5 ideas
In 1965, while parachuting down over a North Vietnamese village after being shot down, Stockdale told himself he was leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus. He had studied the Enchiridion at Stanford only a few years earlier. That tired philosophy text became his survival manual the moment everything external to him had been taken away.
Split everything into what is within your power (your judgments, aims, desires, aversions and responses) and what is not (your body, property, reputation and position). Stake your well-being only on the first category. Whoever controls what you want or fear becomes your master, so if you invest in external things, your captor holds the lever.
Stockdale argues that torture works less through physical pain than through the guilt and shame it produces afterward, when a prisoner feels he has betrayed himself and his comrades. Captors turned fear into submission and then used the resulting guilt to make prisoners pliable. The defense is to treat your own judgment as the only thing that can harm you. You own your conduct fully, and you do not let the captor define what you have become.
As senior officer, Stockdale issued a short set of rules for prisoners. Don't Bow in public, stay off the Air, admit no Crimes, never Kiss them goodbye, and put Unity over Self. The rules assumed everyone could eventually be broken. The goal was to make captors pay for every concession and to have each man return to resistance after breaking, rather than demand impossible perfection. Achievable standards and prisoner solidarity turned isolated men into a functioning organization.
Stockdale landed uninjured, but a village mob broke his leg, and he recalled Epictetus's line that lameness impedes the leg but not the will. He also drew on Epictetus's image of life as a play: you do not choose your role, but performing it well is your task. For him this meant attending to how he carried himself as a crippled prisoner rather than dwelling on the injury.