Stockdale on Stoicism 55

So much for Stoicism as a guide to where one begins and where one leaves off in the world of free will. I now take leave of that relatively happy place, stale and jaded though it may have become in those years, and shift to the much worse circumstances of a political prison, a house of compulsion. There I found Stoicism an even more perfect fit. 

I’m about to tell you more about the psychological side of life in a political prison than many of you will want to know. I assure you it isn’t done for political instruction or shock effect but to take you inside the human mind in a state of its ultimate duress and show how Stoicism can elevate the dignity of man even in worst-case scenarios. 

I got to that political prison just a little over a year after I blew those tanks off the map. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution had been passed by the Congress two days later, and the air war in North Vietnam was on. It was on September 9, 1965, after a couple of hundred bombing missions in that war, and just three years after I left graduate school, that my airplane was finally shot out of the sky. I arrived at the old French dungeon called Hoa Lo ("Fiery Furnace") Prison in Hanoi, as a stretcher case, three days later. 

I identify Hoa Lo as a political prison rather than a "P.O.W. camp," not just because of its honeycomb of tiny cells, each with a cement-slab bed, leg irons at its foot, a food chute above the irons, a toilet bucket beside, and a "rat hole" to the outside drainage ditch for flushing, but because it was a place where people are sent to be used, to have their minds changed, or both. 

Political prisons are not to be confused with penitentiaries or prison camps where people are locked up to preserve the public peace or pay their debts to society. Little attention is given to terms of confinement or time schedules. They are institutions devoted only to the discrediting of the inmates’ causes; when all the prisoner’s juices have been squeezed out, when his forced confession of crimes never committed are judged as convincing as they can be made to be, he is usually free to go. 

It’s not generally known, but Americans held in Hanoi were free to go any time, provided the prisoner (1) cut juicy enough anti-American tapes, and (2) he was then willing to violate our prisoners’ underground organization’s self-imposed creed of comradeship: "Accept no parole or amnesty; we all go home together." 

Thus we came to imprison ourselves, for honor, in accordance with our Code of Conduct. I might add that this mystified several high officials of our government here in Washington. They didn’t know their own code. 

—from James B. Stockdale, Epictetus' Enchiridion: Conflict and Character