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