Faith made 6-year war

prisoner 'resilient'

  
By JOHN FORTMEYER
CNNW publisher
     PORTLAND — Charlie Plumb didn’t have it very easy a few decades ago, and most would understand why he took a brief descent into what he describes as “prison thinking” — the despair and pity a prisoner of war experiences.
     And considering what he went through in six long years in the hands of the enemy during the Vietnam War, no one would blame him today if he carried deep psychological and emotional scars along with physical ones.
But he doesn’t. He is healthy, happy and full of faith in God, and he credits that faith as the reason for his resiliency.
   “What does it take to be resilient? You need a relationship with Jesus Christ! That’s what it takes!” Plumb proclaimed with conviction to a crowd of 1,100 who responded with enthusiastic applause at the fifth annual Portland Good Friday Breakfast April 22.
    The breakfast is sponsored by Portland-based Open Arms International, a ministry founded by David and Rachel Gallagher and dedicated to raising children in Africa and India orphaned by AIDS, civil warfare or disease. Held at the Oregon Convention Center, it is one of the largest Christian events in the Portland area.
     Plumb, who has told his story to 5,000 audiences, graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and went on to fly the F-4 Phantom jet on 74 successful combat missions over Vietnam. On his 75th mission, with only five days before he was to return home, Plumb was shot down, captured, tortured, and imprisoned in an 8 foot by 8 foot cell. He spent the next 2,103 days as a prisoner of war.
     Dramatically pacing a few steps on the stage to illustrate the confines of his prison cell, Plumb said it wasn’t its small size that threatened at first to put him over the edge, but an even smaller distance — the one within his head, where his attitudes were challenged.
    “It’s not the eight feet between the walls, it’s the eight inches between your ears,” he quipped.
    Raised in rural Kansas, Plumb found a jet pilot’s life a big change.
   “I could go 1,400 miles per hour. That’s a long way from a John Deere,” he said.
     Having flown so many combat missions successfully, Plumb said he felt a bit invincible — “bulletproof” — until the day his plane was shot down. As he descended in his parachute in a hail of bullets, he simply prayed for extra strength to survive what faced him.
    “When you’re dodging bullets, it’s tough to come up with a long-range plan,” he said.
     In his prison cell, it was contact through code with a fellow prisoner on the other side of the wall that proved “lifesaving” and was part of God’s provision of hope, he said. Eventually he and other POWs reinforced one another with their own “church” services on Sundays and Wednesdays and sharing whatever scraps of Scripture they could secure. “I had six years to get to know myself, my God, my Jesus,” he said.
      He said he learned that “prayer really works” and that there is a purpose behind even the roughest challenges life brings. He urged all in the audience to turn their lives over to Christ “before you get into that kind of scrape.”