Jet fighter pilot Charles Plumb had completed 75 combat missions when he was shot down, ejected and then parachuted into enemy hands. Plumb spent six years in a Vietnamese prison.
Years later while eating at a restaurant with his wife a man came up and said, “Your Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. You were shot down!”
“How in the world did you know that?” asked Plumb. “I packed your parachute,” the man replied. Charles Plumb in surprise and gratitude had to catch his breath.
The man then shook his hand and said, “I guess it worked!” Plumb assured him it had and said, “if your chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.”
That night Plumb could not sleep. He said, “I kept pondering what he might have looked like in a Navy uniform – a Dixie cup hat, a bib in the back, and bell bottom trousers. I wonder how many times I might have seen him and not even said good morning, how are you or anything because, you see, I was a fighter pilot and he was just a sailor.”
Plumb thought a lot about that man who had packed his parachute and the hours he spent at a wooden table at the bottom of the ship carefully packing his and others chutes. He held in his hands the chute; the fate of someone he did not even know.
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