Charles Plumb, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, was a jet fighter pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile.He was captured and spent six years in a Comminist prison.
One day, when Plumb 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 in the world did you know that?” asked Plumb.“
你到底是怎么知道这些的？”普拉姆吃惊地问。
“I packed your parachute,” the man replied. “I guess it worked!” Plumb assured him, “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. Plumb said, “I kept wondering what he might have looked like in a Navy uniform. I wondered how many times I might have passed him on the Kitty Hawk. I wondered how many times I might have seen him 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 many hours the 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.
Everyday we may make it through in safety. But when the day ends, most person will think what they obtained or what they lost. Maybe we can change our minds: Today we can lay on our comfortable bed just because other’s help and we never know who he is.
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