His fellow POW mates in particular:
Thanks...I am going to check out that link later. I have been looking for that for a while...
I leave it up to his fellow POW’s to judge McCain and I leave it at that. They know what he did, and before he died, he did too.
If you look at. my Freep page, you can see Admiral Stockdale there as one of my heroes, and he has been there since I joined FR.
I never did get to shake his hand.
But not everyone can be James Stockdale. But because they can’t be James Stockdale doesn’t mean they have to be men like Edison W. Miller and Walter E. “Gene” Wilber, both men who were accused of openly collaborating with the enemy in exchange for better treatment.
In retrospect, and we knew it after the Korean War, the Code of Conduct was untenable when our men were in the hands of an enemy who had no qualms about administering the rope treatment or simply beating a man to death.
But it was still in force in Vietnam, and in the prisons, everyone knew, most of all Stockdale himself, that nearly every man would break under torture, and that every man had his own breaking point. They made it a policy among themselves to resist as much as they could, and it was understood nobody was going to condemn a man who broke. They were supposed to tell their fellow POWs what they had divulged under torture.
They all knew, as Stockdale himself did, that the shame and regret most (though apparently not all) men would heap on themselves when they broke under torture was worse than any judgement from their fellow POW’s.
Granted, there was one POW who didn’t agree with Stockdale on the modified policy they observed in prison (can’t remember his name) because he thought it gave them permission to break, but...I have to agree with Stockdale.