Stockdale on Stoicism 44

An encapsulated history of how this bifurcated prison philosophy fared is this: The propaganda footage and interviews started to backfire. Smart American college men were salting their acts with double-meaninged sentences, gestures read as funny-obscene by Western audiences, and practical jokes. 

One of my best friends, tortured to give names of pilots he knew who had turned in their wings in opposition to the war, said there were only two: Lieutenants Clark Kent and Ben Casey. That went on the front page of the San Diego Union, and somebody sent a copy back to the government in Hanoi. 

As a result of that friendly gesture from a fellow American, Nels Tanner went into three successive days of rope torture, followed by 123 days in leg stocks—all while isolated, of course. 

So after several of these stunts, which cost the Vietnamese much loss of face, North Vietnam resorted to getting its propaganda from only the relatively few Americans they could trust not to act up—real loners who, for different reasons, never joined the prisoner organization, never wanted to get into the tap-code network, well-known sleazeballs we came to call "finks." 

The great mass of the other Americans in Hanoi were, by all standards, "honorable prisoners," but that is not to say that there was anything like a homogeneous prison regime we all shared. People like to think that because we were all in the Hanoi prison system, we had all these common experiences. It's not so. 

These differing regimes became marked when our prison organization stultified the propaganda efforts of this two-headed monster called the "Prison Authority." The North Vietnamese turned to vengeance against the leadership of my organization and to an effort to break down the morale of the others baiting them with an amnesty program in which they would compete for early release by being compliant to North Vietnam 's wishes. 

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