Stockdale on Stoicism 19

In a crucible like a torture prison, you reflect, you silently study what makes those about you tick. Once I had taken the measure of my torture guard, watched his eyes as he worked, watched him move, felt him move as he stood on my slumped-over back and cinched up the ropes pulling my shoulders together, I came to know that there was good in him. 

That was ironic because when he first came in with the new commissar when torture was instigated after I got there, I had nicknamed him "Pigeye" because of the total vacancy of the stare of the one eye he presented as he peeked through cell door peepholes. He was my age, balding and wiry, quick, lithe and strong, like an athletic trainer. He was totally emotionless, thus his emotionless eyes. He had almost no English-language capability, just motions and grunts. 

Under orders, he put me through the ropes 15 times over the years, and rebroke my bad leg once, I feel sure inadvertently. 

It was a court martial scene and he was having to give me the ropes before a board of North Vietnamese officers. The officers sat at a long table before Pigeye and me, and behind us was a semi-circle of soldiers bearing rifles with fixed bayonets at a kind of "dangle" position, the bayonet pointing at the cement floor ahead of them. 

This was in the "knobby" torture room of "New Guy Village" at Hoa Lo prison in August 1967—so-called because the walls had been crudely speckled with blobs of cement the size of an ice cream scoop in a "soundproofing" attempt. 

I could tell Pigeye was nervous because of these officers whom I had never seen before, and I don't think he had, and he pressed me flat over my bad leg instead of the good one he had always put the tension on before. 

The healing knee cartilage gave way with a loud "pop," and the officers looked at each other and then got up and left. I couldn't get off that floor and onto my feet for nearly two months. 

—from James B. Stockdale, The Stoic Warrior's Triad