Stockdale on Stoicism 35

When I got my degree, Sybil and I packed up our four sons and family belongings and headed to Southern California. Our new home was to be in Coronado. I was to take command of Fighter Squadron 51, flying supersonic F-8 Crusaders, at Miramar and at sea aboard carriers. Exactly three years after we drove out of our driveway in Los Altos Hills, I was shot down and captured. 

I was not a bookworm throughout those three years before I was shot down; most of the time I was busy at sea in the western Pacific. I launched on three seven-month cruises, all centered on the buildup and explosions of the Southeast Asian war. I was in command throughout, the last cruise as the commander of the air wing on the Oriskany. I dropped the first bombs of the war into North Vietnam and flew more than 100 missions in the flak. 

But I was a changed and better man for my introduction to philosophy, and especially to Epictetus. I was on a different track—certainly not an anti-military track, but to some extent an anti-organization track. Against the backdrop of all the posturing and fumbling that peacetime military organizations seem to have to go through, to accept the need for graceful and unselfconscious improvisation under pressure, to break away from set procedures, forces you to be reflective as you put a new mode of operation together. 

I had become a man detached—not aloof but detached—able to throw out the book without the slightest hesitation when it no longer matched the external circumstances. I was able to put juniors over seniors without embarrassment when their wartime instincts were more reliable. This new abandon, this new built-in flexibility I had gained, was to pay off later in prison. 

—from James B. Stockdale, Master of My Fate: A Stoic Philosopher in a Hanoi Prison