[upbeat jingle] - Hello I'm Nido Qubein.
Welcome to Side by Side.
My guest today looked up to the Kansas skies as a child and marveled at airplanes.
Years later, he'd be shot down from the skies over Hanoi, and he'd be held in a North Vietnamese prison camp for six years, two thousand one hundred and three days.
We're talking about faithful courage with an American hero, Captain Charlie Plumb.
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- [Nido] Charlie, welcome to Side by Side.
You're an American hero.
You're a former fighter pilot a captain of the U.S. Navy.
You flew seventy four successful combat missions in North Vietnam; over North Vietnam.
You were shot down over Hanoi, and you came back to this country and you got the silver star, bronze star, two purple hearts.
You have served your country well.
And when you were in that prison in Hanoi for six, long years, more than 2,100 days, you couldn't communicate with your colleagues, with your fellow comrades, except through the walls of that prison.
How did you communicate?
- [Charlie] We found communication was vital just for our own existence and not necessarily because of what we were passing around, the words, it was the validation of another human being in another cell.
And so we tapped on the walls in a very cumbersome code, [Rhythmic tapping] Where various numbers of letters and numbers of taps would be letters of the alphabet or abbreviations.
And this was our language.
We learned to know that language just as well as English.
- How was that your language?
It just sounded to me like a bunch of knocks on a table.
- It's a five by five matrix where each line is numbered one through five, and the rows were numbered one through five.
So A is 'one one', Z is 'five five'.
[knocking] We left out K just to make it come out even.
- Who came up with that?
- You know, it's an old miner's code.
When miners were trapped in mines, and they could tap on a pipe, that's the way that they use that.
And one of the POW's had learned that code and brought it to the camp.
- And how long did it take any of you to learn it?
- It took probably a month to learn the code.
And at sometimes it was very difficult because in one of the prison cells I was in, I had a guy next door that I wanted to communicate with.
And so I would tap '1, 2, 3' all the way through 26, and then I would wait for an hour and start again, 'one, two' through 26.
It took two weeks for him to realize that 1 would represent an A, 26 would represent a Z.
And with that, then I explained to him the five by five matrix, and it worked, but it took a long, long time.
- So let me give you some sentences.
[Charlie laughing] and see how well you remember this matrix.
Say good morning.
[Rhythmic tapping] Wow.
That took a long time.
- That's all we had was time.
- You were stuck there with time.
Take us there, Charlie.
I want to know how does a human being survive such a difficult time in his life.
First of all, you were shot down and were found by... - I was captured immediately.
As I was parachuting in enemy hands, they were shooting at me.
I was dodging bullets in that parachute and I thought, "Ah, that's not really fair.
They just shot down my airplane.
Now they're trying to kill the pilot.
", but they were right there.
This was just south of Hanoi, the capital city.
And so they captured me immediately, hauled me into the prison camp, torture for two days, for propaganda and military information, and then tossed into this little eight foot by eight foot prison cell.
- They spoke English?
- No, that was just poking me and grunting and hollering in their language.
- I see.
- They spoke no English.
- I see.
And then what?
- I paced that floor three steps one way and three steps the other.
- They put you in a cell.
- In a prison cell.
It was eight feet long and eight feet wide.
- And what was in the cell?
- There were four bunks.
I later had three roommates in that eight foot by eight foot cell.
So there were four beds where we slept, a bucket, a two gallon bucket, which was our latrine, and no windows, a flap in the door where the guards could come at any moment and open that flap and see what you were doing in your cell, because we were supposed to be sitting there contemplating our sins against their country.
- Was there light in the cell?
- Yes, and I was in several different cells while I was there.
And most of them had a light bulb of some kind, but in one of- - They stay on 24 Hours a day?
- 24 Hours, mhm.
And there was also a speaker.
Before they ever brought food or water, they would install a speaker in this cell.
The speaker was so high on the wall you couldn't adjust it or turn it off.
And it just blared out the Communist propaganda.
Day and night.
- In English, or?
- Yes, it was in English.
And it was primarily a woman we called Hanoi Hannah.
It was similar to Tokyo Rose in World War II.
And she would come on in the morning, and early in the morning and she would say, "Good morning, obdurate American air pirates.
This is the voice of Vietnam."
Well, we didn't know what obdurate meant.
And we thought she was trying to say pilots, but she was saying pirates because of the 'L'; difficult to pronounce in Asian languages.
And so not too many years later, a voice came on the radio, an English voice that we recognized, it was Jane Fonda.
And she said the same thing, "Good morning, obdurate American air pirates.
This is the voice of Vietnam."
And so, it was disappointing to know that she was just reading a script, and they really were calling us pirates and not pilots.
- So you were there for six years.
Did you lose weight?
Did you gain weight?
- We survived basically on two bowls of rice a day.
So I was down to about 115 pounds most of the time that I was there.
I weigh 170 now.
So yes, we lost a lot of weight.
Well, there was no medical care, and I had four open wounds when I was shot down.
And so they eventually healed, but without any- - On their own, without any medical care.
- Without any medical care.
It was kind of amazing because guys had lacerations, guys would have impacted teeth, things that we normally would just, you know, go to a hospital and have that fixed, and they all pretty much fixed themselves.
- How many Americans were in that prison?
- I was in several different camps, and it ranged anywhere from 11 guys to 254.
- Really?
And you never saw them?
- We never saw them.
We would just, again, speak to them tapping on the wall.
We wrote notes to each other on pieces of toilet paper and would slip the note under a door.
If we could, wrap it around a rock, heave it from one building to another.
We call that air mail.
[laughing] Probably the best code of all.
And of course, as I say, it was vital.
It was life and death vital that we communicate with the other prisoners, and maybe the best one was when we found that the majority of them have tuberculosis, and they're always coughing and spitting, and they assume that we did too.
So we found out that we couldn't whisper a word outside our cell, but we could go around coughing and spitting.
You know, we decided it's natural.
We'll make a code out of these silly guttural noises.
- You made another language out of coughing.
- We designated various letters of the alphabet or abbreviations to be represented by combinations of cough, sneezes, spits, or wheezes.
So we'd wake up in the morning, hear the guys next door go, [snorting and spitting] That means "Good morning.
How are you?"
[laughing] - Well, that took shorter time than this.
- It was an abbreviation.
[laughing] - Wow.
And you said it was imperative that you communicate with each other just for human survival, I take it?
- Truly, because in the prison cells, especially if it was dark, as I say some of them didn't have light, and you couldn't tell green from red, and you were alone in solitary confinement.
Some guys were in solitary for four and a half years.
I was not.
I, they gave me a roommate eventually, but if it was dark and you were alone, you seem to lose track of reality.
And you don't know what's a real memory or what's a hallucination of a memory.
And so it was just that the single tapping on a wall and the call-up was, [rhythmic tapping] and on the other end of the wall, the guy would go, [short tapping] That meant two things.
Number one, somebody's responding to something you're doing physically.
Thus, I exist.
I'm real.
I'm alive.
Number two, somebody cares.
- And what was the objective?
I mean, they put you in these cells, what was the outcome?
What did they want to see the outcome?
- They wanted to reduce us to the very baseline person, and then rebuild us as communists.
Ho Chi Minh man was their president.
He publicly said, "We're going to take these Americans.
We're going to turn them into communists and send them back to America."
And so that's what they tried to do.
That's what the speaker was about.
That's what the isolation was about.
That was what the lack of communication was about.
- It was brainwashing, basically.
- It was brainwashing.
- Yeah.
- Now they could do that to their own people, but they couldn't do that to us.
A lot of it was just silly stuff that they came up with, and we laughed frequently about their attempt to brainwash us.
But the real key to the survival was the leadership that we had in that prison camp.
Guys like Jim Stockdale, Jeremiah Denton, John McCain, my old flight instructor.
These were the people that reset the goals for us.
- How did, I don't understand, leadership in the camp while you are prisoners?
- They couldn't see us, they couldn't fire us or hire us, or give us a bonus or promote us, and the only way they could even talk to us was tapping on the wall.
And yet it was the best leadership I have ever seen.
They redefined our total mission.
When I was first shot down, I felt really guilty that I had surrendered.
Fighter Pilots are not supposed to surrender.
That's not in our training.
That's not in our DNA.
And I flew the skies of north Vietnam thinking that I was tough enough that I would never ever give in to the enemy, as we all did.
And yet we found that the torture was just too painful.
And so we had to give more than name, rank, serial number, date of birth as the code of conduct states.
And I felt guilty, you know, how can I ever go back to my home country?
How can I ever face my fellow fighter pilots and admit that I had failed in my mission so miserably?
So, here comes Jim Stockdale, and tapping on the wall he said, "We're not on the defensive here, we are on the offensive.
We are warriors.
We will pursue this war 'till our last dying breath."
I couldn't believe it.
I'm a Lieutenant junior grade, okay?
I'm 24 years old, Okay?
I'm wet behind the ears, and to have a senior officer telling me that I'm on the offensive, and I'm looking around in a prison cell, but it worked.
- What did it do?
Did it give you hope?
- First of all, it gave us a mission, right?
It gave us a purpose in life, and it coalesced the prisoners of war into one unit.
And it worked, it really worked.
A study was done five years ago of all the combatants of Vietnam that 30.6% have post-traumatic stress disorder.
Of the prisoners of war, 4% of us had PTSD.
- Wow, and you attributed that to leadership and to... - Leadership and the unity of the team.
And I think it's true in business and in schools and life in families, if you have a defined purpose, our purpose was three words, really simple purpose.
The purpose was 'return with honor'.
That's what we were to do.
And Stockdale would say, "Every decision you make has to fit through that funnel: 'return with honor'."
And so that became our mission.
- So Charlie tell me this, if you were in cell number 4 and somebody else was in cell number 11, how do you communicate?
How does 4 and 11 communicate?
- You pass the word, you know?
Here's a message for cell number 11.
- Oh, I see.
And it just keeps going from one-to-one.
There was a lot of knocking going on.
- A lot of knocking going on in the walls.
And, you know, as the old game of password, when you get in you a circle and you pass something to somebody, and by the time it comes back to you, it's totally different?
Well that happened in that cell block.
- And how did you pass your time?
You played cards, what did you do?
- Well, I, first of all, in solitary confinement, I went back through my mind and tried to remember every book I've ever read, every movie I had ever seen, every girl I've ever dated, and it took me about three months.
I was 24 at the time.
So in three months, I had pretty much exhausted, and I'd worked 10, 12 hours a day on this, just on this.
It's amazing the stuff that's in the back of your mind that you never pull out because you never had the opportunity of being alone for six years.
And then when I got through that, I planned my future.
And the next 20 years of my life, around my high school sweetheart, whom I had married after I graduated from the Naval Academy, and I planned 20 years around her, and I still wasn't home, so I went back through the 20 years and planned it in a different method, you know?
A little more aggressive or a little less aggressive.
So when I finally came home, I had three different options of ways that I could live my life.
Of course, they all sort of fell through because she filed for divorce just three months before I came home.
- Wow.
- And so I couldn't use any of those three plans, but by that time, you know, I'd figured out pretty much the answer to adversity, you know, I'd figured out, "Hey, if I look hard enough at this puzzle, challenge, I will find an opportunity within this."
And so I started to tell my story, and it seemed to fit.
I mean, people really respond to someone who's been frustrated and alone and unable to communicate with those they love.
- And afraid?
- And afraid.
Absolutely.
And failing in the mission, you know, it was interesting that I felt, at that time, that I was the only one who had failed.
And yet when I started to communicate with the other prisoners, I found everybody felt guilty that they had surrendered to the enemy.
In fact, some of the guys even considered suicide because they had failed so miserably, and they didn't want anybody to ever know how weak they were.
And so pretty much a lesson of life, you know, take your failures and use the failures in the future.
- And then you came home.
- I did.
- And you had parachuted out of the airplane.
- I did.
- What happened when you came home?
- Several things when I came home, you know, I began to travel and have a beautiful life.
The doctors and psychiatrists said we'd be in baskets.
They had our families briefed to institutionalize us the rest of our lives.
- Really?
- Yes.
And what can you expect, you know, that long under those conditions.
But I, you know, I just grabbed life and went on with it.
And several years after I came home, I was in a restaurant in Kansas City, where I lived at the time, and about two tables over a guy kept looking at me and I caught his eye.
He walked over to my table, pointed at me and he said, "You're Captain Plumb."
I said, "Yes, sir."
He said, "You flew jet fighters in Vietnam.
Part of that top gun outfit.
You were shot down, parachuted in enemy hands.
You spent six years as a prisoner of war."
I said, "How in the world did you know that?"
He said, "Because I'm the guy that packed your parachute."
- Wow.
"I'm the guy who packed your parachute."
- I was aghast.
I could barely stagger to my feet to reach out a very grateful hand of thanks.
I was speechless.
He came up with the proper words.
He grabbed my hand, he pat my arm and he said, "I guess it worked!"
[laughing] - Wow.
Have seen the guy since?
- Yes.
Matter of fact, we became really good friends, but you know, that night I didn't get much sleep.
I wondered how many times I might've passed him in the passageway of that ship and never said a word to him.
He was a sailor.
I was a fighter pilot, okay?
How many times I might have passed him on Liberty Call and never said thank you.
And then suddenly he's the guy who saved my life.
And again, a lesson in life, you know, who packs your parachute, you know?
who is that that gives you those nuggets that you're going to need when the going is tough?
- Who provides you with the resources to achieve your goals?
Well Charlie, you've been traveling around the country and inspiring tons of audiences.
You've spoken to business audiences and to nonprofit organizations and to governmental organizations and to students and others.
What are the two or three things that you tell them that you have deducted or deduced from your own life that they can apply in their own life?
- I think the first principle is you have a choice.
It's very simple, but people miss when they're surrounded by adversity, you know, when everything is on top of them, they think, "I'm a victim of circumstances beyond my control.
I cannot control this."
You can't control what's around you, but you can certainly control the response.
- Don't give up.
- Don't give up.
Yeah.
You know, keep on keeping on.
The other thing is if you look close enough, you can find an advantage in every challenge you ever have.
There's a seed of value in there, and I try to make it a puzzle, okay?
If it is true that there is an opportunity within this problem, the puzzle is: go find it, and work as hard as you can to find that piece.
A Bible verse came to me in a prison camp, "All things work together for good, for those that love the Lord."
And I'm thinking to myself, "How can this work together for good?
I'm in misery and pain and bleeding from four open wounds?"
and all I have to do is love the Lord, you know?
And it's the same thing in life, whether you're a Christian or not, you know, if something good can happen in this situation, go find it.
- There's a germ of good in all that we do.
All that happens to us.
If you were speaking to young people today who are starting their life, you would give them what piece of advice?
- First of all, I would say, find your support group, okay?
Find the people who you trust.
I mean, trust is just vital as you grow up.
And I think when you lose trust in people, it's forever to try to regain that trust.
So be trustworthy and look for trustworthy people.
- So Charlie, when you came back from Vietnam, we all know a bit of history about how Vietnamese soldiers were not treated with the greatest of respect.
I don't like bringing that up, but I want your take on it.
- Surely.
To begin with, It's true that particularly as the war had gone on for 5, 6, 7, 8 years, and there was an anti-war element in the states that are very unhappy with this, and so they only knew to pick on the soldiers that were over there fighting, and we were over there just trying to do our job.
- You were following orders.
- We were following orders and, you know, and we were patriotic and we were proud to fight for the flag, you know, for our way of life, and we really felt that was vital.
And so you know, we were really into that, and then to come back and find people spitting on the soldiers and that kind of thing it was depressing.
But when I came home, it was sort of a closing of the chapter of Vietnam.
And so I didn't experience that.
- I see.
- In fact, they had ticker-tape parades and gifts from all over the country.
- Was it because you were a prisoner of war?
- Well yes, but also because it was sort of the, it was the finality, you know, let's find something that's good about this war.
The good part is we got our prisoners back.
President Nixon, of course, was a big part of that.
We had a great dinner, the biggest dinner the white house has ever served to this day, as a matter of fact, was when the POW's came back and he invited us to bring our first ladies because many of us had come back to divorces, so I took my mother to the white house.
- Really?
You took your mom?
Your wife had filed for divorce three months prior.
- Right, and it was a wonderful homecoming for us.
It was really bright and shiny.
Ford gave us a brand new car.
La-Z-Boy gave us a recliner.
It was wonderful the way they came out of the woodwork, and when we found out that so many of our compatriots, other guys had been over there and come back to an ungrateful nation, you know, we went to the hospitals and we talked to these guys because we felt like that we were getting the accolades that really should have gone to them.
- And you know a lot of them of course, POW's, are you still in touch with them?
Do you get together?
Is there such a thing as an annual conference?
- There's an annual reunion of the POW's.
We get together, talk about the good old days.
[laughter] - Where is this conference?
- Well it's in various parts of the country.
- I see.
- This year, it was in Colorado Springs.
And next year, I think it's going to be in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.
But there were 591 of us that came home, and we'll have a conference with probably 300 to 350 of those guys.
We're like brothers.
When somebody saves your life, it's a very close association, probably the closest that you can get.
And a lot of the guys saved my life and they claimed that I saved theirs, and so it's a very cohesive group.
- Yes.
It's a bind that brings you all together.
Well, you're an amazing guy, Charlie Plumb.
Captain Charlie Plumb, winner of bronze star, two purple hearts, silver star.
You've earned your wings, figuratively and literally, and we're proud of you, and we're very grateful for your service to our country and I'm delighted that you share this platform with me today.
I'm a better person, because I know you.
- Thank you.
- [Narrator] Funding for Side by Side with Nido Qubein is made possible by: - [Narrator] Here's to those that rise and shine, to friendly faces doing more than their part, and to those who still enjoy the little things.
You make it feel like home.
Ashley Home Store.
This is home.
- [Narrator] The Budd Group is a company of everyday leaders making a difference by providing facility solutions through customized janitorial, landscape, and maintenance services.
- [Narrator] Coca-Cola Consolidated is honored to make and serve 300 brands and flavors, locally.
Thanks to our teammates.
We are Coca-Cola Consolidated.
Your local bottler.
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