It would be almost eight years before he left.
It seems extraordinary to think that while flipping out of a low-flying flaming airplane and grappling for a parachute cord as villagers howled for his blood below, a person might consciously welcome a philosophical challenge posed by ancient Stoics. But Stockdale says his mental tools were all sharpened and at the ready. One was the ability to separate the things he could and could not control. The former category included ‘my opinions, my aims, my aversions, my own grief, my own joy, my judgments, my attitude about what is going on, my own good, and my own evil’. The latter were all external and included the highly nebulous concept of ‘your station in life’, which he was about to learn was negligible as he plummeted from being the leader of more than a hundred pilots and a thousand men, along with ‘all sorts of symbolic status and goodwill’, to being an ‘object of contempt’, a criminal. Worse was the realisation of the body’s fragility, ‘that you can be reduced by wind and rain and ice and seawater or men to a helpless, sobbing wreck — unable to control even your own bowels, in a matter of minutes’.
As he floated down, Stockdale could hear shouting below, pistol shots and the whining of bullets that tore the fabric of his canopy. Then his parachute hooked onto a tree, as a ‘thundering herd of men ran towards him’. He landed on the ground, only to be set upon by a gang of ‘ten or fifteen roughnecks’ who kicked and punched him until a policeman sporting a pith helmet came and blew his whistle, breaking up the fray. By then, Stockdale’s leg had been badly broken.
This greeting was a harbinger of hell to come. Stockdale was sent to Hòa Lò Prison, renowned for its barbaric regime. Inmates were beaten and starved; strapped in stocks, leg irons or near-asphyxiating rope bindings; deprived of natural light by day and darkness at night; fed soup laced with human and animal faeces; and made to stand for several days at a time — the aim being to break the prisoners and force them to publicly criticise the United States. The inmates wryly named the jail The Hanoi Hilton, or Heartbreak Hotel (HBH).
Stockdale was one of the so-called Alcatraz Gang, leaders of the resistance who learned to communicate with a tapping code and were regarded as the most dangerous and subversive of the American POWs. They were placed in solitary confinement in a facility a mile away from the prison, locked into tiny windowless cells, where lightbulbs burned around the clock, and made to wear leg irons for pyjamas — in Stockdale’s case, for two years, half of his stay. The cells burned in the heat, and stank of excrement. One POW died there.
Stockdale scorned his captors. He resisted interrogation and, when told he was going to be paraded for propaganda purposes, disfigured his own scalp, slicing through it with a razor. After his guards said they would cover his wounds with a hat, he beat his face to an unrecognisable pulp with a mahogany stool. When he learned he was going to feature in a film instead, in which he was to tell his fellow prisoners to co-operate with their captors, he tried to kill himself with glass from a broken window. The film was never made. After Stockdale’s bloody spectacle, the commissar was sacked and the worst of the torture methods — the ropings — ended. ‘From then on,’ Stockdale wrote, ‘the life was never the same. It wasn’t happy, but I shut down that torture system and they never wanted it brought up again.’
Finally, 2714 days after entering the Hanoi Hilton, Stockdale was released. When the POWs came home, he was the first man to limp off the aircraft, to loud cheers. He went on to be a vice-presidential candidate (on a ticket with Ross Perot), just like his best friend and fellow Hanoi Hilton sufferer, Senator John McCain.
ONE THING THAT PUZZLED onlookers about the story of the occupants of the Hanoi Hilton was how did these men who returned with shaded eyes, pasty skin and stiff limbs become so resilient? How did they cope? Stockdale’s endurance was not simply about detachment, but about hope. He told author James C. Collins that he had survived because ‘I never lost faith in the end of the story, 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.’ But nor did he kid himself. It was the unrealistic optimists, he said, who did not make it out of Vietnam. ‘Oh, 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.’
Optimism, he was saying, had to be twinned with a tough-minded, open-eyed sense. He told Collins: ‘This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.’ Collins called this the Stockdale Paradox: a faith you cannot afford to lose, in the thick of whatever you are fighting. Something the Vietnamese would surely have struggled to keep after millions of military and civilian deaths decimated their country.
I DON’T BELIEVE THAT every time we fall ill or stumble, we are fighting battles, nor do I like the language that suggests so. But I know what warfare is. And I know what it means to be entirely cognisant of the riskiness and danger of the situation you are in, while simultaneously aware there is also a chance you might yet survive it. I also know how hard and important it is to do as Wendell Berry said: ‘Be joyful even though you have considered all the facts.’
‘Yes, the worst might happen,’ my friend Briony said to me when I lapsed into worrying about the future one day, while watching Charlie bounce on a lush green hill pocked with rabbit holes, ‘but it might not.’
WHEN THOMAS MERTON WAS living as a Trappist monk at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky in the 1940s, he was briefly allocated a cell with a tiny window, through which he observed the world. The Catholic mystic and poet wrote:
God talks in the trees. There is a wind, so that it is cool to sit outside. This morning at four o’clock in the clean dawn sky there were some special clouds in the west over the woods, with a very perfect and delicate pink, against deep blue. A hawk was wheeling over the trees.
Every minute life begins over again. Amen.
Chapter 21
Raiding the Unspeakable
Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly.
— Micah 6:8
GEORGE CROKER, WHO WAS a prisoner of war in Hòa Lò like James Stockdale, was once asked by a journalist what had kept him sane during the two months when he was made to stand still against a wall with his hands above his head every day from 5.30 am to 10 pm. He said he built houses from scratch in his mind, designed menus, and prayed repeatedly, by rote. Decades after his release, signs of PTSD remained: his wife told a reporter from The Virginian-Pilot she would wake at night to see Croker mumbling and shifting, holding his hands over his head: ‘In his sleep, he holds up “the wall”.’ His faith had kept him alive, he said, noting that religion is a ‘very, very powerful thing . . . Realizing there’s something better or bigger than just yourself . . . That was real for us.’ But, as Croker told the journalist, he didn’t want to be ‘preachy about it.’
Nor do I. I am deeply uncomfortable with preachiness. But I have thought about this a lot, and I think there are a few reasons why people like Croker, and me, find solace in knowing there is something much bigger than all of us, something that we may see ‘only through a glass darkly’, something that we may not entirely understand, that we may often doubt, that may be more easily found in thunderous surf than any religious institution, but something that we often instinctively reach for. Something that can provide a wick for an inner light.