If you didn’t get a chance to read this morning’s essay, be sure to do so before reading this second part.
“Five years down there at least.” It would be seven.
Four years would be spent in solitary confinement, and two years would be spent in leg irons.
Admiral James Stockdale would be tortured relentlessly, but he could not be broken. When the North Vietnamese were going to film him in a propaganda parade, he used a contraband razor to slice his scalp open. When they cleaned him up and put a hat on his head, he used a wood stool to bash his head and face. He broke his face and disfigured himself so he could not be used to disgrace his country, the US Navy and himself. When he slit his wrists, he broke the will of the North Vietnamese to keep torturing him and his fellow prisoners. After he slit his wrists, the torture and mistreatment abated.
Stockdale wasn’t just a heroic individual, he was a heroic leader who forged cohesion, unity, trust, and courage from men in the most vulnerable and hopeless circumstances. He set standards of conduct and enforced them by modeling the conduct. He understood the risk of moral injury and shame for Americans who inevitably broke during torture. His orders were to resist for as long as humanely possible. He developed an acronym — BACK US — to guide the expectations of behavior that was tapped through the concrete walls as the American prisoners of war communicated in secret from their solitary confinement.
Stockdale understood the necessity of the American prisoners maintaining their dignity and honor as fundamental to their survival. After the war he recounted his initial experiences upon being captured. His leg was broken, and he was severely injured. His captors told him that the war was over, and that he had to think about himself first in order to survive. When the war ended Stockdale recounted his thinking in the moment:
From this eight-year experience, I distilled one all-purpose idea . . . It is a simple idea, an idea as old as the scriptures, an idea that is the epitome of high-mindedness, and idea that naturally and spontaneously comes to men under pressure . . . This idea is you are your brother's keeper . . . That's the flip side of “What's in it for me?”
BACK US meant: Never Bow to the Vietnamese captors. Stay off the Air. Admit no Crimes. Never Kiss them goodbye, meaning never thank the captors for anything. The last letters US stood for Unity over Self.
Stockdale was later asked about who didn’t survive the ordeal. He said it was the optimists.
They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.
His approach was different, and it saved countless American lives.
I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.
This is what the author Jim Collins called the “Stockdale Paradox” in his estimable book on leadership, ‘Good to Great.’ He described it as follows:
You must retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties. AND at the same time…You must confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
The Warning commentaries are built on this duality. I am certain that terrible events lie ahead, and that an extremist movement that calls itself MAGA has done — and will continue to do — great damage to the country. I believe the media as an institution is as unfathomably corrupt as our political establishment and many corporations where self-interest has eradicated the concepts of duty, responsibility, obligation and patriotism.