“Five years down there, at least. I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”
James Stockdale whispered that to himself on September 9, 1965, hanging under a parachute over North Vietnam. He led the air wing on the carrier USS Oriskany. He had flown his A-4 into a flak trap at 500 knots. By his own account, he had about thirty seconds before he came down in the main street of a village.
Men from the village tackled him and beat him for two or three minutes. When it was over he had a very badly broken leg, one he felt sure would stay with him for life. He was right about that.
He had done some arithmetic on the way down. North Vietnam held about twenty-five American prisoners, probably in Hanoi. He was the only wing commander who had survived an ejection, so he would be their senior officer, in a war he felt sure would last at least another five years.
He took command, in secret, at forty-two, on crutches. About fifty Americans at first, more than four hundred by the end. They talked through the walls in tap code. Each new prisoner was tied in ropes until he confessed to something, then isolated for a month to “contemplate” his crimes. The official rule, name, rank, serial number, had no chance of standing up in that room, Stockdale wrote. He gave orders men could obey. The main one was BACK US: don’t bow in public, stay off the air, admit no crimes, never kiss them goodbye. The US stood for Unity over Self.
It cost him. In May 1967 the camp loudspeakers offered early release to prisoners who truly repented. Stockdale forbade anyone to take it. He and ten of his closest men were isolated, starting with two years in leg irons, and one of the eleven died there. In the fall of 1969, caught with a note he feared would get others killed, he cut his wrists on a broken window. He was found and revived. Before that, he had disfigured himself to keep his captors from using him for propaganda. His Medal of Honor citation says his captors, convinced of his “indomitable spirit,” then eased off the torture of all the prisoners.
Years later, at Stanford, the business writer Jim Collins went to lunch with Stockdale, by then a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Collins had read In Love and War, the book Stockdale wrote with his wife, Sybil, and found it so bleak it depressed him. He asked how Stockdale had dealt with it at the time, when he did not know the end of the story.
“I never lost faith in the end of the story,” Stockdale told him, according to Collins.
They walked on, Stockdale limping on the stiff leg. A hundred meters later Collins asked who didn’t make it out.
“Oh, that’s easy. The optimists.”
Collins was confused. Stockdale went on: “The optimists. 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 they died of a broken heart.”
In Good to Great (2001), Collins named this the Stockdale Paradox: keep faith that you will prevail in the end, and at the same time face the most brutal facts of where you are now.
Stockdale’s own forecast, made in the air in 1965, had been five years at least. He came home in 1973.