 Good afternoon and welcome to the Issues in National Security Lecture Series. I'm Tom Gibbons. I work for the Associate Provost. And it's my distinct honor to introduce my good friend Jim Stockdale. Jim has had a distinguished career in education. He followed in his father's footsteps. He's done everything you can do to become a headmaster and lots of different things in education. But most recently, Jim is a barn builder. And I'm sure that you'll hear about that. And a little-known fact about Jim is he's the star in a rock band. And I'm sure he'll talk about that too. But without further ado, please join me in welcoming my good friend Jim Stockdale. Thank you. Lovely. I didn't know... We okay? I'm sorry, I'm looking up there. Okay, good. Good. Let's put up puzzle, please. Slide one. Oh, I've got to do that. Okay, that's what they're telling me. All right. Well, which one is this? No, that's the pointer. Okay. Oh, I see. F is for forward. B is for back. They did that for me. This is puzzle. He's a mixed spaniel. And he's my dog. And he's out in front of the barn that I just rebuilt. For those of you who I haven't had the chance to talk to, Marina and I became kind of itinerant educators and went around the country, Georgia, Florida, Latin school of Chicago, independent school in New York. Anyway, we wound up in New York at an independent school, and I was the head, which means you raise money. That's all you do. And I came home one night after a fundraising thing in a back room of a Wall Street restaurant. It was the 90s, so anybody could have done it. I mean, just walk in. But I came home that night and I just dropped my briefcase and I said, Marina, we have a five-year-old and an infant. God bless people who can rear their children in cities like these, but I am not one. So we took the whole professional plan and threw it out and said, next shot, we're just going to find a great place for these kids to grow up. 28 years later, I finished the barn. Quickly, it was in terrible shape and what really spurred me was the real estate assessor. At one point, we had to take out a home equity loan to, I'm sure, to pay for tuition. And I said, hey, does the barn, it was all a wreck. And I said, does the barn add value to the land? You know, he said, oh, no, that subtracts value in that condition. Dad, people aren't going to want to buy that. So I thought, in our area, Amish would occasionally be driven by and they'd pause and they'd stop and they'd say, can we help you with your barn? We'll take it down. We just like the slates and the timbers and the so forth and so forth. Both of my sets of grandparents, Dad as you may know is from Illinois and Mom from Connecticut, a dairy farm and a farm farm. But all I could do in the last couple of years was hear my grandparents whispering in my ear, it's the barn. You've got to fix the barn. You can't not do it. So there you have it. Bluers can be in the background there, but boy, when those doors come open, Tom knows we're going to break it in on Memorial Day. All my old college crazies are going to come and we're going to pretend we know how to play music. So it ought to be fun and we've invited the neighborhood. That's the end of that. So I'm really, really pleased that you can be here and I'm not meaning to look over you folks, but I'm really happy you're here. When I was here last fall, I spoke to some summer here today, which is a lovely compliment, but I'm going to go in a little bit of a different direction. Last fall I really gave a heart rendering account of how we happened to get into the Vietnam War and the people responsible and kind of ground them up with the pretty fine pieces before the day was over and people seemed to enjoy it. Today I thought we'd go in a different direction because I was told this was for spouses primarily and I would like for... I'm trying to get an assessment of age here. I don't know where you are with your families. I can't tell that by appearances, but I'd like to kind of carry you through our family, especially before dad was shot down. We'll talk a little bit about his experience and a little bit about mom's and then I'd like it to deteriorate into conversation if we could. Does that sound okay? How many of you are our parents with someone who is under nine at home? Ah, see there. I told Tom I was going to say this, but he said you're going to speak at four o'clock and the old superintendent said, do you provide childcare? And he said no, the husband's, you know, the other spouse is doing that. I said Tom, I'm going to tell you what I've heard for years and that is you tell us this is an important job but when it comes to providing an opportunity to do it you're not providing all the supports you should. So for what that's worth, I don't know. I think that would be a new thing at the Naval War College to have a childcare. I've got a number of nice rooms and nice people, you could figure that out, but to give you the flexibility to be here without, well, maybe with your spouse and with your child nearby. Okay. Sorry, I didn't know I was going to be standing in front of you so I have a book here. I want to be able to use it and refer to it if that's okay. I'm going to try and take a little bit of a risk today as those who attended the previous presentation know that I begin by slapping my vulnerability right down on the barrel head. Okay. I want you to know that there are times when I tell this story still that become a little overwhelming. I confess there's one difference in my presentation and I want before beginning to help you know I have an affliction and I ask that you bear with me. It's a risk with you just in a way that may cause us all a little discomfort. Here's what I mean. There are times when the story is still so close that it overcomes everything. So I've got a couple of pages here, most of which was written after Marina gave me a talk and I said please write it down, but we need not go into that. The dilemma is that the entire process of telling this story is built on unresolved grief. Dad and I were very close. When he got shot down it wasn't just, it was heartfelt for all of us, but I felt as we probably all did that I lost a very specific part of my life. I was 14 when he went down and 22 when he came home and I hung around and helped with my brothers, three of them, and tried to be supportive of mom, but we all have emotional baggage we carry through life. Some of us have more than the rest, so I have a great opportunity to take, well, I want to know, are psychiatrists emotional baggage handlers? Is that how that works? Because at one point I sat down with a therapist, that's a great way to start a doc, and I've been with him for about six or seven months, and at one point I was giving a talk, going through a similar cycle, and I said I just can't keep my emotions under control. I said I'm really, I'm going to see a hypnotist or something because I need to do that. Well, this guy had a good sense of humor and he had long since he brought in something from his shop at home. He said just a minute, I have just the thing. He came over to his desk drawer and he got a hat saw, and he came over and he took my arm and he said where shall we take it off? Where shall we, I said what are you talking about? And he said Jim, the things you feel are just as with you as your arm. Unless you're willing to saw them off or dim it out or brown down the rest of your life, you're going to have to deal with it. You may have to, I apologize in advance, perhaps consider it a way of me saying things to a Navy audience. Oh, thank you. That I could never say or express anywhere else because the rest of the world finds stories like this absolutely incomprehensible. They have no idea what you're talking about. You got to spend five pages on vocabulary and by then they're asleep. So I can say and do things here that I might not be able to do otherwise. Thank you. Maybe I'm going to read some things here that kind of walk us, me and dad up to the point of when he was a carrier group commander and when he was shot down. Is that okay? Maybe some of you will recognize your children, maybe some of you will recognize yourself. Most of you are here kind of in grad school and dad went to grad school and at that point the Naval War College wasn't an option. I don't know why, but he was given a choice between Tufts in Boston and Stanford by the Navy to get his masters. He chose Stanford because it was right down the street. We moved from 1261 Brentwood Street in Los Altos to 2830 Natoma Road in Los Altos Hills and the difference couldn't have been more amazing. Dad rented an old ramshackle hacienda in Los Altos Hills. 25 acres with live oaks, great borbors, apricot trees, wild oats and an old mayor named Babe we could ride bareback if we kept her shot and watered. You could ride bareback if Babe was willing to take you because she was temperamental and you'd approach her with a bridal and if she shrugged off then that was a signal for you. And Apple helped, but I thought she was a very self-sufficient old gal. Next to her gate there was a bush about this high and it was going to turn into something serious, but long since before we got there bush, the bush had been trimmed and it was when Babe's stomach got itchy, she would come and lean over the bush and rock back and forth to scratch herself. I was responsible for filling the old bathtub she had as a trough and we loved her. Imagine this is a place to grow up while your dad's in the Navy. Dad came to my Little League games on a dirt field down the road. He would sit in the stands for the full game even though I only played the obligatory last two innings in right field. When I asked him for help learning to hit the baseball, he pulled out an ancient, I'd never seen it before, Goose Goslin baseball glove. Autograph model from his own boyhood, I'd never seen it before. Then as if to cement a commitment, we headed out to find the tools we would need for the task because I couldn't hit worth a lick. We took his old Plymouth, a 49 Plymouth, a chariot for adventure on the weekends down to Spyro's Sports in the Palo Alto shopping center and not only did dad buy me a brand new glove, but he grabbed a bat named Black Beauty, set it right on the barrel as well. No one had ever heard of batter's helmets. Any other protective gear was for its time, of course, optional. For good measure, he picked up a field knife and a leather sheath for the long walks we took in the surrounding woods. When we got home, he asked about my old wood burning set and he sat down lovingly at the kitchen counter and burned JBS into the knife and Jim Stockdale Los Altos Hills Chines in the thumb of the glove. So out we went, outside we had this old cement wall it was really kind of hard to describe but you get the picture. I was sitting up there, we had an old tin pipan plate down here and I got my cap and we all started and I took my stance adjacent to the wall we used as the backstop and pulled it down. I tried my best to look the part. He had a challenge as he set me up in the batter's box a dyslexic left-hander with no natural ability and what seemed like less experience. Dad began to throw pitches over the tin pipan and I hit a few and told him the big guys on the other team seemed to throw it harder than that. So he obliged me and sure enough after a few went by a tailing fastball came as I was leaning in and slapped me, pow, right in the temple. I saw stars and started to slump. The last thing I recalled was things started to fade away as dad was in a dead sprint toward me. Maybe I was out for a few seconds but when consciousness returned he had caught me going down in his cross-legged lap and as I flailed he was running dry red cool dirt on where the ball had hit me. He drew me close, rocking me back and forth on a hot sunny day even though he knew I was okay in a moment I wished could last forever. When moving around so much you really can't forge friendships with other kids sooner or later you realize your best friend is right there with you when he can be all along and when he's been around and you know he'll go back on the line soon you remember these things. These things you don't forget. How many of you have been to Coronado? Anybody been to Coronado? Whoa! It's, well, it's near San Diego. We made the trip from the Los Altos Hills down to San Diego because Dad was going back on. Is this okay? Am I doing alright? I won't drag this on too long, I promise. You won't believe this. None of you will believe this but there were no traffic lights anywhere on the island in 1962. Not a one. The only way to get across to San Diego efficiently was by ferry. As businesses and base jobs got to quitting time half of Orange Avenue would line up with cars patiently waiting to drive down the clanging set of platforms to a parking space on one of four functioning ferry boats. One loaded the ferry with churn and water and it would go out and there were four of these going back and forth until Orange Avenue was clear and everyone had gone home and needed to be where they needed to be. Such rhythms and rituals in any community have their counterpoint. Just opposing this bay's utilitarian frame was the ocean. Less than a mile away waves crested and crashed on a big white spread of sand. The bay's bookend boundary before an infinite Pacific horizon. The bay stied was still and seemed humdrum compared to the salt in your sinuses and the majestic drumbeat of ocean waves. Few views in life epitomize freedom like the sweep of Coronado Beach. Eminating from North Island a slow but ubiquitous sound would emerge even at night. Pilots in training constantly hovered helicopters at low altitude as part of getting to know there how to fly. As unusual as it sounds this almost musical rhythmic accompaniment was comforting. Oddly when it stopped for one reason or another that got your attention. Putting any particulars aside though Coronado was a natural fit for a Navy town but it was also as all California seaside communities would come to know over the years virgin territory. Just another sleepy seaside southern California town innocently crested on the brink of being discovered, invaded and finally overrun by developers and real estate agents the worst of what the 20th century had to offer. Coronado isn't Coronado anymore. You'll know. When we lived there the Hotel Del had a town and country program where you could use the tennis courts and the swimming pools there and they were very nice facilities. The family membership was $200 a year. That included the spa and they were... Nobody was staying in the hotel at all. At the time it was owned by the Alicio family who owned the Caliente race track down in Tijuana and it just nothing was going on with it and the building was blessed because of the sort of... it was just being ignored and you know how beautiful it is. Well of course it didn't take long to see the paragraph about real estate developers international hotel managers came in and solved that problem. With international pricing to boot it's a beautiful, beautiful place but you're not going to go swim there for $200 anymore or play a game of tennis. Anyway. Across fences in Coronado across cocktails in the library at the beauty shop you get the idea. Aviator wives hear about the deadly work that SEALs are already doing an underwater demolition specialist's girlfriend confides in the fiance of an electrician's mate. One wife over here is another arguing about safety with a spouse. What to hear and say? What to hear and not say? If you could eavesdrop on the collected conversation one thing seemed sure. There was something to worry about. There was a subtle but certain acceleration in training schedules more and more jets and props from over the surf on the beach to do touch and goes at North Island. Even the amphib base was uncharacteristically conspicuous. Classes were completing live combat drills with blank gunfire and small planes doing mock bombing rounds over preset explosives. Previously similar exercises had been conducted in obscure locations but these complete with landing craft were held right out in the open 200 yards south of the Hotel Del Jetty and all of the tourists and you know adolescent hangers on you could just sit and watch this battle unfold. It was about an hour long drama where different people were coming in and hey we're being pretty obvious about this at this point by comparison. There was momentum toward military conflict it was very gradual, very slow very certain. In terms of commitment very uncertain. It would become one of the themes for an as yet unimaginable actual war. Everybody knew but no one said a word. The fretful partners of officers and sailors were in beautiful Coronado after all and in the daylight both rumors and reality seemed less severe. In the sunshine the majority shrugged. All this talk come on it can't happen here. This is paradise. One of the ways Dad tried to compensate for not being with the family at all during that first year really was his idea was to bring the boys to work with him. Okay? So my brother Sidney the time was nine and I got on a greyhound bus in San Diego and we drove over to a place that is misnamed Chocolate Mountain. Across the southern slack of the Mojave in Yuma, Arizona Chocolate Mountain sounds like a place you'd land in the Candy Land Board Game but it's not. It's an aerial gunnery range over thousands, well hundreds of miles hundreds of square miles of desert and it's where the aviators shoot missiles and shoot their cannon in target practice. That's where we were going. The first stop for the day was an old silver mine with an old silver miter and he was funny. As Sidney and I were heading back, I mean we got down and we could crawl around in this mine and we could find things and he'd point to different aspects and it was great. This was first thing in the morning before breakfast and he was giving us this tour. Did some other things during the day in Yuma Territorial Prison. When dad was at Stanford he didn't like he did not like that I watched so many westerns on TV Gunsmoke, Wyatt Herb all of them sanitized versions of the real thing and he thought going to this prison well that might serve up a more realistic picture of what western life was like when it was really happening. I don't think it was at all calculated but our last stop for the day was Yuma Territorial Prison. An old west prison carved out of sandstone on the side of a small hill. Now since the early 60's you should realize that Yuma has discovered its tourist self and this awful prison now has nice signs and little arrows pointing to it and a little booth with information. I wasn't there in 62. As counterintuitive as it seems this case historical designation provided upgraded curb appeal. The modern sanitized version is not what we saw. We ventured into an unkept unattended facility on the other side of town. No velvet rope to keep you away from a display and no goddamn souvenir shop. We toured it at our own speed taking in the small dark cells with chains and manacles mounted in the walls. The filth and cruelty of the place was palpable. Here among small tributes to Yuma's role in westward migration were old copied photos and daguerreotypes showing off the hanged and the haggard. Men who'd wandered so far off the path that this ugly corner of the world held their sad fate. Some of the haunting black and white images were next to the very cells and chains on display. This was not gun smoke no Miss Kitty no Festus or Chester limping down the board sidewalk. What Dad said and I could never foreseen was the role that such a setting would play in our otherwise predictable lives. Men died in that place. That sandstone smelled like suffering. Dad was flying every day during this work up and he seemed simultaneously invigorated happy and exhausted. We were right in the thick of it a four boy full speed ahead hectic navy household. One conversation revealed everything anyone needed to know about our lives at that point. Both at work at home both excitement and apprehension are twin faces for the fighter pilot and his family. We were all together on a whirlwind Saturday afternoon with each of us going in a different direction. The living room was loud confusing and filled with energy. In the swirl mom and dad were having a conversation when with a little more volume than the prevailing din mom almost pleaded I'm just wondering when things are going to settle down and we're going to have a normal life. Sound familiar? Dad realized that this was just momentary anxiety and he said this is it Sid this is normal life. This is our normal navy life. You know this. Would you have it any other way and she kind of smiled and the crinkly lines in her forehead smoothed out and the day went on. But that I don't know if it captures anything for you but in many ways it's the essence of the difference between working in the military and working in the regular world. A constant state of apprehension because there's always danger inherent in what you're doing. On any given day when I was back from the beach ball field or park I enjoyed being separated downstairs I had a basement bedroom in our new last house I had dad's old Zenith clock go tuned to KGB AM, yes, really and in a Kai tape recorder dad had brought home from Tokyo with a wooden cabinet speaker as well as a record player. I was all set in my basement room a bachelor pad as described in any girly magazine we could get our hands on. When there was little else to do I occasionally took inventory. I reviewed my moving essentials roll away a bed old leather suitcase that used to belong to my grandfather and a beat up wooden dresser that we never unpacked from place to place these were the totems of a Navy junior always ready to hit the road always ready for that next adventure what I didn't know was that our family would never again hit that road we weren't going anywhere for a while adventure though we've got an adventure for you. Dad loved loved loved loved his life in the Navy he just loved to fly as a matter of fact this is something a lot of people don't know on what we affectionately call the long cruise mom had gone over to Tokyo to be with dad for a couple of weeks of R&R in the middle of the cruise we've never done that before they'd heard about it happening but they didn't and and dad broached the topic he was the carrier air group commander and that's the last billet the Navy leader has where he can fly and you know some CAG some carrier wing commanders they fly just enough to be editorially correct not bad he flew everybody's squadron's planes all the time because that's what he loved to do and when they were in Japan dad said to mom you know I've been given some thought to getting out of the Navy some of the guys down there in South Vietnam were encouraging me to join Air America that way I could continue to fly well of course this was an invitation to you know a higher risk that mom thought wasn't going to work and so it was decided pretty quickly that that wouldn't be a path that he would take dad had been in the Tonkin Gulf in 1964 he saw the real attack on August 4th he led the saw the real attack on August 2nd was in charge of the false attack on August 4th and he led the reprisal raid that Robert McNamara arranged with 64 sortie flights over North Vietnam on August 5th they lied it was sad and when they knew they had lied they continued to there were no boats out there that night none which it had where a lot of scared sailors black water and American fire power they twisted themselves into what had happened a couple of days before and they you know they'd been at general quarters for about 20 hours they were sweating in the south in southeast Asian heat and they thought they saw things that they didn't there were blips on the radar that didn't represent ships in the local waters it's notorious that radar conduct that is to say the radar throws a signal out there and hits a point and then it comes right back at you looking like a ship or a plane it was awful and dad that night came back to the I mean everybody knew everybody knew on the plane this was big news dad flew in at about 1130 had 300 pounds of fuel he kind of ballooned when he came in he was the first one out and the first one in and he I know both Charlie Patton is this plane captain and Phil Morrison was his electricians mate and they were there to meet the plane and they and dad got out of the cockpit Charlie Patton had to put the pins back into the ejection seat first he got out can somebody tell me what in the hell was going on out there I've ruined my ass ragged I mean this there are no hydraulics in f8s this is all pretty manual labor and he's sweating like a pig I mean he's been out there throwing everything he's got at places where there's nothing to attack he knew there was nothing out there hutch cooper the captain of the ship knew nothing was out there whitey more the two star in charge of the carrier task group he knew there was nothing out there Roy Johnson 7th fleet Tom Moore at the time was sink pack fleet sorry I used the old denominations and only sharp himself was sink pack commander in chief pacific sorry I know those titles I can't keep up with it it was a very very grinding difficult time but dad came back from 64 he came back with a little bit of an edge and a little bit of a wisdom he considered in 64 that his job as commanding officer of the squadron was to get in between his pilots and the danger presented on the ground in Vietnam the second cruise he thought it was his main responsibility to serve as a barrier between his flyers and Washington DC because they were calling the shots the only time the only time any military man could say about how their planes were going to be loaded and where they were going to go dad's up on the flight deck about 5 o'clock in the morning after having flown the night before and down the ramp comes Hap Chandler we've known the Chandlers for 10 years dad took the first group of F-8s to the west coast Hap Chandler took the first group of F-4 Bs to the west coast he had three daughters and married a girl from New Haven dad had four sons and married a girl from East Haven they were just about as alike as they could be and Hap was the executive officer of the ship and dad was going to be leading this raid that was going to go on and Hap came down and he said Kag Kag do you want anything air to air on the planes today and dad just said no Hap they don't know we're coming they won't bring the migs down until tomorrow all air to ground stuff and so you had these two guys who've known one another for a decade looking at one another and realizing what was about to happen and it was kind of impressive for both I called Hap's daughters about two years ago and I said was this, am I imagining was this a moment, was this a thing and they said oh no dad remembered that forever and it's just kind of a, I mean you can imagine this as an officer all of a sudden one of your old friends is coming down and both of you are standing there in the moment when you know it's not right but orders are orders and you do what you have to do dad came home from that cruise he felt a little betrayed because there was no action no follow up, no nothing and he was a little bit down about it he was a very rare group commander and went back with the Euruskene the next year and he flew all kinds of planes all the time as I mentioned but on September 9th 1965 he went down here are the 12 hours dad had he came down out of the plane he had broken both one of his knees and a shoulder when he pulled the curtain you all know what that is actually a little stick of dynamite under the seat and over their heads they have two rings and they pull what amounts to a curtain down and that's supposed to protect them when the dynamite goes off and they bail out their parachute comes out well it's just not as simple as that when you're not practicing so dad broke a couple of things and he went down and he landed in the middle of a village and first of all he was gang-tackled by a group of teenagers young thugs who had been whipped into a rage and they took him down and they beat him and he was bleeding and he was hurt and so forth and so on and then the whistles came your best friend at that moment were the North Vietnamese authorities they'd arrive in their pith helmets because already even in 1965 Ho Chi Minh said those pilots are pure gold we're going to keep them alive we're going to keep them on the plate so dad looked down after the thugs were cleared away and his left knee well I don't know how to explain it it was about a 45 degree angle this way flat he'd broken his shoulder he was hurt he was put on top of a truck and taken to Hanoi spent a couple of very strange nights on the way there it was odd he was put in prison he was put in a little prison part of the main prison called Heartbreak 12 hours at home okay shift everything around I'm in my basement bedroom when I hear the doorbell ring it's already Sunday night so someone's there and something's out so I go up the stairs to answer the door mom calls down, is someone at the door? I open the door and there is my mother's best friend, Doi Anzal he's like pushed past me and right behind her stood the youngest freshest poor guy who drew the short straw chaplain it's Sunday night the last guy in the totem pole gets the duty and he was there and you know that's it no black car, no ceremonious anything just boom, boom, boom and dad at first was missing he was missing and that's what Doi Anzal told mom and mom came down a little bit upset naturally and she said how can he be missing? God knows he's somewhere and so this went on for a while and then Doi Anzal and mom stayed up and drank port late, late that night mom came down to talk to me and she said you know I think if he were dead I would feel something I feel as though I wouldn't know so the decision was made at 3 o'clock that morning that we would pursue the normal day at school the next day off we went to school mom and Doi Anzal sat down and started to just gather their wits about them little Navy town all the other kids really quickly they didn't know how to talk to you they were told at home they felt sorry for you but they didn't know how to behave all of a sudden you were a little bit of a pariah out there you were part of a club no one wants to belong to and they didn't want to acknowledge it what else could it be I'd like to if you don't mind show us some of this growing up because I've talked for way too long but wrong one alright good puzzle off here I start here because we all know we in our family know how lucky we are my god I mean we've got nothing to complain about compared to a whole range of other folks whose souls, hearts and children were lost in that war this is dad coming down the ladder of an A4 this was taken about 24 hours before he was shot down now I think the glorious pictures provide the most authentic representation of what's going on so some of these are a little bit hard to make out I think we've gotten our first camera that would take color pictures and this is a picture of dad with my brother Stanford Sid and me on the left and dad's old Plymouth in the background up in the hills and some months later here we are in front of mom's car 1955 Chevrolet wagon bought at Guy Chevrolet outside of Patuxent river Maryland and that car made it to California the reason we're all gathered there is we're about to in 1963 we're about to drive the car across the country to visit my mom's parents in Connecticut I say that and I think hmm that was kind of risky it was just mom and those four boys you can see up on top of the Chevy the Navy had this little place where you could go and get things that were less expensive than regular U-Haul stuff so we got one of these great big it would look like a great big aluminum box on top of some supports they also gave us those screens in there you remember any of those or any of you old enough to remember those the screens were supposed to reflect the sunlight but the hit item was we got an air conditioner you bet we did it was on the passenger side of the car it stood out it was about a foot and a half long and this big around and you filled it with water cold water and the idea was that as you went through the desert or wherever it was hot that this would kind of cool the air there was a string you could pull well that deteriorated rather quickly because we were doing the triple A triptych and so forth and I pulled that thing a couple of times it just rained on me these were the kinds of things that we were doing in Coronado we went from here to here dad just before going on the last cruise around taking care of business taking care of things and this was taken our first Christmas at 547A Avenue we lived in a little house at first and then mom fell in love with this place so there we are you can tell what year it is and you can tell we're a Navy family because of the braided rugs I don't know if it seemed to me at one point every Navy household had braided rugs and ostentatious oriental looking stuff from cruises sorry I throw this up there to give you a sense of our ages mom and I had a little dig at one point because she always had a tendency to cut me off cut me off of the picture one way or another so that's me, my little brother Taylor Sid and Stan and dad in front of the Christmas tree and it gives you a sense of who we were one thing that people have noticed is that Taylor was the fourth child I was the first so if anything happened with me it was an emergency room visitor Taylor was developing and the doctor told mom that he was going to be pigeon-toed well look at her solution to that mom she put his shoes on the wrong feet for about six months so you put that down in your orthopedist notebook this is a picture we took and sent to dad out on the ship make note of those clothes here's a picture of dad receiving one of his air medals from Bart Connolly Bart on your left was the captain of the Eriscone and got to be a really good family friend they're in the captain's import cabin on the USS Ticonderoga and somebody's handing someone a medal six months later same place same picture Bart Connolly giving mom the Legion of Merit for dad I just look at my brother's faces nine months or seven months actually after dad was shot down we got our first mail pretty amazing back to that one of the ways I wound up much more involved in this story than I should have been at the age of 15 had to do with what you see here on the letter but you don't understand the implications of it do you see where it is sent and he's written mother father daughter son wife blah blah blah blah well they had him write all that out and then cross off the ones to which it wasn't right around the corner once knew we were getting mail and they made contact with mom and one of the first things Bob borrows who was a phenomenal phenomenal guy just a character just amazing naval intelligence guy I mean the most inconspicuous guy in the room I've only ever seen one picture of him I've met his children after he and Ruthie passed away they died in an auto accident in 1999 his children had no idea what he did but he was the hero among the wives he's the one who actually went out and found ways to communicate with the men so that they could try to improve their conditions at any rate when he first came on borrows took a look at that list in the cross-off items and he said Sybil you know how this works you know how the Navy works there's someone in a dangerous situation or situation that's sensitive you always have to have a backup before we get going you've got to have a backup you've got to tell somebody not what we're doing but that we're doing something well mom's mother mom's parents so I was the I was the backup and mom started to tell me about these visits by first very cursory later more involved now I just I just throw this up this was the first letter we got from dad and I thought it was kind of an interesting thing they down there at the bottom you can see where dad is written it is also explained that my outgoing mail within this possible ceiling can go only to one address E as I inferred earlier by the same token only one yourself should write to me on the monthly schedule the weight of your letter must not exceed 20 grams thus hopefully we will keep in closer touch my spirits are climbing already as I savor this knowledge God is with us who can be against us that's what they scratch now but dad wrote that letter during a very tough time now I throw this letter up there because this was the second or third letter that we got and I just have to review this first of all what's all that junk doing on that letter Jim well I thought for a long time that it had been something that happened in Hanoi and finally the intelligence people said no no we did that we have to do that to the letters because we think we might find some sort of encrypted or hidden message so this is the way you get the get the letter one thinks of Vietnam as a tropical country but in January the rains came and there was cold and darkness even at noon well that sent me right to the bookshelf darkness at noon is a novel by an author who knows what is going on it's about Rubeshoff an old commissar in prison in Russia and right in the first 20 pages we didn't read it carefully enough right in the first 20 pages it described how many things that are almost explicitly an idea exactly what dad was living in right down to taps on the plumbing to communicate well we didn't know we didn't like the way it looked but we didn't know what was happening this was dad's intake picture if you will sort of foreboding about what was to come this is a cleaned up version of a piece of heartbreak they opened those windows they were covered with corrugated metal when they were in there this is the picture that appeared in the San Diego union mom got a call got a tip that dad's picture was going to be in the paper so she woke me up and the papers were delivered of course down at the ferry so she went down to the ferry landing at 2.30 to find the paper to see the picture yet she just didn't want it to be terrible well the papers weren't on the 2.30 ferry so she went back at 4 and I'm supposed to be up and I'm waiting for nothing to happen with my brothers but this comforted her so this is the picture that was released first time we'd seen him in years I'm going to give you a sample of what dad was working on in terms of leadership just a little taste this was difficult because you were never allowed to communicate you were not allowed to communicate in the prison at all you couldn't tap you couldn't yell and the price for this was either solitary confinement, punishment or torture that's it here's a little adolescent psychology trick don't tell a 16-year-old who loved his father that he's helplessly being tortured in a country halfway around the world that just knocked me for a loop I got to the point where I was physically sick and I couldn't think about it I just couldn't think about it the torture sounds awful and it was but you know there's some interesting things about it dad got to the point where he was never comfortable with the torture but he knew what was coming he knew what it was for it was to try to degrade him to such a level that he would start to collapse in on himself and wouldn't be able to lead others this was challenging because all they had was the tap code and a couple of other tools at their disposal there was a table in the initial interrogation room a big heavy wooden table and underneath it guys had been left alone I guess for a little while and they drew a diagram of the tap code messages there's a little film clip of it and so he said all prisoners learn this code and then down below the guy who carved it out there wrote PHUCHO so I mean there's a little coded message there so anyway back US was one of dad's policy ideas he had to get rules out there he had to get policies out there among his men it was not enough to say do your best dad tried that one time and the junior officers came back and they said no no no that's not good enough you've got to tell us how to behave you've got to order us to take torture which was kind of revealing in its way this do your best business was not going to wash at all while he's there he's coming up with plans and they have to be short because they can only be tapped and they have to be concise and they have to say something dad's first policy statement the only one I'll share with you today was back US do not bow in public we will not show ourselves as subservient A, stay off the air they were starting to have guys read on the camp radio and once you start reading on the radio you're only two steps away from self-criticism they're reading the news they're reading what's printed and so forth and so on but dad said stay off the air nobody read on the radio you can't do it now this presented a problem because the guys who had already read on the radio would go in and go into this interrogation and they say now we want you to read some more on the radio and they say no we can't why can't you do that you did that last time be reasonable my commanding officer has ordered me not to do it who is your commanding officer okay this person had to get off the ratchet once you start doing something in an environment like that they think they can depend on you to do it every time and when you don't they get very upset they are trying to grind you down to lose your self self-respect to become someone who sort of hollowed out for their message stay off the air see admit no crimes this got to be a problem because of course the Vietnamese said well there's parties to the Geneva convention and there's a whole confusing conversation about that we'll do later but if you weren't a prisoner of war we hadn't declared war and then you were a war criminal our state department came up with a natty term for it I thought and that was detainees of a hostile power what does that mean the idea is that they're going to try to get you to say that you're a criminal admit no crimes and K never kiss the enemy goodbye we all go home together you asked everyone thinks it's United States but it was unity over self because dad realized the only way they were going to get through this wasn't by kind of lame exhortations or band music or memories of the 4th of July you were working for the guy next door you were taking care of the American across the hall you were making sure people stayed alive and stayed communicating that's just a little piece of that maybe just kind of plucked in there but it gives you a sense of what dad was doing at the time and this is a letter that arrived actually dad misdated it it was January 2 1967 Bob Burroughs had given mom a code to embed in a letter and some carbon paper and the way dad was instructed to acknowledge that he got the code was by starting the letter and ending it you're adoring husband mom was thrilled when this came tell you that right now the problem was that dad kept doing it he kept writing darling and you're adoring husband and then mom had to waste a message writing to him and saying well no you're adoring husband well here you'll see this is mom's code this is what she worked on she was given a sheet of digits by the office of naval intelligence well after I'll just go through it after a specified number of letters a word appears in this case late on the far right upper right hand corner what it says is my very dearest Jim I sent my last letter to you with Mr. William Lederer who left for Hawaii in late April some of you know who William Lederer was but nobody knows he was a captain working for naval intelligence and he had access to to Hanoi but that didn't work out each third word you can see how it goes one two three one two three one two three each letter that starts the third word represents a digit and the digits turn into messages it took me 25 years to solve this simplest code I think that exists this also gives you a picture of the frustration mom felt this was one of her practice attempts and she knew she couldn't make a mistake she was so afraid she was going to make a mistake here is what a message would actually be decoded and it's the one I described before you can do amazing things if you leave out vowels you know darling know your adoring husband we're just signals to let us know you received and could send forget these now you are doing a superb job hang on we will spend it many more nights at the Sano together that's the hotel they stayed in in Japan you could go for nine months on that dad said getting that stuff was just amazing now I got some of these old photographs this is obviously a news when you can buy these things in their original form if you really are interested but and I'm the only one who's that interested this is a picture of mom calling when she was getting ready to go to Paris she was organizing the wives one thing I did not do well I'll do it it's worth doing alright here so you know here's what was circulated to Navy families by the PIO at NAS in California straight from Washington this is what you would get the third or fourth day after your husband was shot down advice to potential prisoner of war families Department of Defense publication in the event of capture PNOK you know what that means primary next of kin it's so sensitively written PNOK should be notified in person if possible immediate recommended action by PNOK includes the following parents of the prisoner and parents in law of the prisoners should be notified by telephone they should be instructed not to release any information to the press about the prisoner and not to be interviewed by the press PNOK should engage someone to act as a telephone operator this person should be instructed to take no foreign calls and that no information of any kind should be released she was instructed to say Mrs Stockdale has no comment at this time press silence is to be maintained any intimate data can be skillfully used in psychological warfare to coerce the prisoner to aid the communist propaganda program pictures of the family the prisoner can also be used as coercion and thus be detrimental to the welfare of the prisoner the family should not comment on this announcement or any others children or friends should not be mentioned or referred to other than in general terms and families are encouraged to delete terms of endearment goodness gracious me this is these are the people that are supposed to be helping us these are the people that are going to help the wives and families of these guys feel better I can't do it now but I can show you the 1967 camp regulations from Wallow prison in Hanoi shut up or be punished now I want to go on but I also know that we can't take one of the things that's important to keep in mind and this is where I slip back into being an old literature or history teacher everyone wants to examine this war in terms of what caused what that's reductionism and reductionism seeks to explain a lot by way of very little that is there's one reason that this big thing happened in fact life works best when it does exactly the opposite namely tracing gestalts of thought and action back to a variety of biographical vectors everything we do is over determined caused by a concert of reasons beware of the inverted pyramid when you're going through this stuff you want to say oh I know why that happened that happened because this happened I can see that this was the question and this was the answer or this was x so this was y it doesn't happen that way it never is one of the biases of hindsight is to see historical events as inevitable nothing about this war was inevitable it was a lot of individual decisions that sent 58,000 Americans to die 3 million southeast Asians it wasn't inevitable and we got caught in it and we stayed in it for the wrong reasons the film just shows the matrix and the tap code and so forth and so on and then it describes kind of an interesting episode in which my grandmother well my father's mother would never leave Illinois farm country impulsively and she would never wade in the pacific ocean so Bob Burroughs went out and said to Sybil find pictures of Mabel we need to replicate her so we have these pictures of my dad's mother circled I still have them in an envelope but this was Mabel and what they did was they went out and found a woman who looked a little bit like Mabel and they put her out in like an ocean scene splashing in the surf dad would know just like that something's up here and they sent him this picture and the Vietnamese very thoughtfully said we have a letter for you and a picture of your mother and no one noticed because it was such a kind of a mad scene but dad blurted out that's not my mother and then he took it back to the cell and he thought what is going on here this isn't my mother there was an allusion in the letter to being beautiful when wet so dad decided he should soak the picture and he soaked that thing and he soaked it and nothing happened this is a very good reagent so they had this kind of rusty sorry there was no bathroom break they had this rusty kind of a paint can that served as their toilet and they emptied it once a day so dad hey, urine's a reagent I can handle it so he bestened the bucket and he put the picture in there and he watched and just terribly taken it out and put it back and he can't, yeah day at the beach compared to some of the other stuff but he finally he took it out and he was despondent he just threw it on the concrete slab that was his bed and he noticed the corner was starting to peel away and he went over and he just started to take that corner off and lo and behold there was writing in there and the writing said the letter you receive with this picture is written on special paper write your regular message and then turn it perpendicular put the piece of special paper on top of your letter then use a stylus and write the secret message a lot of you will remember no carbon required remember those NCR forms well this was the the government invented them for this purpose or something like that but they had invisible ink no carbon required forms so that dad could get a message out and they wanted they wanted to know more than anything else who is there? what is their condition? how's it going? and it got difficult the last thing on the note said soak any picture with a rose and then so when I came home from boarding school this was my job some people had to watch out because sometimes you'd have roses and wallpaper there's a backdrop and stuff and that got a little bit confusing but there we were every once in a while something really screwy would go on I mean you'd be going through your day and you hadn't thought about this in a couple of days and you're doing okay in school and you're feeling alright and all of a sudden you find this in the Chicago Tribune while you're going across the country US offers gold for US pilots what? wait what's that? 50 tales of gold I'm sure that's not announced but there are abouts of North Vietnamese who help any prisoner escape that's roughly $5,000 they dropped 16 million leaflets with that message in the panhandle of North Vietnam I didn't work didn't work but this is kind of a little pop up prize you get as a family member of someone who's in prison oh look what we're just we think this will work we found it right over there what are you doing this who are you talking to? but this takes the cake I come home from school in 1967 dad's been shot down for five years I'm sorry for two years and this is what we get from the Bureau of Personnel congratulations you've been selected for deep draft command now for those of you who don't know what that's a ship we work up to being the captain of an aircraft carrier and that's where dad would have been he would have come home this is why I was sent to boarding school to be closer to Washington he was to come home and he would have been in OPPO 5 I think in the E-Ring somewhere there then two years later when he finished that assignment they sent this to his current address we will be attempting to place you in your command at an early date however priority will be assigned to those officers in the early four year group 45 who have not yet had their deep draft command in the event that you were just commencing a tour blah blah blah blah blah blah those officers and JCS and OSD for instance are not rotated short of two years again congratulations we were driving in that Chevrolet wagon still and mom said what's that from the navy and I opened that and I started to read it to her and she just had to pull over don't they know I had to get another picture of myself up here no this is my picture from boarding school and dad's personal interrogator rabbit they had to call them by names because they couldn't know their actual names they had to come up with names for the guards and others so that they could recognize them from camp to camp one day rabbit walked into dad's cell which was always a bad thing he looked at dad and he said if you ever want to see this boy alive again you're going to do what I say well that had a double ring to it that bothered dad we were always told to be careful and be safe and all that stuff but that message boy I wish I wasn't a part of that message here's the way mom would get sensitive information and this is actually a piece the shrunken upper left hand corner is the backside of what mom has written on in the lower right 68-01 this is a department of state it comes from a department of state 68-01 is the office number for Philip Heyman who is an assistant to Averill Harriman who claimed to be negotiating on behalf of the prisoners at one point a navy officer approaches her inside the state department said mrs. Stockdale I've been asked to give this to you here and what he said was he says over there written at the counter in the state department lobby with Captain Dean Webster in summer of 1970 so here's what he dictates to her there and she writes down info from classified sources has revealed that Captain JBS USN has crippled as a result of a broken injury to his leg or possibly both legs Averginzo info also indicates the North Vietnamese will not provide necessary medical care for any legs Intel info from classified sources also indicates JBS has been kept in solitary for a long period of time possibly as long as four years well all that's true but she's getting it at the state department from a captain who just happens to be there who knows what the heck's going on with that when mom made her first trip to Washington to meet Bob Burroughs and to start this stuff she scheduled an appointment with the chief of naval operations she wound up getting on around and she just wanted to see the top man and say we're out here we need support we need help well odd things happen and she saw chin foe again I'm using these things the chief of naval information and a couple of other guys around the chief of naval operations but not him and finally she said she was told after four hours of this she was told the Admiral's office is right down here and she walked in and who was sitting on the couch Bart Connolly who was working in the Pentagon at the time and they knew and this was arranged obviously and mom said what was going on here and Bart just the salt of the earth he said Sybil they were afraid that if you got in alone to talk to the CNO that he would start to cry this picture speaks to me mom had decided that she was going to move to Washington to be closer to the intelligence and the political people to try to exert influence she'd started the league of families around our dining room table she had a collection of women who were helping her but she decided in 1970 that she'd moved to Washington DC and this is a picture of her just before she left now you can't see it but she's wearing her wig and you can't see them but there are lines in that face mom was starting to go downhill she was starting to have trouble this is picking up the doormat obviously in Coronado for the move to Washington and when she moved to Washington she found out that the both the political people and the Navy people they were just as happy with her so that they could have her there with their beck and call what I see in this picture are the beginnings of mom's rapid degeneration into serious depression and sure enough one month later she couldn't get out of bed in the morning Stanford and Taylor were getting up on their own making their own breakfast walking down the street to school mom had gotten a dog for them or different things like that I was at college on the phone it was November and talking with my brother Stan and he's telling me about some adventure he's had he said Jimmy we just can't wait for you to come home for Thanksgiving I said Taylor the band made practice over Thanksgiving I can't I'm not sure I'm going to be there oh Jimmy I walked in and things were not good mom had been through three psychiatrists already they wanted her to see someone in the civilian sector she describes a couple of them you know they sent her to some Allen Ginsburg with a great big beard who sat in the corner and took notes and then they sent her to another younger guy who had some sort of you know notorious reputation for therapy and then this guy who was on the list who nobody had ever heard of before she went to him and Dr. Moran was a miracle worker it took six months but you know what his method was he didn't have he would joke with her he would laugh he would bring her into the office and he'd say alright Sybil hey what do you say we can go to Jamaica this weekend and be back by Monday what do you think come on let's go and he brought her out and he brought her up I have no idea what psychiatry was at work there I don't care it slowly and surely brought her back the last thing she did when she lived in Washington DC was take a two week vacation to Hawaii because she knew she needed to learn to travel learn to travel and be alone so this was her experiment next year she moved back to Coronado and things were better I'll spare you all the rest of it but that's stuff stuff life's hard enough this is mom at work looks almost glamorous doesn't it in front of the microphones in Washington over here this is Iris Powers Iris Powers was the mother of an army kid and he was dead and she knew it but she came to help mom because she wanted to do something for the prisoners this is Andrea Rander wife of an army corporal Andrea was a really remarkable person and woman their marriage didn't make it because he had such terrible PTSD he had been in the south and brought up to the north and had a very terrible experience the others I mean I'll tell you stories but talking of the press what we want is for the North Vietnamese to treat our men humanely and to follow the Geneva convention and so forth and so on and all of that was fine this is the way the work really looked I don't know if you're used to this but this is vintage stuff this is vintage late 60s TV trays right here find those at a yard sale now for 25 bucks but that's the way most of the work really actually happened and that led mom finally after having gone through some things actually you know what it was that deep draft letter and Bob Burroughs said you have to organize they're going to pick you off one at a time he was referring to his seniors they're going to pick you off one at a time unless you organize and the idea was to go public so we did more or less I think this was from Parade magazine you got the idea this was against the rules don't forget families now this is a picture I don't want to wind this up or go to questions or let some of you go this is the only picture dad voluntarily posed for in prison dad and Robbie Reisner are over here and Robbie had to coax him Robbie was an Air Force Colonel who I would describe as the spiritual leader of many of the prisoners and dad was the commanding officer and so he brought him over this was five days before they got to go home see that what's that there were dogs in the compound this was late in the game and they had them all in one place because they didn't want people rescuing them from different camps that dog is named Mako he belongs to Ed Davis who's one of those faces up behind it and he grabbed Mako and this was kind of a tricky thing to do and the timing worked out right because if you ever had an innocent animal or anything innocent that you obviously had affection for if you gave it part of your food and this happened with different animals that was very risky because the Vietnamese were not above hurting the animal in front of you don't forget we're just trying to crush you we're trying to take humanity away well you know how it winds up this is dad's first he had trouble with inclined planes because his leg he said you know the human body is an amazing thing he said I watched that leg over the course of two years and then they forced me to wear leg irons in bed and he said I trained that leg and he came home with it stiff just complete I mean his knee was like a small volleyball of cartilage and bone and everything but he was able to walk he just had never negotiated inclined planes before so this was tricky that fellow with him is his debriefer he is not a lieutenant commander a really remarkable guy who handled a lot of the intelligence the debrief and that's where we end up I hope I haven't droned on too long I know I've probably gone off script a couple of times and mixed some things up I hope you'll allow me that and I made it through without tears today thank you all very it's really been an honor to be here and be with you and share with you in my sort of all out there fashion are there questions so we probably only have time for one or two questions oh I beg your pardon okay sorry yes oh yeah that was stanford he was my brother and he had a tape recorder and he had I don't know if you remember it but they used to have that come a little microphone and then it would come with a little suction cup and if you put the suction cup on the outside of the old telephone handset it would record it and Stan just that was just an idea oh yeah oh no we knew we knew something was going to happen so he was he was preparing anything else I know you've got to go you've been very very thoughtful and I'm sorry and leave more time we have one more lecture that is scheduled for one week from tonight we'll have the graduation certificates for those of you who've toughed it out through all these things we really appreciate your coming and we hope to see you at 4.30 here next Thursday thank you very much sir