If you ever needed a true example of making a statement, here you go. On 9 September 1965, while on a mission over North Vietnam, James Bond Stockdale (yeah, you read it right) ejected from his Douglas A-4 Skyhawk, which had been struck by enemy fire and completely disabled.
Stockdale 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. Tortured routinely and denied medical attention for the severely damaged leg he suffered during capture, Stockdale created and enforced a code of conduct for all prisoners which governed torture, secret communications, and behavior.
In the summer of 1969, he was locked in leg irons in a bath stall and routinely tortured and beaten. 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' "illicit activities", he slit his wrists so they could not torture him into confession.
He survived his captivity and was released in 1973. Shortly after, he was awarded the Medal of Honor. "I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade." #stayzero #zerofoxtrot #pilot #military #vietnamwar