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Who packed your parachute today?

Charles Plumb was a fighter pilot in Vietnam. He flew 75 combat missions before his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. He survived by ejecting and parachuting behind enemy lines.

He was captured and spent six long years in a North Vietnamese prison. The most remarkable lesson he learned, though, may have been one he learned after he returned home.

Plumb was sitting in a restaurant one day when a man from a nearby table approached him and said, “You’re Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. You were shot down!”

Plumb was stunned. “How in the world did you know that?”

“I packed your parachute,” the man replied. “I guess it worked!”

“It sure did,” Plumb responded. “If my chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.”

That night Plumb couldn’t sleep, thinking about the man who had likely saved his life. He wondered what the man might have looked like in his Navy uniform. He thought about how many times he might have ignored the sailor, because he, Plumb, was after all, a fighter pilot, and the other man, just a sailor.

Then Plumb’s thoughts turned to the many hours the sailor had spent at a long wooden table in the bowels of the ship, carefully folding the silks of each parachute, holding in his hands the fates of pilots he didn’t know.

Now, when Plumb lectures, he asks his audience, “Who is packing your parachute?”

Everyone has someone (or several someones) who provides what he or she ...