Strength in Unity

"Do the right thing, even if it means dying like a dog when there's no one there to see it."

            "I was just a blind, crippled animal, shitting on the floor….I had crotch rot from continuous filth. My pajamas were caked with pus."

            That's what happens when you are tortured and then held in leg irons for days on end while chained to the cold, filthy concrete floor of a windowless cell measuring three feet by nine feet.

            That was the plight of James Bond Stockdale, winner of two Purple Hearts and the Medal of Honor, America's most prestigious military decoration. He was the highest-ranking U.S. Navy officer held prisoner during the Vietnam War. A carrier-based fighter pilot, Stockdale had flown nearly 200 combat missions before being shot down in 1965.

            Stockdale even took part in the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident. A U.S. destroyer in a thunderstorm mistakenly reported that North Vietnamese ships were attacking it. As part of an urgent nighttime 'rescue' mission, Stockdale and other fliers shot at what their radar told them was firing at the ship. They later realized that their gear—and the ship's sonar— had created imaginary targets. No enemy ships. No attack.

            But the Johnson Administration used the event as a pretext for massively escalating the war. Stockdale was furious, writing in his memoirs that "it was a bad portent that we seemed to be under the control of a mindless Washington bureaucracy, vain enough to pick their own legitimacies regardless of evidence."

“Punched Out”

            A bad portent indeed. Soon thereafter while on a mission over North Vietnam, anti-aircraft fire peppered his fighter, and Stockdale "punched out," ejecting himself and parachuting into a small village. His parachute still billowing, a dozen men fell on him—"the quarterback sack of the century" Stockdale called it. They beat him senseless, shattering his leg, injuring his knee (which never healed), dislocating his shoulders, and breaking a bone in his neck.

            Much worse came, following his arrival at the Hoa Lo Prison, what POWs dubbed the "Hanoi Hilton." He spent seven-and-a-half years there in captivity, four of those years in solitary confinement.

            "I was tortured 15 times," Stockdale recalled. "That's total submission. They did that with shutting off your blood circulation with ropes, giving you claustrophobia and pain at the same time and bending you double."

            Stockdale knew he held priceless secret information. If torture broke him and the world learned that no North Vietnamese attack had taken place in the Gulf of Tonkin, it would be "the biggest Communist propaganda scoop of the decade," he wrote. "In this war, it was already becoming clear that it was the propaganda bombs, not the TNT bombs, that were going to make the difference."

“A Reverse Cherokee”

            He kept his mouth shut. To keep from being used as a propaganda pawn, he nearly mortally injured himself. He slashed his filthy scalp from front to back with a razor, creating what he called 'a reverse Cherokee' haircut, making a bloody mess of himself. Then he disfigured himself by punching himself in the face again and again until his hands and face were sore. Why? To prevent the North Vietnamese from putting him on international TV.

            Stockdale's will to resist gave other prisoners hope. They saw his resolve. And Stockdale was wise enough to use his authority to relax the military's code of prisoner behavior, giving his fellow POWs permission to reveal information, so long as what they 'confessed' to was harmless.

            "Unity was our best hope," Stockdale said. "A life of perfection was out of the question, but [the POWs] elected to take pain in a unified resistance program….Their self-esteem could be maintained, and they could sleep with a clean conscience at night."

            A student of the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus, Stockdale held fast to this belief—"Look not for any greater harm than this: Destroying the trustworthy, self-respecting, well-behaved man within you."

MORAL: In a crisis, people look for leadership.
Be that leader.

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