Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

In a sermon a while back Pastor Whitaker mentioned a story about Admiral Stockdale in Vietnam from the book Good to Great, by Jim Collins. I’ve boldfaced the key idea: that suffering as a prisoner of war was perhaps the best thing in his life, a source of utility and not disutility.

Tortured over 20 times during his eight-year imprisonment from 1965 to 1973, Stockdale lived out the war without any prisoner’s rights, no set release date, and no certainty as to whether he would even survive to see his family again. He shouldered the burden of command, doing everything he could to create conditions that would increase the number of prisoners who would survive unbroken, while fighting an internal war against his captors and their attempts to use the prisoners for propaganda. At one point, he beat himself with a stool and cut himself with a razor, deliberately disfiguring himself, so that he could not be put on videotape as an example of a “well-treated prisoner.” He exchanged secret intelligence information with his wife through their letters, knowing that discovery would mean more torture and perhaps death. He instituted rules that would help people to deal with torture (no one can resist torture indefinitely, so he created a step-wise system–after x minutes, you can say certain things–that gave the men milestones to survive toward). He instituted an elaborate internal communications system to reduce the sense of isolation that their captors tried to create, which used a five-by-five matrix of tap codes for alpha characters. (Tap-tap equals the letter a, tap-pause-tap-tap equals the letter b, tap-tap-pause-tap equals the letter f, and so forth, for 25 letters, c doubling for k.) At one point, during an imposed silence, the prisoners mopped and swept the central yard using the code, swish-swashing out “We love you” to Stockdale, on the third anniversary of his being shot down.

…

“I never lost faith in the end of the story,” he said, when I asked him. “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.”

If one wishes to accomplish something memorable and great, one must sacrifice some other, lesser, things. Thus, men go to war, write books, and climb mountains.

For most men, serving in battle is the biggest thing in their lives. It is often “the defining event”, but that is a bit different. Most people have no defining event, and most people are not well-defined. War gives them a chance. Recall the “mute inglorious Miltons” of Gray’s Elegy:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton, here may rest,
Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood.
Th’ applause of listening senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land,
And read their history in a nation’s eyes,
Their lot forbade: nor circumscribed alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind;

This is a common notion of non-bourgeois humans. Here is what Nietzsche, bourgeois but trying to escape it, said in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

Ye shall love peace as a means to new wars–and the short peace more than the long.

…

Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause.

War and courage have done more great things than charity. Not your sympathy, but your bravery hath hitherto saved the victims.

“What is good?” ye ask. To be brave is good. Let the little girls say: “To be good is what is pretty, and at the same time touching.”

…

Ye shall only have enemies to be hated, but not enemies to be despised. Ye must be proud of your enemies; then, the successes of your enemies are also your successes.

…

So live your life of obedience and of war! What matter about long life! What warrior wisheth to be spared!

It is a hard and fundamental question as to whether a man should strive for pleasant satisfaction or struggle arduously for achievement. The answer would not be the same for every person.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2006 at 1:57 am and is filed under Poems, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.