my book with all the
Speaker 2: pilot's names.
Speaker 1: Is this while you're parachuting?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I want parachuting death. Pulled up my two way radio.
Speaker 2: I was a couple hundred miles inland. I didn't really
Speaker 2: want the rescue helicopter to try to come. Plus the
Speaker 2: fact that I was very close to Hanoi, the capital city.
Speaker 2: There was no way they were gonna be able to
Speaker 2: get in there. And what I had seen happen in
Speaker 2: that war is that a guy was captured, they would
Speaker 2: take his two way radio and call in for a
Speaker 2: rescue and then shoot down the helicopter. It was just
Speaker 2: automatic for me to know, Hey, that wasn't gonna happen.
Speaker 2: So I broke the antenna off the radio. Through the
Speaker 2: radio one way and the antenna the other way, and
Speaker 2: it went into a rice paddy. So I was pretty
Speaker 2: sure they were not gonna be able to use my
Speaker 2: two way radio. And about that time I sunk about
Speaker 2: waist deep in the mud of a rice patty. I
Speaker 2: was just started upon by it seemed like hundreds. It
Speaker 2: was probably only twenty five or thirty, but it was
Speaker 2: a bunch of farmers for the most part, and they
Speaker 2: had machetes and shovels and farming implements and started hacking
Speaker 2: at me with their farming instruments. I had a thirty
Speaker 2: eight revolver with me, but there were I had. I
Speaker 2: had five shells and flare in the revolver. I decided
Speaker 2: I'm going to do much good, and so I threw
Speaker 2: the revolver into the rice patty and gave up, which
Speaker 2: really bothered me, you know, for the nearly six years
Speaker 2: I was there, because fighter pilots are not supposed to
Speaker 2: give up. That's not part of the top gun playbook.
Speaker 2: So I gave up, and they tripped me of everything
Speaker 2: I had, totally nude, hauled me around and showed me
Speaker 2: off to the village people there as they hit me
Speaker 2: with sticks and rocks and that kind of thing. The
Speaker 2: the army showed up with two jeeps, put my back
Speaker 2: seater in one. We were both burned, but he had
Speaker 2: more serious burns than I did. And we were in
Speaker 2: two separate jeeps, and within thirty minutes we were in
Speaker 2: downtown Hanoi at the Wallow Prison that we rename the
Speaker 2: Hanoi Hilton.
Speaker 1: When we return, Captain Plum takes us inside the infamous
Speaker 1: Wallow Prison, known better as the Hanoi Hilton. He also
Speaker 1: tells us about the brutal treatment and explains how the
Speaker 1: other prisoners gave him purpose and eased his guilt. Our
Speaker 1: guest has retired to US Navy Captain Charlie Plum, who
Speaker 1: spent nearly six years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
Speaker 1: I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles.
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Speaker 1: This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in
Speaker 1: this edition is retired to US Navy Captain Charlie Plum.
Speaker 1: He served as a naval aviator and is a veteran
Speaker 1: of the Vietnam War, spending nearly six years as a
Speaker 1: prisoner of war. We've already heard the details of him
Speaker 1: being taken prisoner Up. Next, Captain Plump takes us inside
Speaker 1: the brutality of the Hanoi Hilton.
Speaker 2: When it got to the Hilton, I was tortured for
Speaker 2: two days for military information and political propaganda. I was
Speaker 2: a very junior officer or grade. I didn't know any
Speaker 2: of the information they wanted. They wanted future targets, They
Speaker 2: wanted information on our syop our psychological warfare, and and
Speaker 2: our nuclear weapons. I didn't know any of that stuff.
Speaker 2: And I started to lie to them, and they would
Speaker 2: they would believe my lies. It was. It was really surprising,
Speaker 2: and I found out, first of all, how ignorant they were.
Speaker 2: I shouldn't say ignorant, because they have a lot of
Speaker 2: natural talent, but they knew nothing about the rest of
Speaker 2: the world. For instance, they knew that I was shot
Speaker 2: down in n F four Phantom, and they said, what
Speaker 2: base did you fly from? And I told them I
Speaker 2: flew from the aircraft carrier. Kiddie, howk well. One of
Speaker 2: the reasons I told them the truth was it had
Speaker 2: been written on my parachute, you know, CBA sixty three
Speaker 2: USS kitty ark. Now, the military had the code of conduct.
Speaker 2: They tell you if your captured, give only name, rank,
Speaker 2: show number, date of birth, then they write your ship
Speaker 2: on your back. I didn't see much sense, but but
Speaker 2: I knew they knew the answer so I said, I
Speaker 2: flew from the aircraft carried cander. That's a lie, they said.
Speaker 2: They slapped me around and kicked me with their boots
Speaker 2: and hit me with their rifle. But tell us the truth.
Speaker 2: What base did you fly from? I flew from the aircraft.
Speaker 2: It's an aircraft carry out there in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Speaker 2: We know you could never take taking a big jit
Speaker 2: airplane like that off a boat. We know you need
Speaker 2: to runway that's at least a mile long. Well, it
Speaker 2: was time for another little fib. I said, well, you know,
Speaker 2: we have a lot of ships out there in the
Speaker 2: seventh Fleet. We just line them all up. And they
Speaker 2: believe that one too. So we found that we could
Speaker 2: lie to them. And even after they had found out
Speaker 2: the truth that we had lied, they they were embarrassed
Speaker 2: to face us with the fact that we'd pull the
Speaker 2: wool over their eyes. And it was a crazy, crazy thing,
Speaker 2: but that's how we answered their questions. So the torture
Speaker 2: lasted for two days. It tossed me into a little
Speaker 2: cell eight feet long and eight feet wide. I could
Speaker 2: paced three steps one way and three steps the other.
Speaker 2: And we call that the Hanoi shuffle because we were
Speaker 2: all doing it, and we would walk hundreds of miles,
Speaker 2: and I felt first of all very lonely, solitary confinement,
Speaker 2: and then very guilty. I was ashamed of the fact
Speaker 2: that I had surrendered, and ashamed of the fact that
Speaker 2: I had given them more than name, rank, show number,
Speaker 2: day to birth. It sounds crazy, but you know, I'm thinking,
Speaker 2: I'm so ashamed of what I did that maybe maybe
Speaker 2: if this war ever ends, I won't go back to
Speaker 2: the country to my home. I can't face my fellow
Speaker 2: fighter pilots. I can't face my family and admit to
Speaker 2: them how weak I was, and that really troubled me.
Speaker 2: Maybe I'll go to some foreign country and change my
Speaker 2: name and live the rest of my life and never
Speaker 2: have to tell anybody about about my history. I got
Speaker 2: communication with Bob Schoemaker, Pow number two. He was there
Speaker 2: over eight years. He pieced a little wire out his
Speaker 2: cell wall and across a storeroom into my cell wall
Speaker 2: with a note in the tap coat. On the note
Speaker 2: to teach me that we could we could indicate any
Speaker 2: of the letters the alphabet by two numbers of tugs,
Speaker 2: the number of the five y five matrix, a number
Speaker 2: of the line than the number of the row, and
Speaker 2: so we would. We started communicating this very cumbersome, our
Speaker 2: our cake code. But it worked. It became our became
Speaker 2: our lifeline in a lot of ways, what we call
Speaker 2: the tap code. I found out who he was, He
Speaker 2: found out who I was. We exchanged rank and dative
Speaker 2: rank because it was really important that we always knew
Speaker 2: who was senior to whom. The military standard was absolutely
Speaker 2: vital in my survival. That somebody had control, somebody was
Speaker 2: in charge, somebody gave us direction and a purpose. At first,
Speaker 2: I thought, I, you know, I don't want to be
Speaker 2: commanded by somebody else. But by the way, that discipline
Speaker 2: brought unity and our survival. So we were on this
Speaker 2: tugging on wires and communicating with each other for I
Speaker 2: don't know a few weeks, and I finally decided at
Speaker 2: a better fess up, and I said, Shoe, it is
Speaker 2: called sign was shoe. Mine was Plumber. Could have been Maverick,
Speaker 2: but it was Plumber. So I said she, I've got
Speaker 2: a confession to make to you, And when I tell
Speaker 2: you what I did, you might not want to communicate
Speaker 2: with me anymore. Because if our roles were reversed, and
Speaker 2: you did what I did. I wouldn't want to talk
Speaker 2: to you. He said, what'd you do, Plumber? I said,
Speaker 2: I broke. I tried to be strong, but I broke.
Speaker 2: She maker said, Hell, everybody broke. There's not a man
Speaker 2: in his prison who was as strong as he wanted
Speaker 2: to be. So pull up your big boy pants. We
Speaker 2: got a war to fight. That turned the whole thing around.
Speaker 2: It gave me, It gave me permission to be weak.
Speaker 2: And it was interesting that I found out that most
Speaker 2: everybody in that camp had gone through the same guilt
Speaker 2: feelings about not being as strong as everybody else had been.
Speaker 1: I've heard so many people talk about the value of
Speaker 1: the tap code and how the communication like you called
Speaker 1: it a lifeline mentally strong teamwork, but a moment like
Speaker 1: that where it absolves you of the guilt you had
Speaker 1: been feeling and really changes your mindset for however long
Speaker 1: you had left had to be just life changing.
Speaker 2: Another interesting value of the tap code and the communication
Speaker 2: system it turned out to be the value was not
Speaker 2: necessarily the words we were using, or top secret plans
Speaker 2: for escape or any of that. The value of tap
Speaker 2: code and communication and a system is the simple validation
Speaker 2: of another human being, because in those prison cells, if
Speaker 2: you were alone in solitary confinement and it was dark,
Speaker 2: especially if it was dark and you were in solitary,
Speaker 2: you'd lose track. You wouldn't know what was a real memory,
Speaker 2: what was a hallucination. Sometimes you wondered if you were
Speaker 2: alive or dead. There was nothing to validate my existence.
Speaker 2: The tugging on a wire or tapping on a wall,
Speaker 2: and have somebody else tug back or tap back meant
Speaker 2: two things. Number One, somebody's responding something that I'm doing physically.
Speaker 2: Thus I exist, I'm real, I'm alive. Number Two, somebody cares.
Speaker 2: And so it was that part of the communication that
Speaker 2: really validated my existence and made me whole. So it
Speaker 2: was absolutely vital.
Speaker 1: You had hundreds of prisoners here at certain points, and
Speaker 1: so did the captors not catch out or did they
Speaker 1: just not do anything about the tap code?
Speaker 2: It depended on the camp that you were in. Of course,
Speaker 2: communication was restricted. In fact, guys were torture because they
Speaker 2: were communicating with each other, and so they were really
Speaker 2: serious about us not communicating with each other. But they
Speaker 2: knew that knew that we were communicating. One of the
Speaker 2: things our senior leaders came up with with what they
Speaker 2: called the Plums. Had nothing to do with Charlie Plumber.
Speaker 2: It was just, I don't know why the code name
Speaker 2: was the Plums. And these were levels of resistance and
Speaker 2: it went from refusing to bow to the enemy all
Speaker 2: the way up to a prison riot. And so the
Speaker 2: senior officers could command resistance level number three and we
Speaker 2: would go into that level. Sounds silly, especially the first
Speaker 2: level refusing to bow. That was one of the things
Speaker 2: we had to do. We had to do a very low,
Speaker 2: ceremonious bow. Anytime a guard came to our door and
Speaker 2: opened the flap and peeked in on us, we'd have
Speaker 2: to go bow to the guard, or anytime, you know,
Speaker 2: we would see any of the enemy, we had to bow. Subservience. Okay,
Speaker 2: that was the camp commander, you know, our leader, Jim
Speaker 2: Stockdale or Jeremiah Dinton or John McCain or whoever was
Speaker 2: in charge, would call for resistance level number one, and
Speaker 2: everybody in the heartire, maybe two hundred guys stopped bowing
Speaker 2: at the same moment, and it really scared them to
Speaker 2: death to know that we had that kind of communication
Speaker 2: and that kind of discipline that all of a sudden
Speaker 2: nobody would bow, and so the resistance we never got
Speaker 2: to the prison riot. Lucky for me, because a lot
Speaker 2: of guys would have gotten killed. I'm sure had we
Speaker 2: start to riot, But we sure showed them that we
Speaker 2: had unity and we had purpose, and we had our
Speaker 2: discipline through our rank structure.
Speaker 1: Coming up, retired Navy Captain Charlie Plum offers more detail
Speaker 1: about the agony his Vietnamese captors inflicted on him through
Speaker 1: an effort to create propaganda on their behalf, and he
Speaker 1: also tells us what it was like to be free
Speaker 1: again after nearly six years of captivity. I'm Greg Corumbus,
Speaker 1: and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm
Speaker 1: Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is retired US
Speaker 1: Navy Captain Charlie Plum, who also spent six years as
Speaker 1: a prisoner of war in Vietnam. In a moment, we'll
Speaker 1: conclude our conversation with Plum explaining what freedom means to him.
Speaker 1: But first he shares the horrors of more torture at
Speaker 1: the hand of the Vietnamese as they demanded Americans create
Speaker 1: propaganda against their own cause.
Speaker 2: As it turned out, they felt that what they could
Speaker 2: get from the prisons of war was propaganda, and that
Speaker 2: became really a mainstay of hoa Chi men's dealing with
Speaker 2: us and our dealing with them. And that's sort of
Speaker 2: bad news good news, because guys were tortured to say
Speaker 2: that the treatment was good. It was just that crazy.
Speaker 2: But the good news was it gave us a purpose,
Speaker 2: a reason, a way to not only defend ourselves, but
Speaker 2: to take action against the enemy. We could be on
Speaker 2: the offense by refusing to allow their propaganda and so
Speaker 2: and so. You know, obviously it was difficult to refuse
Speaker 2: because you're going to be tortured to do something, and
Speaker 2: you're you're probably gonna do it. But then we found
Speaker 2: out that if you could endure the torture until you
Speaker 2: thought it was close to permanent physical damage, uh, and
Speaker 2: then started to ease up and do little things and
Speaker 2: lie a lot, Like if we would make a tape
Speaker 2: or Jeremiah didn't was the excellent example. Uh. And he's gone.
Speaker 2: I wish you could interview him, because he's the guy
Speaker 2: that was tortured to see a delegation and in the
Speaker 2: delegation he blinked out with his eyes tea, oh, our
Speaker 2: torture as he blinked out, and they didn't catch this
Speaker 2: and so uh and so the world suddenly knew that
Speaker 2: we were being tortured. And so he's turned out to
Speaker 2: be great victories of our POW unit was to be
Speaker 2: able to play these things. And uh and and if
Speaker 2: you wrote a can fashion, you know, little buzzwords you
Speaker 2: would use that the Vietnamese would not know, and yet
Speaker 2: our intelligence here would would understand. So the torture for
Speaker 2: political reasons became another fight. You know, that we could
Speaker 2: fight and that we could win, and we did. They
Speaker 2: gave it, and you know, the morale was really great
Speaker 2: when we could play something like that and get by
Speaker 2: with it.
Speaker 1: What kind of things did they do to torture you?
Speaker 1: And do you still suffer injuries from that today?
Speaker 2: The main torture was what we call the rope trick.
Speaker 2: It was manacles around your wrist behind your back, and
Speaker 2: then they wrapped your elbows actually together behind your back. Okay,
Speaker 2: that hurts a lot, but you're not over yet. Shackles
Speaker 2: on your ankles and a bar to the shackles, and
Speaker 2: then they ran a rope from the shackles of your
Speaker 2: ankles up over your back and down to your wrist.
Speaker 2: Then they tightened up the rope. The result is your
Speaker 2: feet are right up in your face. Your wrists, remember
Speaker 2: your shoulder, your elbows are actually tied together, and your
Speaker 2: wrists are coming back over your head. Your shoulders by
Speaker 2: this time are out of joint. You know, they're out
Speaker 2: of the socket. And I remember at one point looking
Speaker 2: up and seeing my wrists backwards above my head, wrapped
Speaker 2: up like a human pretzel. And and it hurts a lot.
Speaker 2: And if that's not enough, then they'll take that rope
Speaker 2: and tie it to another rope and throw it across
Speaker 2: a hook in the ceiling and and haul you up
Speaker 2: off the floor in this position, so I don't have
Speaker 2: the after effects that a lot of guys do. Fortunately,
Speaker 2: I've got a few little scars here and there, and
Speaker 2: my and my shoulders of course were out of joint,
Speaker 2: and so I've got it's a little bit difficult. You know,
Speaker 2: when you saw John McCain couldn't comb his own hair.
Speaker 2: I can comb my own hair, but my shoulders are
Speaker 2: still at.
Speaker 1: Painful men, your faith on the parachute down from being
Speaker 1: shot down, your faith played a major role also, and
Speaker 1: you being able to sustain this imprisonment for so many years,
Speaker 1: and you were even serving as a chaplain for a
Speaker 1: couple of those years. So talk about the role your
Speaker 1: faith played and how you were able to serve as
Speaker 1: a chaplain given the restrictions you had.
Speaker 2: Faith played a major role. I was a man of
Speaker 2: faith when I'm shot down, but it was always kind
Speaker 2: of an eperial, kind of a deesisory work. And I
Speaker 2: think I proved to myself in the prison situation that
Speaker 2: faith does work. My mother was Mother Teresa, absolutely wonderful lady.
Speaker 2: All the years I knew my mother, I never heard
Speaker 2: her complain about anybody or She taught me a lot
Speaker 2: about forgiveness. In the prison camp, I learned that forgiveness
Speaker 2: is not just a good Christian principle, it's a survival technique.
Speaker 2: You know. We passed around Bible versus and patriotic quotes
Speaker 2: and poetry and all this stuff. One of the quotes
Speaker 2: that really meant a lot to me was this acid
Speaker 2: does more harm in the vessel it stored, then on
Speaker 2: the subject it's poured. What that meant to me was
Speaker 2: all this hate and vitriol within me is gonna hurt
Speaker 2: me more than it's gonna hurt the person I'm mad at,
Speaker 2: and I better get over this. I better forgive the
Speaker 2: guards for torturing me. I better forgive the camp commander
Speaker 2: for making this happen. I better forgive the mechanic put
Speaker 2: my airplane. I better forgive myself for being so weak,
Speaker 2: And so forgiveness was a vital part I think of
Speaker 2: my survival. At one point, when we got together in
Speaker 2: bigger rooms after the Sane raid, they were very afraid
Speaker 2: put us all back into Hannoi, and I found myself
Speaker 2: in a group of fifty seven guys, and I was
Speaker 2: appointed by our senior guy as chaplain of that unit.
Speaker 2: I'd had some experience at the Naval Academy with the
Speaker 2: Officers Christian Union to serve as lay leaders aboard ships
Speaker 2: where chaplains weren't available, so I knew some of the techniques,
Speaker 2: and so I started polling all the other guys in
Speaker 2: that cell. The Catholic boys were really good because they
Speaker 2: knew a lot of Bible versus through their Catechism that
Speaker 2: the Protestants didn't know. And so I collected Bible versus
Speaker 2: and patriotic quotes, and at one point, we actually went
Speaker 2: on a hunger strike to get a Bible. And that
Speaker 2: was a very interesting experience because the senior guy was
Speaker 2: a very devout Christian, the second guy was a Jew.
Speaker 2: The third guy in command considered himself an atheist, and
Speaker 2: so we stopped beating. Said give us a Bible and
Speaker 2: we'll start eating. Well, they withdrew our drinking water. Now
Speaker 2: you can. You can live a long time without rice
Speaker 2: and sewer soup. But when they cut off your water,
Speaker 2: you start to get real thirsty. Unbelievably, we found that
Speaker 2: the guys in the next cell they they weren't on
Speaker 2: a hunger strike. We passed a tar paper tube through
Speaker 2: a hole and they poured half of their ration of
Speaker 2: water into that tube, and we dropped the other side.
Speaker 2: We're gonna survive. But while this was happening, they pulled
Speaker 2: out our senior guy and put him in the stockade.
Speaker 2: The Jew guys said, continue the hunger strike. We're gonna
Speaker 2: get ourselves a Bible. They pulled him out of there.
Speaker 2: The atheist guy, continue the hunger strike. You know, it
Speaker 2: was that kind of military discipline we had that you know,
Speaker 2: it was beyond politics, beyond religion anything else. You know
Speaker 2: we were gonna we you know, we were gonna do
Speaker 2: what was the right thing to do. They find about
Speaker 2: us a Bible. They gave us a Bible for a
Speaker 2: day and a half. It was a tattered old I
Speaker 2: don't where they even got it, King James version. And
Speaker 2: we copied from two sides of a page on pieces
Speaker 2: of toilet paper with ink made from ashes. We copied
Speaker 2: down the Nativity scene, the you know, the Matthew Mark,
Speaker 2: Luke John. We we copied down the Book of Job.
Speaker 2: We felt like that we didn't have as bad as
Speaker 2: Job did, but gave us confidence, you know, to know
Speaker 2: that somebody had made it through this, and of course
Speaker 2: the Easter, and so we copied those things down. They
Speaker 2: took the Bible away then, and we tried to hide
Speaker 2: our copies. They eventually found the copies and tore those up.
Speaker 2: So but it was it was a great morale boost
Speaker 2: just to have the Bible in that prison camp for
Speaker 2: a day.
Speaker 1: Wellly got a couple of minutes left, sir, But tell
Speaker 1: me about how you learned you would be free and
Speaker 1: what it was like to be free.
Speaker 2: Wondered for years how we would find out, how would
Speaker 2: we react? They came in, put a piece of toilet
Speaker 2: paper on the floor and said, put your foot on this.
Speaker 2: They traced around our foot. We're going to get some shoes.
Speaker 2: Hadn't seen a pair of shoes in nearly six years.
Speaker 2: Get some shoes. Sing. THEYD brought us shoes, announced that
Speaker 2: the war was over. With trading prisoners, we got on
Speaker 2: a bus over the dike. We'd see the runway, the
Speaker 2: Geelom's run with the enemy's runway, with the US Air
Speaker 2: Force one for one ready to wing us away the freedom.
Speaker 2: But it was no response. We were kind of afraid
Speaker 2: to cry or cheer, hug and kiss everybody else. And
Speaker 2: it wasn't really until we got aboard that airplane lifted
Speaker 2: off enemy. So it wasn't really until we were airborne
Speaker 2: and over the water that we all started hugging and
Speaker 2: kissing the Air Force nurses, so we knew we were
Speaker 2: going home.
Speaker 1: What was it like to talk to your fellow prisoners
Speaker 1: after not being able to actually talk to them for
Speaker 1: so long?
Speaker 2: It was really neat because you know, we with a
Speaker 2: communications system. I knew an awful lot about it off
Speaker 2: of a lot of these guys, but had never seen them.
Speaker 2: You know, I knew Bob Schumacher's growing up and every
Speaker 2: book he'd ever read, and every movie he'd ever seen,
Speaker 2: every girl he'd ever dated. I knew his cat was
Speaker 2: named Matilda, so and so, and I didn't know who.
Speaker 2: I didn't know what he looked like. When I finally
Speaker 2: saw him and he introduced him, Say, Bob Schumaker, I'm
Speaker 2: Charlie bum How's Matilda? He said? Kia, Charlie, Kia.
Speaker 1: Last question. You're among a select number of Americans who
Speaker 1: knows what it's like to lose freedom and then get
Speaker 1: it back. For those who will probably never know what
Speaker 1: it's like to lose it, what do you tell them
Speaker 1: about how to value the freedom that we have.
Speaker 2: There is great value in getting your freedom taken away
Speaker 2: for a while. In fact, I have four kids. I've
Speaker 2: told all four of these kids, if they ever get
Speaker 2: in jail, don't expect me to bail them out. I'm
Speaker 2: going to let them at least a one night in
Speaker 2: jail to let them know what freedom is like. It's
Speaker 2: like being reborn to be free. It's very simple, simple
Speaker 2: things like having a door knob on the inside of
Speaker 2: your door, you know, to be able to just to
Speaker 2: just to walk outside in the air, you know, just
Speaker 2: to take a hot shower. You know, all these things
Speaker 2: still remind me fifty years later, still remind me how
Speaker 2: valuable freedom really is. And I wish I could give
Speaker 2: a person a pill, you know, to experience something that
Speaker 2: I have experienced and then come back to life after
Speaker 2: having been We used to ask a guy, hey, when
Speaker 2: did you die? That meant when we were shot down,
Speaker 2: because we kind of felt that the nineteenth of May
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty seven. The world kept turning, but I got off,
Speaker 2: you know, I was, I was dead, you know, I was.
Speaker 2: I was just not part of the culture for nearly
Speaker 2: six years. And if you could give a person a
Speaker 2: pill to have that feeling and realize how wonderful it
Speaker 2: is to be free and and and we're free primarily
Speaker 2: because of all the men and women who have fought
Speaker 2: for this. Freedom didn't come easy. And so yeah, freedom is.
Speaker 2: It's a wonderful thing. And I enjoyed every day.
Speaker 1: Sir. It's an incredible story. I thank you for your
Speaker 1: time today, and I especially thank you for your incredible
Speaker 1: service and sacrifice for our nature.
Speaker 2: Thanks for helping us tell our story.
Speaker 1: Thank you, sir. That's retired to us Navy captain and
Speaker 1: Naval aviator Charlie Plumb. He's a veteran of the Vietnam
Speaker 1: War spent nearly six years as a prisoner of war.
Speaker 1: I'm Greg Corumbus. This is Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is
Speaker 1: Greg Corumbus, and thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a
Speaker 1: presentation of the American Veterans Center. For more information, please
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