Charles Plumb was a US Navy jet pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Charles ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent six years in a Vietnamese prison. He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience.
One day, when Charles and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, 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 did you know that?” asked Charles.
“I packed your parachute,” the man replied.
Charles gasped in surprise and gratitude. The man pumped his hand and said, “I guess it worked!”
Charles assured him, “It sure did. If your chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.”
Charles couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about that man. He says, “I kept wondering what he had 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 seen him and not even said ‘Good morning, how are you?’ or anything because I was a fighter pilot and he was just a sailor.”
Charles thought of the many hours the sailor had spent at 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.
Now, Charles asks his audience, “Who’s packing your parachute?” Everyone has someone who provides what they need to make it through the day. He 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, recognise people who pack your parachutes.
The Isle of Man, a self-governing British Crown Dependency in the Irish Sea between Great Britain and Ireland, celebrated 50 years of its parachute regiment in 1992 with a set of postage stamps. Image courtesy: https://www.stampcommunity.org/