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Below is the translation of this fantastic book into Spanish.
JAMES BOND STOCKDALE
Yo
Vice Admiral Stockdale, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, served in the regular Navy for thirty-seven years. As a fighter pilot aboard an aircraft carrier, Stockdale was shot down on his second combat mission over North Vietnam. As the ranking naval officer held prisoner of war in Hanoi for eight years, he was tortured fifteen times, shackled for two years, and held in solitary confinement for four years.
During his naval career, his shore duty consisted of three years as a test pilot and test pilot instructor at Patuxent River, Maryland; two years as a graduate student at Stanford University; one year at the Pentagon; and finally, two years as president of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
When physical disability from combat wounds caused Jim Stockdale's early retirement from military life, he had the distinction of being the only three-star officer in Navy history to wear both the aviator wings and the Congressional Medal of Honor (CMH). In addition to the CMH, his twenty-six combat decorations include two Distinguished Flying Crosses, three Distinguished Service Medals, four Silver Star Medals, and two Purple Hearts.
As a civilian, Jim Stockdale was a university professor, university president, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His writings have been many and varied, but they all converge on the central theme of how man can rise with dignity to prevail in the face of adversity.
His books include Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot (1995, Hoover Institution Press), A Vietnam Experience: Ten Years of Reflection (1984, Hoover Institution Press), which won the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge Honor Award in 1985 for Books, and In Love and War (1984, Harper and Row; revised and updated second edition, 1990, U.S. Naval Institute Press), co-written with his wife, Sybil. In early 1987, a dramatic presentation of In Love and War was seen by over 45 million viewers on NBC television.
II
Upon Stockdale's retirement from active duty in 1979, the Secretary of the Navy established the Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale Leadership Award, which is given annually to two commanding officers, one in the Atlantic Fleet and one in the Pacific Fleet. In 1989, Monmouth College in his home state of Illinois, from which he entered the Naval Academy in 1943, named its student center the Stockdale Center. The following year, he was named a 1990 Laureate of the Abraham Lincoln Academy in Illinois in ceremonies at the University of Chicago.
In 1992, Admiral Stockdale ran as an independent candidate for Vice President of the United States as Ross Perot's running mate.
In 1993, Admiral Stockdale became the first Vietnam-era naval aviator inducted into the Carrier Aviation Hall of Fame. On October 31 of that year, following ceremonies aboard the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in Charleston, South Carolina, his bas-relief portrait and bronze citation joined those of World War II's most famous carrier pilots on the island structure overlooking the museum ship's flight deck.
He also held eleven honorary doctorates.
Admiral Stockdale passed away in July 2005.
III
COURAGE UNDER FIRE: Testing the Doctrines of Epictetus in a Human Behavior Laboratory
James Bond Stockdale Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace Stanford University 1993
IV
The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, founded at Stanford University in 1919 by President Herbert Hoover, is an interdisciplinary research center for the advanced study of 20th-century domestic and international affairs. The views expressed in its publications are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, officers, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution.
Hoover Essays No. 6 Copyright © 1993 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
First Printing, 1993 Manufactured in the United States of America 10 09 08 07 06 05 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stockdale, James B. Courage under fire: testing Epictetus's doctrines in a laboratory of human behavior / James Bond Stockdale. p. cm. –– (Hoover essays no. 6) ISBN 0-8179-3692-0
- Vietnam Conflict, 1961–1975––Prisoners and Prisons, North Vietnam. 2. Vietnam Conflict, 1961–1975––Personal Narratives, American. 3. Stockdale, James B. 4. Epictetus. 5. Prisoners of War––United States––Biography. 6. Prisoners of War––Vietnam––Biography. I. Title. II. Series: Hoover Essays (Stanford, Calif. : 1992) ; no. 6. DS559.4.S74 1993 959.704'37––dc20 93-42455 CIP
COURAGE UNDER FIRE
Testing the Doctrines of Epictetus in a Human Behavior Laboratory
James Bond Stockdale
I came to philosophical life as a thirty-eight-year-old naval pilot in graduate school at Stanford University. I'd been in the Navy for twenty years and had hardly ever left a cockpit. In 1962, I began my second year of studying international relations to become a strategic planner at the Pentagon. But my heart wasn't in it. I hadn't yet been inspired by Stanford, and I saw myself simply processing tedious material about how nations were organized and governed. I was too old for that. I knew how political systems worked; I'd been beating systems for years.
So, in what we call a "test pass" in acrobatic flight, I wandered into the philosophy corner at Stanford one winter morning. I had gray hair and was wearing civilian clothes. A voice echoed from an office: "May I help you?" The speaker was Philip Rhinelander, dean of Humanities and Sciences, who was teaching Philosophy 6: The Problems of Good and Evil.
At first, he thought I was a professor, but we soon found common ground in the navy because he had served in World War II. Within fifteen minutes, we had agreed that I would enter his two-term course halfway through, and to compensate for my lack of background, I would meet with him for an hour a week for private tutoring in his home study on campus.
Speech delivered in the Great Hall, King's College, London, Monday, 15 November 1993.
Phil Rhinelander opened my eyes. It was in that study that everything happened to me: my inspiration, my dedication to the philosophical life. From then on, I left international relations (I already had enough credits for the master's degree) and dedicated myself to philosophy. We went from Job to Socrates, to Aristotle, to Descartes. And then to Kant, Hume, Dostoevsky, Camus. All the while, Rhinelander was analyzing me, trying to figure out what I was looking for. He thought my interest in Dialogues on Natural Religion Hume's was quite interesting. In my last session, he reached for a book high on his shelf and took down a copy of The EnchiridionHe said, "I think you'll be interested in this."
Enchiridion It means "by hand." In other words, it's a manual. Rhinelander explained that its author, Epictetus, was a highly unusual man of intelligence and sensitivity, who drew wisdom rather than bitterness from his early firsthand exposure to extreme cruelty and from his firsthand observations of abuse of power and self-indulgent depravity.
Epictetus was born a slave around 50 AD and grew up in Asia Minor speaking the Greek of his slave mother. At the age of fifteen or so, he was shipped to Rome in chains in a slave caravan. He was treated savagely for months on the road. He arrived at Rome's slave market as a permanent cripple, his knee shattered and untreated. He was "bought cheap" by a freedman named Epaphroditus, secretary to the Emperor Nero. He was taken to live in Nero's White House at a time when the emperor was neglecting the empire while frequently traveling throughout Greece as an actor, musician, and charioteer. While in Rome in his personal apartments, Nero was busy having his half-brother, his wife, his mother, and his second wife killed. Ultimately, it was Epictetus's master, Epaphroditus, who slit Nero's throat when he clumsily attempted suicide as soldiers broke down his door to arrest him.
That put Epaphroditus under a cloud, and, fortunately, the now astute slave Epictetus realized he was free to move around Rome. And being a serious and no doubt disgruntled young man, he gravitated toward the high-level public lectures of the Stoic masters who were Rome's philosophers in those days. Epictetus eventually became an apprentice to the empire's greatest Stoic teacher, Musonius Rufus, and, after ten or more years of study, achieved the status of a philosopher in his own right. With that came true freedom in Rome, and the preciousness of that was duly celebrated by the former slave. Scholars have calculated that in his works, individual liberty is praised six times more frequently than in the New Testament.
The Stoics held that all human beings were equal in the eyes of God: male/female, black/white, slave and free.
I read every one of Epictetus's extant writings twice, through two translators. Even with the most conservative translators, Epictetus comes across as speaking like a modern person. It's "living language," not the literary Attic Greek we're accustomed to from men of that language. The Enchiridion It was actually written not by Epictetus, who was above all a determined teacher and a man of modesty who would never take the time to transcribe his own lectures, but by one of his most meticulous and determined students. The student's name was Arrian, a very intelligent aristocratic Greek in his twenties. After hearing his first lectures, he is said to have exclaimed something like, "Wow! We've got to get this guy on parchment!"
With Epictetus's consent, Arrian wrote down his words verbatim in some kind of frantic shorthand he devised. He commissioned the speeches in books; in the two years he was enrolled in Epictetus's school, he filled eight books. Four of them disappeared sometime before the Middle Ages. It was then that the remaining four were bound together under the title Speeches of Epictetus. Arrian compiled The Enchiridion after having finished all eight. These are just the highlights of them "for the busy man." Rhinelander told me that last morning: "As a military man, I think you will have a special interest in this. Frederick the Great never went on a campaign without a copy of this manual in his kit."
I will never forget that day, and the essence of what that great man had to say as we parted ways is burned into my brain. It went much like this: Stoicism is a noble philosophy that proved more practicable than a modern cynic would expect. The Stoic point of view is often misunderstood because the casual reader doesn't grasp that the whole conversation concerns the "inner life" of man. The Stoics disparage physical harm, but this is not boasting. They speak of it in comparison to the devastating agony of shame they imagined good men generated when they knew in their hearts that they had failed in their duty to their fellow men or to God. Although pagans, the Stoics had a monotheistic, natural religion and were great contributors to Christian thought. The fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man were Stoic concepts before Christianity. In fact, one of their earliest theorists, named Chrysippus, made the analogy of what might be called the soul of the universe to the breath of a human being, pneuma in Greek. It is said that this Stoic conception of a pneuma Heavenly is the great-great-grandfather of the Christian Holy Spirit. Saint Paul, a Hellenized Jew raised in Tarsus, a Stoic city in Asia Minor, always used the Greek word pneuma, or breath, for “soul.”
Rhinelander told me that the Stoic demand for disciplined thought naturally attracted only a small minority to its banner, but that those few were everywhere the best. Like its Christian counterparts, Calvinism and Puritanism, it produced the strongest characters of its time. In theory a doctrine of ruthless perfection, in reality it created men of courage, holiness, and goodwill. Rhinelander singled out three examples: Cato the Younger, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus. Cato was the great Roman republican who stood up to Julius Caesar. He was the unmistakable hero of George Washington; scholars find quotations from this man in Washington's Farewell Address, unquoted. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius led the Roman Empire to the height of its power and influence. And Epictetus, the great teacher, played his part in changing Rome's leadership from the filth it had known in Nero's White House to the potency and decency it knew under Marcus Aurelius.
Marcus Aurelius was the last of the five emperors (all with Stoic connections) who ruled successively during that period that Edward Gibbon described in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as follows: "If a man were asked to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation name the period from the accession of Nerva (96 AD) to the death of Marcus Aurelius (180 AD). The united reigns of the five emperors of the age are possibly the only period in history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government."
Epictetus attracted the same kind of audience that Socrates had attracted five hundred years earlier: young aristocrats destined for careers in finance, the arts, public service. The best families sent their best sons in their twenties to him, so that he could tell them what the good life consisted of, so that they would be disabused of the idea that they deserved to become playboys, making it clear that his job was to serve his fellow men.
In his inimitable, frank language, Epictetus explained that his curriculum was not about “income or rent, or peace or war, but about happiness and unhappiness, success and failure, slavery and freedom.” His model graduate was not a person “capable of speaking fluently on philosophical principles like an idle chatterbox, but about things that will do you good if your son dies, or your brother dies, or if you must die or be tortured.” “Let others practice lawsuits, others study problems, others syllogisms; here you practice how to die, how to be chained, how to be tortured, how to be exiled.” A man is responsible for his own “judgments, even in dreams, in drunkenness, and in melancholy madness.” Each individual brings about his own good and evil, his good fortune, his bad fortune, his happiness, and his misery. And to top it all off, he held that it is unthinkable that one man's error could cause another's suffering. Suffering, like everything else in Stoicism, was all down here: remorse for destroying yourself.
So what Epictetus was telling his students was that there can be no such thing as being the “victim” of another. You can only be a “victim” of yourself. It’s all in how you discipline your mind. Who is your master? “The one who has authority over any of the things you have set your heart on.” “What is the result toward which all virtue aims? Serenity.” “Show me a man who, though sick, is happy, who, though in danger, is happy, who, though in prison, is happy, and I will show you a Stoic.”
When I earned my degree, Sybil and I packed up our four children and our family belongings and headed to Southern California. I was to take command of Fighter Squadron 51, flying supersonic F-8 Crusaders, first at Naval Air Station Miramar, near San Diego, and later, of course, at sea aboard various aircraft carriers in the western Pacific. Exactly three years after we arrived at our new home near San Diego, I was shot down and captured over North Vietnam.
During those three years, I had made three seven-month cruises to Vietnamese waters. On the first, we provided general surveillance for the fighting raging in the South; on the second, I directed the first U.S. bombing raid against North Vietnam; and on the third, I flew in combat almost daily as the air wing commander of the USS Oriskany. But on my nightstand, no matter which carrier I was on, were my books of Epictetus: Enchiridion, Speeches, Memorabilia of Xenophon on Socrates, and The Iliad and The Odyssey. (Epictetus expected his students to be familiar with Homer's plots.) He had no time to be a bookworm, but he spent several hours a week immersed in them.
I think it was obvious to my close friends, and certainly to me, that I was a changed man and, I have to say, a better man because of my introduction to philosophy and especially to Epictetus. I was on a different path, certainly not an anti-military path, but to some extent an anti-organization path. In the context of all the posturing and groping that military organizations seem to have to go through in peacetime, accepting the need for elegant and spontaneous improvisation under pressure, breaking from established procedures forces you to be reflexive, thoughtful as you construct a new mode of operation. I had become a detached man—not aloof, but detached—able to throw away the book without the slightest hesitation when it no longer matched external circumstances. I was able to put juniors above seniors without shame when their war instincts were more reliable. This newfound abandon, this newfound ingrained flexibility I had gained, would serve me well later in prison.
But what sustained my new confidence was the realization that I had found the right philosophy for the military arts as I practiced them. The Roman Stoics coined the formula Vivere militare! — "To live is to be a soldier!" Epictetus in the Speeches"Don't you know that life is a soldier's service? One must stand guard, another go out to reconnoitre, another take the field. If you neglect your responsibilities when a severe order is imposed on you, don't you understand what a pitiful state you are bringing the army to, to the extent that it is within you?" Enchiridion: «Remember, you are an actor in a drama of whatever kind the Author chooses: if it is short, then in a short one; if it is long, then in a long one. If it is His pleasure that you play a poor man, or a cripple, or a ruler, be sure that you play it well. For this is your business: to play the given part well, but choosing it belongs to Another.» «Each of us, slave or free, has come into this world with innate conceptions about good and bad, noble and shameful, proper and improper, happiness and unhappiness, fitting and unfitting.» «If you consider yourself a man and part of a whole, it is proper for you now to be sick, and now to go on a journey and run risks, and now to be in need, and sometimes to die before your time. Why, then, do you grieve? Would you have someone else be sick with fever now, someone else be off on a journey, someone else die?» Because it is impossible in a body like ours, that is, in this universe that surrounds us, among these creatures similar to us, that such things do not happen, some to one man, some to another.
On September 9, 1965, I flew at 500 knots directly into a bomb trap, at tree level, in a small A-4 plane—the cockpit walls not even three feet away—which I couldn't steer after it burst into flames, its control system wrecked. After ejection, I had about 30 seconds to make my final statement of freedom before landing on the main street of a small town right ahead. And God help me, I whispered to myself, "Five years down there, at least. I'm leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus."
"By hand" by The Enchiridion As I ejected from that plane, there was the realization that a Stoic always kept separate files in his mind for (A) those things that are “up to him” and (B) those things that are “not up to him.” Another way of saying this is (A) those things that are “within his power” and (B) those things that are “beyond his power.” Yet another way of saying this is (A) those things that are within the reach of “his Will, his Free Will” and (B) those things that are beyond him. Everything in category B is “external,” beyond my control, ultimately condemning me to fear and anxiety if I covet them. Everything in category A is up to me, within my power, within my will, and are properly subjects of my total concern and involvement. They include my opinions, my goals, my aversions, my own grief, my own joy, my judgments, my attitude about what is happening, my own good, and my own evil.
To explain why “your own good and your own evil” is on that list, I want to quote Alexander Solzhenitsyn from his book Gulag ArchipelagoHe writes about that moment in prison when he realizes the strength of his residual powers, and begins what I called for myself “gaining moral leverage”; riding the upward currents of occasional euphoria as you realize you’re beginning to know yourself and the world for the first time. He calls it “ascending” and names the chapter in which this appears “The Ascent”:
It was only as I lay there on the rotten straw of the prison that I felt the first sprouts of good within me. Little by little, it was revealed to me that the line separating good and evil runs not between states, nor between classes, nor between political parties, but directly through every human heart—through all human hearts. And that is why I return to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those around me: "Bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life."
I came to understand that long before reading it. Solzhenitsyn learned, as I and others have learned, that good and evil aren't just abstractions you play with and lecture about and attribute to this person or that person. The only good and evil that mean anything is right there in your own heart, within your will, within your power, where it depends on you. Enchiridion 32: "Things that are not within our own power, not without our Will, can in no way be either good or evil." Speeches"Evil lies in the misuse of moral purpose, and good in the opposite. The course of the Will determines good or bad fortune, and the balance of misery and happiness." In short, what the Stoics say is: "Work with what you have control over, and you'll have your hands full."
What is not up to you? Beyond your power? Not ultimately subject to your will? To begin with, let's take "your position in life." As I glide toward that small town on my short parachute ride, I'm about to learn how insignificant my control over my position in life is. It's not up to me at all. Right now I'm going from being the leader of over a hundred pilots and a thousand men and, God knows, all sorts of symbolic status and goodwill, to being an object of scorn. I'll be known as a "criminal." But that's not half the revelation of your own fragility—that you can be reduced by wind and rain and ice and seawater or men to a helpless, sobbing wreck, unable to control even your own bowels, in a matter of minutes. And, more than that, you’re going to face fragilities you never before allowed yourself to believe you could have, as after just a few minutes, in a frenzy of action while being tied up with ropes tightened like tourniquets, carefully, by a professional, hands behind you, bent forward and down toward your ankles secured in lugs attached to an iron bar, that, with the onslaught of anxiety, knowing that your upper body circulation has stopped, and feeling the induced pain increasing and claustrophobia getting closer, you may be forced to blurt out answers, sometimes correct answers, to questions about anything they know that you know. (From now on, I’ll call that situation “taking the ropes.”)
Your "position in life," then, can change from that of a dignified, cultured gentleman to that of a terrified, sobbing, self-loathing wreck in a matter of minutes. So what? To live under the false pretense that you'll always have control of your position in life is to risk a fall; you're asking for disappointment. So make sure, deep in your heart, in your inner being, that you treat your position in life with indifference—not contempt, just indifference.
And so it is with a long, long list of things that some thoughtless people assume they have assured control over until the very last moment: your body, property, wealth, health, life, death, pleasure, pain, reputation. Consider “reputation,” for example. Whatever you do, reputation is at least as fickle as your position in life. Others decide what your reputation is. Try to make it the best it can be, but don’t get hung up on it. Don’t covet it and start chasing it in ever-narrowing circles. As Epictetus says, “For what are tragedies but the representation in tragic verse of the sufferings of men who have admired external things?” Deep down in your heart of hearts, when you take out the key and unlock that old roll-top desk where you actually keep your things, don’t let “reputation” get mixed up with your moral purpose or your willpower; they are important. Make sure "reputation" is in that bottom drawer box marked "matters of indifference." As Epictetus says, "He who yearns for or shuns things not under his control cannot be faithful or free, but must be changed and tossed about and must end up subservient to others."
I know the difficulties of assimilating this immediately. You're still thinking about practical problems. Everyone has to play the game of life. You can't just go around saying, "I don't give a damn about health or wealth or whether I get sent to prison or not." Epictetus took time to explain further what he meant. He says everyone should play the game of life, that the best play it with "skill, form, speed, and grace." But, like most games, it's played with a ball. Your team devotes all its energies to getting the ball over the line. But after the game, what do you do with the ball? Nobody cares much. It's worthless. The competition, the game, was the important thing. The ball was "used" to make the game possible, but in itself has no value that justifies falling on your sword for it. Once the game is over, the ball is properly a matter of indifference. Epictetus on another occasion used the example of throwing dice, dice being matters of indifference once their numbers have come up. Exercising judgment about whether to accept the numbers or throw again is a voluntary act, and therefore not a matter of indifference. Epictetus's point is that our use of externals is not a matter of indifference because our actions are a product of our will and we fully control that, but that the dice themselves, like the ball, are material over which we have no control. They are externals that we cannot afford to covet or take seriously, otherwise we might set our hearts on them and become slaves to others who control them.
These explanations of this concept seem so modern, yet I have just given you almost verbatim quotes from Epictetus's observations to his students in Nicopolis, colonial Greece, two thousand years ago.
So I took those core thoughts to prison; I also remembered many observations that shaped my attitude. Here's Epictetus on how not to fall into the trap: "A man's master is he who is able to confer or take away anything that man seeks or shuns. Whoever would be free, let him desire nothing, reject nothing, depend on others; otherwise, he will necessarily be a slave." And here's why never to beg: "For it is better to die of hunger, exempt from fear and guilt, than to live in affluence with disturbance." Begging establishes a demand for quid pro quo, deals, agreements, retaliation, the abyss. If you want to protect yourself from "fear and guilt"—and those are the crucial pincers, the real destroyers of the will in the long run—you have to get rid of all your instincts for compromise, for meeting people halfway. You have to learn to stay out of the way, never give opportunities for deals, never be honest with your adversaries. You have to become what Ivan Denisovich called a "shrewd, slow-moving prisoner."
All of that, for the previous three years, I had unknowingly stored away for the future. So, returning to my ejection from my A-4, I can hear the midday shouts and the pistol shots and the whistling bullets ripping through the canopy of my parachute and see the fists flapping in the street below as my chute snags on a tree but deposits me unharmed. With two quick flicks of the quick-release buckles, I free myself from the parachute, and am immediately accosted by the ten or fifteen town thugs I had seen in my peripheral vision, coming up the road from my right.
I don't mean to exaggerate this or indicate that I was surprised by my reception. It was simply that when the boarding and beating were over—and it lasted two or three minutes before a man in a pith helmet arrived to blow his police whistle—I had a very badly broken leg that I was sure would stay with me for life. My hunch turned out to be correct. Later, I felt some relief—but only minor—from another warning of Epictetus that I remembered: "A lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the Will; and say this to yourself concerning everything that happens. For you will find such things to be an impediment to something else, but not truly to yourself."
But in the time between pulling the ejection lever and stopping on the street, I had become a man on a mission. I can't explain this without unloading some of the emotional baggage that was part of the legacy of my military generation in 1965.
After the Korean War, a little over ten years ago, we all had memories of reading and watching the first television reports about the U.S. government investigations into the behavior of some American prisoners of war in North Korea and mainland China. There was a famous series of articles in the magazine The New Yorker which later became a book titled In Every War but OneThe essence was that in the American prisoner-of-war camps, it was every man for himself. Since those days, I've come to know officers who were prisoners of war there, and now I see much of it as selective reporting and an injustice. However, there were cases of young soldiers who were confused by the times, terrified, in cold weather, treating each other like dogs fighting over scraps, throwing each other out into the snow to die, and no one doing anything about it.
This could not continue, and President Eisenhower commissioned the drafting of the American Warfighter's Code of Conduct. It is written in the form of a personal pledge. Article 4: "If I become a prisoner of war, I will keep faith with my fellow prisoners. I will not give information or participate in any action that might be harmful to my comrades. If I am the senior officer, I will take command. If not, I will obey the lawful orders of those appointed over me and support them in every way." In other words, from the moment Eisenhower signed the document, American prisoners of war were never to escape the chain of command; the war continues behind bars. As an insider, I knew the whole situation: that the North Vietnamese already had about 25 prisoners, probably in Hanoi, that I was the only wing commander who had survived an ejection, and that I would be his superior, his commanding officer, and would remain so, most likely, throughout this war, which I was sure would last at least another five years. And here I was, starting out, crippled and bedridden.
Epictetus turned out to be right. After a very rudimentary operation, I was on crutches in a couple of months, and the sprained leg, healing itself, was strong enough to support me without the crutches in about a year. All in all, it was only a temporary setback for things that were important to me, and being put in the role of sovereign head of an American expatriate colony that was destined to remain autonomous, without communication with Washington, for years was very important to me. I was forty-two years old, still on crutches, dragging one leg, weighing considerably less than normal, with hair down to my shoulders, my body unbathed since I was catapulted from the Oriskany, a beard that hadn't seen a razor since I arrived, when I took command (clandestinely, of course; the North Vietnamese would never recognize our rank) of about fifty Americans. That expatriate colony would grow to over four hundred, all officers, all college graduates, all pilots or electronics wizards in the back seat. He was determined to "play the given role well."
The key word for all of us at first was "fragility." Each of us, before we were within shouting distance of another American, was forced to "take the ropes." That was a real shock to our systems, and, as with all shocks, its impact on our inner selves was far more impressive, lasting, and significant than on our limbs and torsos. These were the sessions in which we were beaten into submission, forced to spout ugly confessions of American guilt and complicity into old-fashioned tape recorders, and then put into what I call "cold soaking," a month or so of total isolation to "contemplate our crimes." What we really contemplated was what even the most laid-back American saw as his betrayal of himself and everything he stood for. It was there that I learned what "Stoic Damage" meant. A broken shoulder, a broken back bone, a leg broken twice were peanuts in comparison. Epictetus: "Seek no greater harm than this: to destroy the trustworthy, self-respecting, and well-behaved man in you."
When we were put in a regular cellblock, hardly any American emerged from that experience without responding something like this when a fellow prisoner next to him first whispered, "You don't want to talk to me; I'm a traitor." And because we were similarly fragile, it seemed to spread that we would all respond something like this: "Listen, buddy, there are no virgins here. You should have heard the kind of statement I made. Pull yourself together. We're all in this together. What's your name? Tell me about yourself." Hearing that last bit was, for most of the new prisoners fresh out of the initial interrogation and cold soak, a turning point in their lives.
But the new prisoner's learning process was just beginning. He would soon realize that things were not at all as some had told him in survival training: that if he showed good, firm resistance in the early chapters, the interrogators would lose interest in him and he would be relegated simply to boredom, to "roughing it," to "languishing in his cell," as uninitiated novelists love to describe the situation. No, the war continued behind bars; there was no such thing as the jailers giving up on you as a lost cause. Their political beliefs made them believe that you could be forced to see things their way; it was only a matter of time. And so you were marched off to the interrogation room endlessly, particularly on the occasions when you were caught breaking one of the countless rules posted on the wall of your cell—"trick" rules, which paid dividends to the commissioner if his interrogator could get you to fall prey to his wedge of shame. The coin on the gaming table, where you and the interrogator faced off in a duel of wits, was shame, and I learned that unless he could impose shame on me, or unless I imposed it on myself, he had nothing going for him. (Force was available, but that required the commissioner's approval.)
For Epictetus, emotions were acts of will. Fear wasn't something that came out of the shadows of the night and enveloped you; it imputed to you the total responsibility for starting it, stopping it, controlling it. This was one of Stoicism's greatest demands on a person. Stoics can sound like lazy brutes when described simply as people indifferent to almost everything except good and evil, people who make stingy use of emotions like pity and sympathy. But add this requirement of total personal responsibility for your every emotion, and you're talking about a person with their hands full. I would whisper a "chant" to myself as I was marched at gunpoint to my daily interrogation: "Control fear, control guilt, control fear, control guilt." And I devised methods of averting my gaze to hide the fear or guilt that undoubtedly emerged in my eyes when I temporarily lost control during questioning. You could be beaten for not looking at your interrogator's face; I was concentrating on his left earlobe, and he seemed to get used to it—he probably thought I was a little cross-eyed. Controlling your emotions is difficult but can be empowering. Epictetus: “For within you, both your destruction and your deliverance lie.” Epictetus: “A courtroom and a prison are each a place, one high, the other low; but the attitude of your will can remain the same, if you choose to keep it the same, in either place.”
We organized an underground society through our wall-pounding code, a society with our own laws, traditions, customs, even heroes. To explain how we could order each other to more torture, order each other to refuse to comply with specific demands, intentionally call our jailers' bluff, and, in a real sense, force them to repeat the entire ropes process for another submission, I will quote a statement that could have come from at least half of those wonderful, competitive fighter pilots I found myself locked up with: “We are in a situation like never before. But we deserve to keep our self-respect, to have the feeling that we are fighting back. We can’t refuse to do all the degrading things required of us, but it is up to you, Chief, to choose the things we should all refuse to do unless and until we are put through the ropes again. We deserve to sleep at night. We at least deserve to have the satisfaction that we are following our leader’s orders. Give us the list; why should we endure torture?”
I know this sounds like strange logic, but in a sense it was a first step toward reclaiming what was rightfully ours. Epictetus said, “The judge will do some things to you that are considered terrifying; but how can he stop you from accepting the punishment he threatened you with?” That’s my kind of Stoicism. You have the right to get hurt, and they don’t like doing that. When my fellow prisoner Ev Alvarez, the first pilot they captured, was released with the rest of us, the prison commissary told him, “You Americans were nothing like the French; we could count on you to be reasonable.” Ha!
I thought long and hard about what those first orders should be. They would be orders that could be obeyed, not a "cover your back" measure of reiterating some U.S. government policy like "name, rank, serial number, and date of birth," which had no chance of standing up to in the torture chamber. My mindset was "we here under pressure are the experts, we are the masters of our destiny, let's ignore the guilt-inducing echoes of hollow edicts, throw out the book and write our own." My orders came out as easy-to-remember acronyms. The main one was BACK US: Don't bow in public; stay off the air; admit no crimes; never kiss them goodbye. "US" could be interpreted as United States, but it really stood for "Unity over Self." Loners thrive in an enemy's prison, so my first rule of union there was that each of us had to work to the lowest common denominator, never bargaining for ourselves, but only for everyone.
Prison life became a crazy mix of the old regime and the new. The old regime was routine political prison, primarily for dissidents and internal enemies of the state. It was designed and run by old-school Third World communists, of the Ho Chi Minh variety. It revolved around the idea of "repentance" for your "crimes" of antisocial behavior. American prisoners, common criminals, and internal political enemies of the state were all in the same prison. We never saw a "POW camp" as the movies depict. The communist prison was part psychiatric clinic and part reform school. North Vietnamese protocol required all its inmates to demonstrate shame: bowing to all guards, head bowed, never looking at the sky, frequent sessions with your interrogator if for no other reason than to check your attitude, and if it was judged "wrong," then perhaps by the torture slide of confession of guilt, apology, and then the inevitable reward of atonement.
The new regime, superimposed on the old one, was for Americans only. It was a propaganda factory, overseen by young, English-speaking army officers and bureaucrats with quotas to meet, quotas set by the political arm of the government: press interviews with visiting leftist Americans, propaganda films to be shot (starring intimidated "American air pirates"), and so on.
An encapsulated story of how this bifurcated prison philosophy fared is that the propaganda footage and interviews began to backfire. Intelligent American college men peppered their performances with double entendres, gestures interpreted as playfully obscene by Western audiences, and practical jokes. One of my best friends, tortured into naming pilots he knew who had given up their wings in opposition to the war, said there were only two: Lieutenants Clark Kent and Ben Casey (popular fictional characters in America at the time). That joke was a front-page headline in the San Diego Union, and someone sent a copy to the government in Hanoi. As a result of that friendly gesture from a fellow American, Nels Tanner endured three successive days of rope torture, followed by 123 days in leg irons—all while in solitary confinement, of course.
So after several of these stunts, which cost the Vietnamese much lost prestige, North Vietnam resorted to obtaining its propaganda only from the relatively few (less than 5 percent) of Americans they could trust not to rebel: true loners who, for various reasons, never joined the prisoner organization, never wanted to enter the code-tapping network, known scoundrels we came to call snitches. The vast majority of my constituents were outraged by their actions and diligently took it upon themselves to memorize facts that would condemn them in an American court-martial. But when we returned home, our government ruled against my pressing charges.
The great mass of all the other Americans in Hanoi were, by all standards, “honorable prisoners,” but that is not to say that there was anything like a homogeneous prison regime that we all shared. People like to think that because we were all in the Hanoi prison system, we had all these common experiences. Not so. These different regimes became evident when our prisoners’ organization stalled the propaganda efforts of this two-headed monster they called the “Prison Authority.” They resorted to revenge against the leadership of my organization and an effort to break the morale of the others by tempting them with an amnesty program in which they would compete for early release by pandering to the wishes of North Vietnam.
In May 1967, the PA system blared: "Those of you who repent, truly repent, will be able to go home before the war is over. Those few recalcitrants who insist on inciting the other criminals to oppose camp authority will be sent to a special dark place." I immediately issued an order forbidding any Americans from accepting early release, but that didn't mean I was a lonely man on a white horse. I didn't have to sell that one; it was accepted with obvious relief and spontaneous jubilation by the overwhelming majority.
Guess who went to the “dark place.” They isolated my leadership team—me and my cohort of ten top men—and sent us into exile. The Vietnamese worked very hard to learn our habits, and they knew who the troublemakers were and who “didn’t cause trouble.” They isolated those I trusted most; all of them had a long history of isolation and a pedigree of rope brands. Not all of them were high-ranking; we had high-ranking men in prison who wouldn’t even communicate with the man next to them. One of my ten was only twenty-four, born after I was in the Navy. He was a product of my recent shipboard tendencies: “When instincts and rank are out of step, pick the guy with the instincts.” All of us remained in solitary confinement for the duration, beginning with two years in shackles in a small, high-security prison right next to North Vietnam’s “Pentagon,” its Ministry of Defense, a typical old French building. There are chapters and chapters after that, but what they boiled down to in my case was a protracted revenge struggle between the "Prison Authority" and those of us who refused to give up trying to be our brothers' keepers. The stakes grew to nervous-breakdown proportions. One of the eleven of us died in that little prison we called Alcatraz, but even including him, there wasn't a man who ended up with less than three and a half years of solitary confinement, and four of us got more than four years. To give you some idea of the proportion of how the four hundred fared in solitary, one hundred got none, more than half of the other three hundred got less than a year, and half of those who got less than a year got less than a month. So the average for the four hundred was considerably less than six months.
Howie Rutledge, one of the four of us with more than four years, went back to school and earned a master's degree after we returned home, and his thesis focused on the question of whether the long-term erosion of human purpose was most effectively achieved by torture or solitary confinement. He sent questionnaires to us (who had also been through the ropes at least ten times) and to others with histories of extreme prison abuse. He found that those who had had less than two years of solitary confinement and a lot of torture said that torture was the trump card; those with more than two years of solitary confinement and a lot of torture said that for long-term behavior modification, solitary confinement was the way to go. The way I see it, you can get used to repeated rope torture; there are some tricks to minimize your losses in that game. But keep a man, even a very strong-willed man, in solitary confinement for three or more years, and he starts looking for a friend—any friend—regardless of nationality or ideology.
Epictetus once gave a lecture to his faculty complaining about the common tendency of new teachers to downplay the harsh realism of Stoicism's challenges in favor of giving students an edifying and optimistic picture of how they might fulfill the harsh requirements of the good life without pain. Epictetus said, "Men, the philosopher's lecture hall is a hospital; the students should leave it not with pleasure, but with pain." If Epictetus's lecture hall was a hospital, my prison was a laboratory—a laboratory of human behavior. I chose to test his postulates against the demanding, real-life challenges of my laboratory. And as you can see, I think he passed with flying colors.
It's hard to discuss the real-life challenges of that lab in public because people ask all the wrong questions: How was the food? That's always the first one, and in a place like the one I've been to, that's so far down the scale it makes you want to cry. Did they physically harm you? What was the nature of the device they used to harm you? Always the device or the truth serum or the electroshock treatment, all of which would totally defeat the purpose of a person seriously trying to break your will. All of those things would give you a sense of moral superiority, which is the last thing he would want to happen. I'm not talking about brainwashing; there's no such thing. I'm talking about having looked over the edge and seen the bottom of the abyss and understanding the truth of that pillar of Stoic thought: that what brings a man down is not pain, but shame!
Why did those men in “cold soaks” after their first rope trip waste away and feel so unworthy when the first American contacted them? Epictetus knew human nature well. In that prison laboratory, I don’t know of a single instance where a man was able to erase his qualms of conscience with some loose pop-psychological theory of cause and effect. Epictetus emphasizes again and again that a man who attributes the causes of his actions to third parties or forces is not being truthful to himself. He must live with his own judgments if he wants to be honest with himself. (And “cold soaks” tend to make you honest.) “But if a person subjects me to the fear of death, he compels me,” says one student. “No,” says Epictetus, “it is neither death, nor exile, nor labor, nor any of those things that is the cause of your doing or not doing something, but only your opinions and the decisions of your Will.” “What is the fruit of your doctrines?” someone asked Epictetus. "Peace of mind, courage, and freedom," he replied. You can only have these things if you're honest and take responsibility for your own actions. You have to understand this clearly! You're in charge of yourself.
Did I preach this stuff in prison? Certainly not. You soon learned that if the guy next to you was doing well, that meant he had all his philosophical ducks lined up his way. You soon realized that when you dared to throw high-level philosophical suggestions through the wall, you always got a very reluctant response. No, I never once knocked or mentioned Stoicism. But some perceptive fellows read the signs in my actions. After one of my long solitaries outside the prison cellblocks, I was brought back within signaling range of the group, and my point of contact was a man named Dave Hatcher. As was standard procedure in a first contact after a long separation, we began not with outpourings of news, but first, with an agreed-upon distress signal, second, with a cover story for each of us if we were caught, and third, with a backup communication system if this link was compromised—sly, slow-moving prisoner precautions. Hatcher's backup communication to me was a note left near an old sink near a place we called the Mint, the isolation cellblock in Hatcher's "Las Vegas" wing of the prison, a place he rightly guessed I would soon be. Every day we communicated by signals for fifteen minutes through a wall between his cellblock and my "no man's land."
Then I was in trouble again. At that point, the commissioner of prisons had isolated me and kept me under almost constant surveillance for the year since I had staged a riot at Alcatraz to get our shackles removed. I was barred from all prisoner cellblocks. I had special guards, and I was caught with a release note that gave clues I knew the interrogators could develop through torture. The result would be to implicate my friends in "black activities" (as the North Vietnamese called them). I had been through those ropes more than a dozen times, and I knew it could contain material, as long as they didn't know I knew it. But this note would open doors that could lead to more people dying there. We had lost some in major purges, I think from excessive torture, and I was tired of it. It was the fall of 1969, and I had been in this role for four years, and I saw nothing else to do but leave. I was alone in the main torture room in an isolated part of the prison, the night before what I was told would be my day to let it all out. There was an eerie atmosphere in the prison. Ho Chi Minh had just died, and his special funeral music was in the air. I was to sit all night in travel irons. My chair was near the only glass window in the prison. I was able to crawl out and stealthily break the window. I went for the arteries in my wrist with the large pieces. I had turned off the light, but the patrolling guard found me unconscious in a pool of blood but still breathing. The Vietnamese raised the alarm, called their doctor, and saved me.
Why? It wasn't until after I was released years later that I learned that that very week, Sybil had been in Paris demanding humane treatment for prisoners. She was on the world news, a public figure, and the last thing the North Vietnamese needed was for me to die. There was a very solemn crowd of high-ranking North Vietnamese officers in that room while they were resuscitating me.
The prison torture, as we had known it in Hanoi, ended for everyone that night.
Of course, it was months before we could be sure that was the case. All I knew at the time was that in the morning, after my arms had been bandaged and dressed, the commissar himself brought me a hot cup of sweet tea, told my watch guard to remove my shackles, and asked me to sit at the table with him. "Why did you do this, Sto-dale? You know I sit with the Army Staff; they asked for a full report this morning." (It wasn't unusual for us to talk like this at the time.) But he never mentioned the note, nor did anyone else afterward. That was unprecedented. After a couple of months in a small isolated cell we called Calcutta for my arms to heal, I was blindfolded and taken directly to the Las Vegas cellblock. The isolation and special surveillance were over. I was put alone, of course, in the Mint.
Dave Hatcher knew I was back because they took me under his window, and though he couldn't look out, he could hear, and over the years he'd attuned his ear to my signature walk, my limp. Soon, the rusty wire above the sink in the bathroom was bent north, Dave Hatcher's signal for "note in bottle under sink for Stockdale." Like an old-fashioned fighter pilot, I checked my hour six, quickly scooped up the note, and carefully hid it in my prison pajama pants. Back in my cell, after the guard closed the door, I sat on my toilet bucket—where I could stealthily dispose of the note if the peephole cover moved—and unfolded the sheet of Hatcher's shoddy paper on which, in a rat dropping, he'd printed, without comment or signature, the last verse of the poem. Invictus by Ernest Henley:
It no longer matters how narrow the path has been,
No matter how many punishments my back carries,
I am the master of my destiny,
I am the captain of my soul.