Excerpt from Open Doors: Vietnam POWs Fifty Years of Freedom
It was a dramatic ploy, and a desperate one. Exasperated with the status quo in Hanoi and his inability to effect change within the prison system that had incarcerated and tortured him and his colleagues for years, Jim Stockdale knew he had to do something. When he was told he was going “downtown,” he knew what it meant. He was going to be cleaned up and paraded in front of anti-war activists or sympathetic journalists to counter Western allegations that the American POWs were being treated inhumanely.
Jim refused to be a pawn. So, he staged a fake suicide attempt. Uncertain of the impact and ramifications his actions would have, he just followed his instincts. Breaking a cell window, he took the glass shards and repeatedly cut his wrists. Then, he beat himself with a wooden plank to a bloody, bruised pulp. With his piercing blue eyes, he appeared half-dead and half-crazy. For the first time, his Vietnamese captors were scared of him. These actions effectively changed the entire prison dynamic. Nothing was ever the same again: prison conditions improved and the torture sessions ceased…for good. As Jim described it, “I’d been looking for the keys to the kingdom for seven years, and I’d found ‘em.”
To what does he ascribe his ability to trick the system? “I’m an actor! I’ve been acting since I was a kid.” An actor? “I had the lead in every high school play, and Mom knew most of those plays well,” he describes in the book In Love and War. “We would talk about my interpretation of the parts at home. In my last play, my senior year, we began arguing about the male lead’s part. From the way I described my feelings about it, she was convinced I was way off track, that I was creating a character quite different from the one she would have her actor portray. I was confident I knew what I was doing.” Early stage presence and an innate instinct for the lead character’s influence on the drama, he used the art of acting as a tool. His mother imparted this inner power and strength to him. Sybil, his wife of fifty-five years, took over that coaching role.
Was Jim Stockdale chosen for the lead in Vietnam or did he choose it himself? Schooled in the doctrine of Epictetus at Stanford University prior to going to Vietnam, Jim was a follower of the Stoics and credits the philosophy with providing him his moral sustenance and direction. But he wrote the script. And it earned him the Medal of Honor.
“Remember that you are an actor in a drama of such sort as the author chooses—if short, then in a short one: if long, then in a long one. If it be his pleasure that you should enact a poor man, see that you act it well; or a cripple, or a ruler, or a private citizen. For this is your business—to act well the given part; but to choose it belongs to Another.”
— Enchiridion 17, Epictetus
Open Doors: Vietnam POWs Fifty Years of Freedom takes a close look at thirty former Vietnam POWs from all branches of the military. Produced by photographer Jamie Howren and author Taylor Baldwin Kiland, the exhibit was created in 2003 on the 30th anniversary of the men’s return and updated for the 50th Anniversary in 2023. The exhibit includes 31 impressionistic photos and accompanying written profiles intended to capture these extraordinary American men who were tested like few people of subsequent generations have. It is also intended to defy the lingering negative stereotype of Vietnam veterans.
Open Doors is available for rent as a traveling exhibit to museums, libraries, universities, and other cultural institutions. For more information, please contact info@coronadohistory.org.
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