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When I was a young midshipman there came a time
eventually when service selection - ships, subs or aircraft (I was never meant
to be a Marine) - was no longer merely theoretical but was looming on the near
horizon. It was no longer a matter of glibly saying, "After graduation, I'm
going to flight school, and then select for fighters," but committing to a path
which, although brightly lit with clear milestones towards a successful
destination, also had many potholes along the way. The choosing would open up
one door and close off all the others - forward or out were the only two
choices.
So before committing, I
began to seriously examine whether I had the right stuff to be a naval aviator,
to walk down that path and close all the other, less demanding doors. The avatar
of heroism that both inspired me and caused me to search within myself to tally
up my physical and psychic resources was James Bond Stockdale. He was, to all
of us, nothing else but a hero. Why, even his name seemed almost graven out of
stone, almost impossibly romantic.
He
was not only a highly decorated combat leader in Vietnam, a man who threw
himself into his role as a tactical aviator and leader, but who also threw
himself against his enemy time and again and always at great personal risk. He
had also, in a war in which the popular
zeitgeist
evolved to eventually allow for no claims of heroism by conventional acts of
courage on the field, received universal acclaim for his endurance after he had
been shot down and endured seven and a half years of the most brutal kind of
mistreatment in captivity. In 1980 the cultural wounds of the Vietnam War were
still fresh, but looking up to Stockdale's example did not require you to reopen
any of them.
As a senior officer in
detention, the other prisoners looked up to him as an example of how to act, and
he did not disappoint. He devised a tap code to enable each man to correspond
with his neighbor, and thereby relieve the grinding pressure of solitary
confinement, share the latest interrogation techniques, prepare themselves for
their time of trial, exchange names and news for a later reckoning.
A student of the stoic philosopher
Epictitus, Stockdale refused when interrogated to take the lower road, the path
of least resistance, the path of even partial collaboration. Again and again his
captors attempted fruitlessly to finally break his will, to turn this "war hero"
into some sort of propaganda tool, knowing that their only hope for victory on
the battlefield lay in sapping the will of the American people at home. They
tortured him for tactical information too, of course, and of course he gave in,
a little. Everyone eventually gives in. But the instant they took the pressure
off and tried to turn him with
faux
kindnesses, the type of thing a tortured man too often blubbers over gratefully,
he always bounced straight back up into a posture of stoic resistance. In doing
so, he made the road so exhausting and harrowing for his torturers that they
never threatened him to the final extreme - an extreme he in any case assured
them by word and deed he would welcome gratefully.
Being told that he would be used in
a propaganda film, Stockdale beat himself almost senseless in his cell with a
stool, in order to deny his enemies the profitable use of his face on camera.
Suffering a vicious beating for that in return, he broke shards of glass and cut
himself, simulating a suicide attempt. When his appalled captors discovered him,
bleeding and unconscious, they finally eased the pressure off him and all the
rest of the American prisoners - having such a high profile captive die in their
custody would not advance their cause in the court of world opinion. Later, when
he retold this story in front of a hushed auditorium, one of the mids in the
room raised his hand and asked, "Did you really mean to kill yourself,
admiral?"
"Not really," the
diminutive officer, with his shock of earned white hair and unbelievable depths
of physical and moral courage replied, "but I meant to make them honestly
believe that I would."
So he led men
in combat, and he led men in captivity, and years later he would lead other
young men to weigh themselves against his almost impossible example, while also
telling us that: It was OK to get knocked down, the content of your character
was measured in how quickly you sprang back up again. And that, above all, it
was OK to do the best you could - some would fight harder, and some less hard.
Some would do better, and some worse. All that your country can ask of you, and
all that you will ever ask of yourself in the long days and nights after your
time of trial is over, is whether you gave it your all, every last bit. If you
can answer, "Yes I did - that was all I had," then you had no judgement to fear
from any man, and nothing to hate in yourself.
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