Sid Stockdale On The Stoic Legacy Of His Father, Admiral James Stockdale

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3:19Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. We've talked a lot about Admiral James Bond Stockdale here on this podcast quite a bit. I have written about him in my books. I've told his story here on this podcast. I have talked to people who have known him. I've talked to people for whom his work shaped and informed them and hardened them in moments of great adversity and difficulty. There's this link obviously going from Epictetus to Stockdale. Stockdale is shot down over North Vietnam in 1965. He says to himself, I'm leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.

4:02And he spends seven years there as a prisoner, tortured, solitary, confinement, isolation, loneliness. It's an incredible feat of human perseverance, grit, determination, virtue, all of that. But one of the problems with the celebration of heroes like that isn't, because I'm not about to do some revisionist history on Stockdale, quite the opposite. What I'm saying is that our focus on him obscures the other people involved in this story. His wife, Sybil Stockdale, is writing letters back and forth with Stockdale as it's happening, communicating in code, helping pass along intelligence about other prisoners who are there so their families aren't so alone.

4:46She ultimately creates sort of a lobbying organization, a group of POW mothers and wives and relatives that helps bring those POWs home that's still active today. I think they're even making a movie about it. And then, of course, we also don't talk about his children. James Stockdale had four children, four boys, who were prisoners, in a different sense, prisoners of the circumstances of the loss, the deprivation, having to grow up without their dad. Their dad was there, but they couldn't touch him. And of course, they were proud of him, inspired by him, but they also missed him deeply and they missed out on stuff because of him.

5:24So I was very excited to get connected to one Sid Stockdale, who was 11 years old when Stockdale was shot down. and as the second oldest boy, a lot of the weight of that fell on him. And he's written this beautiful memoir. We have a memoir of Stockdale, his book, Courage Under Fire. Stockdale and his wife wrote a book called In Love of War, which is amazing. And now we have a world apart, growing up Stockdale during Vietnam. It came out in April and it's Sid's story. It's what it's like to be a kid in those days. It's what it's like to have James Stockdale as a father. And it's a beautiful book.

6:09I was excited to read an early copy of it. And I was excited more still that Sid wanted to come on the podcast and talk about it. This is the first time one of the four Stockdale children have shared their experience, their trauma, what they learned from their dad, what they want other people to know about it. Sid's had an incredible life. He was an educator for 40 years. He taught history. He was a department chair where he hired and evaluated and mentored teachers in independent schools across the country. He got his master's degree from St. John's College, which is a great books college. So he followed it in his father's footsteps, studying the classics.

6:46And now he's written this great book, A World Apart, Growing Up Stockdale During Vietnam. We just added it here at the Painted Porch at the bookstore. And he and I had a great conversation. I think you're really going to like this. and I remained fascinated with the family. And, you know, they say don't meet your heroes. You know, there's always a chance there's someone you so admire. You know, you hear about those who lived up close and personal with them that maybe some of the shine comes off. Maybe it turns out, I mean, it's always going to turn out to be more complicated, more human. But, you know, maybe you find out that beneath the public facade or character, there's something darker, which again would be understandable given what Stockdale goes through.

7:26But that's not what comes through at the book at all. Certainly not what comes through in today's interview, which is why I was so excited to bring it to you. And I think you're all going to enjoy it very, very much. So here's me talking to Sid Stockdale.

7:48I was trying to think about where to start this, and I thought maybe I'd start sort of in the middle. Do you remember the first time... you heard of stoic philosophy in your house? When would that have been? I really, probably the first time I heard it was when dad returned from prison. And, and it was something he didn't launch into it, but he was very, very interested in sharing with us the power that stoicism provided for him while he was in prison. And it came through more and more over time. You would have been very young when he found it. And then you would have been about the age that you could start to wrap your head around it when he came home.

8:36That's right. So when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in 1962, I was eight years old. And that's that is where my memoir begins is in 1962. and I was eight years old. And then when he came home, I was 18 years old. I was getting ready to go off to college. So yes, I could very much wrap my head around it.

9:02Reading the book was incredible for me because I have a six-year-old, which isn't quite an eight-year-old. I know there's a difference, but I could really see just what the effect and then at the same time, the incomprehensibility of your father, first off, going to war, then your father being missing, and then your father being found, but not available to you. Like how that must have affected someone your age is really, it's unreal to think about. Well, it's, you know, I was born at test pilot school in Patuxent River, Maryland. So my whole life, my father was a jet pilot and he had been deployed all through, they were doing training exercises in the South China Sea and in the Western Pacific Ocean, beginning in really 58, 59, all the way through.

9:58And they would, those deployments were usually about eight months in duration. So we were brought up with that being normal and surrounded by, you know, other fighter pilots. And so that was just the way things were. Well, what was it like? I mean, was it the Great Santini or was it something very, very different? Oh, it was very different. No, my dad was, when he was at home, he was really very, very comfortable and casual and he liked to wrestle around with us. And, um, you know, I mean, it was throw the football and let's, you know, he would play, play the piano. And, uh, it was, um, when the war got, when the war got cranked up.

10:46So 1964, after the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, he had one last, uh, return home, um, for three months before his final deployment. And I could tell that he I was older, so I was more sensitized to his bodily emotions. And and he was he had moments when he was pretty intense. But that only in retrospect comes from, you know, being in very, very tight combat situations where, you know, directions need to be followed to be very carefully and precisely. So understandable. Yeah, your childhood would have been defined by your father being absent before any of this happened. He was gone a lot. You had a family rhythm, a home life apart from him that all military families probably know and that the rest of us civilians don't really understand.

11:47Right. That's true. And the great blessing for me and was the fact that dad, the Navy decided to put dad through the Stanford graduate school, get a degree in international relations. So that meant that he was home. And that was fantastic. We had many great adventures, as I write about a few of them in my memoir. And we were really very tight. And I don't know how different it would have been, very different, if I hadn't had that when he was away. It seemed quite idyllic. I mean, you guys had like a farmhouse and a horse, and you were living a California life that probably does not exist for many Stanford grad students anymore.

12:40No, it does not. That's right. Yeah. Los Altos Hills now, of course, is the ultra posh center of the Silicon Valley. And back then, it was apricot orchards and Little League baseball. And yes, we rented a house. It was really two houses. There was one behind that one of the Blue Angels, two of the two Blue Angels lived there. They rented that place. And we had the other one. And it was 20 acres. And it came with Babe the horse. And so I know it's pretty amazing to think about that a lieutenant commander in the Navy could afford something like that. But it was different. Yeah. And I imagine there's a little bit of a parenting lesson there that's worth sort of calling out, which is when you get time with your kids, you should take it because you never know what the future holds.

13:35That period of time where he was at Stanford, you all didn't know what the next few years held. And so it's great, one, that he took the assignment and two, that he was present for it because I imagine he could have been consumed by his studies. He could have been And, you know, getting hours in on different aircraft, he could have found a way, as a lot of parents unfortunately do, with less pressing demands on their time. He could have found a way to be preoccupied then, too. Oh, there's no question about that. Yeah, no, he was always looking for an opportunity. I'll never forget again one time in just prior to the start of the war, he was going with his squadron out to Yuma, Arizona, where they would do some target practice over the Chocolate Mountains.

14:26And he told my mom, he said, hey, listen, why don't you have Sid and Jim come out on the bus? I'd love to spend a few days with them out here in Yuma. So we hopped on the Greyhound bus and we were pretty young and rode out there to Yuma and he met us. And that was it was a very powerful get together. And one of the things that really stuck with both he and I was the fact that we visited one afternoon the Yuma Territorial Prison, which was a lockup out. It's a museum right off of Highway 8. And it was it was very gloomy. They were solitary cells. You could see where the men had been chained up.

15:13and it was something that I thought about after we learned that he was in prison and he certainly thought about it in much the same way. Yeah, neither of you had any idea that that was a glimpse into the future or the possibilities. The Stoics would say, I think it was Seneca, he said, you should keep all the terms of the human condition before your mind. He says, you know, exile and war and torture and shipwreck. You know, the things we don't want to think about when you walk through an old museum or like that or something, you don't go, I could be in something like this someday, but that could happen, I guess.

15:52Yes. Yeah. And of course, by that time, he had already begun, you know, many times over, read Epictetus and the Incheridian. And I know it was in the back of his mind. You know, he didn't share any of those thoughts with us because we were so young at that point. But yeah, in the long run, it was a very, very powerful connection for both of us. It must have been a unique combination of personality traits in your father. You have this sort of fighter pilot, which is kind of a jock, swagger, cocky thing, as we know. And then he's also this intellectual. And then also in the fighter pilots that I've met, there is this love of mastery, figuring things out, being the best in the world at what you do, not in the sort of swaggering way, but you don't get drawn to a machine like that without a desire to sort of master it and figure it out and be world class at it.

16:56Right. And I think you're absolutely correct in saying that that is exactly what my father was building towards his entire fighter pilot career. After he went through the test pilot school, then he taught at the test pilot school. and uh at following there that year and a half we moved to california for the first time and he was right into a squadron and um before too long we were down in san diego and he was going to become the executive officer of bf-51 and uh he he was he was had an amazing ability to focus on details and you're absolutely correct fighter pilots uh if they're going to survive and be successful They're going to be very attentive to absolutely everything all the time.

17:45Was he a very systems-oriented guy then, sort of very organized, very checklist-y? Oh, yeah. When he was around the airplanes, it was all about the checklist. You read the book, so you know about the story. The one time I was in the cockpit with him was when he was checking out a big spad over in Coronado on North Island that had an oil leak. and we were hanging around. It was weekend. He said, hey, you want to come with me over to North Island? I want to check something out. And it was very, very kind of astounding for me to sit kind of in between his legs in this cockpit of the SPAD when he fired it up and the smoke, boom, over the canopy and the dials all registering and the plane is, you know, just bumping away.

18:36I mean, you're sitting right on the engine. And, you know, he very much attention to detail, you know, what RPMs to push him up to, what should the oil pressure be at a particular RPM. And pretty soon he realized, no, this has not been repaired to specs. And so he shut it down and we got up. But it was that was a very important part to remember, though, as soon as he confronted the maintenance officer to say, this is not fixed. I, you know, I'm not happy with this work. You know, I was waiting at the car, but I could see them having a conversation. And and by the time he got in the car and we started to tootle back across Coronado Island to our house, you know, he was back in his casual self, joking, having a good time and very relaxed.

19:23So it was it was he was a professional soldier, but he was also a very dedicated family guy. And those two things are oftentimes part of what I have learned is in the M.O. of really, you know, professional fighter pilots in my service. So someone once told me that the key to parenting is fast transitions. transitions. You know, you're at work and then suddenly you're at your front door. Can you transition? You get a text message or a phone call that's really upsetting. Then you got to go back to your kids and the ability to sort of make that transition. I imagine your father wasn't someone who messed around.

20:07So if a mechanic didn't do their job and that endangered the fighter pilot, in this case, I imagine he would have been particularly upset because you had been in the plane with him, right? And so for someone not to have taken care of something that then, you know, potentially put his family at risk. So for him to get down, handle business, but then go back to being a parent on the drive home, you know, that's a kind of day-to-day stoicism that I think is actually much harder to do than people realize, but it's key to being great at what you do and being a good parent. Yeah, I think you're absolutely correct about that.

20:43Yeah, it's, You know, things happen so much more rapidly today in the world. Back then, Dad would, I know he would consciously carve out time when he would say, hey, you know, I've got this afternoon. I'm going to I need a break from reading and studying. So, you know, I want to I'm going to take Sid. We're going to go over to that pool over Stanford University. And I just want to show him this place because it's it's so unique. And I think he'd really enjoy it. And, yeah, he carved out time. It was intentional. And that was very meaningful when I look back at it when he was in prison. The fact that he was taking time out to do that, it meant a great deal to me.

21:29So you end up having to say goodbye to your father, not knowing that it would be different, you know, than the other deployments that he had gone on. I mean, obviously that he's deploying into a combat zone. There's a different level of it. But walk us through what it's like for an eight-year-old to say goodbye. Dad's going off to Vietnam. mom? Well, you know, it depended upon how old I was. I mean, that only makes sense. So when I was eight and he was going on a deployment, you know, that was the norm. And mom, mom was always had a very stiff upper lip about things and they would smile and kiss, look forward to seeing you soon.

22:14Yeah, I'll send you a letter. And of course, that's how communication was done back then. snail mail. And then by the time he was leaving in 1965 to go back, you know, once the war had started, you know, by then I was old enough. I was 10 and I wasn't fully cognizant of what was going on, but I was much more cognizant and it affected me more. But after about, you know, once you're normalized to it for about a week and you're in your routine, it's like all the other times that dad has been away. And so it doesn't, it's not something that would nag at me after a brief period of time of adjustment.

23:07But how does it, how does it begin to sink in that it, it is different, that this isn't the normal? Well, it's, you know, it's kind of like growing up and seeing the world differently. It's not that he was doing anything differently. It was that I was perceiving it with a slightly more mature eye. And so, yeah, the real shock, of course, was the news that when he was shot down, that was a very, very emotional, traumatic experience for all of us, my mother included. And that was very hard, very different because it wasn't that he was shot down and he perished, he died somewhere. He was MIA. So you didn't know, It was the not knowing that was the hardest part of all.

24:03Sure. And that lasted for seven months. And I was in the sixth grade and I had a tough time. Again, when I wrote my memoir, I described this, it's very difficult for me to recapture daily life from that phase. in the first few years when my dad was, then we learned that he was in Hanoi Hilton. So yeah, the trauma had kind of, you know, you have these natural defenses to kick in and that's what happened. And so when I started journaling to write my memoir, I immediately had problems for the first few years of when he was shot down. And I was kind of stymied by that. And then, as I mentioned, in the book, in March of 2016, I finally acquired a copy of my mother's diary

25:12that my mother was a consummate writer. She had multiple diaries. But at the top of this one, 217 pages typed at the top of this one in her in her cursive handwriting it said written as if addressing our four boys so this was a diary that was just for us and hugely helpful when i was trying to reconstruct those first two or three years after dad was shot down well because i think kids kind of like dogs they're very easily distracted if it's not immediately in front of them. They have this sort of innocence that allows them to get lost in whatever actually is in front of them. So there's probably a part of you that's just not thinking about it necessarily or that's worried about this or that.

26:03And so I've got to imagine going back through those pages, you get thrust back into... You're able to watch that 10-year-old, that 11-year-old, that 12-year-old, through the eyes of your mother a little bit to see what you were seeing then, but you have forgotten. Right. I had forgotten the chronology of so many things. It was like I had a photograph of the past, but it had made a glass and it had shattered and I only had some of the pieces. And so with her diary, I could really more precisely recall exactly when things happened, how they happened. And that allowed for me to really go through that emotional event again.

26:53But as a, you know, as a 65 year old man who was looking back and just recalling it, and it felt very, very healthy to be able to see it clearly. Was that painful to sort of get thrust back into what must have been a scared, sad 10, 11, 12, 13, 14-year-old? No, it wasn't. It wasn't. I wouldn't say that it was – it wasn't that difficult. It was more enlightening that it was – it was both enlightening and difficult. But it was more enlightening because it – I knew what the problem was. I knew that I had these defenses that were getting in the way of my recall. So to recognize that, to know that, and then to recognize that what my mother's diary was doing was it was allowing me to kind of see beyond those barriers.

27:49It really it was it was extremely liberating. And it was felt wonderful to be able to put the thing together again. You see, here's what a lot of people. So this is. So I experienced my father in our family situation from the age of 11 to 18. Dad came home from prison with all the other guys, and it was unbelievably beautiful. And, you know, we we bonded. We we really were tight right off the bat. And I went off to college and I got a degree in history, graduated from college, and I started teaching. And I'm 30 years old and I'm at my alma mater, South Kent School in Connecticut, and I'm teaching.

28:38And all of a sudden in the mail, I'm starting to receive these thick pamphlets from mom and dad. And what they were, they were the draft chapters of their book, In Love and War. And for the first time at the age of 30, I started to learn about what dad had gone through with torture and with the leadership role that he held in prison. And also seeing the backstory about my mother, who was clandestinely communicating with my father through their mail. And that was all directed by Navy intelligence. So I experienced it. Then I'm 30 and I see the backstory. But I still then for the rest of my life, I couldn't get really past the childhood, the first three years until I received the diary.

29:34And so that kind of put everything in front of me. Now I could tell the story.

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32:35I was just thinking as you're saying this, one of the questions I get is people ask, you know, is stoicism something that one naturally is or can it be taught right this sort of being able to control your emotions be able to respond and stuff you you guys are an interesting sort of your family's kind of an interesting unintentional scientific experiment in this regard right because your father is taught stoicism and then goes off and experiences this thing and then you the rest of the family are like the control group that is also going through an ordeal and a trauma. And you have your father's example.

33:14You have some of the things that he said to you, but you don't necessarily have the same training that he does. And so I was just thinking, I wondered, as you look back at that diary, did you see the rest of the Stockdale's kind of naturally stoic? Or what did you see across those pages about you and your brothers, how you were dealing with this immensely tragic, painful thing that's also totally outside your control? Yeah, no, the, you know, as I mentioned before, we, at least I didn't really know very much about stoicism, obviously, until dad came home. right right one of the opportunities that he created again one of these other opportunities to be together was uh he joined a b the uh kind of a swim club down in coronado and they had a steam bath and it was on the beach and so we would walk down there he'd go for a swim in the pool because he couldn't run due to his stiff leg i'd go run on the beach and then we'd meet in the steam bath.

34:23And this kind of gathering in the steam bath was always a moment. It always gravitated towards a philosophical conversation related to how important Stoicism was to him and his survival. And he just naturally gravitated to it because it was the perfect opportunity to share these very, very deep thoughts with me. And it was, it was, uh, it was really beautiful. I mean, I learned so much about my, my father in that steam bath and we got so close. I eventually went on to get a master's degree at St. John's college, you know, in the great books. And part of it was, I think, because obviously he had, he really, um, uh, he didn't, he didn't put it out in front of But just having these conversations really tantalized my imagination to learn more about classical philosophy and to read the primary source documents like they do at St.

35:31John's. So I hope that answers your question. Yeah, no, I was just I was just wondering, you know, as you were able to look back at how the family held up. I mean, your your your mother seems like an incredible embodiment of stoicism. one, at the superficial level, you said the stiff upper lip, but then also, and I think this is where people misunderstand stoicism, she gets involved, right? And she begins agitating for, you know, influencing, not just her relationship with your father, you're talking about these, which you talk a lot about in the book, these sort of coded letters they're sending, But then she starts lobbying politicians.

36:13She uses her uniquely sympathetic position along with a handful of the other wives. And they start to really make change happen and apply pressure on the government, which again, I think is a thing that people don't, when the Stoics say, focus on what's in your control, they don't just mean sit there and control your emotions. They mean if you can influence things, if you can change things, if you can steer the ship, that's in your control and you should do that. And that's what your mother did. Oh, yeah. I couldn't agree more that my mother's – really, honestly, her heroism is equal to that of my father's.

36:52I mean, it's, you know, the Johnson administration's policy towards the POWs and the families was to tell them to be quiet, keep quiet. Don't talk to one another. Don't talk to the press. Well, that worked. You know, I mean, these women were. Why do you think that was? You know, the only thing I can think is that they feared that if it became public knowledge, then the question would be, well, what are we going to do about this? These guys are being held there. And how are they being treated? And why aren't we being informed about this? And of course, they had no answer for that. And that's my own take on it.

37:35But, you know, mom didn't just she wasn't just a lone agitator, you know, she in October of 1966, she against the against the policy, she invited 11 wives to our house for a luncheon. and all of them were thrilled to be together with people who are in similar circumstances. And I came home from school about 3.30 on my bike that day. And they were still just talking up a storm, having a great time together. So I took off on my bike and giving them space. And that became the first gathering of what would become the National League of Families, POWs and the missing in Southeast Asia, which was a nationwide.

38:30I mean, ultimately, in the following, in the year thereafter, other POW, MIA wives started to hear about this gathering, started to hear about this group in the San Diego area. And so they started to gather in other military towns, in Seattle, in Colorado Springs, out in Norfolk, Virginia, down in Pensacola, Florida. And this is, again, before the Internet. So all of these communications, all of this huge national organization was born in our dining room, which became the headquarters for petitions, letters, phone calls, ultimately pressure, not overt pressure on the U.S. government because the wives didn't want to, you know, make it appear as though they were opposed to our government.

39:23They just wanted to inform the government about their circumstances and to ask them to do whatever they could to try to, you know, let's get an accounting here. You know, my mother's first letter that she wrote, the first coded letter back from my dad, and you know this, the first thing he wrote in code was experts in torture, leg iron 16 hours a day. And then he proceeded to list the names of guys who he knew were in prison. And so this is in the summer of 66, right? And so if my mother knew that, certainly Naval Intelligence knew it. But the American public had no idea until, you know, after the election of 68 in 1969, when the administration went public and, you know, began to condemn the North Vietnamese for not abiding by the Geneva Conventions.

40:24I just got goosebumps as you were saying that because I interviewed Captain Dave Carey a couple months ago, who was in the Hilton with your father. And he was talking about how he didn't need to get therapy after because the groups that your father had created in there was his therapy. He was like, we were talking about what we were going through as we were going through it every day in a kind of group therapy. And so when you're just talking about your mother hosting this luncheon for the other POW wives, the first time that any of them had gotten together, it occurred to me that there's this beautiful mirror image that your mother and father are doing the exact same thing, thousands of miles apart.

41:12even though they're personally going through something, they're victims of it too. They have this part of their personality, this sort of innate draw towards leadership and being of service that they create support groups just kind of naturally, probably at great peril to both of themselves in very different ways. And then also because these things are quite effective. And so the image of the sort of two groups getting together, you know, one having a nice luncheon at your house and the other, you know, sitting around in a dank cell or in the yard, but both fundamentally doing the same thing is very, very beautiful to me.

41:57Yeah, they would never consider themselves victims. They would be adamant about that. I mean, they were advocating for each other. And, you know, even in Love and War, when Dad realizes that he's going to be able to communicate with Navy intelligence, I mean, he's so buoyed emotionally by that. You know, finally, I can get I can finally take a shot at these people and we can start to get this thing organized. And, yeah, no. What astounds me about my father's experience is that he was doing this all, you know, he was in solitary confinement for four years. Two of those years, he was blindfolded and had his arms tied behind his back.

42:56and he would talk about how he would occupy his time, you know, keep his mind sharp, what he would do, what his routines were. And that, I think, is also a trait of the Stoics, is their ability to create their own world and be content to live within it. And I've always thought of how brilliant that was of him to create something called the acronym BACKUS, BACKUS. and that was you know he realized that the traditional name rank and serial number was just not going to hold up I mean that's you can't just say that and let people hang out there and go into torture sessions they want to know what can't I do what you know not what can I do but so he said you know we're be back be do not bow in public Do not bow when you feel that a camera is on you.

44:20A, airwaves. No one voluntarily is going to go on the camp radio and start to read propaganda. C, crimes. Admit to no crimes. The North Vietnamese always contended that the Navy pilots, all the pilots, Air Force included, were criminals. and they so and and k uh kiss um you know when we get released we're not going to kiss them goodbye there's no oh that's okay we're going to hold our heads up and we're going to walk out and and we're we're going to stick together as a group and of course us is unity over self Your brother, you are your brother's keeper. You are that person next door. And that is what a lot of the guys who were in prison with dad really felt helped save them was the fact that they knew everybody around them was with them.

45:21I do think that is, again, another part of stoicism that is not particularly well understood. And then one might also not guess would be so prevalent in the military community, which we have this sort of idea of the tough men and women, sort of invulnerable. But so much of what I've read from your dad in that time, he was incredibly focused. Yeah, unity over self. I am my brother's keeper. And then he wrote and spoke so much about shame, about what happens when you break. So not this idea that you are unbreakable and that you will make no mistakes and that you can endure everything. but more when you do reveal yourself to be a human being as any person would under the immense torture and cruelty that they were subjected to, how do you repair?

46:19How do you build yourself back up? How do you help the person in the cell next to you? You know, there's such a sense of brotherhood and connection and compassion and empathy that runs through your father's interpretation of stoicism that I think is under discussed in a philosophy, you know, that can seem so aspirational and unattainable to people. Yes. Yeah, that's well put. You know, one of the other policies that my father had was that he created and, you know, sent it out as an order was, there were some people who, some prisoners who obviously broke and they decided that it was going to be in their interest to play nice with their captors because their life was going to be softer as a result.

47:13And of course, you know, some would say, well, they're traitors, you know, they're no good, they're the other, and we're going to shun them. My father always said, you know, if they want to rejoin, If they signal that they want to come back, we are going to accept them and we're not going to blame them for their decision to do otherwise. I thought this was a powerful statement that even as we're going out of the gate to go home, if then they decide that they want to come back and be part of our organization, we're not going to, we are not going to chastise, you know, this repentant sinner. We're going to accept them as one of us.

48:04And that's the kind of, that's exactly, I think, what you're driving at. He said something like, it's neither American nor Christian to hold something against someone that they have voluntarily repented or something like that. Was your father's sense of stoicism and his military sort of code of honor, was it also fused with a sort of a sense of Christianity? I mean, what you just described is also kind of the parable of the prodigal son right there, that it doesn't matter what happens. We accept them back into the fold because that's what love and brotherhood and family is about. Right. Yes. And, you know, dad would talk about that, that there were many people in prison who were deeply religious and that that was gave them strength.

48:54I would say that my, you know, obviously my parents were Christian, but that was not as much the focus so much as it was the beauty and the power of Stoicism, the empowerment that he felt from it. and not that he was non-Christian, but he wasn't one of those that would talk about that being a great source of strength for him, even though there are many parallels, as you say. I can certainly relate to that because as someone who sort of grew up Christian, my parents are sort of nominally Christian. It's just kind of there. It's kind of just out there. But if it doesn't speak to you, if it doesn't sort of hit you in the heart the way that they say Jesus is supposed to.

49:46There's something about stoicism that really hits you because you're like, here is an ethical framework for living. Here is a path to meaning and purpose and a sense of right and wrong. But it doesn't ask faith from you in the sense that you have to accept things without evidence necessarily, right? There's not the supernatural component to it, the mystical component to it that, depending on how you think about these things, if that's a stumbling block for you, stoicism can really turn you on because you're like, it's got so much of that. This is how I want to live my life in it, but without maybe the bridge too far that some of us might struggle with.

50:37Yep. No, I would agree with you. And I think, you know, because of my father's circumstances and grim circumstances, having an understanding and appreciation for the power of human will was key to his survival. And not only just survival, I don't say that. Really, it empowered him in a way that took him to a different level. He was, after a period of time, he began to really live as a Stoic. And he, it wasn't something that he consciously took on. It just, it became the most empowering way for him to live his life and control the circumstances around him. Just to shut it out. No, that's not me.

51:33This is me. I don't think it's a coincidence. either that the Stoic your father locks onto is Epictetus, right? Seneca is this rich, smart, but sort of morally corrupt guy. Marcus Aurelius has all the privileges in the world. Cato, very principled, has this sort of moral code, very upright in a way that I think your father probably would relate to, but is a politician. And Epictetus, of all the Stoics, Epictetus is the one who struggles, who knows suffering and pain and powerlessness. And it's both a coincidence that that's the book that he gets there at Stanford, but then also perfectly fitting that that's the one that he builds his own version of stoicism and sort of resilience around because they had both been through the same laboratory of human experience, to borrow your father's phrase.

52:35Yeah, no, you're absolutely correct. And, you know, when my father ejected and got to the ground, you know, his leg was severely dislocated at the knee, and he eventually lost the kneecap, and he was in a terrible way. When he arrived in the Hanoi Hilton, they didn't bring him through the front door. They brought him in a side door and stashed him in a storage closet. And they did that because they didn't know if he was going to be able to walk again. And if he couldn't walk, they weren't going to keep him alive because that was. and so that his leg became this symbol of survival. And it's miraculous when he came back and the Navy surgeons, you know, looked at, studied his leg and how all the veins in his leg had rerouted themselves and how the leg had fused so that it was completely stiff.

53:47And then, of course, you've been to the Naval Academy and you've seen one of the sayings that's on the base of the statue there. What is it? It's an impediment to the leg is not an impediment to the mind. It's about how the body can be racked and destroyed and taken from you, but the mind is something that's always in your command. It can only be relinquished is how I've always taken that little saying from Epictetus. Yeah, I think it's lameness is not an impediment to your leg, but to your will. Yes, yes. Lameness is an impediment to the leg, not to the will or to the mind. Yes, absolutely correct.

54:30And that, you know, on one level, of course, he was living that, but then it became something, I think that over time he did overcome the through great willpower and tenacity that leg fused. And he did join the ranks, obviously, of the rest of the guys in prison. And I think it I think it kind of it became a metaphor for him that everything is this way. All the impediments you suffer are not physical. they are impediments to the will. So if you can control your will, you can overcome these things and be independent and not dependent upon your captors, certainly not. And I'm sure you're aware of it, or maybe not.

55:22Epictetus was also impeded in the leg. Do you know that story? Yes. Yeah, I do. I do. The parallels are just incredible. I mean, Epictetus loses his leg, not in an accident, but it's broken in torture. And so, you know, the idea that both of them would have gone through similar ordeals for very different reasons in very different ways, even if you don't believe in a superpower, there's something so perfect about that book finding its way into that man's hands before that ordeal. I mean, I can't imagine, you know, People go, what book would you bring with you to a desert island? It's like if you had to script out the perfect bit of philosophy or advice for someone who was about to go through what your father was about to go through, I'm not sure you could do better than Epictetus.

56:14Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. And you probably know this as well, that after his leg had healed, he was in a torture session with a guard who was a little bit more rambunctious. and he put the ropes in the wrong location. And my dad was kind of panicked and he popped my father's progress. He popped the tendons. And so for a brief period, he was right back where he started again. It was very, I think I know it really must've made him feel terrible to be back where he started. I mean, there must've been so many moments where the sort of any sense of progress or hope just gets ripped out of you.

57:03And so for him to be able to sort of rebuild and come back, that's really what his superpower was.

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59:32You know, after, as I mentioned, 1969, the torture ended. And it was primarily because pressure from Henry Kissinger and the State Department in the U.S. And it was also pressure from my mother's organization, who was now accepted. And, you know, mom was meeting almost monthly with Kissinger and Nixon and was discussing POW policy. So it's important to realize that there are two phases. The first phase through the beginning of 69 was brutal, brutal, brutal. And thereafter, it was kind of like they were just being held. They were just being detained. And and that that that's really it's it's hard to imagine how what it would have been like having been in those brutal times and then all of a sudden to be put in a cell with people who you had been in tight contact with, but you'd never even seen them.

1:00:38And now you were in the room with them. I often think about that experience and how powerful it would be. Speaking of which, the other thing that Captain Carriott told me that I thought you might like is he said, you know, he'd been in there not too long and he knew your father was in there and they all referred to him as CAG. And he gets, you know, that sort of tapping on the wall and he sort of decodes it. And it basically says, you know, Stockdale says, remember what Epictetus said. And that was the whole message. And he was just sort of like, what? Because that's what's so unique about your father's experiences.

1:01:20He was probably the only one there who'd studied philosophy at Stanford. So many of those guys were so much younger. And I thought it reminded me of a thing that I think all of us that fall in love with stoicism does. We just assume everyone knows all this stuff and that they're as excited about it as we are. And so I love the idea that this guy's in basically solitary confinement and he gets this message that says, remember the teachings of an obscure ancient philosopher, message out. And it took some time for them to communicate the fullness of Epictetus's dichotomy of control, focus on what you've got, not what's outside your control.

1:02:07But I just, I found that to be so, so wonderful that he's, he's just got this shorthand that of course, not everyone is quite up to speed with just yet. Sure. Yeah. You know, the, yeah, they were using the tap code in prison and they could tap on the walls and, and of course they had, you know, you don't, you don't want to spend all the time tapping on the wall, typing out a whole, you know, long message. So they, they, they were, you know, they were, it was like a text. It was just like somebody with a cell phone today, tapping out a little, you know, three letters, uh, see you later, you know, uh, this is where the acronyms you mentioned come from.

1:02:48Absolutely correct. Yep. Absolutely correct. And the dad, uh, used to tell some funny stories about prison too, things that would really buoy his morale. And one was when he was in this terrible situation early on, and he's told, you know, you're going to go dump your bucket, you know, your urine bucket. And so he had crutches and he was going along in the crutches and he was pushing with his foot, this little bucket down the hallway. He gets into the toilet room and he dumps his bucket and he's right up against a wall, kind of a cement wall. And he says that he sees something that's just very minute scrawl written on the wall.

1:03:31So he puts his eye right up to it and it says, smile, you're on candid camera. He said, you know, it was like, hooray, I'm with a bunch of Americans and we're all in here together. I mean, again, the unity, the knowing that these people were right there, even though you couldn't reach out and touch them, was such a powerful influence. I've got to imagine humor is a big part of it. There's an interesting passage in Seneca where he says, you know, you can either look out at reality and cry or you can laugh, you know, and it's better to laugh. And I imagine they had to laugh at the absurdity and the awfulness and the insanity of the situation that they were in, or they would break.

1:04:16Humor's a way to deal with pain and suffering. Yes. You know, recently I've been in communication with Captain Dick Stratton, Richard Stratton, who was in prison with Dad. And he has an amazing story and he does some great YouTube interviews that were done by the Stockdale Center. And so Captain Stratton, he's a Boston guy. He's a hard nails guy. But he is he gets out of prison, retires from the Navy, and he goes and he gets a degree in counseling and becomes a counselor working with other military vets and their families, treating them for PTSD. I mean, he's a very interesting, interesting guy.

1:05:06And he was very close with my father. I think you would really enjoy, would appreciate maybe watching one or two of those YouTube videos. And I'd be happy to put you in contact with him because he has a sharp mind. He's living down in Florida and he's got great insights into my father. And there aren't very many of those guys left. No, it's very sad. Yeah, this would be the 100th year. This would be my dad's 100th birthday. Wow. 1923. Yeah, my grandfather was born in 21. And it's weird how those, he fought in World War II, it's weird how those generations overlap, right? Like, those generations overlap.

1:06:03And some of them are still around and some of them aren't. And some from the previous generation still are around. It's surreal how that all sort of lines up. Yes. Yeah. So dad entered the Naval Academy in 1943 during World War II. Yeah. And they were accelerating the classes then. So they went through in three years instead of four. The war ended and he eventually found his way into test pilot school. And that's where he was through the Korean conflict. And so you're right. He was 41 when he was shot down, and that's as old as you can be and be flying in a combat situation like that. And he was, what, a year before Jimmy Carter, right?

1:06:48I'm just thinking about the same class. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And same with Admiral Bill Crowe. They were in the same class. And Bill Crow and his wife, Shirley, are buried right next to my parents in the cemetery there at the Naval Academy. I'm going there Sunday. I'm doing a talk to the freshman class on Sunday. Wonderful. That's great. Yeah, I'm going to do a book signing there in October. and that's going to be, it'll be great to meet a lot of the midshipmen. And then I'm also going to do a, what they call a brown bag lunch, kind of a book talk with the faculty and the staff over at the Stockdale Center.

1:07:38And that's wonderful. Yeah. Well, that was, as we wrap up, that was something I wanted to ask you about also. So what's so interesting, we've been talking a lot about your dad. You have this parallel narrative in the book, which is, you know, you growing up, You going from 10 to 18, your brother's growing up, your mother doing all this stuff. And then there's also the narrative of what's happening in the war in the world. Like you guys are, your father's in this kind of bubble. You know, your family's kind of in this bubble. And then meanwhile, the war is waging the whole time and public opinion is turning against the war.

1:08:13Talk to me about how you guys saw it all evolving around you. That must have been strange and disorienting. You know, you saw these angry protesters and you saw the government escalating things and you you probably also started to not trust everything the government was saying because you had your own ringside seat to how that was going. It must have been strange. It was. And, you know, one of the things that my mother realized early on was that, you know, the network news was not helpful for us. We did not need to be reminded of our circumstances every day. We did not need to follow every little twist and turn of the war effort.

1:09:04And so I wasn't I didn't really pay much attention to that. I was only focused on one issue. And it was the POW issue. That was something that really was important to me. Um, and, um, so even though all that was going on, um, it was more healthy for me to not focus on it. The war effort and just stay focused on my mother. How is she doing? You know, through that time period, she was under unbelievable stress. If she botched a coded letter in one way or another, my father could misunderstand the message. That could cause all kinds of problems. If my father was caught communicating, that would have led to espionage charges.

1:09:55He could have been put to death. And so when I went, I eventually went away to boarding school. And the hardest time during that phase of my growing up was when I was a sophomore. My mother had moved to Washington, D.C. with my two younger brothers. My older brother was in college.

1:10:19And we had been dad had been a prisoner for five years and she began to slip into a depression. And I was at boarding school. I wasn't aware of it. I wasn't aware this was going on when I talked to her on the telephone. And she sounded she sounded fine. She sounded normal. But when I went home for Christmas vacation to, you know, Washington, D.C., I could tell things were just in absolute disarray. Mom's POW wives, two of them had come out from San Diego because they knew she was in trouble. And and, you know, she was she was gone. She was lying in bed. She was. So when I went back after that Christmas vacation into the winter of New England, I didn't I didn't know what was going to happen.

1:11:08I didn't know if my mother was going to be able to recover from this thing. Fortunately, she did. But there was a phase in there where my younger brothers were cared for by by a nanny who my mother wisely hired before she moved to D.C. but I didn't know how that thing was going to turn out and then pretty soon, thank goodness for the great doctors that she worked with because they were able to get her back on her feet and I got the phone call then. I've had it with Washington. We're moving back to Coronado and we're going to go down to Brantford to the cottage again this summer and that was just such a shot in the arm for me.

1:11:54I just felt like, hooray, I'm so thankful. And it was so great to know that she was healthy. Being a single mom of four boys is no walk in the park, everything else nonwithstanding. Yeah, that's right. No kidding. I can't imagine. We only have two children, having four, wow. That's a big load. Um, and, and then, and then, you know, there's probably this perception that your father is this sort of rah, rah, you know, born in the USA sort of patriot, um, which he certainly was in the sense that he put his ass on the line and, you know, had this sense of honor and duty and responsibility. But I imagine he had to wrestle with and reckon with why they were sent there, what it all meant, you know, and same with your mother getting a peek behind the curtain in Washington where your government saying, hey, wives of these POWs, don't talk amongst yourself.

1:12:57You know, we don't want you to stick your nose in this. That's got to change your perception of your own government. Oh, there's no question that my mother came away with a much different attitude about the government. She also learned, and people are oftentimes kind of taken aback by this, but that different branches of the government, there were phases when the State Department was not trusted by the Pentagon. and she had witnessed some of the reasons why they weren't acting in good faith. But as far as my father's position with, you know, he never questioned. He never questioned, you know, why are we over here or anything like that?

1:13:42He said, you know, I'm a professional military soldier, and this is what I was trained to do, and I'm going to go in here and I'm going to do my job the best that I can possibly do it. I'm not, there's, there's, there's no point in, uh, you know, trying to answer, uh, or, you know, wonder about these questions related to, um, why did this happen? Um, he had, he had great faith in the, in the military system all the way through his life. And, um, and so that, that was never, that was never in doubt. I was just wondering how a family like yours would react to the, it's not really a conspiracy theory because I guess it's all sort of backed up, but even the sense that the war could have ended earlier under Johnson, but it gets extended with Nixon in those sort of final days of the campaign and afterwards.

1:14:41I just wondered, how do you wrestle with that afterwards? What you went through is what you went through. And then as you sort of look at who's responsible, could it have been avoided? Could it have gone differently? Is that something that you guys came to think about, or you're just like, what happened is what happened? No, no. I think a lot of people don't understand that the Johnson administration never had a policy for the POWs. So if they, so, and this is what the wives feared, was that the Johnson administration was going to just all of a sudden pull the plug and go and desert and leave the POWs.

1:15:22I mean, what? Sure. You know, the Nixon administration, you know, both administrations have a lot of things to answer for related to the war, but the Nixon administration guaranteed the wives that they were going to have a policy for it. There was going to be, there was going to be a plan we were not going to pull out unless the POWs were, there was a guarantee that they were going to be coming home. And that, that really, like I said, that, that broke the deal for us. I mean, uh, better to stay longer and guarantee those guys are going to come home safely. Um, it may sound very selfish, but that's, that's pretty much the way we saw it.

1:16:09Sure. No, I didn't think about that. The, the worry that the prisoners would just be sort of politically inconvenient, a loose, like the person who is your everything is to a politician trying to exit something, a pesky little detail. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yep. And, and yeah, that, that was, that was one of the most troubling things for the wives. And then those are the, those are the wives who knew that their husbands were POWs. You have to remember that there were so many wives who hoped their husbands were POWs because the alternative was they had died when they were shot down. I mean, there's still some families that don't know, right?

1:16:58Absolutely correct. Well, they have to assume that they should perish, but they have no evidence of it. And when John Kerry called together the commission to look at the POW situation, in the 1990s. My father did a calculation using the statistics of all the people who were shot down through that whole era. And he said, he finally concluded and he, you know, spoke before the Senate panel. And he said, the odds were about roughly 50-50 for someone to eject from a fighter jet and make it to the ground alive and stay alive all the way to prison, about 50%. And that was the number that they started to use in order to calculate how many probably no doubt perished because of incidents with ejection, super complicated process, or being just summarily executed on the ground or some other thing that led to their death.

1:18:11Right, you could catch a disease, you could get an infection. It's not like you had access to great medical care. They kept the Red Cross out for most of it, right? Like it was not a good place to be. Well, that's true. But I remember as a boy that we would send packages through the Red Cross. Monthly, we'd send these packages to the guys. And that became another thing that naval intelligence started to mine as a potential way to gain access to the prisoners. They knew that not a lot of those packages were going to actually make it to the men. And so at one point through the secret communication, dad was instructed to spread the word that if you received a package and it had a little small Rice Krispies box, be very discerning when you go through the Rice Krispies.

1:19:08because buried within there are little teeny pieces of microfilm that if you find a direct light and you hold it up to your eye with the other eye closed, it will give you a full-page message. Things like that. It's amazing how clever people were at getting things, to these guys. Well, it was a chance for him to live up to his middle name, right? Yeah, there you go. I love that story about the guys on the ship, the fellows who worked on the deck, and they would paint 007 on his plane, and they would put 007 on their jackets, and it was big. They just loved it. They were thrilled by that. James Bond Stockdale is a pretty sick name.

1:20:06It doesn't get much better than that. Um, well, as we wrap up, I thought the book was fascinating. I thought maybe you could tell us, you know, what, what made you decide to write it and, and, and who do you really think it's for? Like what, what, what kind of, um, impact are you, are you, uh, you hoping to have with it? Cause I thought it was beautiful. And, uh, I think, you know, speaking about it, the Naval Academy. That is one target audience. But maybe speak about who you think it speaks to. Well, I think it speaks to anybody who lived through that period. And that's who I'm hearing from most.

1:20:52People I know, I mean, my wife told me, you're going to have to get ready because you're going to have to listen a lot. And I know now what she meant was, you know, you open up and you expose yourself, you expose your vulnerabilities in a book to people who don't know you. And suddenly they feel a certain connection to you and a comfort level with you. And so they begin to open up to you about their experiences or what happened to somebody who they knew there. And so anybody who lived through that period, I think that's one group. that's why I'm looking forward to creating the audio version of the book.

1:21:33I'm going to do that before too long because I think a lot of people would appreciate it. The other group that I think would appreciate having taught secondary school history students, you know, it's a kind of book that I think a young person would enjoy reading because they could relate to my perspective inside of the circumstances and what I thought about and how I was processing things. And so I would hope that it might be something that would be, some teachers would find valuable to expose kids to a different rendering of the Vietnam experience. Well, that's what's so powerful about Anne Frank's diary and books about Anne Frank, is you get to view history through the eyes of a child who's experiencing it.

1:22:27And, you know, so little of history is written through the perspective of the person who is just like you when you're seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. You know, it's always history. The main characters in history are always older than your parents, give or take, you know? Oh, that's true. Yeah, no, I would see the book actually being most attractive to sophomores in high school. That was my favorite group. The wise fools. Your point about having to listen a lot, I do imagine for the few remaining members of your father's generation and then people of your generation, they're getting you're all getting up old enough in the years that some of the old defenses some of the closed offness the repression some of that's loosening and now that they they're they're wanting to talk about it or needing to talk about it um after having held a lot of these things very close for a long time or or to themselves for a long time yeah it it depends on the person obviously but i think that that's right i've that's what i've encountered um i was at the nixon library in may when the pow's had their 50th reunion there um and it it was they were they were so comfortable with one another they were such good friends and it's you know a chance for them to be all together and and and share stories and um and and i was talking about my book and they were thrilled with it.

1:24:08They were excited. Where can I get a copy? And I said, go to Amazon and look it up, a world apart, growing up Stockdale during Vietnam. And they were really genuinely excited about it. And that made me feel very good. Well, I thought the book was beautiful. And the only reason I'm not holding it up is you sent me an early PDF. So I read it there. but I love the book and I carry your father's books here at the store and I'll make sure that we start carrying this one also. So it was an honor to talk with you and I hope we can do this again sometime hopefully in person if you're ever down in Texas.

1:24:49Yes, yeah. I would like to, perhaps in a year, you know, there's a beautiful statue, you know, outside of the Stockdale Center of my father. I worked with the artist Larry Lundke when that was being created. And there's now a statue that is a memorial that's being planned for the League of Wives, the League of Families, a bronze, life-size. And if things go to plan in September of 2024, it's going to be dedicated in Coronado, California, there at Star Park. And it'll be, when it's up, you'll appreciate this, Ryan. It will be the first memorial to military spouses in the country. Wow. Isn't that amazing that when you think about what military spouses go through and there is nothing anywhere.

1:25:47And so we're really thrilled that Moms organization will be the first to be recognized in that fashion. Yeah. Admiral Rickover, he liked a line, I think it was from a Milton poem, where he says something like, even those who wait are at work, I think is the line. And that was his encapsulation of the sacrifice and the contribution of the military spouses, that the being at home and the holding down the fort and the waiting was just as important, if not more important, than the sacrifices being made on the other side of the ocean. Well, and the fact that that women's organization was so integral in forming the policies directed towards the return of the POWs, it's an important story for everybody to know.

1:26:46For sure. And it's one that I hope will be preserved both in my book and with this memorial. Well, you certainly did. And I would love to see you at the memorial. And we will talk again very soon. Yeah, thanks so much, Ryan. So it's always a pleasure to talk with you. It's an honor.

1:27:15Thanks 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. And I'll see you next episode.

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