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Aug
6
In Love and War, the Stockdale Story
Filed Under Inspiration, Reading Room
“A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armor of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last.” —Joseph Conrad
It’s been a couple of years since I’ve read a book with this many pages, but at the suggestion of Jim Collins, I just finished reading In Love and War: The Story of a Family’s Ordeal and Sacrifice During the Vietnam Years, by Jim and Sybil Stockdale.
James Stockdale was a navy pilot shot down in 1965 over Vietnam. For seven years he was tortured and held prisoner in Hoa Lo Prison, before being released in 1973.
In Love and War is a first-person account of the Stockdales story. Every other chapter is written by the other spouse, telling the story and struggle from their side of the world. It’s tender and tenacious, violent and victorious.
I was most impressed with Jim Stockdale’s grounded sense of self. As he recalls “a pilgrimage to [his] birthplace,” Jim says, “I figured it was healthy to be reminded of my upbringing and who I was from time to time; I would take all of those qualities I acquired in my boyhood home with me to the grave.”
It was this prevailing sense of self that led another Jim—Jim Collins—to unpack a bit more in his book Good to Great. Collins writes about a conversation he had with Stockdale regarding his coping strategy during his period in the Vietnamese POW camp. Says Stockdale, “I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
When Collins asked who didn’t make it out, Stockdale replied: “Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Stockdale then added: “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” Witnessing this philosophy of duality, Collins went on to describe it as the Stockdale Paradox.
In contrast to this paradox, Stockdale said in his book that “chance and continual uncertainty are the ultimate destabilizers.”
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I actually heard about this book when I was driving to pick my son up from school. The local NPR station had an hour where they read a from book each day. If you listened every day, you heard the whole thing.
My father was a CPO in the Navy in WWII and the Korean Conflict (which he says felt a LOT like war) and thus have an interest in these stories.
Since I was a kid during the years this book covers, it was a remarkable chance to see inside the stories that the media didn’t share. It was great to learn of honor and faith in a time when all that was decried and protested. I might have to get a copy and read that again.