Interview: James Stockdale
Medal of Honor

It's a great pleasure to be speaking with you, Admiral.

James Stockdale: Thank you.

Let's go to September 9, 1965, when you were shot down over North Vietnam.

James Stockdale: A lot happened before that, it wasn't just happenstance. As soon as that was over, I had got wind that I was going to get orders to leave the Ticonderoga to become the CAG of the USS Oriskany.

What is the CAG?

James Stockdale: Air Group Commander. He owns all the airplanes, flies them all, they're all his. Of course, he obeys the captain [of the ship], but everything with wings on it belongs to him. There were about 70 or 80 airplanes over there and there were about 1,000 men and 100 pilots. I had an F-8 Marine squadron and an F-8 Navy squadron, and the exec of the Marine Corps, Major Ed Ruddy, came up to me one day and he said, "You know, we're doing all this bombing of the An Wa bridge and we're losing aviators right and left." He said what I knew. I'd been out there years before. That was the biggest capital building assignment ever taken over by North Vietnam. They just roughly doubled the strength of everything. He was right. Five hundred-pound bombs were not going to phase that thing.

We were going against that bridge and I noticed that we were losing about two A-4s for every F-8 over the last weeks and I started flying in A-4s for morale purposes. Pump 'em up, you know? Not for the reason because I could fly the crusader blindfolded backwards, but I told the skipper, Chuck Loudon, that his exec and he and the whole VMF-212 had done a brilliant job bringing this new weapon into being, "and for this last flight before we go into Hong Kong I want you to take all your F-8s" -- we planned on using just about one squadron of them -- "and I'm not going to be in an F-8. I'm going to be back leading six A-4s in flak suppression. I'll go ahead of them and bomb and shoot the gunner, see." We got out and everything worked. We got the A-4s to tag the F-8s and we had a search plane that we sent ahead to give us a weather report when we got to the coast. And he said, "It's zero-zero at the bridge." Zero visibility up and sideways. So I took my friend with me who was in an A-4, and the two of us went up not to throw our bombs into the water, but to throw them into a railroad yard (at An Wa bridge).

We'd come in low and put a snake-eye fixture on a snake eye bomb. That meant as soon as it felt itself released, it would have a shield come up to slow it down so we wouldn't be getting hit with our own shrapnel. Now that's the kind of stuff you have to work with all the time, but even with all that, I could hear boom, boom, boom, boom. This little engine is right there. The cockpit is no wider than that, and it's very noisy inside, but I looked right there and I saw that damn plane and I thought ,"There's my Armageddon." And it was fireballs coming at me one after the other. And then now everything is out. The engine is shot up, the hydraulics are gone, and I've just got to get out of the airplane and I did. I didn't have my lip mike on. I had to get it up and say, "I'm going to eject."

Admiral, wouldn't that make you an easy target for ground fire? Floating right into enemy hands?

It never got above 1,000 feet even with the trajectory, and I was low and I was going right into this little town. Straight -- it was a town that I could imagine being very similar to the places I saw in Illinois, a town of about 800 people with one thoroughfare and that's it. They're farmers or rice people or whatever. And I landed and got myself on deck, flipped off my protective -- the thing that held my parachute on -- and then I looked up and I had seen traces of this -- A thundering herd was coming down on me. All probably between 18 and 24. They were going to defend the honor of their town.

They racked me up and it was the quarterback sack of the century!

They pounded me, twisted me, they were zealous and pretty soon I was -- I didn't know what was happening to me because my face was in the dirt but everything was happening to me. And then finally a police whistle blew. That was about four minutes later. And they all backed off after that happened and then the guy with the police whistle had a pith helmet, and he gave me the motion to stand up and I couldn't get up because this leg was not where it is now but it was right out there.

Admiral, I've read that when you were coming down you had a sense that you were going to be down for at least five years?

James Stockdale: Yes. I had been on the ship when we would have unofficial exchange programs between the A-4 pilots and the army people on the ground. They would arrange for pick-ups in helicopters and there would be conversations around the ship and you could sit down and listen to any of them. I remember one man said, "They own the world at night." There wasn't any motion going in our activities. We were stalemating ourselves. We heard the B-52s when we were in prison and that was a morale booster.

Here I was, crippled. They lugged me out to a -- literally lugged because they didn't have a stretcher or anything -- I was in the grass and I'd passed out. Then I was lugged through the underbrush in kind of a seated position with guys on either side of me. Here was a whole caravan of transport trucks lined up to go south with equipment for South Vietnam and they would take it over that An Wa bridge that I had started out that day to kill. It took three days and we came to a prison and I noticed interesting things. An old man and an old woman were driving in a junk truck that brought me into Hanoi. They didn't speak any English, of course. But at that time the commissar was rather youthful and rather glib and he spoke good English. And I said, "You speak like you've been to college. Where did you go to college?" He said, "The revolution is my college. My wife is a doctor. She's in South Vietnam and thank God I'll soon be moved down there to be near her." But I noticed his eyes were flittering around and he kept looking at my leg. That wasn't the dominant thing that was going on, but as I thought back over it this is what's behind it. The history books tell us that in the last two wars North Vietnam has fought, namely against the French and then the Americans, they have never repatriated a single prisoner with an amputated limb. I don't know what to do with that but that's in a lot of books. I think if he was thinking kindly of me, he (would have) said, "With this leg out here, I hope our doctor can get it to where he can walk or limp." He didn't say that -- maybe he'd just as soon have me gone.

Did you receive any kind of medical attention after you were captured and transported?

I was out there on a card table --a ping pong table -- for about a month, and they would bring sloppy food and stuff but then a guy came in the night, a medical guy. You could tell -- he never -- didn't speak anything. He wanted to see the leg, and he had a pan and he jammed needles in here, sucked it out. I mean, it was over here, wherever that leg went, and pus and blood went in this pan, and then he went away, and then he came back three nights in a row. And then the fourth night he had a truck ready to take me to the hospital. The French would not allow Vietnamese natives to go to universities. They'd have to go to Japan or make some kind of arrangement. He went to the Sorbonne. None of them got medical training there [in Vietnam]. He'd read some American pamphlets or something and was too ambitious on the first one. He was going to try and remake the knee. I was out. Every time you take a shot in the Vietnam hospital they'd bring out a big, long needle. They'd put it in here, they squeeze it down and you're unconscious for six or eight hours, no matter what. But, then the second time he says, "I think I'm going to try to get it under you. I opened. I felt. There was nothing there but blood. No sign of a knee cap. I think we're going to have to satisfy ourselves with just getting it under you enough that you can walk with crutches." And, he effectively did that.

I had been on the ground say six weeks, and we didn't go in the front door. They went around in back and slid my stretcher in through the window because they didn't want any Vietnamese to know that they were treating Americans in there. Every time I left the room I would be on a stretcher cart all covered with blankets. I had a doctor, even though they hadn't gotten the doctors into the prison system yet. They made them cognizant later of all the rules and regulations we had to follow.

Admiral, did your captors know immediately that you were the commanding officer?

James Stockdale: Yes, and I'll tell you how that came about. The American newshounds thought it would be in the spirit of better news for them, and for morale in the fighting forces, when anybody had had a great event -- say the wing commander -- they'd have plain language interviews. They talk about the target and they give their name and what their position is. I'd been down there two or three times to Saigon on such a case. So I'm on the roster. I'm CAG Stockdale, USS Oriskany. One of my other squadron commanders, Harry Jenkins, went down there one time. And the first thing they said to me was, "When do you think Jenkins will get shot down?" I said, "I don't expect him over here."

Could you tell us about Eisenhower's Code of Conduct for Prisoners of War and how that influenced you in prison?

James Stockdale: I thought it was magnificent. It was insane that they didn't have one before. When he did that, for the first time in history, everybody was obliged to conform to it: "If I'm junior, I will obey the officer in charge; if I am senior..." whatever it said. So it was the first time it ever was written into law that the war went on behind bars, there were no exemptions. For prisoners, it supplied the same code for everybody. There were some features of the code that got in my hair. You cannot accept a favor. After several years they established an amnesty program which was in cahoots with the American left wing. They would send these counterculture guys over to pick up the people that applied for the amnesty. Now I made it very clear, if you go, you're in trouble legally because you've violated the Code of Conduct. I don't think anything is more pointedly attributable to prisoners than that. You can wind it around but you're just looking for some way to use it. I never used it any other way. I didn't put it in my orders as such. My orders were always "tap." There were no written orders.

When you say "tap," tell us what you mean, and how you communicated with the other prisoners.

James Stockdale: We had some smart guys that were shot down ahead of me. Bob Shoemaker was one of them and Smitty Harris was another one. They both had prisoner experiences in survival schools and all. They said, "We've got to have a code." One day a man that was near them, Larry Gorrino, was taken away, and they didn't know where he was. So they said...

"We've got to get a code going." So what it came down to was a five-by-five matrix. A 25-letter alphabet. You throw "k" out because a "c" will make the same sense in a sentence. And then it's line and then -- well, rather than getting mixed up in the terminology, if I wanted to write -- if I wanted to say "C"-- start a letter with "C" I would go dom-dom-dom-dom. Line, top line, third letter over. Then you get so you know them all. "S" is dom-dom-dom-dom-dom-dom and so forth. So you get to know this code and then you had to have operating signals. You've got to go dum-da-da-dum-dum, made an American sound, and when the guy says "dum-dum" that means go. Everything is clear. Yes. Or if he just says one hit, "Danger. Stop. We're being sighted."

So if you had cells next to each other you did this on the wall?

James Stockdale: Yes, sometimes. And then at one point my ten guys were kicked out of the camp system and we went to Alcatraz. It was our nickname for this place. We were in the army headquarters. We were right across the walk from their Pentagon, but we were the only Americans in there and there were only 11 of us. We called it Alcatraz, ALCZ was the abbreviation. It's in all the books. But we were not in alignment there as well as we were in some of the other places, so you can do the same thing with your hand under the door.

We read that during a torture session you went through, you heard the message tapped out: "God bless you, James Stockdale."

James Stockdale: It was in '67. We were still in Hoa Lo prison before we were exiled and there were a lot of cell blocks. I was in leg irons in a bath stall and I had been in there for several days and that night a guard came in, unlocked the leg irons, grabbed my arm, took me around the corner into an open area and beat the hell out of me. And the prisoners knew it was me because of my limp.

When he was beating me up, he was being heard by about 200 Americans who were living in cells three deep all around that area, and it was dark. And that was when I was brought out. They were getting me put back in the bath stall and somebody had a wet towel and he was snapping it. The people would think "That's his bath towel and he's just doing it." But he said "G." G, okay? Dom-dom-dom-dom, that's G. "B," dom-dom-dom: B. Oh, no. "GB," dom, dom, dom, dom, dom, dom, dom, "U." "G-B-U-J-S." So I got more -- I was more moved by that than many other things. Almost more than anything else because there half of the prison crowd knew that I was out there getting beat up.

And it stood for?

James Stockdale: God bless you, Jim Stockdale.

Were you tortured a lot?

James Stockdale: Yeah, I think more than anybody else. About half way through the first months, the camp reorganized itself. They weren't sure the war was going to last, but it came down from on high, "Pull no punches."

They got a couple of teams of torture guards and they had a special procedure. And the way it was done was to get a long iron bar and shackle your legs to it, and then the man on the back would start weaving ropes through your arms to bend them backwards. And then they -- getting as much leverage as he could -- what they're doing is shutting off the blood circulation in your upper body. And then he would push, he would bend you double and stand on your back and he would pull from this angle, giving him better leverage, and then he would find--you know, it's about over when you feel the heel of his foot in your--back of your head and he put your nose right on the cement and there you are. You're encased in ropes. Your blood is not circulating. You're in pain and you're in claustrophobia.

Now there's only two ways to go. You can die or you can submit.

Submit. And I did that 15 times, and I don't think anybody had that many before. I had about five within one real short period. But when we looked at the -- we knew -- now this took about 45 minutes to go through all this and get all that blood stopped. And we knew we had eight guys that died in the ropes. And then later when some books came out we know we had over a dozen, because these were guys that were put in those ropes even before they got into the prison. They were just in the anteway when they were taken in. So that was what we were living with.

So sometimes when you submitted you gave them information, but it was never what they wanted, was it?

James Stockdale: No. You've got to be an actor. Every move you make, you've got to have it conform to an imaginary man you've made up in your mind, particularly with the senior people. They had no idea who I really was.

Admiral, how did you survive psychologically? The other men you mentioned perished under the same circumstances.

James Stockdale: I don't know. I didn't feel like I had more vitality than the next one. I had things to do. I was alone a lot, and I found ways to talk to myself and to bolster my own morale. I was getting occasional letters from my wife Sybil. And she would from me. She probably wrote 50 and I got six, and I probably wrote 20 and she got two or something like that.

After I came out of Alcatraz, we all came back to the regular prison. They tried to get me to go downtown. They tried everything. They would give me the ropes three times a week. One of my original breakthroughs was self disfiguration. I was given a lot of times in the ropes in room 18, which is the main torture chamber of Hoa Lo prison. It also serves as kind of a ceremonial chamber when no prisoners are in there. In that, the only room in the building, a great big building with plate glass windows, and they had big heavy quilts that they drew across it. I was in there and they were about at their wits end. Two officers were working me over. Pi Ga, my torture guard, was always there to take me wherever they wanted. It was about mid-afternoon and they said, "Okay, you've done okay, today. Now you want to get washed up." I knew what that meant. That meant we were going downtown that night.

On any day you could probably find a couple of international discussion groups somewhere in town and on some days probably five of them. And they would cajole Americans into going downtown. It's not so much the location, it's some place in Hanoi where you're going to talk about politics and nothing else. I never went downtown. In Heartbreak Hotel a lot of prisoners only had access to this shower head that was in a regular cell with two cement seats or beds. But this was dedicated to showers, they didn't have anything else to do. So you walked in and you went between these beds and then you saw the spigot and pretty soon the water started coming out and you were to take your clothes off and he handed you the soap and the razor and slammed the door because he had other errands to do.

As soon as I could I got my head wet and lathered up, I started with that safety razor, just cutting a track down the top of my head that I judged would make it impractical for them to take me downtown. He came back to the peephole and I ducked down, just showing him my behind, which is all he could see because I was stooped over, and then back up and again. I didn't realize that I was bleeding so bad. And then he came in and grabbed me, grabbed my arm and he knew he was in trouble, too. There was blood running down my shoulders and there were secretaries in the courtyard that we went by and they were looking. That was the headquarters prison of the whole country of North Vietnam so they had offices and they had everything you can expect. He took me back into this room and boy, those two officers, they said, "How dare you? How dare you?" I just got down in the position for the ropes and he said, "You have no right to take the ropes." I knew I was getting him screwed up. Finally they said, "I got it. We'll get a hat and we'll take you down to the press conference with a hat on." So as soon as they locked the door, I looked around for something else to do damage to myself with, and I saw the old toilet can that had been there for years, and I knew every chunk of it, but that was infection and one thing -- and then I said, "Well, what's wrong with this mahogany stool?" and bang, bang, bang, bang, and the secretaries across the hall wondered what the noise was and they started shaking the door. I didn't -- couldn't see them. But by the time they got back my eyes were closed and there was no question about it. They couldn't do anything and said, "What do you want me to tell the commissar?" I said, "You tell the commissar the CAG decided not to go downtown tonight." And they went out and then they gave me -- you know, then through that -- other times I'd used other devices.

They told me, "We think they're going to put you in the mint pretty soon." And that was kind of the end of the line. There was an old privy outside, and we had this signal system. You could take a vertical wire -- the outsider wouldn't even realize it was up there -- and if you moved it this way, that meant there was an old bottle under that sink. If you had a message for Stockdale he would know that he had a message in the bottle. If it looked like it was booby trapped you'd just push it back. There was even a position for if it was okay.

So I was down there and I was exchanging notes and getting things done and then I had kind of got a nice note from a guy and I -- but we were -- what we were using for paper and pen was tough toweling that was sort -- it was the idea of toilet paper and rat manure. You'd lick it and you could print right on it and get another piece. And so a voice said -- and I was careless on this. He sneaked up under the door, and it was kind of a complicated thing but he said, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm reading these letters my wife sent me," which was authorized. They would leave letters. And he said, "No, your hand was moving." Uh-oh, I knew it. Well, then he ran and he got the turnkey and they came in and they got me out and they told me to put my hands up -- this is the typical prison shake down position.

In the meantime I had had sense enough to put it in the crotch of my pants. I did that because I concluded -- and I think I'm right -- that there's a great connection between farm boys in Illinois and farm boys in rural Vietnam. They have a sense of propriety against intruding in other people's private parts. As far as I know that's true. I don't know, because I didn't have it up there well enough. As I was walking back it rolled out of my pant leg and then they had it.

There was something in the air. I don't want to make this too mysterious, but it was kind of a dark and dreary night. As they walked me over to the other side of the camp and put me in a little privy-like place I'd never seen before that's just full of cobwebs -- it would only accommodate one man -- and I think they were just doing something to get me out of that camp so that I knew I'd go in room 18 the next morning. And the man came in with leg irons and he put them on me and they were squeeze irons, built to put pressure points on your legs so you couldn't sleep that night. And I looked down there and he was, so help me, weeping, and not out of sympathy for me I'm sure, but I marked that down in my book. And then the next morning, when I was taken over to the other place to get the torture started for that day there was a couple of other people weeping. And I said, "Old Ho Chi Minh probably died last night."

I'd been unsuccessfully accosted to give them information. I could hold it back from the particular crowd that was working with me that day, they were kind of halfway friendly people. Something was wrong. The whole country was going bananas. Later that afternoon, I was just lying down on my roll, assuming that the day was over, and this guy named Bug, who was a snotty officer, he said, "Get on your feet! Tomorrow is the day we bring you down." That meant I would succumb. And he said, "This country is in mourning. There will be dirge music in the streets tonight. Ho Chi Minh died last night and we're in mourning." Well, I'd anticipated that. And then they didn't let me lie down. They put me in a chair. They said, "Put him in a chair with ropes on his arms and traveling irons for his feet." Traveling irons were what you got so you could go to the bathroom in the night. I was depressed. I said to myself, "God, maybe I'm the problem here instead of the solution. I had said, "Here's my orders. Remember: B-A-C-U-S: BACUS." It could be tapped out. "B" means do not bow in public. "A," stay off the air, never talk into a tape recorder or a microphone. "C," don't kiss them good-bye when we go home. "U-S" might be seen as United States but what it really means is "Unity over Self." That was the first order. I put out dozens of them but that was the instruction. I said, "Maybe I'm the problem, because there had been people who were killed in the ropes." And then I just said, "I do know one thing. I've got to change the status quo because I'm going to be dealing with a different country tomorrow than I was yesterday. And who knows what's going to happen? They may go bonkers."

And so I said, "I've got to change the status quo," and with that I got off from my traveling irons and went over and shut off the light, pulled back these blankets, and exposing the plate glass window, using the palm of my hand, which was relatively free -- I had enough freedom there, to get the long shards, pull the curtains back, turn on the light, get back in my chair and sit down and just start going like this. And, first of all, I started getting blue blood and I said, "Where is the blue blood coming from? We've got to get some red blood." And so I said, "I don't..." I said to myself, "Is this right? I don't know but I know I've got to..." my hands -- I had run out of ideas and I had to explore the future. You wouldn't think I had a future if you saw me. I passed out in a pool of blood.

Did you want to die, Admiral?

James Stockdale: No, I don't think so. I just knew I had to do something, and I had kind of a hunch that there might be some opening here. I went unconscious. I had a feeling that ever since I'd started this self-defacement they had a suicide watch on me. About two in the night somebody screamed "Eow," and I think that was the suicide watch. I think he looked through a peephole and saw me in that pool of blood in front of my chair.

I was groggy and I really had to be slapped awake, but the room filled up with soldiers and the doctor and some officers and a lot of guards. They were cleaning the room. They were like they were ashamed of it and they were sweeping the floor and putting fluid on it that smelled like something in a funeral parlor. The guards took my clothes out and washed them. The officers were nasty, but they couldn't figure out what to say. Finally -- I don't know the time of night, maybe 3 or 4 in the morning -- they brought in a cot and then they brought in a chair and they put a soldier in the chair and he put the rifle across his knees and they let me lie in the bed with a pillow and I passed out. "Boy, this has been a day!" I looked up at those walls and they're all covered with geckos. You see them on all of the walls in Southeast Asia and they're moving around and they snipe at one another but, God, I looked up there and to me all the gekkos were bisecting their friends! I knew I was hallucinating. I almost laughed.

The next morning the door squeaks open and I look out and it's the commissar himself. He sat down and he said, "Stockdale, do you want a cup of coffee?" I said, "Yes." I don't think I had leg irons on. I went over and sat down across from him and he said, "What happened last night was a catastrophe." And he said, "You know I sit with the general's staff. A report will be written. It may adversely affect me. It might even adversely affect you. I can't say. But..." he said, "You will not stay here. We will put you back in that little place where the doctor will attend you until all traces of bandage and scars as best we can arrange it are gone." Well I was out there from September to almost Christmas and then I went back. Things had happened. I was completely out of communication there. I found out two things. One, nobody had ever been in the ropes since I cut my wrists, and secondly, the commissar had been discharged. So from then on 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.

That was reflected in the Congressional Medal of Honor, wasn't it?

James Stockdale: It's just two paragraphs. They always start out the same. "For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty." Then it explains what happened, and it says, "The highest traditions of the Naval Service were upheld."

You truly suffered for your men.

James Stockdale: I thought I owed it to them. I was the senior guy there. That night was not like any other night except some of the thoughts and some of the mental state. I don't think that was an exception. I guess you can say it's just dumb luck, but you never know. I gave them a problem like they'd never had before and they solved it by backing off.

You've spoken a lot about Epictetus and stoicism. What role do you think your knowledge of that philosophy had in your survival?

James Stockdale: I think it had a lot, but I never mentioned that name or stoicism, it never left my lips. I'd had experience; sometimes there'll be a man in good communication with you, and you had some sort of a -- maybe a religious experience, maybe an inspirational thought -- and you get on the wall and you start giving that stuff to him, tapping him on the wall. After he sees what you're up to, his "twos" -- which he does each time you finish a word -- get less and less enthusiastic.

What does the "two" mean?

James Stockdale: That means "Received. I've received the message. I've received the letter. I know what letter came in." So I gave myself a lesson, I said, "The last thing this guy wants to hear from you is your personal philosophy about important matters. He's got his ducks in line. He's all alone, and he's got certain procedures that he alone has invented to live in that predicament and he just doesn't want to get into your skin." So I think if I had started using the word Epictetus or stoicism it would have been bad for the camp because you can't explain it through the wall. So I just never said anything about that.

What are you most proud of, Admiral?

James Stockdale: Never betraying a friend in prison.

If you were to give advice to someone who was going through terrible adversity, how would you tell them to survive?

James Stockdale: I was just looking at a quotation in a book about hardship: "Men can stand anything, if they just will not give up." I think that's one good way to define a man or a person. We pretty well can stand anything. And the worse thing that can happen is death, and that's not the worst thing in the world either.

We'd like to go all the way back now to the beginning of your childhood. You were raised in a very small town in Illinois. Could you share your recollections of that town?

James Stockdale: My mother was born on a farm near this town, which we still own; it has been in the family since 1850. She was college educated, and had a master's degree and was a high school teacher. The biggest industry in the town was the Abingdon Pottery.

Dad didn't go to college, but he had lots of smarts and was a very well-liked guy and was soon the vice president of the pottery. They employed about 800 people. He went into the Navy voluntarily in 1917. He was in his 30s, and he was white collar by that time, but he went to his boss, Jim Simpson, and said, "Jim, I'd like to join the Navy." Jim said, "Go ahead. Your job will be waiting for you." That's when he became familiar with cities and the way people behave in them. It was a great asset to him, and he never forgot it. That's why I'm named Jim, because he made my dad's life full. He and my mother got married in 1919.

I was in the city schools, grade school and high school. I lettered in three sports -- football, basketball and track -- every year. My dad would always be present at football practice. That was part of my growing up. He and my mother were kind of at odds about my future. I was second in my class in high school and she wanted me to be a lawyer. He wanted me to go to Annapolis and go into the Navy. He won. I was on his side. I thought it was very good news. I didn't think he could have thought of a better thing to do.

This isn't as important as it used to be, but Dad knew the congressman in our district and had negotiated a year when there would be an appointment vacancy. It turned out to be the year after I graduated, so I had a year to go to college first and was accepted at Carleton College, which is still one of the best small colleges in America. But Mother said, "You're going to be gone for the rest of my life. How about going to Monmouth College, which is about 25 miles away?" and I did. Two of my cousins had gone there. So I had a good year there. We were a good freshman football team. I've been back. There's a Stockdale building where they have all the meetings. It's kind of the student union, so I'm certainly part of their alumni. After that, everything went like clockwork and I got the paperwork to go to Annapolis. I was 19 years old by that time.

Dad had heard that the eye exams were very stiff there, so I remember him making carrot juice for me to drink. It seemed to work. I got along all right, and he went with me. I had seen my future classmates and they were saying, "You and your dad were staying over at the big hotel and the rest of us were in rooming houses." He really did it right.

We took a train to Chicago and then got on the Baltimore and Ohio to Annapolis. We were in the parlor car and I was sitting there listening to a three-star Admiral telling about his adventures up to that point. Just conversation, he wasn't giving a speech. This was 1943 so a lot of fighting had gone on and he was going back to be a Washington bureaucrat for a while and then back into the war. I thought that was kind of a good omen, listening to him.

As a kid, did you think you were destined to be a leader?

James Stockdale: Yes. I wasn't a bully, but I watched my dad for one. When he'd walk through that plant everybody had a good word for him, almost like a salute. He'd stop and joke. I fashioned my personality after his.

What was it about the Navy that attracted you?

James Stockdale: I liked it because my dad liked it. That's part of it. I made him so proud that I just couldn't let him down. I worked as hard as I could and I stood in about the 15th percentile, starting from the top. I put in for destroyers, and I was joined by my best friend in the Naval Academy, Bill Crowe. We asked for the same destroyer after graduation. He lived in Oklahoma and I lived in Illinois. We met in San Francisco and went aboard the ship. It wasn't long before I got orders to another ship, the Thompson. I was always trying to get into a sideline of aviation. I put in for test pilot school at Patuxent River. I got it and we moved up there. Sybil was pregnant and had been told to walk. When we were driving the last leg, we would stop and let her off, and she would walk, and then I'd pick her up and we'd drive and then stop again and so forth.

What year did you go to test pilot school?

James Stockdale: 1954. I got my wings in '50 and then I got four years of many kinds of small ships and it was '54. And that was a real turning point in my life because there were only 17 in a class and it lasted six months of school. John Glenn was in the class and we became friends immediately, and I hadn't flown jets yet. And I said, "Listen John, I'll make you a deal. You don't know how to do algebra too well. I can help you with that but you're going to have to teach me to fly jets." And he said, "It's a deal." It was a very good friendship and we started making permanent friends. I graduated six months later and went to a test unit called Service Test. I was then called back to the test pilot school to be an instructor.

I spent about two-and-a-half years as an instructor in test pilot school. I flew all kinds of airplanes because every six months a class passed on and there were only about five guys that were teaching. I was teaching aircraft performance and others would teach stability and control and a lot of things. I was commanding officer of Fighter Squadron 51, and I had the problem at first of getting air-to-ground equipment for my planes, because some of the hotshot fighter pilots had said, "We now have the plane that can outrun every other airplane in the military, so let's be sure and not put rocket rails and bomb racks on these planes, because that'll slow them down."

I could fly over South Vietnam the year before and see all the little skirmishes going on, including sometimes American soldiers and marines, and flying American airplanes, but they were really "noncombatants." I could see all of this thing. I said, "Listen, if we come over here, we're supposed to be up here looking for MIGs. They're not going to fly a MIG down here over South Vietnam, and it's just foolish because they don't have enough planes to do what you do if you wanted to get involved in one of these hassles." You could see three wars going on at almost any time below you. You would see lines of firing men firing at each other. You go 50 or 100 miles on and there's another one going on. South Vietnam was alive with ammunition expenditure.

When was this, Admiral?

James Stockdale: 1963.

What was your feeling at that time about the U.S. involvement there?

James Stockdale: It never crossed our mind that anybody would think there was anything you could do but what we were doing.

Why? Because it was your duty?

James Stockdale: I just thought that that was the best thing that could happen to me, that I would be a hero in Vietnam. That was the only war in town. That's the only reason to fly, is to fight.

I turned that around and I arranged to have air-to-ground equipment, and we were the only F-8U squadron when we deployed that got good scores on our air-to-ground and air-to-air. That set the pace. Others started drawing them and I was the breakout guy because there were some hard heads that said what I said about speed.

Anyway that was a very good cruise. It was '64. The first night of my command cruise. I was called to go down below and they had a message for me from the commander of Seventh Fleet, and it was to take the squadron at noon tomorrow to the USS Constellation, and the Kitty Hawk would also be there.

This was news that never got out. It was secret and stayed secret. All that action we were involved in there had to do with the movement of the Pathet Lao who were threatening to take over the Plain of Jars, which was quite a rich farming country. We were there for about 40 days and we were flying every day. Every time a plane went into Laos, you'd have to check and that all went back to Washington. Once in a while we'd get an assigned target. We would strafe and bomb this factory or whatever. We didn't realize how dangerous it was to get shot down over Laos.

In 1973, when I was waiting with a fort of other people in North Vietnam to get the American air transports to bring us out, a message came in to the American contingent and it said, "Save 300 seats for the Laos prisoners." When it all boiled down, nine guys showed up. That was all there was. I asked people, "What was it like? Why was it like that?" They said, "They weren't in a central government. It was like Indian tribes." They would see a couple of American soldiers, bring them in and they would have a campfire and they'd say, "What do we do? Do we cut off their heads or do we --" You never knew what was going to happen.

You led three principal actions on the Tonkin Gulf.

James Stockdale: Yes. This is kind of a long story but here's the way that was handled by L.B. Johnson. William Bundy was Secretary of State for the Far East, and in May of that year he drafted a congressional resolution -- if you've got enough congressmen to go along with it -- what he wanted to see come out of Congress when it came time to settle with erratic raids by the enemy that were illegal, unconstitutional.

I had hardly gotten back from the Connie when I was back on the Taiko and we were having Sunday afternoon sleepy day flight operations that consisted of really training your new and weak pilots. We would go down and we would shoot rockets.

This was an easy day. There were probably about 15 airplanes that were going out to shoot rockets at a towed spar that the ship would be towing. They were A-4s and F-8s.

After we had been out there just a few minutes and maybe made two runs a piece, I got the word to shift to strike control. That means you're going to get sent somewhere and everybody switches that button on the machine. And the voice on the ship said that the Maddox is being chased by four PT boats at 300 plus miles north of here so clean up and get up there and help them out. What had happened was, that morning on the ship they had had kind of a strange announcement before they got everybody in the ready rooms and told them you should know that there's a certain type of counter to the North Vietnamese seagoing traffic. It's a single Destroyer. It was the Maddox, a single ship that was going up the coast. In doing that, he was involving himself necessarily with another American effort that was sort of off the books. Big PT boats made in Norway, bought by the United States, supposedly being manned only by South Vietnamese. But, a lot of high ranking officers doubted that in my company because of the need for them. They would go on regular runs, leaving at dusk out of Da Nang. They could make about 45 knots. They would go up and they would have target areas that they would shellac in the middle of the night and then they would head back down. The sun would just be rising as they coasted into their dock.

It so happened that before the destroyer got up there, they had even accelerated this program to not having navy guns but army rifles, not great big ones, but big enough to be supported by this ship. In some cases they were skippered by Norwegian merchant seamen. Anyway, they caused a lot of damage and they really raised hell with these army rifles at night. When this fellow came in with the Maddox, the North Vietnamese were really griped at him. They knew he didn't do it, I suppose, but they were really seething. It was an island off shore, maybe a half mile off shore, An May they called it, and it's probably about the size of Coronado, maybe a little bigger. The Maddox had an instrument which sounds pretty good -- all you could hear on the radio was the gibberish of the Vietnamese calling this and that, this and that -- brought into existence, and I didn't know it at that time, a device which he could throw a switch and it instantly translated all that into English. The Maddox heard by that means that the North Vietnamese were calling in PT boats to get even with him the next morning.

When we first sighted those people, we could see that the boats were almost up there to torpedo him. We were descending, and we saw three PT boats with a torpedo under each wing. So six torpedoes hit the water less than a half a block behind this destroyer but they all went bananas. They didn't steer. I said to myself, "So much for Southeast Asian electronics." So the Maddox cut it; he was getting the hell out of there and he said, "Your mission now is to sink and destroy these three PT boats." We were almost out of fuel, but we learned a lot in those few minutes. I learned how to damage a PT boat. You don't want big rockets from altitude going after them. You want to get way down, right on the water's edge, go right up next to them and just give them 40 millimeter machine gun bullets and cut the whole thing up the side. We had one dead in the water and both of the others were spewing oil by the time we had to get out of there and fly back. I had to call planes in to refuel us about half way and we did that and we landed about dark. We'd left about 1:00 o'clock. But, that was the first step.

So everybody around the Washington powerhouse tables said, "Well, looks like we've got a good option here. We can declare war now because they've violated common international law." And then next morning LBJ had a meeting in his office and he said, "Gentlemen, I've been thinking this over and I think that I'm not going to execute the Tonkin Gulf Resolution at this time because this could have been the result of a hare-brained local area commander." And then people he'd also talked to, and even out of the newspapers -- I got this -- he said, "You know, I'm running for President for a second term against Barry Goldwater and if I do something that seems rash to the Americans they will say, 'What the hell is the difference between Barry Goldwater and L.B. Johnson?'" Of course that was in his head, but all these powerful military commanders deluged the office immediately with instant telegraphs saying, "What in the hell are we doing? We've been working for two years to set this up and now that it's time to pull the handle and you lose your guts."

Did you feel that, too?

James Stockdale: Oh, yeah. I'm a player in this. A willing player, but not an instigator.

So President Johnson decided not to execute the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution after that first incident. What happened next?

James Stockdale: The next night, Monday night, I had gone up to see the two destroyers. They were forming up to go back out to the middle of the gulf for the night. A storm was making up. You hardly ever hear thunder at sea but we were in a thunderstorm part of the time. I was in a thunderstorm in a single engine airplane. There's no "we" to it. The clouds were getting lower and it was ominous. We came back and landed just about dusk and I ate my supper in the ward room, which allowed flight suits. And then I went down into my ready room and started shooting the breeze.

Now every night on a carrier -- if you're flying fighters -- you have two planes on the catapults if you're in a dangerous area, ready to launch in an instant's notice. They have ammunition. They have fresh pilots in them that just had something to eat, and then we have two pilots down below that get up in the second two if they go. They shoot two and these guys are ready and they get another guy in. It was dark, the door opened and I got a signal to come out. It was the CIC officer and he said, "We just got a message that indicates that there's going to be some PT boats attacking the Maddox and the Joy tonight in an area just south of here and I'm going to send your pilots." I said, "Wait a minute." I quit listening and I tore off my hat and I got in my torso harness, ran up to the ladder because I'd been out there shooting at those boats two days before and I had to get in that seat, but already the plane on the starboard side had already turned up and was moving up the deck. I grabbed the plane captain and said, "Call up there and get that pilot out and tell him I'm getting in." Meantime on the bridge, the captain was saying -- I learned this in prison because one of the guys was on the bridge -- he said, "What the hell is Stockdale doing out there?" and they said, "He's getting in because he wants to take the flight." And he said, "Well, I guess I'd do the same if it was me." To hear that years later was kind of pleasant.

We got out there and this guy took a cat shot, took off from the starboard catapult, and all his lights went out going down the track. I'd never seen that before. He had lost his generator. He was going to fly into the water. He didn't have any lights unless he could get this thing opened so that the lever would spin a little windmill to make enough electricity for cockpit lights and stuff like that. And he came alive. I said, "God, it's black as hell and he won't even be able to see his instrument panel." They had to land him because he just had this little electricity that was giving him light and there are a lot of switches you've got to have to get your bombs where you want them.

I was glad to go and I said to Hutch Cooper, who's the captain as I walked by said, "Hutch, I really want to go and I think I know what's going on tonight." He said, "Go ahead, Jim," and that was it, and that was against violation of everything. So I was alone, and then there were two A-4s behind me, and later in the night some more planes came down there. I had a hunch that this was a mix-up, because it was an intercepted message and could be misinterpreted as to what they would do. I called Wes McDonald, who was about 100 miles behind me, and I said, "Wes, if you want to do some dive bombings, get up a course above 2,000 feet, give me a call before you come down and I'll get out of the way, but I'm going to shut off all my external lights and I'm going to get below 1,000 feet." Now I'm doing this all on my own. It's all illegal, but I knew on a destroyer those black shoes get itchy if they see planes flying by with lights on them. Nobody could see me. That's what I wanted. Pretty soon the destroyers opened up gun fire. Here comes the big PT boats. I chased those bullets as they went along and went right down on the water and there was nothing there, because you could see -- the Tonkin Gulf has different physical characteristics. It's like a lake. It's like a shallow lake in the middle of a bunch of rocks in the middle of the ocean or close to shore. And any -- the water is very luminescent and if a bullet hits, if a shell hits the water you're going to see not only a splash but luminescence. And there was no disturbance. This went on for an hour.

Maybe not quite that because I was running out of fuel. These two destroyers started reporting things like they had sunk an enemy ship. That would have illuminated a stadium! Everybody was screwed up. I had no evidence that there were any PT boats there and I made that clear.

I came back to the carrier and landed. I was all alone and I went up in the ready room and there were all, three guys, four guys, sitting there kind of -- you know what kind of grins they had on their face and they said, "What's going on out there?" I said, "Yeah, that's what I want to know." I said, "I got so low I had salt water on my windshield. There's no boats out there!" They said, "Well, read this." It was a pencil copy of a message that the destroyer boss had sent while I was flying back. I can't give you the language exactly but the point of it was, "For goodness sake we have no positive indication that anything happened out here tonight, so let us at least hope we get verification before we take action." I said, "I agree with him entirely." Well, everybody kind of got giddy because we thought we were going to be in a war about two hours ago and now we see it's just a stupid screw-up.

So I went down, went to bed just happy as a clam and went to sleep and the next thing I know I've got a man in the room. If any man was in the room it would usually be a steward who would probably be a black man who was waking me for some reason. I saw the glint on this guy's collar and I said, "What the hell are you doing down here?" He said, "I'm the assistant officer on deck. The captain sent me down here to let you know that he is going to give you a phone call in about ten minutes and he's got a lot of news for you." So, I sat there and the phone rang and Hutch, who I loved --he's dead now -- but he said, "Jim, I've got targets all over North Vietnam that are going to have to attack tomorrow. I want you to lead the most important strike, the one they call the number one, and that is the POL storage." POL is petroleum, oils and lubricants. It's fossil fuel. They had eight towering tanks that we'd all noticed. It was maybe 300 miles from where we were going to go. He said, "Hap Chandler is down getting the big bombs out of the bottom. You look him up and tell him what you want for Crusader armament." I found Hap. I'd known Hap for years. Knew him at Patuxent. I went to him and he said, "What do you want on the Crusaders?" And I said, "I want eight zoonies on either side. Nothing else." He said, "Aren't you going to have any defensive weapons?" And I said, "No, there'll be no action out there against us today except the flack." I could have said, "Hell, no. This is Pearl Harbor because we're going to attack a country that's not waiting for it." I didn't say any of that and it's just as well.

Had LBJ signed the resolution by now?

James Stockdale: Yeah.

They had already signed it and (President) Johnson had withheld it. Now I don't know what happened to it. But I said, "I'm going to be leading the first strike of a war under false pretenses." Now you would think that would be a big emotional thing, but I mean it was so mixed up. That's the only way to go. You can't stop -- everything is in motion. We blew those tanks off the wall. I took 18 airplanes. Some of them were A-1s, which had to figure themselves out. They go very slowly in comparison to our jets. I had to go to meetings and I told the A-1 skipper, "Do your navigation and get airborne, and you can just orbit the ship until the time you kilo yourself." Kilo means, "I'm headed for the target." That's a kilo signal. They did that, and then we were sitting there in the ready room and they say, "At midnight, L.B. Johnson announced to the American people that we are retaliating against outrageous activities of PT boats, and in fact some of these attacks are in progress." I had 300 miles to fly and I didn't even know. I said, "Yeah."

So it was all false pretense?

James Stockdale: No. That was a big screw-up. Even in the intelligence community, nobody disputes it now. There were bullets fired, but they weren't fired off of PT boats out there. It was some other action.

Are you saying the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was based on false pretenses?

James Stockdale: No, I wouldn't say it that way. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was written to be used by responsible people who knew there was action, and that they were going to sanction our retaliation. But, there wasn't any (action)! I laughed to myself. I didn't put it on the air, but I said, "Here we go. I'm starting a war under false pretenses."

Looking back on that today, Admiral, what mistakes do you think the U.S. Government made in taking on the Vietnam challenge?

James Stockdale: I've just never studied it enough to know.

First of all, I think McNamara and (President) Johnson and that administration was stupid about warfare. They didn't know what they were talking about and that's about as far as I could take it.

What do you tell young people today who ask you about the Vietnam War? Aside from your own personal sacrifice, how do you look back on it?

James Stockdale: We could have won the war if we had sent the B-52's in. We waited 'til the last moment. Everything was caution. When we came back from that mission, the target was 95 percent destroyed. Those were eight big tanks. That started the Vietnam War. Look at your calendar. August 5th, 1964, and I was the guy that did it.

I wouldn't have missed it, but I don't argue about the Vietnam War legitimacy or anything like that.

Is it more the matter of how it was fought that you argue with?

James Stockdale: Yes. We were doing a lot of tactical bombing raids that were doing good. We could tell that Hanoi's water mains were out, the electric generators were out, and we didn't take advantage of that. We just did the right thing and then acted like it never happened and walked away from it.

Tell us something about what happened when you were finally released.

James Stockdale: When I was released...

I called Sybil, of course, and we had a very, very loving conversation. She said, "How is your -- how are your wounds?" And I said, "Well I can't bend one leg, and I can't raise one arm, but I think the walk kind of gives me a sense of style." And she laughed on that. She thought that was wonderful that I was making fun of that leg business. Being kind of -- well, it does have kind of a flair if somebody thinks you've got a monocle or something.

Was that the first time you had spoken in all those years?

James Stockdale: Yeah. It went over just fine and we got a tape of it. One of our kids knew just enough to put a tape in, and we used that in the movie. That was the real tape. Then we flew right here to the airport at the Navy base. Sybil tells interesting stories about the mindset of a lot of people. She said, "You'd think that when we were finally going to see this thing that we had been waiting eight years for there would have been gales of laughter. But that was the quietest waiting room I'd ever been in, because all these thoughts were going through people's minds. I don't think many of them were malicious thoughts, but it wasn't the time to giggle about it. It was something really serious. We were finally putting a family back together."

Thank you for your time and for everything you've done.

Okay.