Lt. David Carey On Surviving As A POW W/ Admiral James Stockdale (with Stoicism)

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2:30Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

3:21Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I think I've talked about this before. You may have seen or listened to, as I think we put some of them on this podcast, the talks I've been doing at the U.S. Naval Academy over the last year, year and a half. That all came about because I have been a fellow at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership, which is based there at the Naval Academy. It's a very important part of Admiral Stockdale's legacy, someone we've talked about. I wrote about him in The Obstacles of the Way. One of the great modern practitioners slash philosophers in the great tradition of the Stoics who didn't just talk about these ideas, but tried to live them.

4:10And as Stockdale himself said, tested the ideas in the laboratory of human experience. So I've gotten to know the folks there at the Leadership Center quite a bit. They've been very helpful on the books that I've been writing. And I wrote Courage. They introduced me to some wonderful Navy SEALs and people whose ideas about courage had stood up on the battlefield after grievous injuries, things like that. And so So I was talking to Joe Thomas, who's the director there. And I just said, who else should I talk to? Who else would be interesting? And he gave me a bunch of, gave me the phone numbers of the handful of Stockdale's POWs who are still with us.

4:51It's incredible. I think that was 50 years ago now that those men came home, the POWs who were imprisoned in North Vietnam. And he gave me the interview, he gave me the info and I sent some emails out. I heard back, we've been playing phone tagging. And one of them, it turns out, lives in Georgetown, which is about 45 minutes from where I live in Texas, about 45 minutes from the painted porch. So I said, hey, instead of me just asking some questions for research I'm doing, would you want to just come out and do the podcast? And Dave Carey said yes. Dave Carey was shot down a few months after Stockdale.

5:30He was interned as a POW in Hanoi for five and a half years. Among his military honors are the Legion of Merit. He won five Bronze Stars, two Meritorious Service Medals, the Purple Heart, eight Air Medals, and the Navy Commendation Medal. After he returned from Vietnam, where he'd been a fighter pilot, shot down in the same kind of plane as Stockdale, he had three positions as a commanding officer, including service as director of the Navy's leadership and management training program. And he retired from the Navy with the rank of captain. And he's written a beautiful, inspiring book called The Ways We Choose Lessons for Life from a POWs Experience.

6:08Came out in 2005. He signed some copies. So I'll link to that in today's show notes. You'll go to his website at davecarry.com. We had just an absolutely amazing conversation. I very much enjoyed it. It was an honor to sit across from him. And we kick off this episode with a funny little connection we have in common. My youngest son is a fan of his work in a way that you might not have anticipated. So this is part one of my episode with Captain Dave Carey. Enjoy.

6:47I was thinking we have a weird connection. You won't think of this, but my youngest son, he's like obsessed with boats. Yeah. And for some reason, he really likes boats sinking. So he likes the Titanic. And he has made me watch a video of the USS Arinsky sink. Ariskany. Ariskany sink like 500 times. Oh, is that right? He's obsessed with it. Because there's videos that they prepped it and then they shot. He's just fascinated with it. How old is your son? He's four. He just turned four on Sunday. Yeah. But that was your ship. Oh, yes, it was. You spent a lot of time on that ship. I did. And let me tell you how old you start to feel when they sink your ship to make it a diving reef.

7:33Yeah. Where did they sink it? Off the beach in Pensacola. Oh, interesting. Yeah. It's in the Gulf. Yeah. All the prep they had to do. Yeah. Because you'd think you'd just be like, well, sink ship and they go to the bottom. But when they sync them on purpose, there's some environmental regulations they have to follow. Yeah. If it's on purpose, it would have been better to just run into a rock or something somehow. Yeah. And also, how do you sync something that is basically designed to be unsyncable? That's right. That's right. Like, it can be disabled pretty easily, but sync is a very different thing.

8:18Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of it feeling, it makes you feel old. How long ago do those events feel to you? Well, in most ways, it's like yesterday. Yeah, I was curious. It's like a lot of things in our lives that have a big impact on us.

8:42Somehow they remain fresh in our memory. Sure. And then, of course, after I retired, I went into the speaking business and I used that as an analogy for dealing with problems, change, and uncertain future. And so that probably keeps it reasonably fresh. You revisit it. Yeah. Not necessarily from a place of trauma, but you're revisiting it because you're telling the story and you're trying to put people in your shoes in that moment all the time. Yes. and I'm trying to make connections to their lives and their business. And yes. Walk me through that day. You're in your Skyhawk. You take off. What happens?

9:25Well, we launched about 7 o 'clock in the morning. We were going on a strike. There were going to be 18 airplanes together, so we get organized overhead, head towards North Vietnam. We were about 60 miles off the coast. As we crossed the beach, they started shooting. They always start shooting. And among all the other stuff, the target that day was a small railroad bridge just inland from the port city of Haiphong. And so as we crossed the beach, they started shooting. And among all the other stuff, they fired some SAM, surface-to-air missiles, SAMs, from way, way out in front of us. And, I mean, this is all so clear in my mind.

10:06It's amazing, you know. And so the first – back then, a surface-to-air missile was about the size of a small telephone pole. And for miles away, you could see them launch them because of the flame and it kicked up from getting them off the rails. And once they're in the sky, the plume of flame on the booster rocket is so big and so bright, you just track them as they go through the sky. So our basic tactic was to not do much of anything until we found something that seemed to be tracking us. because otherwise you just jink forever and never get to a target. You don't know if the bell tolls for thee yet.

10:45That's right. You don't know. And you're hoping that you see the ones that have your name possibly written on them. And so I watched the first missile. They launched two missiles. And I watched the first one, and it's just a point of light sitting on my windshield. And eventually it starts to move on the windshield, so I know it won't hit me. It's a relative motion kind of thing. And the second missile just sat there and sat there and sat there until finally I decided if it wouldn't move, I would. And what I decided to do that day was instead of going to my left, because there were 16 airplanes out here beside me somewhere.

11:22And everybody's kind of flying wild trying to avoid things. There's only one airplane on my right. And so I decided to just pitch my airplane up, go across the airplane on the right in a big barrel roll kind of thing, come down on the outside, press onto the target. And it was a brilliant idea until I was upside down over this guy beside me who happened to be my flight lead. And the missile went between us and there was a huge explosion. The fireball blew the tail section off the airplane, which I didn't know. So did it make contact or it exploded between you? No, it exploded in between us. But the explosion blew the tail section off my airplane.

12:05Well, I can tell you about Al, too. But my airplane stayed on its back and started spinning upside down and falling through the sky. And it's like everything was in slow motion. I mean, this thing has come through the sky like a rock, you can imagine. But it's all in slow motion. And so I'm kicking the pedals and stirring the stick and trying to figure out what's going on. And we were shaking so – the airplane was shaking so bad that nothing would focus. You know, when I look at the instrument panel, see if I can figure out which way I was going, it was just a blur. And so I'm trying to fly the airplane or get it to fly.

12:51And so I started this at about 18 ,000 feet or 20 ,000 feet. As I go through 4 ,000 feet, I get a glimpse of my altimeter, and I can see the needle go through four. And I knew I had to get out. You know, with airplanes nowadays, you can't – well, I don't know about airplanes that will pull a ton of Gs like an F-35 or something. But in those days, you needed 6 ,000 or 8 ,000 feet to even think about getting recovery. And so I'm upside down. I reach down and my butt's about this far off, you know, four inches off the seat. Sure. Because I'm upside down. Yeah, yeah. And the seats are built, it's like sitting on a rocket or a mortar shell.

13:37Yeah. So the seats are built so that you have to have your butt in the seat when that seat cooks off or else by the time it gets to your back, it'll just crush your back. Sure. So I grab the stick with both hands. I pull on it with all I had. I pull my butt up into the seat. I grab the handle between my legs and poof, I ejected straight down. Shooting the wrong way. The wrong way. The wrong way. You're trying to avoid going towards the ground. And I don't know how high I was by then, but I know that everything worked the way the book says it's supposed to work. I had a shoot. I had maybe two swings in the shoot.

14:19I could hear airplanes. I could hear guns. I could hear explosions. And then I hit the ground. I landed in the middle of a small North Vietnamese village. How long between seeing the missile and touching the ground? What are you talking about, five minutes? Oh, no, no, no, no. It's probably more like, well, it might have been five minutes. I mean, I saw the missile way out in front of me and I was tracking it. So it might have been five or six minutes or something. But from the time I decided to make my move until I hit the ground was probably maybe two minutes at the most. Yeah, it wasn't long.

15:09But it felt long. Oh, it felt like forever, yeah. Because your training slows time down. I don't know what does it, but it slowed down. Yeah. In my mind, it's kind of slow. I can picture it. I can picture the cockpit. I can picture the blur. I vividly see the altimeter with the needle going through 4 ,000. And that whole process was slow, it seems like. Yeah, because even to drop, what is that, 16 ,000 feet, that takes a little bit of time. It takes a little bit of time, yeah. So fast. Sure, yeah. I mean, you're hurtling through space. Yeah, if you're just going straight down like dropping a rock, you know, it goes pretty fast.

15:57I've read that, I mean, famously they talk about this at the Naval Academy, but Stockdale, as he's parachuting in, says to himself, I'm leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus. I wonder, is he really thinking about philosophy as he's hurtling towards Earth, or is that something we think about later? Yeah, I think we think about that later. I can't imagine. I mean CAG might – so Admiral Stockdale was the carrier air group commander. Yes. We called him CAG. Okay. And he was the CAG from the Oriskany. Now, he got shot down the year before I got there. So he had been long gone by the time I got there.

16:40But I have a hard time remembering to call him somebody other than CAG, quite frankly. Yeah. So I think that's – hindsight is always more brilliant. Maybe he was at a higher elevation, had a little bit more time. Maybe he had more time to think about it. Because I do wonder – I mean you have a little time to think about it and people had gone down before you. So did you have a moment to consider what was awaiting you? No, no, no. I didn't. I was busy as a one-armed paper hanger. I was really, you know, I'm trying to fly this airplane. I'm trying to figure out what to do with it. I was just very, very busy.

17:23And then I hit the ground. So I come down in this little village. I mean, literally, I went right between two hoochies. And my parachute is sort of hung over one of these, I call them hoochies, kind of a shack. Sure. And there's nobody around. So I get rid of my helmet and my parachute. I ducked out between the hoochers. I don't know where I was going, but there was a rice paddy there, so I started out through it. Yeah, and, you know, in retrospect, as I've thought about it, I was probably in some sort of shock or something. Sure. You know? You just had a rocket shot up your ass twice, basically.

18:06First from the missile and then from the ejection. That's right. Yeah, you've fallen 20 ,000 feet. You've been subjected to incredible Gs. I was a mess. Yeah. When does it hit you that best-case scenario you're being rescued, but the worst-case scenarios are not great? Well, the best-case scenario of being rescued was not an option. That just was not a possibility. I mean, you know, the airspace in North Vietnam is probably the most heavenly defended airspace ever in history. And to bring a helo into that, we're up in Haiphong. We're not down in the root pack somewhere where there's not much going on.

18:53We're right in the center of it with suicide. So we knew if you went down in that whole Haiphong, Hanoi area. You're on your own? Yeah, you'd kiss it goodbye for a while. So what goes through your mind next then? Evade escape? No. Well, so I go out across this rice paddy or into this rice paddy, and there's nobody around. I go into the rice paddy, and I can look up, and I can see the airplanes flying away. So I'm trying to run in the rice paddy, which is really hard with all the mud. But I'm out there and I get to about the middle of the ice paddy and one of those airplanes is turning around and he's coming back.

19:37And so I stop and I dig out this little radio that we carried, which is about the size of a couple of iPhones pasted together. And I had had this radio in my hands a lot. I mean a lot. On the ship, they used to make us get them out every couple of weeks and check the batteries. We used to play with them sometimes on the ship. But now I'm standing on the rice paddy. I got mud up to the middle of my calves. I'm looking. I'm watching this one airplane. It's coming right straight at me. I've got this one. For the life of me, I couldn't get that radio turned on. It was like I had all thumbs on both of my hands.

20:13And this is not a complicated machine. It had like two little switches on it, but I can't get him in the right sequence, and he's coming faster. And finally, I promise you, by blind luck, about the time he boomed across the top, I managed to mash down on the right combination of buttons on that radio, and it sparked to life, which allowed me to say, in my very finest airline pilot drawl, I started babbling in that radio. I'm going, give me help. I need help. Give me somebody. Come on. And I'm babbling in this radio. And the whole time I'm thinking, this does not sound good. Yeah. But there was nothing I could do about it.

20:57I just went on and on. And I had been trained, as you probably would guess, that it would have been better for me to die than not sound good on a radio. I mean, this is serious pilot stuff. But there was nothing. I just babbled and babbled and went on that radio. And the best thing that happened was I ran myself out of breath. And when I ran out of breath, I had to pause the inhale. When I paused the inhale, I let off one of those buttons on the radio, which allowed Dean then to get a word in edgewise. And he said, you know, we cannot come and get you. At which point I couldn't think of anything clever to say.

21:34And Dean said, I'll see you when this is over. And he flew away. And I stood out there in the middle of rice paddy. It was like I was the only person in the entire intergalactic universe. Yeah. Was me out there by myself all alone. and when I speak one of the connections I make with people is I say hey I probably don't have to describe that to you too much because I'd be willing to bet money you've had some time in your life when you get that alone feeling stuff happens to us and so then I wasn't alone for very long of course I was immediately surrounded by, I tell people, about a million North Vietnamese.

22:23That's an exaggeration. There were only 800 ,000 of them. They captured me so fast. I mean, when I look back at where I had come from, there were a jillion people lined up on that levee along the rice paddy. And they captured me and drug me up out of there. They tied me up with a bunch of rope, lots of rope. I mean miles of rope. And then after they had me all tied up, they wanted to undress me. And they didn't untie me, but they took a machete made out of leaf spring of a car and they would reach in between the rope and just grab handfuls of my gear and chop it off.

23:00And then they threw me in a truck and took me into Haiphong, the port city there, and into a big prison. I mean, some of the prisons in North Vietnam were the things that the French had built over there in the early 1900s. You know, the kind of things you see in movies with huge stone walls and little air slits up at the top. So I spent the day there. They started some interrogations. And then that night they threw me in a truck and took me to Hanoi. It's about 60 clicks, 60 kilometers from Haiphong to Hanoi. It took all night to get there. And then that started my time. And there wasn't then, if Stockdale had been recently shut down and there wasn't – Year ago.

23:55Yeah. So there wasn't a sense of, hey, it's going to be a year, five – it was all unknown. The outcome was unknown. Yeah, absolutely unknown. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, it was. And it was that way the whole time we were there, actually. Actually, we had no idea when this was going to be over. I would tell you where we were, you could be an optimist or you could be a pessimist, and there wasn't a lot of percentage in being a pessimist. Things were pretty crummy already. So I think all the guys I know, we all thought we were going to get out of here someday. We just didn't know when.

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27:23Stockdale, I think, said that the optimist, though, that's who got crushed, that there was something problematic about hope and that it could always be ripped out from under you. But I can't imagine that pessimism serves one particularly well either. Not at all. Yeah. I don't think. First of all, let me give you a disclaimer. I haven't read Keg's work on the Stockdale paradox. I haven't read how he frames that up or I haven't – okay. I have read some clips. Yeah. Okay. When I was in Hanoi, what I thought we were told, and Cag was a genius. I mean, Admiral Stockdale, you know how God raises up people for certain situations like Churchill in World War II?

28:16Stockdale was that kind of guy. Destiny taps you on the shoulder, he says. He was that kind of guy. Yeah.

28:23And, well, so I can tell you a CAG story. Please. So one day, you know, we communicated by tapping on the walls, and it did take a long time, weeks or months maybe for stuff to get around. Yeah. But one day we were, I was living with some guys, and we're in this cell, and we get a message tapped on the wall, and it says, CAG sends the following. remember what Epictetus said I'm paraphrasing so we get off the wall first of all who was Epictetus we know anything about Epictetus what might Epictetus have said the Navy didn't send you all to get a postdoc in ancient philosophy I mean but it was a great thing because we could talk I mean, we could pass – we passed weeks talking about who you think Epictetus was.

29:19What's Keg talking about? You think he's smoking dope over there? What is going on with Keg? And so eventually somebody somewhere in the chain sent a message back or maybe we did and said, okay, we give up. We don't know who Epictetus was and we don't know what he said. And so he comes back. This all takes a lot of time. Eventually, it comes back, and I can only paraphrase, but he said, Epictetus said, don't spend your time worrying about stuff over which you have no influence or control. Sure. And we thought, that's great. Yeah. I mean, so we talked about that for a lot. I mean, this is what we did.

30:04We would dissect everything. But we decided, of course, what he's telling us is tend to our knitting here and don't get all wrapped around the axle about the war and what's going on in the United States or stuff. Let's just do our job here, which I thought was absolutely brilliant. It was absolutely brilliant. So that kind of got our minds right. And what did you take it to mean your job was in that moment? Our job was to continue to resist, to try to in any way we could take care of each other and help each other, to remember that we were still in the United States military. and just because we got shot down didn't mean all of a sudden we were transformed into weirdo hippie freaks, which was what, that was the way it was in the States.

31:04And so now we come to this Dockdale paradox. Somewhere in my experience, another message came from CAG, okay? And I don't remember – what I remember is the essence of what I took from it. I don't remember wording and I certainly don't remember any kind of old Greek philosophy or anything associated with it. Okay. And it was that our posture, our thinking need to be one of realistic optimism. Okay. In other words, you're not just an overflowing, blind, optimistic person. There's a realism here. But on the other hand, we needed to be looking for the pony in all this mess and remembering that, you know, thinking that one day we're going to be out of here.

32:14We have a job to do. We're doing the best we can do and be realistic about what our situation is. That then got translated somehow, as I understand it, into the Stockdale paradox. Yes. Okay. Let me tell you. I personally know of no optimist who perished or had insurmountable problems. And I know of no pessimist who, because of his pessimism, was a crushed. I don't know. Those comments, which at least online I've seen attributed to Keg, I absolutely disagree with. And I think, I don't know if that was like Keg in his parachute thinking about Epictetus, you know, where time does things to our thinking.

33:12Sure. So as far as if CAG's paradox was we're realistic optimists, right on. Yeah, I think as I understand because it's most famously in Jim Collins' good to great. And the paradox is effectively you have to, on the one hand, and unflinchingly accept the reality of the situation you're in, which is not good. You know, you are in a prison with an unknown release date, if there ever is one. But then he says, I never lost faith in my ability to decide the end of the story, that if I got out, I would be proud of who I was and what I did with the time that I was in there, or what I did afterwards. Right.

34:04No, I agree with that. Yeah.

34:09I would take exception to the word if because we were always going to get out of there. No, we didn't know when, but – and it didn't take much to get us stirred up, at least the guys I was with. You know, if the guard smiled when he unlocked the door in the morning, we're thinking he knows something we don't know. Sure. We're out of here. Yeah. Get your toothbrush. We're going. But we just never got out the door. But was that demoralizing? No. The day you think it's going to happen and then it doesn't happen? No, no, no. No? It just keeps you going? You get used to it. Keeps you going. Yeah. It's like a game.

34:46Yeah. Like, oh, things are bad now, but it'll get better, you know. Or things are good now, but it'll get bad. It was – But were there people that gave up? Like, could you see having – take out of that situation? If someone loses heart, decides they're never going to recover, they're never going to find love again, they're never going to walk again, there is a sort of a self-fulfilling nature of that in life. So I have to imagine you guys were trying to encourage each other so people didn't give up or become too pessimistic. Oh, most certainly. Yeah. And the good – the fortunate thing about the situation was if you were having a bad day, I probably wasn't or vice versa.

35:34Sure. So if you're having a bad day and you – I mean I remember when I turned 30 years old. I told my cellmates, I just turned 30 years old. The flower of my manhood is being spent in this damn prison. I am going over in that corner. I'm going to sit there and die. Now, don't bug me. Yeah. And they said, yeah, go sit in the corner and die. But, you know, so I'm sitting in the corner. Yeah. And that day what happened was they got into this argument about something, and it became obvious to me they needed my input. And so I'm up out of the corner. I can't die. You guys are wrong. I don't have time right now.

36:12You guys are wrong. I got to straighten this thing out. So if I was having a bad day, they weren't, you know, and we just took care of each other. The hardest part probably was being by yourself. Now, I was only by myself for a couple of months, but somebody like CAG being by himself for all those years, that's really hard. Fortunately, he was in contact, but it was not. I know of no one who got into the dump such that it was that bad. So we had 18 guys who disappeared. We called them the lost sheep. I don't know what happened to those guys. Okay, their bodies have all been accounted for, but they flat out disappeared.

37:02Now, whether how they died, I have no idea. We have no idea. But aside from that, now some of them were very sick physically. one of them I can't think of his name off the top of my head was Catatonic but I have no idea what their situation was but amongst the other 400 of us it was not a problem How old were you when you were shot down? I was 25 when I was shot down Did you notice? I was curious there was a big age range like Stockdale was older, he had kids almost in high school Yes. How did you notice age affecting different guys? I imagine being a POW at 22 is a different experience than a 38-year-old who's been through more things.

37:54Yes. Well, first of all, the 38-year-old turns out to be wiser or more life experience, even though I wouldn't want you to let those guys know I said that.

38:11and had been through more life experience and were better able to guide this whole mess, I think. Now, they couldn't do as many push-ups or sit-ups, but we weren't so old back then. I mean, Cag was probably in his mid-early 40s maybe when he was shot down. I'd have to figure it out. So they weren't so old, but they had a lot more experience. I mean, you know, by the time CAG got shot down, he had been a squadron commanding officer. He had a lot of experience. Yeah. And thus with the older guys that did get shot down, they brought a lot of experience with them. but other than that it was you know so we were organized militarily i mean when they would shuffle the deck and move us around when they closed the doors the first thing we figured out was who's the senior person in this room now yeah and who's next senior and who's next senior get that all worked out then the next was who's the senior person in this building with whom we have contact or who's the most senior person we can get to, period.

39:31So this was not a pickup ballgame. It was very – You're constantly finding order in the chaos. Oh, yes. And that's a form of resiliency. You're reasserting structure and control and systems that they're trying to break you of repeatedly. They kept trying to tell – I mean, we'd go to interrogation. They want something, whatever. We'd say you got to talk to the senior guy. You're a big lecture about – well, if they wanted it bad enough, they'd come get it. But we always referred them to the senior guy. From what I have experienced with fighter pilots is that these are masters of their destinies.

40:14These are alpha men and women. They're used to defying the elements, defying gravity. And then all of a sudden you find yourself in a situation where 99 % of your life is not in your control. As Epictetus says, very little is in your control. It's a rude introduction to the idea of acceptance and surrender. It's a very rude introduction. It's a rude awakening. Oh, yes. How did you struggle with that? Well, I'll tell you a story. I'm to the point in my life where there are no sound bites anymore I love the story so I got shot down they took me to Hanoi and they began to interrogate me the interrogation led to beatings, the beatings led to torture and we got to the point where I hurt so bad I knew I had to do something and what I decided to do was hold out as long as I could and then lie and so we got to that point and see I'd like to be able to tell you that took weeks.

41:21It didn't take weeks. I don't really know how long it took because I lose a little track of time in there. But we got to the point where I had to do something. I started lying. I lied about everything you can possibly imagine. Every question they asked, I had a lie. I made up a lie for. And finally they got done with me and they left.

41:43Now, I'll skip a lot of details. I couldn't get up off the floor. My arms didn't work anymore. But worse than that, aside from when I didn't have control of my mind, that's another story. But when I finally started to get my head back together, it's as close as I've ever been, and maybe I was, depressed, to depression. I mean, first of all, I had been through all the training. I knew how to conduct myself in this kind of situation. Second of all, I had seen every John Wayne movie that had ever been made, and I knew how an American fighting man conducted himself here, and I had not been able to do that.

42:22They had broken me. So there was a period of time there for a couple weeks where, I mean, I was lower than whale dung. And the best thing that happened was they came in after a couple weeks and told me, get your stuff. I had a mat by then and I'm like, roll your stuff up. And they took me over and put me in a cell and they brought in another guy. His name was Tom Norris. He was an Air Force thud driver, F-105 pilot. And he had been shot down a few days ahead of me. And so, I mean, when we finally quit crying and hugging each other and start talking, come to find out that what I had been through, he had been through.

43:13Where I hadn't been strong enough, tough enough, however you want to think about it, neither had he. So we're thinking, this is good. We are soulmates now. I mean, literally, we'd have conversations about, you know, I don't know what's going to happen when we get out of here, what the military is going to do with us or think about us. And at one point we decided, well, if we're going to be men without a country, we can go together and we'll just bum around the world. I mean, it was a shattering experience to find out just how untough I was.

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45:45To me, though, from what I have read, kind of maybe the most beautiful and inspiring and perhaps unsung role that people like Stockdale and others whose names I don't remember played, it wasn't just the defiance or the courage or the endurance, but it was really the mechanisms that they created to give people support after they broke. And he talked a lot about avoiding guilt and shame and then coming back from that dark place. Oh, yeah. Well, they knew. I mean, they went through the same sorts of things to whatever extent they did. And so, you know, when they told us, look, here's the deal. You bend and when you can't do it anymore, you do what you have to do to get out from under it, but then you bounce back.

46:43and yeah it was that kind of so you know so Tom and I then find out over time that this has happened to everybody oh well so this is the norm here if they want to bust your hump they can bust your hump and you just have to come back and so as stark as that might sound it was good okay if they take me out and do this I just have to get through it somehow and eventually get my act back together. And part of that whole process was, I'm trying to think if we had some sort of guidance along. I can't remember if we were told or if the heavies came up with this kind of thing or not. But the way we conducted ourselves was if they took you out, no matter what, whether it was bad or really bad or whatever, whenever you got back into circulation, we confessed.

47:45We told everything. Everybody knew everything. I remember when Cag sent through the wall one day, we got another message from Cag, and he said, it is neither Christian nor American to haunt a repentant sinner to the grave. We thought, whoa, that's deep. What do you think Keg's talking about now? You think he's smoking dope over there? What is going on with Keg? But of course, eventually, we're like a box of rocks. Eventually, we say, oh, he's telling us how we're to conduct ourselves with each other. Kindness, forgiveness, acceptance. Kindness, forgiveness, take them back into the fold. Rehabilitation.

48:26You know, the whole Christian confession sort of thing. Come back, tell everybody what happened, get taken back into the fold because your day was coming. I think what's so beautiful about that is there is, especially amongst tough people, a reluctance to share, a reluctance to be vulnerable. They say in Alcoholics Anonymous, you're only as sick as your secrets. Yeah. But we want to keep secrets about what we're struggling with or what we've done. Believe me, we do. We really do. Yeah. You know, and it's – but that was not the way we lived over there. The way we lived over there was we came back and told whoever we were with everything that happened.

49:09And it got spread around. And then life moved on. Because we were talking about optimism or pessimism earlier. But I do imagine shame and guilt. That will kill you. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. If you think you're not worthy of living. I'll tell you, those first few weeks when I was there were probably the worst weeks of my life. And because, you know, it was all shame and guilt. Like, holy cow, you know, I didn't do what I was supposed to do. This name rank and serial number thing didn't work for me. Sure. On and on and on it went. Yeah, sure. How has that informed the rest of your life? I got to imagine you're a pretty good ear now for people who maybe feel guilty about something or struggling with something.

49:58And you've seen it all and done it all. Well, let me tell you this way. I am a hardcore follower of Jesus Christ. Okay. And that idea when John wrote in his first letter, when we fail, we are to confess our sins and God is consistent to forgive us. I see that I mean I'm supposed to be that way I'm supposed to treat you that way I'm supposed to interact with everyone that way and so I mean I've told my kids I tell my grandchildren hey when you screw up you gotta fess up but it's gonna be okay it's not the end of the world That is the most beautiful part of the Christian tradition, I think, is that no one is beyond redemption.

51:01No one is beyond redemption. Yeah. Which is really good news for me. I don't know about you, but it's good news for me that no one is beyond redemption. That's right. But yeah, I do think we have this idea of you and your peers as being unbreakable, and that's how you got through it. But that's a kind of a superficial understanding of what actually being resilient is. It's not that you – there's a Hemingway quote I love. He says something like, the world breaks everyone, but the ones that will not break the world kills. But those that do break, he says, can become strong in the broken places. I think that's right.

51:43If you break your leg where it heals back together, it's stronger than it was before it was broken. So I think that's right. And, you know, the absolute truth is that life's going to be full of bumps. And we are going to go through things that are discouraging, hurtful, and even to the point of our brokenness. Right. Some of those will be self-inflicted. Yeah, some of those are self-inflicted. Lots of those are self-inflicted. But it's the idea that we can deal with that. We're resilient. Yes.

52:34So you want to talk about PTSD for a minute? Please. So I get asked often, hey, do you have PTSD? Steve, you didn't? And I said, no, I didn't. Nothing. Nothing bothers me. Nothing bothers me. Now, I'll say a couple of things about that. One, you know that our treatment changed in the – started to change a little bit in the fall of 69 and they backed off a little bit of pressure. And the last couple of years we were there, it became obvious, for example, that if the interrogator wanted to hammer you, he had to go get permission. And sometimes he would, but sometimes he wouldn't. And so they backed that pressure, that constant pressure off.

53:17And I tell people now, I would never have thought of these words at the time. Never. But from that time on in those cells, we were doing group therapy. Now, we didn't even know what group therapy was, but here are a group of guys locked up 24-7. We talk about anything we want for as long as we want, and then we can talk about it again and again and again. So that by the time we were released, we were ready to go. You know, in that ex-POW group, the percentage of problems ranging from very minor to suicide is like minuscule. It's minuscule. That group has done extremely, extremely well. And I think it's because of that time and that process.

54:07I believe we were created to process outside of ourselves. We do not do well up here in our heads. Stuff just goes around. I think it's really important you say that because Stockdale is so well known for his association with stoicism, which in today's world, stoicism, lowercase stoicism is has no emotions, feels nothing, stuffs it down. And that's really the opposite of the work you guys were doing together and that he was leading and encouraging, which was talk about it, process it, deal with it, get it out, not pretend it didn't happen, pretend it didn't exist, pretend you're invulnerable and superhuman.

54:48No, you're absolutely right. Yeah, that was not the way he thought about it, at least in my understanding. And it certainly wasn't the way we thought about it. I mean, even the fact that he's sending messages to you guys and they're not, hey, make sure your room's clean. He's saying, here's some advice. Think about this. Don't be too hard on yourself. We're in this together. He's trying to bring everyone together because the sum is greater together. Yeah. And in a way that, I mean, when he sent the message about it's neither Christian nor American to haunt or repent and send her to the grave. I mean, you know, he was telling us we're to stay connected here and get ourselves back together.

55:33And he was not, we were not ostracizing anyone. And he was, he wasn't talking about that as the field commander far away. He was talking about himself also. He's trying, he's trying to deal, process his own guilt and shame and, and, and struggle. I think so. I think so.

55:59Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.

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