Stockdale on Stoicism 50

Then I got back into trouble. At that time, the commissar of prisons had had me isolated and under almost constant surveillance for the year since I had staged a riot in Alcatraz to get us out of leg irons. 

I was barred from all prisoner cell-blocks. I had special handlers, and they caught me with an outbound note that gave leads I knew the interrogators could develop through torture. The result would be to implicate my friends in "black activities," as the North Vietnamese called them. 

I had been through those ropes more than a dozen times, and I knew I could contain material—so long as they didn't know I knew it. But this note would open doors that could lead to more people getting killed in there. We had lost a few in big purges—I think in torture overshoots—and I was getting tired of it. 

It was the fall of 1969. I had been in this role for four years, and saw nothing left for me to do but check out. 

I was solo in the main torture room in an isolated part of the prison the night before what they told me would be my day to spill my guts. There was an eerie mood in the prison. Ho Chi Minh had just died and special dirge music was in the air. I was to sit up all night in traveling irons. 

My chair was near the only pane-glass window in the prison. I was able to waddle over and break the window stealthily. I went after my wrist arteries with the big shards. I had knocked the light out, but the patrol guard happened to find me passed out in a pool of blood but still breathing. The Vietnamese went to General Quarters, got their doctor, and saved me. 

Why? It was not until after I was released years later that I learned that that very week, my wife, Sybil, was in Paris demanding humane treatment for prisoners. She was on world news, a public figure, and the last thing the North Vietnamese needed was me dead. 

There was a very solemn crowd of senior North Vietnamese officers in that room as I was revived. Prison torture, as we had known it in Hanoi, ended for everybody that night. 

Of course, it was months before we could be sure that was so. All I knew at the time was that, in the morning, after my arms had been dressed and bandaged, the commissar himself brought in a hot cup of sweet tea, told my surveillance guard to take off my leg irons, and asked me to sit at the table with him. 

"Why did you do this, Stockdale? You know I sit with the army's General Staff; they've asked for a full report this morning." It was not unusual for us to talk like that by that time. 

But he never once mentioned the note, nor did anybody else thereafter. That was unprecedented. After a couple of months in a tiny isolated cell we called Calcutta to let my arms heal, they blindfolded me and walked me right into the "Las Vegas" cell block. The isolation and special surveillance were over. I was put, solo of course, in the Mint.

Dave Hatcher knew I was back because I walked under his window, and though he could not peek out, he could listen, and over the years he had attuned his ear to my walking "signature," my limping gait. 

Soon enough, the rusty wire over the sink in the washroom was bent to the north—Dave Hatcher's signal for "note in the bottle under the sink for Stockdale." 

Like an old fighter pilot, I checked my six o'clock, scooped the note up fast, and concealed it in my prison pajama pants, carefully. Back in my cell, after the guard locked the door, I sat on my toilet bucket—where I could stealthily jettison the note if the peephole cover moved—and unfolded Hatcher's sheet of low-grade paper toweling on which he had printed with rat dropping, without comment or signature, the last verse of Ernest Henley's poem lnvictus:

"It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate; 
I am the captain of my soul." 

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