Stockdale on Stoicism 45

In May 1967, the PA system blared out: "Those of you who repent, truly repent, will be able to go home before the war is over. Those few diehards who insist on inciting the other criminals to oppose the camp authority will be sent to a special dark place." 

I immediately put out an order forbidding any Americans to accept early release, but that is not to say I was a lone man on a white horse. My order was accepted with obvious relief and spontaneous jubilation by the overwhelming majority. 

Guess who went to the dark place. They isolated my leadership team, myself and my ten top cohorts—and sent us into exile. The Vietnamese worked very hard to learn our habits, and they knew who were the troublemakers and who were not making any waves. They isolated those I trusted most: those with a long record of solitary and rope-mark pedigrees. 

Not all were seniors. One of my ten was only 24 years old—born after I was in the Navy. He was a product of my recent shipboard tendencies: "When instincts and rank are out of phase, take the guy with the instincts." 

All of us stayed in solitary throughout, starting with two years in leg irons in a little high-security prison right beside North Vietnam's "Pentagon"—their Ministry of Defense, a typical, old French building.

There are chapters upon chapters after that, but what they came down to in my case was a strung-out vengeance fight between the Prison Authority and those of us who refused to quit trying to be our brothers' keepers. The stakes grew to nervous-breakdown proportions. One of the eleven of us died in that little prison we called Alcatraz. There was not a man who wound up with less than three and a half years of solitary, and four of us had more than four years. 

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