The Daily Stoic - Lt. David Carey On Surviving As A POW W/ Admiral James Stockdale (with Stoicism)

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

Ryan speaks with Lieutenant David Carey in the first of a two-part interview about his incredible experiences serving in Vietnam as a fighter pilot and being shot down and captured by North Vietnamese forces, how 2,022 days in captivity led to him embracing the teachings of Epictetus, why the community that he and his fellow POWs formed in prison saved them from depression, how he has been using his experiences to help others ever since, and more.David Carey is a retired Navy Lieutenant Commander who served in the Vietnam War, as well as an author, motivational speaker, consultant, and trainer. After being deployed aboard the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany in 1966, he was forced to eject over North Vietnam and taken as a Prisoner of War. After serving 2,022 days in the camp, David was released during Operation Homecoming in 1973 and was awarded the Legion of Merit with Valor. Since his retirement from the Navy in 1986, David has dedicated his work to sharing his experiences in the hopes of helping others through his speaking and training engagements and his book The Ways We Choose, Lessons for Life from a POW's Experience. David’s work can be found at davecarey.com.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast.

I think I've talked about this before. You may have seen or listened to, as I think we put some of them on this podcast, the talks I've been doing at the US Naval Academy over the last year, year and a half, that all came about because I have been a fellow at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership, which is based there at the Naval Academy.

It's a very important part of Admiral Stockdale's legacy. Someone we've talked about, I wrote about him in the obstacles the way. One of the great modern practitioners slash philosophers in the great tradition of the Stoics who didn't just talk about these ideas, but tried to live them. And as Dr. himself said, tested the ideas in the laboratory of human experience. So I've gotten to know the folks there at the Leadership Center quite a bit. They've been very helpful on the books that I've writing. I've been writing and I wrote Courage.

They introduced me to some wonderful Navy SEALs and people who had really sort of, whose sort of ideas about courage had stood up on the battlefields after grievous injuries, things like that. And so I was talking to Joe Thomas, who's the director there, and I just said, who else should I talk to? Who else would be interested in? He gave me a bunch of, he gave me the phone numbers of the handful of stockpills, POWs who are still with us.

It's incredible to think that it was 50 years ago now that those men came home, the POWs who were imprisoned in North Vietnam. And it gave me the info and I sent some emails out. I heard back. We've been playing phone tagging. One of them, it turns out, lives in Georgetown, which is about 45 minutes from where I live in Texas, about 45 minutes from the painted porch. So I said, hey, instead of me just asking some questions for research, I'm doing, would you want to just come out

and do the podcast? And Dave Carey said, yes, Dave Care Kerry was shot down a few months after Stockdale. He was entered as a POW in Hinoit for five and a half years. Among his military honors are the Legion of Merit. He won five bronze stars, two maritorious service medals, the Purple Heart, eight air medals, and the Navy commendation medal. After he returned from Vietnam, where he'd been a fighter pilot, shot down on the same kind of plane as Stockdale. He had three positions as a commanding officer, including service as director of the Navy's leadership and management training program. And he retired from the Navy with the rank of captain. He's written a beautiful inspiring book

called The Ways We Choose Lessons for Life from a POW's experience came out in 2005. He signed some copies, so I'll link to that in today's show notes. You'll get his website at DaveCarry.com. We had just an absolutely amazing conversation. I very much enjoyed it. It was an honor to sit across from him and we kick off this episode with a funny little connection we have in common. My youngest son is a fan of his work in a way that you might not have anticipated. So this is part one of my episode with Captain Dave Carey. Enjoy.

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music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music Business Wars. And in our new season, two of the world's leading hotel brands, Hilton and Marriott, stare down family drama and financial disasters. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. I was thinking we have a weird connection. This is a thing of this, but my youngest son, he's like obsessed with boats.

And for some reason, he really likes boats sinking. So he likes the Titanic. And he has made me watch a video of the USS Arinsky sinking. Ariskini sinking like 500 times. He's all right. Yeah, because there's videos that they prepped it and then they shot.

He's just fascinated with it. How old is your son? He's four. He just turned four on Sunday. Yeah. But that was your ship. Oh, yes, it was. He spent a lot of time on that ship.

I did. And let me tell you how old you start to feel when they sink your ship to make it a diving reef. Yeah. Well, where when they sink your ship to make it a diving reef. Where did they sink it off the beach in Pensacola? Oh, interesting. It's in the Gulf. Yeah, they um, all the prep they had to do. Yeah. And because you think you'd just be like, well, sink ship, like on the bottom. But when they sync them on purpose, there's some environmental regulations. They have to follow.

Yeah, if it's on purpose, they would've been better than just having run into a rock or something somehow. Yeah. And also, how do you sync something that is basically designed to be unsynchable? Yeah, that's right. And it's right.

Like, it can be disabled pretty easily, but sync is a very different thing. Yeah. How, speaking of it feeling, it makes you feel old. How long ago do those events feel to you? Well, in most ways, it's like yesterday. Yeah, I was curious, it's like yesterday. Yeah, it's like a lot of things in our lives

that have a big impact on us. Somehow they remain fresh in our memory. And then, of course, after I retired, I went into speaking business and I used that as an analogy for dealing with problems change and uncertainty. Sure. And so that probably keeps it true. Are you revisiting it?

Yeah. Not necessarily from a place of trauma, but you're revisiting it because you're telling the story and you're trying to put people in your shoes in that moment all the time. Yes. And I'm trying to make connections to their lives and their business and yes how Walk me through that day you're in your skyhawk you take off what happens? Well, we launched about seven o'clock in the morning we were going on a strike

There were gonna be 18 airplanes together so we get organized overhead going on a strike, there were going to be 18 airplanes together, so we get organized overhead, head towards North Vietnam. We were about 60 miles off the coast. As we crossed the beach, they start shooting, they always start shooting. And among all the other stuff, the target that was a small railroad bridge just inland from the port city of Haifong. And as so as we crossed the beach they started shooting and among all the other stuff they fired some sand surface tear missiles, sams from way, way out in front of us. And I mean this is also clear in my mind it's amazing, you know. And so the first back then of surface tear missiles was about the size of a small telephone pole.

And for miles away, you could see in launchroom because of the flame and it kicked up from getting them off the rails. And once they're in the sky, the plume of flame on the booster rocket is so big and so bright, just track them as they go through the sky. So our basic tactic was to not do much of anything until we found something that seemed to be tracking us. Because otherwise you just jink forever and never get to a target. You don't know if the bell tolls for the end.

That's right, you don't know. And you're hoping that you see the ones that have your name possibly written on. And so I watched the first missile, they launched two missiles and I watched the first one and it's just a point of light sitting on my windshield and eventually it starts to move on the windshield so I know it won't hit me, it's a relative motion kind of thing and the second missile just sat there and sat there and sat there until finally I decided if it wouldn't move I there until finally I decided if it

wouldn't move I would and what I decided to do that day was instead of going to my left because there were 16 airplanes out here beside me somewhere and everybody's kind of flying wild trying to avoid things. There's only one airplane on my right and so I decided to just pitch my airplane up and go across the airplane on the right and a big decided to just pitch my airplane up and go across the airplane on the right in a big barrel roll kind of thing, come down on the outside, press on the target. And it was a brilliant idea until I was upside down over this guy beside me who happened to be my flight lead and the missile went between us and there was a huge explosion. The fireball blew the

tail section off the airplane, which I didn't know. So did it make contact? Or it exploded in between us. But the explosion blew the tail section off my airplane. It actually, well, I can tell you about L, too, but my airplane stayed on its back and started spinning upside down and fallen through the sky. And it's like everything was in slow motion.

I mean, this thing has come through the sky like a rock. You can imagine. But it's all in slow motion. And so I'm kicking the pedals and stirring the stick and trying to figure out what's going on. I'm kicking the pedals and stirring the stick and trying to figure out what's going on and we're shaking so the airplane was shaking so bad and nothing would focus. You know when I look at the instrument panel see if I can figure at about 18,000 feet or 20,000 feet. As I go through 4,000 feet, I get a glimpse of my altimeter and I can see the needle go through four.

And I knew I had to get out. You know, with airplanes nowadays, you can't... Well, I don't know about airplanes that will pull a ton of G's like an F-35 or something, but in those days you need a 6 or 8,000 feet to even think about getting recovered. And so I'm upside down. I reach down and my butts about this far off, you know, four inches off the seat because I'm upside down.

And the seats are built, it's like sitting on a rocket or a mortar shell. So the seats are built so that you have to have your butt in the seat when that seat cooks off or else by the time it gets to your back, it'll just crush your back. So I grabbed the stick with both hands, I pulled on it with all I had, I pulled my butt up into the seat, I grabbed the stick with both hands. I pulled on it with all I had.

I pulled my butt up into the seat. I grabbed the handle between my legs and, boof, I ejected straight down. Shooting the wrong way. The wrong way, the wrong way. You're trying to avoid guard for a grab. But, and I was, I don't know how high I was by then, but I know that everything worked the way the book says

it's supposed to work I had a shoot. I had maybe two swings in the shoot. I could hear airplanes. I could hear guns. I could hear explosions and then I hit the ground and I landed in the middle of a small North Vietnamese village. landed in the middle of a small North Vietnamese village. How long between seeing the missile and touching the ground were you talking about five minutes? Oh no, no, no, no. It's probably more like, well, it might have been five minutes.

I mean, I saw the missile way out in front of me and I was tracking it. So it might have been five or six minutes or something. But from the time I decided to make my move until I hit the ground was probably maybe two minutes, two minutes at the most. Yeah, it wasn't long. But it felt long. Oh, it felt like forever.

Yeah. Because your training slows time down. I don't know what does it But it slowed down. Yeah, or in my mind, it's very it's kind of slow. I can picture it. I can picture the cockpit. I can picture the blur I I vividly see the altimeter with the needle going through 4,000 and They vividly see the altimeter with the needle going through 4,000 and the whole process would slow. It seemed like. Yeah, because even to drop, what is that 16,000 feet?

That takes a little bit of time. It takes a little bit of time, but it's still fast. I mean, we're hurtling through space. Yeah, if you're just going straight down, like dropping a rock, you know, it goes pretty fast. I've read that, I mean, famously, they talk about this as a naval academy, but Stockdale, as he's parachuting and says to himself, I'm leaving the world of technology

and entering the world of epictetus. I wonder, does he really, is he really thinking about philosophy as he's hurtling towards Earth Earth? Is that something we think about later? Yeah, I think we think about that later. I can't imagine. I mean, Kag, so Admiral Stockdale was the carrier air group commander.

We called him Kag. And he was the Kag from the Eurasian. Now he got shot down the year before I got there. So he had been long gone by the time I got there. But I have a hard time remembering to call him somebody other than keg, quite frankly. Yeah. So I think that's, you know, hindsight

is always more brilliant than that. Maybe he was at a higher elevation. Yeah, a little bit more time to think about it. Because I do wonder, I mean, you have a little time to think about it. And people had gone down before you. So did you have a moment to consider what was awaiting you? No, no, no, I didn't. I was busy as a one-armed paper hanger. I was really, you know,

I'm trying to fly this airplane. I'm trying to figure out what to do with it. I was just very, very busy. And then I hit the ground. So I come down in this little village. I mean, literally, I went right between two hootches. And my parachute is sort of hung over one of these, I call them hootches, kind of a shack. And there's nobody around. So I get rid of my helmet and my parachute, I ducked out between the hootches, I know where I was going, but there was a rice patty there,

so I started out through it. Yeah, and in retrospect, as I've thought about it, I was probably in some sort of shock or something, you know, you just had a rocket shot up your ass. Twice, basically, first from the missile and then from the feet. Yeah, you've fallen 20,000 feet. You've been subjected to incredible cheese.

Yeah. I was a mess. Yeah. What wind does it hit you that best case scenario you're being rescued, but the worst case scenarios are not great. Well, the best case scenario of being rescued was not an option. That just was not a possibility.

I mean, you know, the airspace in North Vietnam is probably the most heavenly defended airspace ever in history. And to bring a hilo into that, we're up in high fong. We're not down in the root pack somewhere where there's not much going on. We're right in the center of it with suicide. So we knew if you went down in that whole high fong pen oil area, you're on your own. Yeah, you kiss a goodbye for a while. So what goes through your mind next then? Are they the scape? No, well, I go, so I go out across this rice patty or into this rice patty and there's nobody well, I go out across this rice paddy or into this rice paddy and there's nobody around. I go into the rice paddy and I can look up

and I can see the airplanes flying away. So I'm trying to run into rice paddy, which is really hard with all the mud, but I'm out there and I get to about the Miller ice paddy and one of those airplanes is turning around and he's coming back. And so I stopped and I dig out this little radio that we carried, which is about the size of a couple of iPhones pasted together. And I had this radio in my hands a lot.

I mean a lot. You know, on the ship they used to make a skid of my eye every couple weeks to check the batteries. We used to play with them sometimes on the ship. But now I'm standing on the little rice paddy. I got mud up to the middle of my calves. I'm looking, I'm watching this one airplane coming right straight at me. I got this one for the life of me. I couldn't get that radio turned on. It was like I had all thumbs on both my hands. And this is not a complicated machine. I had like two little switches on it, but I can't get them in the right sequence. And he's coming faster. And finally, I promise you by blind luck, about the time he boomed across the top,

I managed to mash down on the right combination of buttons on that radio. And it sparked the life, which allowed me to say in my very finest airline pilot, Droll, I started babbling that radio. I'm going, you know, I'm going to be on, and I babbling this radio. And the whole time I'm thinking, this does not sound good. But there was nothing I could do about it. I just went on and on.

It was, and I had been trained, as you probably would guess, that it would have been better for me to die than not sound good on a radio. I mean, this is serious pilot stuff. But there was nothing, I just babbled and babbled and went on that radio. And the best thing

that happened was I run myself out of breath and when I run out of breath I had to pause the inhale. When I paused the inhale I let off one of those buttons on the radio which allowed Dean to get a word in edgewise and he said, you know we cannot come and get you. At which point I couldn't think of anything clever to say and Dean said, I'll see you when this is over and he flew away. And I stood out there in a Miller Rice study. It was like I was the only person in the entire intergalactic universe. Yeah. was me out there by myself all alone. And when I speak, one of the connections I make with people is,

I say, hey, I probably don't have to describe that to you too much. Sure. Because I'll be willing to bet money you've had some time in your life when you get that alone feeling. I mean, stuff happens to us. Yeah. And so then I wasn't alone for very long, of course. I was immediately surrounded by, I tell people about a million North Vietnamese, that's exaggeration, or only 800,000 of them.

They captured me so fast. I mean, when I look back at where I had come from, there were a million people lined up on that, on that lovely along the rice patty. And they captured me and drugged me up out there. They tied me up with a bunch of rope, lots of rope. I mean, miles of rope. And then after they all tied up, they wanted to undress me and they didn't untie me.

They took a machete, he made out a leaf spring of a car and they would reach in between the rope and just grab handfuls of my gear and chop it off. And then they threw me in a truck and took me into Hyphon, the port city there, and into a big prison. I mean, some of the prisons in North Vietnam were the things that the French had built over there in the early 1900s.

You know, the kind of things you see in movies with huge stone walls and little air slits up at the top. So I spent the day there. They started some interrogations and then that night they threw me in a truck and took me to Henley. It's about 60 clicks, 60 kilometers from Hyphon to Henley. It took all night to get there. And then that started my time. And there wasn't then, if Stockdale had been recently shot down, and there wasn't, yeah, but there, so there wasn't a sense of, hey, it's going to be a year or five. The, it was all unknown.

The, the outcome was unknown. Yeah, absolutely unknown. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, it was. And it was that way the whole time we were there. Sure.

Actually, we had no idea when this was going to be over. I would tell you where you could be an optimist or you could be a pessimist. And there wasn't a lot of percentage in being a pessimist. Things were pretty crummy already. So I think all the guys I know, we all thought we were going to get out of here someday, we just didn't know when. When we think of sports stories, we tend to think of tales of epic on the field glory. But the new podcast Sports Explains the World brings you some of the wildest and most surprising sports stories you've never heard, like the teenager who wrote a fake Wikipedia page

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and that it could always be ripped out from under you. But I can't imagine that pessimism serves one, particularly well either. Not at all, yeah. I don't think. I, first of all, let me give you a disclaimer. I haven't read Keg's work on the Stockdale paradox. I haven't read how he frames that up or I haven't read. I have read some clips. When I was in

Hanoi, what I thought we were told, and Kag was a genius. I mean, Admiral Stockdale, you know how God raises up people for certain situations like Churchill and World War II. Stusty Elves, that kind of guy. That's the only guy on the shoulder. He was that kind of guy. And well, so I can tell you a Keg story. Please. So one day, you know, we communicated by tapping on the walls, and it'd take long time. Weeks or months, maybe, for stuff to get around.

But one day, we were, I was living with some guys, and we're in the cell, and we get a message tapped on the wall, and it says, Kag sends the following. Remember what Epictetus said. I'm paraphrasing. So we get off the wall and say, first of all, who was Epictetus? We know anything about Epictetus. What might Epictetus have said?

And maybe didn't send you all to get a post-doc in ancient philosophy. Yeah, exactly mean, but it was a great thing because we could talk, I mean, we could pass, we passed weeks talking about who you think Epic tedious was. What's Kagg talking about? You think he's smoking dope over there? What is going on with Kagg? And so eventually, somebody somewhere in the chain sent a message back or maybe we did and said, okay, we give up. We don't know who Epic TDs was and we don't know what he said. And so he comes back, this all takes a lot of time. Eventually it comes back and I can only paraphrase, but he said, Averyc T.D. said,

don't spend your time worrying about stuff over which you have no influencer control. Sure. And we thought that's great. Yeah. I mean, so we talked about that for a lot. I mean, this is what we did. We, we would dissect everything. But we decided, of course, what he's telling us is tend to our knitting

here and don't get all wrapped around the axle about the war and what's going on in the United States or stuff that we just do our job here, which I thought was absolutely brilliant. It was absolutely brilliant. So that kind of got our minds right. And what did you take it to mean your job was in that moment? Our job was to continue to resist, to try to, in any way, we could take care of each other and help each other to remember that we were still in the United States military and you know just because we got shot down didn't mean well the sudden we were transformed into weirdo hippie freaks which was what that was the way it was in the

states and so so now we come to this Dockdale paradox. Somewhere in my experience, another message came from Kag. I don't remember what I remember is the essence of what I took from it. I don't remember wording and I certainly don't remember any kind of old Greek philosophy or anything associated with it, okay? And it was that that our posture or thinking need to be one of realistic optimism, okay?

thinking need to be one of realistic optimism. Okay. In other words, you're not just an overflowing, blind, optimistic person. There's a realism here, but on the other hand, we needed to be looking for the pony and all this mess and remembering that, you know, thinking that one day we're going to be out of here, we have a job to do, we're doing the best we can do,

and be realistic about what our situation is. That's then got translated somehow, as I understand it, into this Doctile Paradox. Yes. Okay. Let me tell you, I personally, no optimist who perished or had unsurmonable problems. And I know of no pessimist,

who because of his pessimism was a question. I don't. Those comments, which at least online online I've seen a tribute of the Keg. I absolutely disagree with. And I think I don't know if that was like Keg in this parachute thinking about epitides, you know, where it were time, I mean time does things to our thinking. Sure. So as far as if the stock, if Kags paradox was, we're realistic optimists right on. Yeah, I think, I think as I understand, because it's most famously in Jim Collins is good to great. And the paradox is effectively, you have to on the one

hand, unflinchingly accept the reality of the situation you're in, which is not good. You know, you are in a prison with an unknown release date, if there ever is one. But then he says, I never lost faith in my ability to decide the end of the story that if I got out, I would be proud of who I was and what I did with the time that I was in there or what I did after. Right. Words. No, I agree with that. Yeah, I would take exception to the word if, because we were always gonna get out of there.

Now, we didn't know when, but, and it didn't take much to get us stirred up, but at least the guys I was with, you know, if the guard smiled when he unlocked the door in the morning, we're thinking, he knows the way to know. We don't know. Sure. We're out of here. Yeah. Get your toothbrush. We're going, but we just never got out the door in the morning. We're thinking he knows something we don't know. Sure. We're out of here. Yeah.

Get your toothbrush. We're going, but we just never got out the door. Um, uh, but was that demoralizing? No, the day you think it's going to happen and then it doesn't happen. No, no, no, you just keep going. You just, yeah, it's like a game. Yeah. Like, um like things are bad now, but it'll get better, you know, or things are good now, but it'll get bad. It was, but were there people that gave up, like could you see having, not want, take out of that situation, if someone loses heart, decides they're never gonna recover, they're never gonna find love again, you know, they're never going to recover. They're never going to find love again.

You know, they're never going to walk again. There is a sort of a self-fulfilling nature of that in life. So I have to imagine you guys were trying to encourage each other so people didn't give up. We did. We did come to pessimism. Oh, certainly. Right. And the good, the fortunate thing about the situation was if you were having a bad day,

I probably wasn't or vice versa. Sure. So if you're having a bad day and you, I mean, I, I remember when I turned 30 years old, I told my cellmates, I just turned 30 years old. The flower of my manhood is being spent in this damn prison. I am going over in that corner I'm sitting there and die now don't bug me. Yeah, and they say yeah, I go sit in the corner and die. But You know as time so I'm sitting in the corner. Yeah, and that day what happened was they got in this argument about something and it became obvious to me

They needed my input and so I'm up out of the quarter. I can't die. You guys are wrong. I don't have time right now. You guys are wrong. I got a straightness thing out. So if I was having a bad day, they weren't, you know, and we just took care of each other. The hardest part, probably, was being by yourself. Now I was only by myself for a couple of months, but somebody like Kagg being by himself for all those years, that's really hard. Fortunately, he was in contact, but it was not, I know of no one who got into the dumps such that it was that bad. So we had 18 guys who disappeared.

We called them the last sheep. I don't know what happened to those guys. Okay, their bodies have all been accounted for, but they flat out disappeared. Now, whether how they died, I have no idea. We have no idea. We have no idea. But aside from that, now some of them were very sick physically. One of them, I can't think of his name off top of my head, was catatonic. But I have no idea what their situation was. But amongst the other 400 of us, it was not a problem. How old were you when you were shot down?

That was 25, what I shot down. Did you notice, I was curious, there was a big age range, like Stockdale was older, he had kids almost in high school. Yes. How did you notice age affecting different gods? Was I imagine being a POW at 22 is a different experience than a 38 yearyear-old who's been through more things.

Yes. Well, first of all, the 38-year-old turns out to be wise or more life experience, even though I wouldn't want you to let those guys know I said that. to let those guys know I said that. And had been through more life experience and were better able to guide this whole mess, I think. Now they couldn't do as many push-ups or setups, but they, you know, we weren't so old back then. I mean, Kage was probably in his mid-early 40s maybe when he was shot down.

I'd have to figure it out. So they weren't so old, but they had a lot more experience. I mean, by the time Kage got shot, Donnie had been a squadron in commanding officer, he had a lot of experience. Yeah. And thus with the older guys that did get shot, Don, they brought a lot of experience with them.

But other than that, it was, you know, both. So we were organized militarily. I mean, when they would shuffle the deck and move us around, when they closed the doors, the first thing we figured out was who's the senior person in this room now, and who's next senior, and who's next senior, get that all worked out. Then the next was who's the senior person in this building with whom we have contact, or who's the most senior person we can get to period.

So this was not a pickup ball game. Right. It was a very constantly kind of finding order in the case. Yes. And that's a form of resiliency. You're reasserting structure and control. Yes. And systems that they're trying to break you up from. They're trying to try. They kept trying to tell, I mean, we go to interrogation, they want something, whatever we'd say, you gotta talk to the senior guy. We, you know, mostly in big

lecture about, well, if they wanted it bad enough, they come get it. But we always referred them to the senior guy. From what I have experienced with fighter pilots, is that these are masters of their destinies, these are alpha men and women. They're used to defying the elements, defying gravity, and then all of a sudden, you find yourself in a situation where 99%

of your life is not in your control. As Epic Titus says, they're very little is in your control. It's a rude introduction to the idea of acceptance and so very rude introduction. It's a rude awakening. Oh yes. How did you struggle with that? Well, I'll tell you a story. I'm to

point in my life where there are no sound bites anywhere. I love everything. So I got shot down. They took me to Hanoi and they began to interrogate me. The interrogation led to beatings, the beatings led to torture. And we got to the point where I heard so bad. I knew I had to do something. And what I had to do something. And what I decided to do was hold out as long as I could and then lie. And so we got to that point.

And I'd like to be able to tell you that took weeks. It didn't take weeks. I don't really know how long it took because I lose a little track of time in there. But we got to the point where I had to do something, I started lying. I lied about everything you can possibly imagine They'd every question they ask I had a lie. I made up a lie for and

And finally they got done with me and they left no Skip a lot of details. I couldn't get up off the floor. My arms didn't work anymore. I'm But worse than that aside from when I didn't have control of my mind, that's another story. But when I finally started to get my head back together, it's as close as I've ever been, and maybe I was depressed, to depression. I mean, first of all, I had been through all the training. I knew how to conduct myself in this kind of situation. Second of all, I had seen every John Wayne movie that had ever been made, and I knew how

an American fighting man conducted himself here, and I had not been able to do that. They had broken me. So there was a period of time there for a couple weeks where I mean I was lower than whale dung. And the best thing that happened was they came in after a couple weeks and told me get your stuff. I had a mat by then and I'm like roll your stuff up and they took me over and put me in a cell and they brought in another guy. His name was Tom Norris, he was an Air Force Thud Driver, F-105 pilot, and he'd been shot down a few days ahead of me. And so I mean, when we finally quit crying and hugging each other and and start talking, come to find out

to start talking, come to find out what I had been through, he had been through, where I hadn't been strong enough, tough enough, whatever you want to think about it, neither had he. So we're thinking, this is good. We are soulmates now. And if, I mean, literally, we'd have conversations about about you know, I don't know what's gonna happen if we when we get out of here how what the military is gonna do with us or think about us or and

One point we decided well if we're gonna be men without a country we can go together and we'll just bum around the world I mean It was it was a shattering experience to find out just how untough I was. To me, though, from what I have read, kind of maybe the most beautiful and inspiring and perhaps unsung role that people like Stockdale and others whose names I don't remember played, it wasn't just the defiance or the courage or the endurance, but it was really the mechanisms that they created to give people support after they broke. And he talked a lot about avoiding guilt and shame and then coming back from that dark place. Oh yeah. Well, they knew. I mean, they went through the same sorts of things to whatever extent

they did. And so, you know, when they told us, look here, here's the deal. You bend. And when you can't do it anymore, you do what you have to do to get out from under it, but then you bounce back. then you bounce back. And yeah, it was that kind of... So, you know, so, Tom and I then find out over time that this has happened everybody. Yeah. Oh, well. So this is the norm here, you know, is if they want to bust your hump, they could bust your hump. And you just have to come back. And so, as stark as that might sound or be, it was good. Okay. You know, if they take me out and do this, I just have to get through it somehow and eventually get my act back together. And part of that whole process was trying to think if we had some sort of guidance along, I can't remember if we were

told or if this, the heavies came up with this kind of thing or not, but the way we conducted ourselves was, if they took you out, no matter what, whether it was bad or really bad or whatever, whenever you got back in the circulation, we confessed. We told everything. Everybody knew everything. I remember when Kag sent through the wall one day, we got another message from Kag. And he said, it is neither Christian nor American to haunt a repentant sinner to the grave. We thought, whoa, that's deep.

What do you think Kag's talking about now? You know, you think he's smoking dope over there? What is going on with Kag? But of course, you know, eventually, we're like a box of rocks, you know, but eventually we say, oh, he's telling us how we're to conduct ourselves with each other. Kindness forgiveness, kindness, forgiveness.

Take him back into the fold, come back, you know, the whole Christian confession sort of thing. Come back, tell everybody what happened. You're taking back into the fold because your day was coming. I think what's so beautiful about that is there is, especially amongst tough people,

a reluctance to share, a reluctance to be vulnerable. They say in alcoholics, anonymous, you're only sick as your secrets. But we wanna keep secrets about what we're struggling with or what we've done. Believe me, we do. We really do. Yeah.

But that was not the way we lived over there. The way we lived over there was we came back and told whoever we were with, everything that happened and it got spread around. And then life moved on. Because we were talking about optimism, repessimism earlier, but I do imagine shame and guilt. That will kill you.

Oh yes. Oh yeah. If you think you're not worthy of living. You think, I'll tell you those first few weeks when I was there were the worst weeks of my life. And because it was all shame and guilt, like, totally cow. I didn't do what I was supposed to do. This name, rank, serial number thing didn't work for me.

Sure. On and on and on. It went. Yeah, sure. How have you, how is that informed the rest of your life? I got to imagine you're a pretty good ear now for people who, who maybe feel guilty about something or struggling with something. You've seen it all and done it all. Well, let me tell you this way. I am a hardcore follower of Jesus Christ.

Okay. And that idea when John wrote in his first letter, when we fail, we are to confess our sins and God is consistent to forgive us. I see that I mean I'm supposed to be that way. I'm supposed to treat you that way. I'm supposed to interact with everyone that way. And so I've told my kids, I tell my grandchildren, hey, when you screw up, you gotta fess out that, I mean, but it's gonna be okay, it's not the end of the world, you know.

That is the most beautiful part of the Christian tradition, I think, is that no one is beyond redemption. No one is beyond redemption. Yeah, which is really good news for me. I don't know. Yeah, which is really good news for me. I don't know about you, but it's good news for me. Yes, that no one is beyond redemption. That's right. But yeah, I do think we have this idea of you

and your peers as being unbreakable and that's how you got through it. But that's a kind of a superficial understanding of what actually being resilient is. It's not that you... There's a Hemingway quote I love. He says something like, the world breaks everyone, but the ones that will not break the world kills, but those that do break, he says, can become strong in the broken places. I think that's right. If you break your leg where it heals back together,

it's stronger than it was before it was broken. So I think that's right. And the absolute truth is that life's gonna be full of bumps. And we are gonna go through things that are discouraging, hurtful, and even to the point of our brokenness. Right. Some of those will be self-inflicted. Yeah.

Some of those are self-inflicted. Lots of those are self-inflicted. But the idea that we can deal with that. Yeah, we can we're resilient. Yes. I so you want to talk about PTSD for a minute? Please. So I get asked often, Hey, did you have PTSD? I'd say, no, nothing bothers me. Now, I'll say a couple of things about that. One, you know that our treatment changed and started to change a little bit in the fall of 69 and they backed off a little pressure in the last couple years we were there. It became obvious, for example,

that if the interrogator wanted to hammer you, he had to go get permission. And sometimes he would, but sometimes he would. And so they backed that pressure, that constant pressure off. And I would, I tell people now, I would never have thought of these words at the time, never. But from that time on in those cells, we were doing group therapy. No, we didn't even know what group therapy was, but here a group of guys locked up 24, 7, we talked about anything we want for as long as we want, and then we can talk about it again, and again, and again. So that the time we were released, we were ready to go. Yeah. You know, in that X, P, O, W group, the percentage of problems ranging from very minor

to very to suicide is like minuscule. It's minuscule. That group has done extremely, extremely well. And I think it's because of that time and that process. I believe we were created to process outside of ourselves. We do not do well up here in our heads. Stuff just goes around. I think it's really important you say that because

Stockdale's so well known for his association with stoicism, which in today's world stoicism, lower case stoicism is has no emotions, feels nothing, stuffs it down. And that's really the opposite of the work you guys were doing together, and that he was leading and encouraging, which was talk about it, process it, deal with it, get it out, not pretend it didn't happen, pretend it didn't exist, pretend you're invulnerable and superhuman.

No, you're absolutely right. Yeah, that was, that was not the way he thought about it, at least in my understanding, and it certainly wasn't the way we thought about it. I mean, even the fact that he's sending messages to you guys and they're not, hey, make sure your room's clean. He's saying, here's some advice. Yeah, think about this. Don't be too hard on yourself.

We're in this together. Yeah. He's trying to bring everyone together because the sum is greater together. Yeah. And in a way that, I mean, when he said that the message about his neither Christian or American to Haunt or repentance center of the grave, I mean, you know, he was telling us we're the stay collected here and get ourselves back together and he was not, we were not ostracizing anyone. And he was, he wasn't talking about that as the field commander far away.

He was talking about himself also. He's trying to deal process his own guilt and shame and struggle. I think so. I think so. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and add free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.