James Stockdale

  b. 1923; d. 2005 | American pilot/author

At The Bottom

— 1966

The North Vietnamese shattered his legs, broke his back and yanked his shoulders from his sockets.

It was New Year’s Day, and Navy Squadron Commander James Bond Stockdale lay in a North Vietnamese prison in Hoa Lo, where he’d been held since being shot down in September 1965.  “I was shivering,” Stockdale recalled years later, “legs in stocks, hands in cuffs, lying in three days of my own excrement.”  Conditions only grew worse from there.  Stockdale, like most Americans captured during the war, was tortured on a regular basis.  To emphasize their inferior position, captives like Stockdale were prohibited from looking anywhere but toward the ground, and they were even forced to bow at the waist in greeting the guards and officers who brutalized them.  Stockdale lived under these unimaginable conditions for the next eight years, during which time the North Vietnamese shattered his legs, broke his back and yanked his shoulders from his sockets.