How I Dodged Missiles in an F-4 Phantom and Lied to Survive as a POW | Charlie Plumb

I didn't even know what hit me. 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 airplane anymore. I was upside down. My radar interceptor officer in the back, you know, was talking to me about what are we going to do. I hit the rudder as hard as I could, said a prayer as loud as I could, shuttered upright where I could eject, my back seater could eject, our parachutes open, and we came floating down over enemy territory. You are about to embark upon the great crusade to meet this mounting aggression. And make no mistake about it, good will prevail. By early 1967, war escalated in Vietnam, on the battlefields and in the skies. The definitive fighter jet, the F-4 Phantom, delivered close-to-air support and engaged in air-to-air combat with the enemy. Then-Lieutenant Charlie Plum, a seasoned top-gun pilot, masterfully evaded surface-to-air missiles in his F-4 while providing critical air assistance to ground forces, flying 74 successful missions. His 75th mission would prove different and lead to six years in a North Vietnamese prison cell. Bringing you Captain Plum's story is War Thunder. War Thunder is the most comprehensive vehicle combat game ever made. Play with more than 2,000 tanks, planes, helicopters, and ships in dynamic combined-arms PvP battles. In War Thunder, you can hop into the cockpit of an F-4 just like Captain Plum and see what it was like in the skies over Vietnam, as every vehicle is incredibly detailed, providing a highly immersive combat experience. The collection of vehicles in War Thunder spanned over 100 years of development from the 1920s to the present day, and there is no extra pilot hardware necessary. You can fly any aircraft using nothing more than a mouse and keyboard, thanks to the game's intuitive mouse-aim mode. Play War Thunder for free on PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and by using our link in the description. Register now and get a large bonus pack by using our link to get access to premium vehicles, boosters, and more. Now we take you to the skies over Vietnam with U.S. Navy Captain Charlie Plum. I was born in Gary, Indiana during World War II. My father was about to be drafted, so he moved us to Kansas. So I grew up in a tiny town in Kansas. Why did you decide to attend the U.S. 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 send 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. 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 flew the first adversarial 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 supersonic interceptors, the F-4 Phantom, a Mach 2 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, to hassle, the World War II 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. When were you deployed to Vietnam? On my wife's birthday, the 5th of November of 1966. We had two weeks as fighters and 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 and rockets to do air-to-ground missions. 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 66 and 67, Hanoi was the most heavily defended city in the world. They had a lot of crap to throw at us. 19 May 1967 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 got to plan it. So at 0-30, 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, rendezvoused at 25,000 feet, plugged into an airborne tanker, which is a trick in itself, and took on 5,000 pounds of jet fuel, pointed the nose of that airplane towards the beach, and that became my last flight. I remember, though, we had three aircraft carriers and five Air Force bases on that day, 19th 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. In fact, there were eight F-4 Phantoms shot down that day. I was one of them. We were just short of the target, and things were looking pretty good. Saw a lot of flak in the air. I didn't see any missiles. I had dodged several misses. If you can see a missile coming, okay, at you, and you can wait for it to get in to maybe a quarter of a mile, you can out-turn the missile. These missiles were 20 feet long and maybe 12, 14 inches in diameter. So they're very gangly missiles. They can't turn very fast. I could turn inside the missile. But if you start your turn too soon, that missile, the missile has 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, 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 74 missions. So this time, I didn't see the missile. It came from behind. 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 airplane anymore. I was upside down. My radar interceptor officer in the back, you know, was talking to me about what are we going to do. I turned the, I had a, the only manual control on an F-4 Phantom is the rudder. It's hydraulic assist, but you have some power manually. My hydraulics were gone. I hit the shutter upright where I could eject, my back seater could eject, our parachutes open, and we came floating down over enemy territory. 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 gazillion 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, so I took a deep breath, let about half of it out, bowed my head and said a prayer. Asked for a little extra strength that day. I knew there was going to 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. And we were both 24 years old. And we'd been married, let's see, by that time, two years. So, and it was going to be tough. I then, as I said, I was the flight officer. And so I had all the schedule in my, in a little book in my pocket. I had a schedule in a book in my pocket. So, 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. Pulled out 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 it was very close to Hanoi, the capital city. There was no way they were going to 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. And I, you know, it was just automatic for me to know, hey, that wasn't going to 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 going to be able to use my two-way radio. And about that time, I sunk about waist deep in the mud of a rice paddy. I was just turned upon by, it seemed like hundreds, it was probably only 25 or 30, but it was a bunch of farmers for the most part. And they had machetes and shovels and rakes and hoes and farming implements and started hacking at me with their farming instruments. I had a .38 revolver with me, but I had five shells and a flare in the revolver. I decided I wasn't going to do much good. And so, I threw the revolver into the rice paddy 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 stripped 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 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 30 minutes, we were in downtown Hanoi at the Wallo prison that we renamed the Hanoi Hilton. When I got to the Hilton, I was tortured for two days for military information and political propaganda. I was a very junior officer. I was a lieutenant junior grade. I didn't know any of the information they wanted. They wanted future targets. They wanted information on our PSYOP, our psychological warfare, and our nuclear weapons. I didn't know any of that stuff. And I started to lie to them. And they would believe my lies. 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 an F-4 Phantom. And they said, what base do you fly from? And I told them, I flew from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. Well, one of the reasons I told them the truth was it had been written on my parachute, you know, CBA 6-3, USS Kitty Hawk. Now, the military has the code of conduct. They tell you if you're captured, give only name, rank, serial number, date of birth. Then they'll write your ship on your back. I didn't see much sense. But I knew they knew the answer. So I said, I flew from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. That's a lie, they said. They slapped me around and kicked me with their boots and hit me with their rifle butt. Tell us the truth. What base did you fly from? I flew from the aircraft. It's an aircraft carrier out there in the Gulf of Tonkin. We know you could never take a big jet airplane like that off a boat. We know you need a 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 were embarrassed to face us with the fact that we'd pulled 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. They tossed me into a little cell, eight feet long and eight feet wide. I could pace 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 in 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, serial number, date of birth. And I mean, it sounds crazy, but, you know, I'm thinking, I'm so ashamed of what I did that 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 my history. So I got communication with Bob Shoemaker, 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 and the tap code on the note to teach me that we could indicate any of the letters of the alphabet by two numbers of tugs, the number of the five by five matrix, a number of the line, then the number of the row. And so we started communicating this very cumbersome, archaic code, but it worked. It became our lifeline in a lot of ways, what we call the tap code. So I found out who he was. He found out who I was. We exchanged rank and date of rank because it was really important that we always knew who was senior to whom because, you know, 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, you know, I don't want to be commanded by somebody else. But by the way, that discipline brought unity in 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 I better fess up. And I said, shoo, his call sign was shoo, mine was plumber. Could have been maverick, but it was plumber. So I said, shoo, 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. Shoemaker said, hell, everybody broke. There's not a man in this prison who is 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 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. Another interesting value of the tap code and the communication system, it turned out to be that 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 any 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 to something I'm doing physically. Thus, I exist. I'm real. I'm alive. Number two, somebody cares. It was that part of the communication that really validated my existence and made me whole. It was absolutely vital. Of course, communication was restricted. In fact, guys were tortured because they were communicating with each other. They were really serious about us not communicating with each other. But they knew that we were communicating. One of the things our senior leaders came up with was what they call the plums. It had nothing to do with Charlie Plum. I don't know why the codename was the plums. These were levels of resistance. It went from refusing to bow to the enemy all the way up to a prison riot. The senior officers could command resistance level number three. 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 we would see any of the enemy, we had to bow. Subservience. And so when the camp commander, our leader, Jim Stockdale, or Jeremiah Denton, or John McCain, or whoever was in charge, would call for resistance level number one. And everybody maybe 200 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 started the riot. But we sure showed them that we had unity and we had purpose and we had our discipline through our rank structure. 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 Ho Chi Minh'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, you know, obviously, it was difficult to refuse because you're going to be tortured to do something and you're probably going to do it. But then we found out that, first of all, if you could endure the torture until you thought it was close to permanent physical damage, and then start to ease up and do little things and lie a lot, like if we would make a tape. Or Jeremiah Denton was an excellent example. 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, T-O-R, torture, as he blinked out. And they didn't catch this. And so the world suddenly knew that we were being tortured. And so these turned out to be great victories of our POW unit was to be able to play these things. And if you wrote a confession, you know, little buzzwords you would use that the Vietnamese would not know. And yet, our intelligence here 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. And, you know, the morale was really great when we can 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 through the shackles. And then they ran a rope from the shackles of your ankles up over your back and down to your wrists. Then they tightened up the rope. The result is your feet are right up on your face. Your wrists, remember your elbows are actually tied together and your wrists are coming back over your head. Your shoulders by this time are now 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. That wrapped up like a human pretzel. 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 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 shoulders, of course, were out of joint. And so I've got, you know, it's a little bit difficult. You saw John McCain couldn't comb his own hair. I can comb my own hair. But my shoulders are still a little painful. 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 and 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. Sure enough, they brought us shoes. Announced that the war was over. We're trading prisoners. We got on a bus over the dyke. We could see the runway, GLOM's runway, the enemy's runway with the U.S. Air Force C-141 ready to wing us away to freedom. But there was no response. We were kind of afraid to cry or cheer, hug and kiss everybody else. It wasn't really until we got aboard that airplane, lifted off the 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. Wow. 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 the communications system, I knew an awful lot of these guys, but I'd never seen them. You know, I knew Bob Schumacher 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. And so I did know what he looked like. When I finally saw him and he introduced him, I said, Bob Schumacher, I'm Charlie Pumb. How's Matilda? He said, KIA, Charlie, KIA. 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 stay 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 doorknob on the inside of your door, you know, to be able to just to walk outside in the air, you know, just to take a hot shower, you know, all these things still remind me 50 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, we used to ask a guy, hey, when did you die? That meant when were you shot down? Because we kind of felt that the 19th of May, 1967, 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, and, and realize how wonderful it is to be free and, 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 a, it's a wonderful thing and I enjoy it every day. Thank you again to War Thunder for sponsoring this video. Fly the F4 Phantom today by clicking the link in our description and play for free on PC, PlayStation, or Xbox. Register now and get a large bonus pack by using our link to get access to premium vehicles, boosters, and more.