“…I was a fighter pilot, and he was just a sailor.”

The day before Thanksgiving in 2021, my brother Steve texted me: “Fifty years ago today a TV station called me and asked, ‘Can a man jump out of an airplane and the pilot not know it?’”

“Who is this?!” brother Steve asked.

He had just returned from Viet Nam and was packing parachutes for the 101st Airborne in San Francisco. It seems a man had hijacked a plane and jumped out with $200,000. The TV newsman wanted an “expert’s” advise. The hijacker was known as D.B. Cooper and he has never been found. It’s the only unsolved aviation case in American history.

Maybe that’s why this true story grabbed my attention: Charles Plumb was a US Navy jet pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent 6 years in a communist Vietnamese prison. He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience.

One day Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant and a man at another table came up and said, “You’re 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
Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude. The man pumped his hand and said, “I guess it worked!”“It sure did. If your chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.”

Plumb couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about that man. “I kept wondering what he might have looked like in a Navy uniform: a white hat, a bib in the back and bell-bottom trousers. I wonder how many times I might have passed him on the ship 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 of the man-hours that sailor had spent on a long wooden table in the bowels of the ship, carefully weaving the shrouds and folding the silks of each chute, holding in his hands each time the fate of someone he didn’t know.

Today Plumb asks his audience, “Who’s packing your parachute?” Everyone has someone who provides what he needs to make it through the day. Plumb also points out that he needed many kinds of parachutes when his plane was shot down over enemy territory.
He needed his -physical parachute, 
 -his mental parachute,
-his emotional parachute
-and his spiritual parachute.
He called on all these supports before reaching safety.

Sometimes in the daily challenges that life gives us, we miss what is really important.

We may fail to say “hello,” “please,” or “thank you,” congratulate someone on something wonderful that has happened to them, give a compliment or just do something nice for no reason. As you go through this week, this month, this year, recognize people who pack your parachute.

So… to all of my parachute packers:

THANK YOU & MERRY CHRISTMAS!