Charlie Plumb’s Unexpectedly Long Mission

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Pushkin

Hello everyone.

It's JR.

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

He's a pilot who spent nearly six years as a POW during the Vietnam War, in a cell not far from the Medal of Honor recipient, Bud Day.

Captain Charlie Plum is a retired U.S.

Navy fighter pilot who earned his wings in 1965.

He went on to fly 74 successful combat missions over North Vietnam, making over 100 carrier landings.

Then came his fateful 75th mission.

It was May 19, 1967.

Charlie was flying an F-4 Phantom jet off the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk.

His mission that day was a high-risk alpha strike targeting a military complex south of Hanoi.

known by pilots as Little Detroit.

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

If you listen to our last episode, you'll remember that while he was a POW,

Bud Day expressed his courage through pure stoicism and steadfastness, a belief in upholding the code of conduct above all else.

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

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

including Bud Day.

Here's our conversation.

So, Charlie, thank you so much for joining.

It is such a pleasure to have you on.

How are you doing?

I'm doing fine, J.R., and it's honored to be with you.

Well, thank you so much.

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

I was a farm kid from Kansas.

Never been out of the four states of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri.

Never seen the ocean.

And age 17, I knew I needed an education.

My parents were poor.

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

So at age 17, I knew my parents couldn't afford college, and so I started looking for scholarships.

I sent my application to everybody I could think of, just a shotgun approach.

And lo and behold, I got an appointment to Annapolis, the Naval Academy.

Well, I had no idea what they did in Annapolis.

I really did not.

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

That's not true.

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

so

got on that greyhound bus and two days later, just like you, I was pledging to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies.

That's how I got into the military.

And so you joined the military.

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

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

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

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

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

You know, you find yourself deployed on missions, 74 missions.

Talk us through the 75th.

I flew 74 combat missions trying to protect the air group from enemy fighters and a couple of ground support missions, but those were very difficult flights for me because I knew I had to be accurate.

And so we went lower and took more risks when we were supporting ground troops.

And so I was five days from the end of my tour of duty on that 75th mission.

I mean, I felt like I was bulletproof.

Overconfident?

Probably.

And felt like I really was the top gun.

It was a big, big deal.

It was a big strike called an Alpha Strike.

We had three aircraft carriers, one of which I was on, the Kitty Hawk, and five Air Force bases on these targets in Vietnam.

So I launched off the Kitty Hawk, rendezvoused at 20,000 feet, took on another 3,000 or 4,000 pounds of jet fuel in an airborne tanker, and pointed the nose towards the beach.

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

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

Hit by a surface-to-air missile.

It exploded some 12,000 pounds of jet fuel I had in that airplane and sent that bird topsy-turvy end-over-end down towards the rice paddy below.

I ejected, my co-pilot ejected, our parachutes opened, and in 90 seconds, I went from king of the skies to scum of the earth.

Spent the next 2,103 days in communist prison camps.

Wow.

So you find yourself now as you're parachuting.

What is going through your mind in that moment?

Talk me through what is about to happen.

I was in shock.

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

And about that time, I find myself about waist deep in a rice paddy.

And so my first thought was to my buddies.

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

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

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

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

So I made one call and said, see you guys at the end of the war.

Please don't try to rescue me.

Tore the antenna off the radio, threw it one way, and threw the radio the other way.

And then I bowed my head and I said a prayer.

I prayed for my wife that she would understand this.

I mean, I can't even imagine finding yourself in that position and yet still have the awareness to take that book and to take that radio, to throw it in opposite ends, to say your prayer.

It's one of those things that I think, as myself and listeners of this podcast, are just in awe.

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

I don't remember actually

thinking logically.

It was all almost automatic.

Of course, I'd been trained.

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

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

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

I had a very strong family.

I was a very optimistic person.

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

was in more control of this than I was.

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

I ejected in a very populated area.

So I was captured immediately.

They were right there.

Hollowed me into the prison camp, immediately interrogated, tortured for two days.

And, of course, code of conduct, as a lot of your listeners will know, is name, rank, serial number, date of birth.

That's all you're obliged to give to the enemy.

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

I will never give more than name, rank, sheriff number, date of birth.

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

I was 24.

Okay.

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

I buckled.

And I never told them anything they could use.

I didn't know.

I was a junior officer.

They didn't tell me secrets.

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

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

There's no window.

There's a door with a flap in the door so that a guard could come by at any moment.

and drop that flap and see what you were doing.

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

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

This was our latrine.

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

It wasn't very nice at all.

They delivered two meals a day, about 10 and 2.

We got a cup of rice each time, and sometimes a cup of broth.

And so I was alone and scared

and I felt very guilty.

Lucky for me,

well, it's more than luck, I think it was Providence, a fellow two cells away passed a wire across a storeroom.

The cell between us was being used as a storeroom.

He passed this wire over the boxes around the shovels, through the ropes of the storeroom, and into the little hole in my cell wall 14 feet away.

The wire scratched on my concrete floor.

I thought it was a cricket at first, but I found it and I pulled on the wire and it pulled back and then it disappeared.

And I thought, man, I'm in real trouble now.

They've tricked me.

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

The note was written on a dirty piece of toilet paper and just blobs on this piece of toilet paper, and I could barely make it out.

But it said, memorize memorize this code, then

eat this note.

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

So I did it.

The codes is a 5 by 5 matrix of the alphabet, indicating any letter would be represented by two numbers, number of the line, then the number of the row.

So A is 1, 1, Z is 5, 5.

We left out K,

substituted C for a K.

So a very cumbersome code.

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

I talked for him for a while.

Bob Shoemaker passed me some very important information.

He said,

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

He said, bar none.

I don't care where you go, what you do.

This team of American fighter pilots like Jim Stockdale, Medal of Honor winner, and Bud Day, Medal of Honor winner, Leo Thorsenus, Medal of Honor winner.

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

Our leadership in this prison camp is the best leadership you will ever see.

The rest of your life, you will never see a leadership like this.

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

Surely they know something that I don't know.

It's incredible.

I mean, I think what I hear is when given

purpose,

right, we show up and we respond, right?

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

Yeah.

It was a mission that our leadership had established for us.

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

And Shoemaker is telling me this.

I felt very ashamed.

How can I ever go home and face my family, my fellow fighter pilots, the community, and admit that I'd failed in my mission?

Because I did fail in my mission.

And I didn't do what I came there to do.

And what I was proud to do while I did it, suddenly I am on the other side of this equation.

I'm a failure.

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

We're going to take a quick break.

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With online programs that fit around deployments, training, and unpredictable schedules, AMU makes it possible to earn your degree no matter where duty takes you.

Their preferred military rate keeps tuition at just $250 per credit hour for undergraduate and master's tuition.

And with 24-7 mental health support plus career coaching and other services, AMU is committed to your success during and after your service.

Learn more at amu.apus.edu slash military.

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We're back with Captain Charlie Plum.

He's just gotten in touch with other captured U.S.

airmen in the camp.

using a secret code to talk to Bob Shoemaker.

And he's realizing the gravity of telling the enemy the information he has.

I was convinced that there were other fighter pilots in that prison camp, that they were all probably older and more mature.

They were better fighter pilots, and they probably didn't stray from name, rank, show number, date of birth like I did, that they had accomplished their mission and I had failed in mine.

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

I was blaming the guards that tortured me.

I was blaming the mechanic that put the airplane together, thinking that at the end of the war, maybe I would go to some foreign country, change my name, because I didn't want anybody to know how terribly I'd failed.

And finally, I said, Bob, I have a confession to make.

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

He said, what'd you do, plumber?

That was my call sign, plumber.

I said, I failed.

I broke.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but the torture was too great.

And he tugged back on the wire through the wall.

He said, hell, everybody broke.

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

So get over it.

We still have a war to fight.

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

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

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

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

You know, it seems like

the opportunity to interact with the other prisoners in that particular camp is essentially what saved you.

That brotherhood and that camaraderie and how no matter where you are, no matter what the conditions are, you're going to be together.

You're going to stick together.

You're going going to show up for one another.

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

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

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

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

We even numbered our jokes, and you'd just come up with a number.

The guy knew the joke you were talking about, and then he would add a pun to the end of the joke.

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

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

It was all in our mind.

You know, it was all tapping on walls, but you always look forward.

But it worked.

It worked.

We were saving the lives of each other.

And we had a purpose in life.

We had a goal.

And keep that goal foremost in your mind, regardless of what you're going through.

I tell people all the time, yes, the physical recovery was obviously challenging.

And I'm not going to dismiss that or overlook that, right?

That's difficult.

But for me personally, in my recovery and what I had to navigate, the mental, that's where it's at.

And what are some of the daily things that you're saying to yourself to remember that you're on the offensive?

So Shoemaker passed along to me patriotic quotes and Bible verses and stories and jokes.

And one of the little poems that he sent across really turned me around.

The poem was this, Acid does more harm in the vessel it's stored than on the subject it's poured.

That wire was a revelation to me.

The first time that a young guard couldn't have been more than 14 or 15 years old, he brought his girlfriend into my cell to show her how tough he was.

He hit me with his rifle button, kicked me with his steel-toed boots.

And she's back in the corner of my prison cell laughing and enjoying how tough her boyfriend was.

And that was tough for me to overcome.

But that I couldn't waller in this misery and pain pain because it wasn't doing me any good at all.

In fact, it was very harmful.

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

It was destroying me.

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

I got to do something to make this worthwhile.

I found in that prison camp, if you harbor this acid within you and you don't forgive people,

you're on a downhill slope.

You're not going to make it.

And it's not hurting the enemy.

It's going to kill me.

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

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

I said, wait a minute.

My restriction was not the eight feet between the walls.

It was the eight inches between my ears.

This was a mental game.

I was in this mental box.

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

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

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

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

Now, it took a while,

but eventually I was ready to forgive the guards that tortured me.

I was ready to forgive forgive the camp commander.

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

So here you are, 24 years of life.

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

I mean, over 2,100 days of doing this exercise and this work.

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

So we had no books to read, no windows to look out, no TV, telephone.

We didn't have any communication with the outside world at all.

And so, especially in solitary confinement, we were in our own heads probably 20 hours a day.

That's all we had was ourselves.

So I went back through my life.

I decided to try to make an autobiography from the very beginning at three and a half years old, step by step.

Every day, every book I'd ever read, every movie I'd ever seen, every teacher I'd ever had, every girl I'd ever dated.

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

About three months.

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

But in going back for the 24 years that I had lived, I tried to pick out the positive parts.

Then I decided to plan the future.

I started to try to figure out what I'd do, what kids my wife and I would have together, where we would live, where we would vacation, what kind of cars we would drive, all this stuff for 20 years.

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

So I went back through that future and re-planned.

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

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

This episode is brought to you by Navy Federal Credit Union.

Navy Federal can help you find and finance the right vehicle with ease.

And this summer, you're in the driver's seat with savings.

You can get a $250 bonus when you buy your next car through Navy Federal's Car Buying Service, powered by TrueCar and financed with Navy Federal.

With this tool, you can find the vehicle that's right for you as you search through inventory and compare models.

And you could get an amazing rate when you finance with Navy Federal.

Navy Federal strives to support all active duty veterans and their families to achieve their personal and financial goals.

And this partnership with TrueCar is one of the many tools Navy Federal uses uses to help its members.

Make your plan with Navy Federal and TrueCar today.

Navy Federal Credit Union.

To qualify for the $250 bonus, car purchase and financing must be completed by September 2nd, 2025.

Terms and conditions apply and are available at navyfederal.org slash TrueCar.

Credit and collateral subject to approval.

Navy Federal is insured by NCUA.

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at OOCLA Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

American Military University, where service members like you can access high-quality, affordable education built for your lifestyle.

With online programs that fit around deployments, training, and unpredictable schedules, AMU makes it possible to earn your degree no matter where duty takes you.

Their preferred military rate keeps tuition at just $250 per credit hour for undergraduate and master's tuition.

And with 24/7 mental health support plus career coaching and other services, AMU is committed to your success during and after your service.

Learn more at amu.apus.edu slash military.

That's amu.apus.edu slash military.

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

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

Coming home was a wonderful event, but we were sure surprised.

And they they had organized ticker tape parades.

They gave me a brand new Ford.

We got lifetime tickets to World Series.

And I think we had like 200 major gifts.

One of my favorite was Lazy Boy gave me a recliner.

A leather recliner.

Reader's Digest had produced a set of books called While You Were Not Here.

And each one of the books was one year of things that had happened while we were there.

And so I got six volumes of this from 1967 to 1973.

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

None of us felt like heroes at all.

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

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

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

I knew I was coming home every day.

They didn't know.

And about half of us came home for divorces.

My poor wife had it so tough.

And she

found another guy, fell in love, and filed for divorce three months before I came home.

And so obviously another gut punch for me.

And I'll never forget laying in that hospital room and the Great Lakes Naval Hospital in Chicago and thinking to myself, how terrible this is.

And I started blaming everybody I could think of, blamer boyfriend.

And it didn't take long till I said, wait a minute, wait a minute, you hypocrite.

You know, that little poem

about acid within you hurts you more than it hurts anybody else.

Get over yourself.

Got a life to live.

You know, Charlie, there's something that keeps.

popping up to me and I'm curious.

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

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

Talk to us about what transpired 10 years ago when you went back to Vietnam.

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

He contacted me.

He said, hey, I want you to come back.

We've got the camp commander.

who wants to see a prisoner of war before he dies.

He was in charge of all of our torture.

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

And I tried to figure this out in my mind.

Is this some kind of a trick?

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

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

This may be painful.

for me.

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

Why would I ever go through this?

No, thank you.

And then when they inferred that he wanted to see me and that it might be because he was in his late 80s and wanted to apologize, okay, maybe it's going to be good for him and maybe this will be good for me.

And then of course, when they invited my family to go with me for a vacation, I thought that would be interesting for my kids to see the prison cell that I was in because it's a museum now.

So I, okay, I'll go do this.

But even before I met the guy, I really

was confused and

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

Now, my kids, even though they know my philosophy in life, my kids thought, you know, dad's going to break loose and punch the guy.

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

Yeah,

I can imagine.

And what did you feel when you saw him?

What happened?

So he had a little shack.

It was his little retirement home on a river.

So he came out.

He was nervous.

He was as nervous as I was.

I felt safe.

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

The guy brought out offered me his homemade beer, and it was in a plastic peps, Pepsi-Cola bottle.

And it was pretty good beer.

I talked to him for probably 45 minutes or an hour.

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

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

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

But there's a certain commonality with anyone you have a conflict with.

If you research this thing, if you think about it enough, we're more alike than we are different.

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

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

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

There was smiles, and there was humor in our conversation.

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

He'd fought for his country.

I fought for my country.

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

That's kind of my attitude, and that's what I live for.

I mean, that's incredible.

There's some component to that where I can identify with what you're saying.

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

You know, for

you to

access this element of forgiveness to go meet this camp commander, it's very noble, my friend.

Well, thanks.

Certainly, I respect Bud Day,

not just for what he flew with the Misties,

but when we came home and he fought for us and other veterans with our health care.

So it wasn't just his military experience.

He served well after he came home.

People deal with it different ways, right?

You know, you agreeing to come on and have this conversation with me.

This is still an extension of service.

I know you're a humble man, J.R.

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

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

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

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

Yeah, that is so true.

And thank you for that.

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

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

Adversity is a horrible thing.

to waste.

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

90% of the POWs from Vietnam stayed in the military, went back to flying airplanes and commanding fleets around the world.

591 guys came home.

So far, we have 17 generals and seven admirals, most of us retired as senior grade military officers.

We have doctors and lawyers and preachers and teachers and bishops and judges.

And we have two ambassadors, two United States senators, a vice presidential candidate, and a presidential candidate, all from 591 men.

It was because of the leadership we had and the team that they put together and the direction to the purpose that we found in that presentation.

And I'm not just talking about military stuff.

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

Even today,

I'm 82 years old and I continue, whenever I get upset about something, I think it's a puzzle.

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

I have sort of become the poster boy for PTG, post-traumatic growth.

The whole idea that you can go through a challenging experience and come out better.

How do you do this?

Well, it's part of an organization called Boulder Crest.

It's a free process for any veteran, any first responder that can go to one of of three different ranches in Texas and Arizona and Virginia and go through this process of turning PTSD into PTG.

You have to decide on your own.

I'm going to make this work.

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

And it may take a while.

It may take months or even years.

Then it becomes a whole lot easier.

Find a support group.

And it might be the guys at the VFW.

It might be PTA.

Find people that you can talk to and listen to that have the same kind of experiences that you do, because nothing would replace the little community, the POW community that we had through this very difficult communication, but it was vital in my existence to know that I was not alone.

Captain Charlie Plum,

thank you for your service.

Thank you for continuing to serve, not only in the nearly six years you spent as a POW, but the years after you were a POW and were released.

And you continue to tell your story and the story of the individuals that you served with.

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

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

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

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

Captain Plum, thank you again.

I love you, sir.

Proud of you, two men.

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

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

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

That's Boulder with a U after the O.

And for more on that prison, you can check out our episode about Bud Day.

Thanks for listening.

This episode of Medal of Honor Stories of Courage was produced by Jess Shane.

Our editor is Ben Nadaf Hafri.

Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski.

This episode was mixed by Sarah Bruguer.

Our executive producer is Constanza Gallerto.

Fact-checking by Arthur Gompertz and original music by Eric Phillips.

Don't forget, we want to hear from you.

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

Email us at at medalofhonor at pushkin.fm.

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

I'm your host, J.R.

Martinez.

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