The Lives They Lived; The Prisoner (original) (raw)
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- Dec. 25, 2005
When Cmdr. James Stockdale parachuted out of his nose-diving Skyhawk over the North Vietnamese jungle in September 1965, the war was still young. Little was known about the fate that awaited American prisoners of war. It didn't take Stockdale long to gain a clearer sense. After a few months in solitary confinement in Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi, he was introduced to "the ropes," a torture technique in which a prisoner was seated on the floor -- legs extended, arms bound behind him -- as a guard stood on his back and drove his face down until his nose was mashed into the brick floor between his legs. The North Vietnamese knew they were overmatched militarily, but they figured they could at least win the propaganda war by brutalizing American P.O.W.'s until they denounced their government and "confessed" that they had bombed schoolchildren and villagers.
For his part, Stockdale intended to return home with his honor intact. One afternoon, he was given a razor and led to the bathroom -- a sure sign that he was being readied for a propaganda film. Instead of shaving, Stockdale gave himself a reverse Mohawk, tearing up his scalp in the process. More determined than ever now, his captors locked him in the interrogation room for a few minutes while they fetched a hat for him. Stockdale glanced around, looking for an appropriate weapon. He considered a rusty bucket and a windowpane before settling on a 50-pound stool, and proceeded to beat himself about the face. Then, realizing that his eyes were not yet swollen shut, he beat himself some more. By the time the guards had returned, blood was running down the front of his shirt. For the next several weeks, Stockdale kept himself unpresentable by surreptitiously bashing his face with his fists. The North Vietnamese never did manage to film him.
As Hoa Lo filled with American shootdowns -- it would become known among prisoners as the Hanoi Hilton -- Stockdale transformed a loose colony of destabilized P.O.W.'s into a tightly knit underground resistance movement with its own language (an alphabetical tap code) and laws. Stockdale was the highest-ranking Navy P.O.W., but his authority derived less from seniority than from that rare blend of virtues that enables a small minority of men to thrive in what the Prussian military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz called the province of danger.
Inside the interrogation room, the military's Code of Conduct, which presupposes adherence to the Geneva Conventions, was of little value. The torture was simply too intense to limit statements to name, rank, serial number and date of birth. So Stockdale created new rules designed both to protect America's war effort and to keep P.O.W.'s alive. Stockdale ordered his men to endure as much physical abuse as they could before acceding to any of their interrogators' demands -- the key, in his view, to preserving a sense of dignity -- and to always confess to fellow inmates everything they had been forced to divulge. To carry an unclean conscience was to risk descending into a spiral of guilt and shame that would make them only more vulnerable to themselves and their captors.
Desperate as he was to return to his wife and four boys in Southern California, Stockdale was so adept at living through privation and pain that he came to feel at home inside Hoa Lo. He recalled long-forgotten details from his childhood, calculated natural logarithms with a stick in the dust and pondered the physics of musical scales. As he saw it, he was still at war, only it wasn't the Navy that had prepared him for this sort of battle, it was two ancient Greek philosophers. From Aristotle, Stockdale had learned that free will can exist within a state of imprisonment. From Epictetus, the influential Stoic, he had learned about our ability to shape experience by perception: as months of solitary confinement in leg irons and brutal beatings turned to years, Stockdale would remind himself that "men are disturbed not by things but by the view that they take of them." Most of all, he became absorbed in his battles with his captors, whether that meant planting fake notes for guards to discover or gleefully "tapping" his tales of interrogation-room intransigence to his neighbors.
Not long after he was finally released in early 1973, Stockdale said he had no intention of becoming a professional ex-P.O.W., yet his 2,714 days in captivity powerfully shaped the rest of his life. Stockdale drifted professionally -- not like the stereotypically disillusioned Vietnam vet, but in nevertheless unmistakable ways. He was given different peacetime commands, all of which felt like comedowns from his service in Vietnam, both as a commander and as an underground prison boss. "In those jobs under life-and-death pressure, what I said, what I did, what I thought, really had an effect on the state of affairs of my world," he would later reflect.
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