On 9 September 1965, while on a bombing mission over North Vietnam, Commander James Stockdale’s A4 Skyhawk was shot down by heavy ground fire.
He parachuted into a small village, but was quickly captured.
He was held as a prisoner of war in the infamous "Hanoi Hilton” for the next seven-and-a-half years. As the senior Naval officer, he was one of the primary organizers of prisoner resistance, creating and enforcing a code of conduct for all prisoners which governed torture, secret communications, and behavior.
He was routinely tortured and beaten, locked in leg irons every night and received no medical attention for the wounds he had sustained.
When told by his captors that he was to be paraded in public, Stockdale slit his scalp with a razor to purposely disfigure himself so that his captors could not use him as propaganda. When they covered his head with a hat, he beat himself with a stool until his face was swollen beyond recognition. When Stockdale was discovered with information that could implicate his friends' "black activities", he slit his wrists so they could not torture him into confession. He was subsequently discovered and revived by the North Vietnamese who, convinced of his indomitable spirit, abated in their employment of excessive harassment and torture toward all of the Prisoners of War.
Stockdale was eventually released in 1973 and would receive the Medal of Honor for his leadership and sacrifice.
"The optimists. They were the ones who said, 'We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then out by Easter..And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And those POWs died of a broken heart. This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be”
Be thankful that legends like him roamed the Earth at one point.
#thankful #reality #pilot #stayzero #zerofoxtrot