 Well, good afternoon. I'm Professor John Jackson, and it's my pleasure to be able to introduce our guest speaker today. Well, we don't want to take too much time away from him. I've been asked to take a few minutes to provide a little information about the events leading up to the capture of Porter Halliburton to speak briefly about the treatment of POWs in general during the Vietnam War, and then I'll turn the microphone over to a man I greatly admire. First, I ask each of you to think back to where you were and what you were doing on January 9th, 2007. Let me spark a few memories. The big movies were Borat and Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers. The TV show The Sopranos won the Emmy for Best Drama. Super Bowl was on the horizon and would pit the Indianapolis Colts against the Chicago Bears. Nobody cared then either. Several months earlier, the Navy had retired its last F-14 Tomcat and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter made its first flight, and Steve Jobs unveiled something called the iPhone. Consider all that has transpired in your life since that period. Well, January 7th of 2007 is exactly 2,675 days ago, which is the period of time that Porter spent in the prisons of North Vietnam. Seven years, three months, and 26 days. It's been almost five decades since Lieutenant Junior Grade Porter Halliburton and his pilot, Lieutenant Commander Sam Olmstead, climbed into their F-4B Phantom Fighter Bomber and launched on a mission over North Vietnam. This was Porter's 75th combat mission of the war, and it would prove to be his last. During a low altitude run of 40 miles north of Hanoi, the plane encountered heavy ground fire and took a direct hit in the cockpit from a 37 millimeter anti-aircraft shell. Recognizing that the plane had been critically damaged and the pilot killed, Porter rejected from the stricken aircraft. He was soon captured by Vietnamese villagers, and at the age of 24 became the 40th American flyer to be taken prison in North Vietnam. To help visualize the events and conditions which followed, we will display a series of drawings done by Lieutenant Commander Mike McGrath, who himself spent six years as a POW in North Vietnam. The stark images that will follow were taken from his book, Prisoner of War, which was originally published in 1975 by the U.S. Naval Institute. Once Porter ejected from his stricken aircraft, he was quickly captured by local peasants and militia. Within days, he had been transported to the Wa Lo Prison, which ultimately came to be known as the Hanoi Hilton. Thus began his seven and a half year ordeal. Mike McGrath drew pictures of their accommodations, but more revealing are these photos of the actual cell in which Porter was held. The prisoners were kept in austere conditions, often shackled in leg irons and handcuffs for weeks and months at a time. When not locked down, they were subjected to brutal treatment from abusive guards who took great pleasure in their suffering. Most vicious of all were the professional interrogators, who were given pet names by the prisoners. With complete disregard for the Geneva Convention, these interrogators used various forms of punishment and physical torture to force information and statements from the POWs. Many were forced to kneel on rocks and other sharp objects for hours or even days on end. By far the most common method of torture was what the POWs came to call the rope trick. They were tightly bound in painful positions, which often pulled arms out of sockets and left many permanent injuries. Punishment was routinely given for violations of camp rules. This punishment included beatings with rubber straps and countless hours in shackles. Communication of any sort between prisoners was forbidden, but the resourceful POWs maintained contact with one another by various clandestine methods, including written notes on scraps of stolen paper, the now famous tap code, and a POW device mute code which could be used when visual contact could be made. From 1964 to 1969, most prisoners were kept in solitary confinement or in very small groups. But several events, including the attempted rescue raid on the Sante prison, caused significant improvement in treatment and conditions. Over time, increasing pressure to improve conditions was brought to bear by the U.S. government as well as by individuals such as Ross Perot and organizations such as the National League of Families of POWs and MIAs in Southeast Asia, which was founded by Sybil Stockdale, wife of the former Naval War College president, James Bond Stockdale. Porter's wife Marty was very active in the National League as coordinator for the 10 southern states. Public support was shown in many ways and some in this audience may have worn POW bracelets, such as this one I'm wearing today, engraved Lieutenant Commander Porter Halliburton, 10, 17, 65, the date of his shoot down. From 1970 on, most prisoners were held in large cells in the Hanoi Hilton, each holding up to 40 prisoners. Their conditions were still meager and crowded, but still far better than before. After over 10 years at war and nearly five years of negotiations, the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973 and the POWs began to be released in February. Shown here, boarding the C-141 in Hanoi is Lieutenant Commander Halliburton about to board the plane. The remarkable story of Porter and Air Force Colonel Fred Cherry was told in the book Two Souls Indivisible, the friendship that saved two POWs in Vietnam, which is now part of the Chief of Naval Operations Professional Reading Program. Dr. Halliburton served as Professor at the Naval War College from 1979 until his retirement in 2006, and he now holds Professor Emeritus status. Please welcome Lieutenant Commander Porter Halliburton back to Spruin's Auditorium. Thank you. Thank you very much. About the tombstone, the report of my death was greatly exaggerated, even though, unlike Mark Twain, mine was engraved in stone. I actually think the Navy was trying to get rid of me, but I got back at them by coming up here and refusing to leave for 25 years. And here I am again. I'm, of course, delighted to be back in Newport, which was my home for so long, and to be able to speak to you today. And so the introductory slides here were meant to just give you an idea of briefly of our treatment and what the conditions were like. I don't really want to talk about that very much, because even though these brutal treatment was a central feature of our captivity in addition to isolation and brutality and all of that, it's not what's important. What's important is how we reacted to these circumstances. And so that's really what I want to talk about today. I want to break these down into groups of three. I don't know why three is such a good number, but they seem to fall into place. And there really were three time periods of our captivity. There were also three personal adaptations to captivity. There were three reflections that I would make about it. And then there are three important things that I would remember from that experience. So I want to begin by talking about the time periods. And the first began with Everett Alvarez in August of 1964 when this whole thing began, and he was the first prisoner taken in North Vietnam. Of course he was there for a long time before we ever got there, but this period roughly existed from August of 1964 up through the summer of 1966. And I'll talk about what changed into the next period in a minute, but the features of this period were first of all one of adaptation. We were becoming adapted to our captivity. Our leaders were sorting out the situation, were giving us advice. We talked about a lot of things and a lot of things were developed, particularly our methods of communication because we knew right away that we were not allowed to communicate in any way with each other. They wanted to keep us in isolation because it's easier to deal with an individual than it is a group. And so that was one of the things that we had to deal with and that frankly that Sear School had not prepared us for. Sear School assumed a compound situation and it wasn't that at all. And so we had to devise these methods and fortunately we have Smitty Harris who was one of the early guys, Air Force guy who remembered this tap code that had been used in World War II. It had been used by the Greeks a couple of thousand years ago as a military code and so we adapted it as our primary means of communication. Aviators don't tend to know Morse code and it's very difficult to send Morse code through the wall to tap the difference between a dot and a dash. So the tap code was developed there and we were fortunate in having leadership that we did in the early days. Somebody remarked that you had to get there early to get the good deals. And sometimes it was a little difficult to figure out what those were but really getting there early did have some advantages. And one of them was that I became in contact with the great leaders that we had there, most of them. Jim Stockdale, Jerry Denton, Robbie Reisner and Bob Purcell and many others. And so having this leadership there early on to assess the situation was one of the things that ensured that we were going to be effective as we could in resistance and survival. And so that was very important and all of that was worked out in the early period in which torture was the exception, not the rule. Brutal treatment as you saw was the rule, isolation, beatings and all kinds of threats and things like that. But generally torture was not resorted to. It was also a time of making choices and I think all of us knew that we were bound by the code of conduct and that we were going to do the best we could to live up to it. And so it was a time of adaptation to our situation with the code of conduct in mind and that was our guide. However, it doesn't cover everything and so that's why it was so important to have the leaders that we did who could interpret the code of conduct in a practical way for us to follow and that's what we did. Of course we had many, many choices to make and I'll tell you one story that sort of illustrates that. I had spent time in that jail cell that you saw there cell number two and heartbreak hotel in Wallow prison and I was there for about two weeks after constant interrogations for hours and hours a day. And finally after that time they said either you'll talk to us or we'll move you to a worse place. If you talk to us we'll move you to a better place where you'll be with your friends and food will be better and you'll play games and write home and all of that. And I wasn't sure that that was true but I didn't think they had a worse place but sure enough they did. And so I moved there and this occurred another three times and each place got worse in a different way and each time this decision that I had to make got a little harder as my health began to deteriorate and my spirits began to deteriorate and as I grew more and more in isolation from everyone else. And the last place that I was in was a cold storage bin in a little building out by the wall of this prison not the Hanoi Hilton but a place that we call the zoo. And it was filthy and the food sat outside for hours and hours for the rats and the ants and everything to consume. And I think I had dysentery I couldn't have eaten that food anyway but I was just about at the end of my rope. And once again they gave me this choice better place or worse place. And it was the most difficult choice I've ever made because I didn't think I could survive the place that I was in for much longer much less a worse place. And so it was a tough time but I spent a lot of time in prayer and I made that choice. And so that night they moved me up to another cell block another building. They opened the door and they pushed me inside and they said you must care for cherry. And inside was a black man major Fred Cherry Air Force 105 pilot. They thought that putting us together was going to be the real catalyst here that would break us both down based on their notions about young southern white boy and black Air Force officer. Well his being black didn't make any difference to me I was so happy to see him I could not stand it. Air Force that was a little harder to get used to. So I spent eight months with Fred Cherry and did did my best to take care of him. He says I saved his life and maybe that's so but he certainly saved my life because it changed my whole way of thinking about imprisonment. You know here we were it wasn't just about survival it was about family it was about taking care of each other and getting through this together. And I knew that we had to do to do that in order to survive. And so rather and then being with him with and he was very very badly injured and nearly died several times. Not so much from the injury but from the Vietnamese attempt to operate and put his arm back in his socket unsuccessful. But it turned me away from my own concerns to to somebody else. And this was very important realization you know that we weren't just in it alone we had to be a group. And so I think this whole idea of unity became much more much more important to all of us during this time. And it also illustrated the importance of choice that we always have a choice to make in life. If I had chosen the other way I wouldn't be here today. I'm not sure where I'd be but it wouldn't be in this circumstance at all. And so in a way that was the most important choice of my life right there and I almost didn't make it. So I want to talk more about choice as we go along. But let me move transition here with one other story about a man that I have the utmost respect for. His name was Bob Purcell. He was an Air Force Air Force captain and a very unusual guy. He should have been a major but you know he flew his airplane is 105 inappropriately at times. And had a lot of Article 15's and so on but he also had many letters of commendation in his record as well. He was just the most fabulous guy and a great leader although he was not a senior guy at all. But because the Vietnamese tried to remove our leadership and isolate them from us. The de facto day-to-day commanders became O3's sometimes O2's. And so I had the great fortune to be in the same units with Bob Purcell on a number of occasions and he was a fabulous leader. But even before I got to know him I heard this story about him. He was living in a building called Pool Hall and the Pool Hall this whole prison had been something else and they converted this building into from three rooms to ten cells, five on each side. And in these ten cells they had dropped electrical lines so a little light bulb could burn at night. And they'd gotten in the overhead in order to do that. And so one room had the access to the overhead and Percy was living in that room. You couldn't get up there. There was no way to get up there. You stacked up everything we had and you had a stack like that and it didn't help. But Percy was the kind of guy that was always going to figure out a way to do something and he figured out how to get up there. And the reason he got up there was that in the other end of the building in cell number five was another Air Force officer named Nolan Daughtry who was one of the unfortunate who was very badly injured like Fred Cherry but Nolan had two broken arms. One broken in two places and the other in three. And he was helpless and he refused to talk to the Vietnamese which was inspirational in itself. And yet to try and further break him they put him in this cell by himself. No slings for his arms or anything. No care and no food. So Percy hears about this and he figured he was getting too much food anyway and so he gets up in the ceiling that crawls down. You remember this was an escape attempt and so he was taking his own life or health in his hands when he did that. He crawls up in there and he crawls down and gets above this hole where the electrical wire went. And he looked down there and he saw Nolan down there with his two broken arms. And he said, hey, Nolan. Well, Nolan been praying a lot, you know. And he thought God was answering his prayers. But Percy said, no, it's me up here Percy. And he told him a couple of jokes trying to get him cheered up and everything. But what he really went down there for was to take his own food and he took all the solid food he had and he stuffed it down that hole. And he had taken his water jug up there and he poured that water down there for Nolan. He did that every day, risked his life every day for two weeks. Vietnamese thought these Americans must be really something, you know. They can survive without food or water for two weeks. They gave up on that program. They used, you know, starvation as a punishment but I don't think they ever used it again to try to extract cooperation. So it was that kind of story and I tell that one story as a lustive of all kinds of stuff that happened during this time. Of people looking after other people and taking extraordinary risks in order to do so. So this was the kind of leadership that inspired us, particularly Green JOs that, you know, would have been at a loss otherwise. And so it was not just what our senior leaders were saying and doing. It was what was occurring throughout our whole group. Well, in the summer of 1966, we bombed Hanoi for the first time. And this initiated a reaction from the Vietnamese that was severe. It resulted in the Hanoi march, if any of you have heard of that. We were paraded down the streets of Hanoi in a gauntlet and we were very lucky to survive that. And that initiated a period of a new policy that if you did not give them the information or cooperation that they wanted, they were going to use extreme force to get it. And so that characterized this next period of time, which unfortunately lasted until late 1969. However, that common suffering and the common experience during this time really bonded us as a group. You know, we became in a way a family. We became a military unit, the 4th Allied POW Wing. We had a command structure. We had all kinds of things, but we were becoming a family as well. Let me read a poem that I wrote during this period of time that I think maybe captures some of what I'm trying to convey. It's called Reflections on Captivity. How can I measure the loss of my dimensions as I lie spread across this crass expanse of time? Bitter years devoid of latitude or luster, my duty days of trial and decision, are but pages turned, but pages not forgotten. Those countless hours of aimless retrospection, regret, restraint and introspection. The strange monotony of unrewarded hopes, unconquered hopes amidst my unborn tears have tempered the metal of my structure and filled the empty spaces of my soul. So the next period began with another extreme change in treatment. After all of this time, during this time the Paris peace talks had started in 1968. 1968 was certainly a pivotal year in the terms of the war and everything else. The Tet Offensive and the beginning of the Paris peace negotiations, all of that, assassinations and so on. Civil Stockdale's going public with the National League of Families and this resulted in an incredible amount of public awareness being brought on the issue of our treatment, not so much for our release but for our improved treatment according to the Geneva Conventions. A couple of POWs had come back early. Doug Hedgull, it might be a name that you know, had come back. He was a Navy seaman and he brought back first hand information and names and all kinds of things about the way we were being treated. And so the public was becoming very aware of this issue and the letter campaign was incredible. They were dumping truckloads of letters and postcards on the doorstep of the litigation in Paris during the negotiations. Well, I believe that they began to question their own policy that they had not really gotten what they thought they were going to get from us. And when they found out, of course, they could force us to do something, they couldn't always force us to do exactly what they wanted. So they found out that they didn't know about that, you know, and so in any photograph, you tried to get the finger in the photograph to send a message that this is not legitimate. And so we used that throughout. Anything that was written, you tried to put the finger in there in some way or another. And I would love to have been there when some Chinese guy or something actually told them what they were getting and to gone through their whole photo library and seen, you know, that it was always, you know, in there somewhere. So it was, and I think they just realized that they were, some of this was kind of productive, that people were turning against them, that people could be against the war. And of course their whole program was to foster the anti-war movement in the United States. And our media helped them do it. And so they used the media, they used celebrities like Jane Fonda and so on in doing this. And they tried to use the POWs, and that was what it was all about. And I think they finally realized that this was counterproductive and that in fact it was splitting the anti-war movement over this issue. So Ho Chi Minh conveniently died in late 69, and they took that opportunity to change their policy. And things got better. By and large they quit torturing people. The food got better. We began to write and receive letters and a few packages and things from home. Vitamins and protein and so on, so our health improved a great deal. We got more time outside, more sanitary conditions, everything. So this last period was really quite different and we were really in much larger groups. This was interrupted sort of by the Sante raid which put them into a panic. Realized that we were willing to do anything to try and get us back. And so that changed the environment a great deal. But it did force us all back into the Hanoi Hilton in big room, the big cells that we were, that you saw there that we had not occupied before. And so that time really became quite different. Since we were in large groups and we had a lot of things available to us that we didn't have before. And we had very, very active programs of physical, mental, spiritual activities. We had classes and everything that you could imagine. Anybody that knew something that was more than anybody else knew, they became the professor, they became the expert. So we had everything from growing tomatoes, you know, to Civil War history and studying German and French and Italian and all kinds of things. I particularly wanted to learn German. I had always been intrigued by the language and you're too young to remember the Saturday evening post that used to have a section called Tales von Montgrosvater. And it was fractured German. But I always was intrigued by the way German sounded and all of that. And so I wanted to learn German and I had studied Spanish in college and didn't do very well in it. I moved in with Fred and we were talking about things like that. And it turned out he had taken German. I said, oh great, I can learn some German from Fred. Well no, he knew about as much German as I knew Spanish. So we kind of didn't do that. But anyway, over the years I did accumulate a lot of German and ran into some people who spoke it pretty well. And towards the end I was actually giving an introductory course in German to Neophytes, you know. We didn't have any written material. We didn't have textbooks or dictionaries. So if we didn't know a word, you know, we just made one up. And it was because German construction is the way it is, you know, a duck became a swimming quackin. And a rabbit was a hippo-nopper. So, you know, we just pressed on with the program with these made up words and everything. So anyway, after I got back I wanted to go back to graduate school and I needed to take a couple of undergraduate courses to get back in the academic swing. And so I talked to my advisor and I said, you know, I'd really like to take German. And he said, oh, okay, and I told him my experience and he said, why don't you take the equivalency test? So I did. And I passed first year college German based on what I had learned in Hanoi with no paper and pencil. So there was some significant academic work that went on. And entertainment, we revived the art of storytelling. We told movies. They had to be two hours long. They had to have sex and violence. You know, it didn't matter whether you actually remembered the movie or not as long as you made something up. And so it was great. And I lived with a guy, I lived with him three or four different times and he told the same movie over and it was never the same. And then after I came back, I went to see it. And it was called World in His Arms at Anthony Quinn and somebody else in there and it wasn't anything like Fred told me. But it was great fun and we felt like we had accomplished a lot. Three adaptations and these don't necessarily coincide with these time periods that I've talked about. And they didn't happen all at once in any period. But the first was kind of what I talked about in the poem of retrospection. I lived in the past. I just, you know, that was a way to escape the present, very unpleasant present. I could live in the past and think about my childhood and days in college and all kinds of good things and good times and so on. So I really, that was what allowed me to get through is thinking about my life in the past. And of course, in trying to think of all the good things, I also dredged up a lot of things I wasn't so proud of. People I'd hurt, wrong things I'd done. And so there was a lot of regret there as well. But that served a purpose, I think. And after I dredged up just about everything that I could, I think I began to think about the future. Okay, what's your life going to be like after this is over? How are you going to make up for this lost time? And how are you going to reconcile with people that you've hurt and make apologies and your life will be different and all that? So I lived in the future and it was a time of great planning. And I didn't do it all alone. One of my good friends, Fred Perington, I lived with for a long time. We would plan all these amazing things and I got all this information and I had to organize it. It was so much. I wanted to do so many things and so I began to alphabetize this list of interests that I had. Art, aviation, automobiles, you know, right through the whole gamut. I had 77 categories. No way I could ever accomplish much of this. And I hadn't talked to my wife about it so it was all kind of out the window anyway. But it was great. It was great fun working on this and I could go down the alphabet and stop and pull out a mental file drawer and take out a folder and look at the stuff that was in there and make modifications and put it back and stick it in the door and close it and move on. So it was a way to occupy time and remove myself from an unpleasant present. So that period was more enjoyable, I think, but it was still a way to escape. And then gradually was a period that I called the now. And it was when I had done all of this stuff and gradually began to understand that my happiness does not necessarily depend on my release. Before that, prison time was survival. Do your duty and survive. Stay healthy, mentally, physically, spiritually. I would divide every day up into those periods of activity. But nothing really meant a whole lot until and unless we got home. All the plans were rest on that one date. And finally I realized that that wasn't necessarily true. That we over the years had built a society and this society had a culture. I had everything in that culture except our real families, but we had become a family. And I realized that this was a meaningful life and that you could lead a meaningful life in the worst of circumstances. As Victor Frankel says, if you haven't read Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel, you need to do that. Because it explains so much that we all are searching for a meaningful life. And we get there by making choices and quite often there are choices that are made during great suffering. And so while I was first shot down in October, I was hoping to be out of there before Christmas. Because I didn't think I could stand it anymore than that. And then Christmas came and I knew I wouldn't want to be there in the summertime, horrible heat and humidity. Because I didn't think I could stand it and yet I was there. And so I was there the next year. And so gradually my projected release date moved out based on how much time I thought that I could survive and endure. And by the time I was actually released, I was mentally, physically, spiritually prepared to stay there another 10 years. Or forever. I didn't want to, that wasn't a plan. But I was reconciled to the fact that we may never go home. And if we don't, we have to make the best of this situation. So that allowed this last period to be so different than all of the others. Three reflections. The first I mentioned that it was a balanced activity which made all the difference. Mental, spiritual, physical. And so we did every day PT, every day we had education, every day we had prayer, we had services. Every Sunday was church call. I remember I was shot down on a Sunday, Sunday morning. It took me three days to get to Hanoi and so I was there for the next Sunday in which the senior guy in Heartbreak Hotel said we're going to have church call. And by that time, or at that time, they weren't quite so adamant about communications and so while the guards were not there we could talk. And he said we're going to have church call. And so he did. And we all stood up if you could, if you weren't in the leg irons and we said the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag facing what we thought was the United States. We said the Lord's Prayer and we had our own individual service. We did that every Sunday together. And it was not just doing it, it was doing it together at the same time because their objective was to break us apart, to keep us separate. No matter how big or small the group was, you couldn't communicate with any other group. And so it's so important that we in an act of defiance and an act of service, we did this all at the same time. And so it was that kind of thing that really brought us together in a spiritual way. And we had contests for physical activity. I know most of you in pretty good shape. How many people here have done 100 push-ups? 500 push-ups. Okay. Do you want to guess what the record was? 2,250 by my friend, Err Williams. And I know he did them because I counted every one of them. So given enough determination and time and practice, you don't just pop down and do them all at once. It's amazing what your body can do and how your body can be healed by exercise. Almost everything that comes up that bothers me, I can alleviate or heal with some form of exercise. And so that exercise was so important to us. I know that I entered the deep knee-bend competition foolishly because it was deep knee-bends. It was not, you know, half or three-quarters of deep knee-bends and you couldn't stop. And so my competitor, the two of us kind of fell out as the finalists there and we worked our way up to, you know, 1,000. And so he did 2,000. So I had to do 3,000. He did four. I did five. He did seven. I let him have it. I knew I could physically do 10,000 deep knee-bends, but there was not time. You had to start when the door closed at night and the guards went away and you went all night until the door opened in the morning. You couldn't do more than 7,000. Well, thank goodness I've already had one knee replaced and I'm probably going to have the other one. And it was because of that kind of foolish activity. But it did indicate that you're given enough time and determination. You can do things that you have no idea that you can. I've talked a lot about mental activity. One of the important things that we did was to memorize the names of everybody that was there. I know that by the time the bombing stopped in 1968, I had 350 names. Of people who were physically there. I had them by chronologically, by shoot-down date, I had them alphabetically. I had them by rank and service, sometimes by aircraft type, by physical location. If we knew that, we didn't always know that. And I went over that list every single day in one form or another. We also had lists of people that we knew that shot down, hadn't shown up. People who had shown up, but we didn't know where they were. All kinds of things. And so again, we found out that if you work hard enough at it, you can force your mind into things that you never thought you could. Because my, I have a very poor memory. But through determination, all things are possible. So the second reflection is that our lives really depend on the choices we make. The things you can't control are things you can't control. And so you don't worry about those. But it's your reaction to what does happen to you or what choices that you have to make that determines our lives. And I go back to that first choice that I had to make about better place or worse place. And how important that is. And so I think that throughout our experience there, we realized these guys can take away every single freedom that we enjoy as a human being. Up to and including your life. But the last thing to go is this freedom to choose. Man's free will. God's great gift to us. And we quite often forget that. We think we're prisoners of our circumstances or that we have to depend on something else. And of course we don't have to make these decisions by ourselves and we often don't make the right decision. But I think about our young people today and the onslaught of stuff that they have to go through. They're told you know that they are prisoners of their circumstances so often. And they don't realize the power of choosing. And the most difficult thing is choosing your attitude. You know if you say I will never ever get over that. Means you never will get over that. But if you choose differently and say okay I'm gonna grieve, I'm gonna mourn, I'm gonna make amends of whatever and now I'm gonna get on with life and make the best of it. Then everything is different. So choice is really the most important freedom that we have. So that was one thing among many others that really kept us. Now Victor Frankel said in his book Man's Search for Meaning which I had not read before I was there. But I certainly did afterwards that that search for meaning in one's life is the most important drive that we have. And when you fail in finding a meaningful life is when you turn to other things. To pleasure, to you name it, money, power and so on. And of course so many people set those as goals thinking they will bring meaningful life or happiness. And they get there and they find out that it's not true. And so this whole idea about a meaningful life and striving for it is so important. And Frankel says that you can find a meaningful life in the worst of circumstances. Frankel was a prisoner at Auschwitz in World War II. And he endured and saw so many more terrible things than we did. And yet he saw people making choices both ways determining their lives. So that meant to me that we are ultimately in charge of our lives and in charge of our happiness. And it's all through control of your attitude. And of course that's the hardest kind of choice to make. But it's what helped us so much. Three important things. Well I've talked some about communication and it really was so important. Because there can be no leadership without communication and without good communication. If we had been effectively cut off from communication we would have been adrift as individuals in this sea of misery. And would have been so much more susceptible to what the Vietnamese wanted to do with us and to us. But because of communication it was the glue that held everything together. It was the only way that our leaders could communicate with us and convey their guidance. It was through this tap code. Everybody know the tap code? No. Everybody does. It's pretty simple. You know just five by five matrix. Put the letters in there. Give them numbers. Indicate the row in the column where the cell is where the letter is. That's it. I explained it to you in what less than 30 seconds. I moved back from a very bad place into back to Hanoi and everything had changed and all guys were new there. Nobody was tapping on the walls and so I determined to teach the guys in the cell right next to me. The tap code took me 56 days in order to do that. To teach them that small little code. But that's what we survived. I remember how important it was when I moved away from Fred Cherry and was alone again in isolation. I moved out from Hanoi to a camp out in the country we call the Briar Patch and it was a bad place. I was in a little cell block that only had four cells. The configuration I could only tap on the wall to one wall meaning one cell. We were kept in handcuffs behind our back all during the day and only got out at night to eat a meal in the evening after dark. And then once again eat a meal in the morning before dark before light and then back in the handcuffs and so on. They were afraid of a rescue attempt. A 105 had come over the camp wagging his wings real slow and they were afraid. So they had us prepared to evacuate. That's what to save our lives they said. But that was the environment and I had to back up to the wall and very carefully with the tip of my finger tap on the wall to the guy next door. And we had to be very careful because when we moved out there and this is the beginning of the second period in which they used torture to get what they wanted. And so all of us out there went through this program and there was a Marine major F-4 pilot next door and how he'd done. And he was my senior officer of our two grades and certainly the guy that I reported to. And every time we went off for a session come back you would share information about what questions they asked, what methods they used. And because being prepared for something is much better than not knowing what's coming. And so this is very important and then we spent this time tapping on the wall and gradually we began to exchange personal information about family and career and likes and dislikes and all that. And so we spent a lot of time tapping that way and learning to know each other and he was really my best and only friend during this whole time. And so we became quite close and I don't know we decided we would torture ourselves by talking about food. And so we came up with this scheme that one day it would be Howie's turn to come up with the menu for the day. So he'd tap across what we were having for breakfast and then later on what we were going to have for lunch and dinner and cocktails and nightcap and the whole smear. And then the next day would be my turn to do the same. And that was great because it gave you something to do at night because there was no electricity out there. And so you had to come up with something other than bacon and eggs and steak and potatoes. You had to be a little creative and so we had to be innovative in our menus and so we did that. So we became pretty good friends and I realized one day I'd never seen him. We never got outside these cells except to go to interrogation. And so I tapped over and I said I've never seen you Howie. What do you look like anyway? He taps back and he said you know John Wayne. I said yeah I know John Wayne. He said like that. Okay this guy's a Marine. He's a fighter pilot. He's 6'2". He's got broad shoulders, narrow hips, good looking guy. So I carried this whole image of Howie done with me. The rest of the time, this was in 1966, we moved from that situation some months later. I never saw Howie again. And there weren't many Marines there and I never ran into anybody that knew Howie. I told a lot of stories about Howie, what I knew about him and everything. And so many years passed and we're on the verge of being released. And we know that's happening because we've been read the agreements that have been signed in Paris and all of that. And so everything is relaxed. They're dumping mail and magazines on us and you know good food and all of this. And so they've taken down the barriers to each big cell and now we let us out into this big courtyard. And then they did something they'd never done before and that was to let another cell out in the same courtyard. At the same time. So there's 40 guys from one cell and 40 from another and we're, you know, renewing old friendships and people that you knew by sight and everything. Well, this guy comes walking up to me, never seen him before in my life. He stuck out his hand and he said, and he's short and bald and not real good looking. He stuck out his hand and said, hi, I'm Howie done. I said, how are you son of a bitch? You lied to me. And he laughed and we had a great laugh over and he said, yeah, I know, but it was such great fun knowing this image that you had of me all this time. Well, I love the story and I love how he's passed away, but I love him and we had gotten through a tough time together and he was my best friend. It was all because of numbers one to five. That simple communication brought us together into a friendship that was deeper than most friendships. And so the lesson that I learned from that, you know, what it's not, it's not the means of communication that's important. It's the quality of that communication. It's what you say. And I think about that in terms of today where we are overwhelmed by the means of communication and we are overwhelmed by the amount of data that comes. And so the problem is not the means of communication. It is how you get your message as a leader in any organization or anything through the spam filter, you know, because everybody has to erect a spam filter. You know, there's so much junk that comes in. And so if you're in the business of communication, which you all are and leadership, which you all are, think about communication because it is so important in leadership. And if you cannot communicate effectively to the people that you hope to lead and influence, then you're going to fail as a leader. And there are many ways to do that. Speaking of leadership, I think, you know, I think about our leaders there and it was not what they said it was what they did and what they did not do. I could stand here and tell you stories about Jim Stockdale and Robbie Reisner for hours and others, many others. I remember what they did. I remember that later on in the experience, the Air Force began to fly some 06s, which the Navy never did. So they became several of them became senior to Stockdale and Reisner and Denton. And they got finding in the end when things got better and they relaxed the rules and everything. Everything got organized, you know, and they organized all this guidance and advice and everything into what became embarrassingly called the plums. There was Plum 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 about what to do and not to do and all this thing had been codified and it came from the head shed. And by this time we had, we were using the deaf mute code and standing up and looking at the next guy and all this stuff was coming over and I was in the comnet. So I'm receiving all this and had to pass it on to the memory bank. You know, somebody there that was going to memorize that one and another plum would come and another memory bank stand up and then we all had to learn the plums. You know what, I don't remember a single one. It was what people did, not what they said, you know. So my conclusion was that its leadership is so important in terms of what you do. It's important in what you say, but if what you say and what you do coincide, it is really effective. But it all depends on that communication. Well, we also found, you know, that sometimes things got so bad you just had to laugh about it. I had my friend, Irv Williams used to say, well, if you can't take a joke, you shouldn't have joined. I had another friend, Glenn Dagle, from Louisiana and he, things would get really bad and he'd say, we just remember it's always darkest right before it's totally black. Just to put things in perspective. The story that I remember the most, I had a friend named Mike Christian, who was an A6BN. He had been Navy enlisted prior to that. He was a little rough around the edges. He let the Vietnamese know how much he despised them and he wanted it that way. And so he got all the crappy little details, you know, and the Vietnamese particularly disliked him. And I lived with him a long time and I learned so much from him. We were in a group of nine of us. The first time I'd been in this size group at all, part of that had just been one or two together. And so it was when it opened up the possibilities of all kinds of activities and I learned so much from Mike. He was just intellectually curious about everything and such a great guy on everything. And during this time there was an escape attempt. And there were two guys that were going to go over the wall on a rainy Saturday night. And they had disguises and all this stuff and supposedly it was well planned and so on. And so we all participated in the preparation for this escape. Mike and I went up in the overhead standing on each other's shoulders and worked the barbed wire out of the hole in the ceiling and looking over to figure out what was on the other side of the wall. And we gathered what little supplies we could and left them in a common area and all the kinds of things like that. So sure enough a rainy Saturday night comes along and these two guys go over the wall very successfully. That part was really well planned. But of course Sunday morning when the sun comes up and here they are among millions of Vietnamese they were quickly captured. One of them was tortured to death. The other was very nearly killed. And we knew that the stuff was going to hit the fan. So what we had done in the past when they had a comfort when they really wanted to know what was going on in the prison the Vietnamese would take one person from every cell block and would ask them all the same questions. Who's the senior guy? What orders has he given? How do you communicate? When do you communicate? What are the escape plans and things like that? So the first time they did this it was pretty effective because they eventually got that kind of information. After that there was always a cover story. Okay if you're in a compurge here's what you can say which was largely what the Vietnamese already knew. They knew who was senior. They knew we communicated and all of that. But if everybody can accept some mistreatment in order to get that information. So the idea is if everybody provides the same information they think they have gotten to the truth. And that allows you to protect what's really important. The real backdoor methods of communication, the real orders, the real escape plans, all of that. So we figured there was going to be a compurge but we were unprepared because there was no way that we could have the same kind of cover story. So sure enough a day after that escape they came late at night and they unlocked the door. They marched in and they pointed at Mike and they gave him the signal to roll up his stuff. And I know that I knew that he was selected for the compurge and I knew what was going to happen to him. And I had two very powerful emotions right next to each other and the first one was when they pointed at Mike. And that was a great sense of relief. They didn't pick me you know because I knew how bad it was going to be. And the second one was this great sense of regret that Mike was going to bear the brunt of this terrible experience and it wasn't me. Well sure enough he and one from every other cell block in that building were tortured for information, everything about that escape attempt. And you know every time they would learn our participation they came and put us in leg irons or beat us or something. So we knew what was going on we could hear these guys screaming and we were just about as low as we could get. And so finally you remember Mike McGrath's picture of the rope trick. And we knew that they were going through torture like that. And so finally after a couple of weeks this was over and the door opens late at night and they pushed Mike in and God you could tell what he had been through. He just looked like hell. And the door closed and we gathered around him and somebody in the group said Mike where have you been? Mike got a little grin on his face. He looked up and said I got tied up and couldn't get away. Well with that little bit of humor he changed everything. He could have come back as a victim he could have come back as a hero he could have come back in any number of roles but he chose that you know. He was essentially saying I'm back no big deal let's press on and there's no reason for you to look so glum you know I'm the one that went through this and so let's press on. He made a choice he controlled his attitude he used humor in a very very effective way. That was one of the most powerful moments in my life was that little bit of humor and yet it changed everything. I often ask a Navy or military audience you know how many commanders have you ever had that had no sense of humor? People you think were good leaders you know a good leader with no sense of humor. Occasionally I'll get you know like that but almost never. So the use of humor is really important in leadership and we saw that time and time again that you can change a situation that's grim that is dangerous that is terrible by a little humor just to put things in perspective. Well the last important thing was right at the end I like to say sometimes that I learned I learned one important lesson at the very beginning of my experience and that was the importance of choice. And I learned this last lesson at the very end of it and it was when we knew we were going home we were we saw the civilian clothes laying outside. We'd been given a shave and a haircut and so we knew that the end was near. We had been talking about the future talking about what you want to do. I had these 77 categories of things but we had never talked about what are you going to do the first 24 hours at your home. That was just you couldn't do that. I knew what I was talking I was thinking about was my family that I had not seen. I left I left a daughter who was five days old and now she was almost eight. So I was looking I was thinking about being reunited with my wife and and daughter. I overheard two guys next to me talking about what they were going to do to get back at the Vietnamese. In the first 24 hours they were going to start a campaign of revenge. And I said my God you know this hatred is really got a grip on a hatred had been a useful thing. And there was plenty of room reason to hate the hate our captors for any number of reasons. The fact that they they left they left our families in ignorance of what we were really what was really happening to us. You know that they let me lie in a grave without telling my family that I was there their brutal treatment towards us. So this hatred that you build up was like an armor like a shield. I could never break through that. And yet I realized that this hatred had a tremendous grip. And so I knew that I never wanted these people to adversely affect my life again. And so when we marched through the gates of the Hanoi Hilton to get on the bus to go to the airport to leave. I just turned around I said I forgive you. And it was not a Christian act. It was an act of self preservation because I knew I could not leave with that hatred. Because hatred is a poison to the soul. I have since forgiven everybody in connection with that war as a Christian. Well except for two people but I don't hate them. So forgiveness was the most powerful thing I've done in my life and it affects my life today. So those are the two most powerful lessons that I learned the choice and it was a choice to forgive. Well I've done everything in threes except I've only read two poems. You know I was an English major in college and so I was sort of an anomaly in this group of you know erinautical engineers and so on. But I became the expert you know. And one of the things I did was to write poetry to pass the time and sort of express. So I want to read another one and it's called it's really about my wife and it's called the three of us. Which appropriate name. Yesterday on meeting you hoping without knowing you knowing without asking you loving without telling you. The young and misty two of us sharing each the best of us accepting to the worst of us and we so good for both of us. And as for me the faulty one the wild and hungry needy one to spend my life in search of one and finding you the perfect one. And so we shared our pastel days our soft and glowing magic days and you with child within those days and then our few but perfect days. Now two of you to wait for me to love to hope to pray for me and I still feel you part of me though you and she so far from me. The future still so bright for us for you for me for three of us and she the best of each of us will fill the lives of both of us. Thank you. Thank you. I'm happy to answer any questions that you have or listen to any remarks that you have sir. Sir. Well you bring up a very interesting topic of the code of conduct and it's history because I had gone through Sear school based on a rather rigid. Interpretation of the code up in runs with Maine and they didn't know much about Vietnam or our experience or you know what it was going to be like this is you know in 1964 65. And so our training in the code of conduct was very strict name ranked service number and date of birth period nothing else be willing to dive rather than give them anything else. I know I was criticized there because I was put in an academic situation. You have a bubbling chest wound you need an immediate transfusion start the program again. What's your blood type A positive. I wanted a transfusion as quickly as possible. It's on my ID card it's on my dog tags it's not secret information but I was criticized for giving it. So I went into that experience thinking OK name ranked service number and date of birth and nothing else and I tried to stay with that for as long as I possibly could. And so when I was finally tortured to give you know more than that I was unprepared. You know because they had never taught us the second line of resistance. What do you do if you have to do something. How do you communicate. They didn't teach us that. And so the code of conduct was written at a time that was quite different. You know it assumed a compound situation like World War two. You know it didn't assume that you had to communicate leaders had to communicate. So I was just a brand new J.O. And I got there and so I was not in a leadership position at all. And so I didn't really have a choice one way or the other except for my own personal behavior. I was going to try and stick to the code of conduct as much as possible. But after being tortured the first time and having to do something right something. The psychological blow of that was far worse than the physical. And I only was able to deal with that when I found out that every other person reacted the same way. They gave it gave everything they had. They reached a point where they couldn't take anymore. Death was not an option. Take that out of the equation. It's very different. So since everybody was in the same boat you know there was guidance that was given about. Okay. You will accept torture rather than give them what they want. But once you reach the point where you are sure they're going to continue until you give it to them. You give up early. You don't take it all the way. And there's a very practical reason for that. And it you know it rubs you wrong that you know you don't give up early. You try your best. Well we tried our best you know and wound up by definition with no further will to exist. To resist. You were helpless. But fortunately I mean they ruined your arms enough that you couldn't write anything for quite a while anyway. So during that time you had to think you know if I got to write this. But what am I going to write. How can I screw it up. How can I give them the finger in this document. So on. So that was a whole rationale that if you give up early you still have your wits about you to resist in a different way. By screwing up whatever it is they want. You know if they're going to have you give a statement and they're going to record it you give them the finger. You know in the statement you put stuff that will indicate to another reader that this is BS. So it was a second line of resistance. That's what we worked out. And it was sort of a common thing. You know because it was a common experience. Everybody did their best. That first time. And we realized that we were not the Superman that we'd been told we were. Is that useful. Yes man. I would say yes it's a great mistake to focus entirely on that you know scientific areas. I you know I great I went to a liberal arts college and I'm glad I did. You know I think that that brings so much to to life that is beyond the science. Stockdale you know who was when he was president here he instituted a course that's still being taught. Foundations of moral obligation based on his philosophical feelings. You know he he studied epictetus a stoic philosopher and that's what brought him through. You know it wasn't his knowledge of aerodynamics. It was it was it was philosophy. I think you know when I read Victor Frank I said that explains everything to me. You know and it wasn't it wasn't mathematics. And so I think I think it's a mistake to concentrate solely on those that stem feels at the expense of what we would call liberal arts meaning philosophy and literature and all of all of that. And I think you know you're a much more rounded person. It will enhance your professional career it will enhance your personal life and so on so. Yes anything else. Yes sir. Doug Doug Hedgo was a Navy seaman and he was aboard the cruiser Canberra and somehow fell off the ship. Maybe it was during a night firing exercise. I'm not sure but anyway it's 19 year old sailor wound up in the in the South China Sea floating around out there at night. The ship went on they didn't know that he'd fallen overboard. And so he was picked up in the morning by Vietnamese fishermen and the fishermen turned him over to the military eventually. And when the military got him they actually thought that he was a CIA plant that the CIA had you know trained this guy to go in and do nefarious things and so on. And that's given the CIA a lot of credit but anyway he finally you know he just you know convinced him he's a dumb sailor young guy didn't know nothing. And so they sort of primed him for propaganda release you know he actually wasn't legally a POW he was a survivor at sea because he'd been taken in international waters. And so they put him in with another guy named Dick Stratton some of you may know him or know his name I mean spent a lot of time here in Newport. And Dick had been through the program been tortured he had memorized all the names he knew the com methods and all of that. And he taught all that to Doug. Now Doug had an amazing memory. It was not quite photographic but he could memorize almost anything when he got there he could already recite the Gettysburg address forward and backward. So he had this this amazing memory and so Dick took that opportunity to tell him all of this stuff about what was going on and everything. And the first time that Doug had been offered this early release he refused he said no I'm going home with everybody else. So Dick Stratton did a very controversial thing at the time he was a senior guy there and he ordered Dick Stratton ordered Doug to accept early release. Now that's against the code of conduct. You will not accept parole which is what this was but there was an overriding reason to do so. And some people didn't agree about Dick but most of us did. And so Doug Hedgel was released early with another two guys propaganda release and everything. And he gets back and 15 minutes after he landed in the United States he was on the telephone with my wife telling her information about me. Not just that I was alive but that I was OK. And he did that with the other two Navy guys who were who were declared KIA as well. And then he goes on an extensive debrief and all of that and he makes the rounds of all the Sears schools and they completely revamped their Sears schools to teach the code the tap code and the mute code and every other method of communication. Second line of resistance a whole new approach to code of conduct and so on. So he completely he completely revised that whole resistance program. And so that was that was a turning point. It was the first time that we that anybody had any kind of detailed information about what was going on there. So Doug is you know this 19 year old kid really made a significant difference in our defense posture and he is a great hero. And he never considers himself to be that way. Yeah I think we've gone over the time. Thank you. Thank you again for your.