5 ideas
Everything splits into what is 'within my power' (my opinions, aims, desires, aversions, and the moral purpose behind my choices) and what is not (my body, property, reputation, and position). Stockdale argues that a person who invests their sense of self only in the first category cannot be defeated, because a captor can seize anything in the second category but cannot reach the first.
On 9 September 1965, Commander James Stockdale ejected from his crippled A-4 Skyhawk over North Vietnam. During the descent he whispered to himself that he was 'leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.' He was tortured about fifteen times, and he disfigured himself with a stool and a razor so he could not be used in propaganda films.
Torturers work less by pain itself than by pushing a prisoner to a point where he submits and then feels guilt and fear about it. That self-generated shame makes him controllable and isolates him from his comrades. Stockdale concludes that a man is broken mainly by his own judgments about what happened to him, and Epictetus's phrase 'lame is my leg, but not my will' names the defense: an injury to the body is not an injury to the self unless you let it be.
As senior officer, Stockdale gave men he could not see a short, memorable code of conduct, communicated by tap code through prison walls. The code, BACK US, stood for: don't Bow in public, stay off the Air, admit no Crimes, never Kiss them goodbye, and Unity over Self. The mechanism is that a few clear, achievable standards, held in common, let each man judge his own conduct and feel part of a unit even in solitary. Unity over Self was ranked as the value that held everything together.
Every prisoner could be made to submit under enough torture, so the standard Stockdale set was not 'never break' but 'resist to your limit, then return to resistance.' Men who had given in were brought back into the communication network rather than shunned. This removed the despair that made a first failure permanent and turned integrity into a practice renewed after each lapse.