Couple Write a Tale of Vietnam: History and Love

Ask Jim Stockdale which Christmas he spent in Puerto Rico and you will get a blank stare. Ask him which Christmas he spent in leg irons and the memory flows.

It was actually two Christmases, he tells you, in 1967 and 1968, when he was a prisoner in Hanoi during the Vietnam War.

Ask Sybil Stockdale what she remembers most about her husband’s confinement and she’ll tell you about fall 1970, the five-year mark she had hoped would never come.

It has been 20 years since Stockdale, the U.S. Navy’s most decorated officer, was shot down over North Vietnam and nearly 13 years since he returned to the Coronado home where his wife and four sons spent eight years in a prison of their own.

The couple have written a book about the ordeal called “In Love and War.” As they do in alternating chapters in the 475-page account, the two take turns surrendering the floor in a discussion of the diary.

“We felt it was important to have the truth in writing and to keep the record straight,” said Sybil Stockdale, whose frustration in dealing with government bureaucracy during her husband’s imprisonment led her to start a national lobbying and support group for families of war prisoners.

“As one person said, we included the warts of the story,” said Stockdale, who walks with a stiff left leg as the result of two breaks--one while parachuting from his stricken aircraft and the other while being tortured in prison.

“It’s a tough pill to swallow, but it had to be told. We’ve kind of slipped through the Vietnam War by smoothing over the rough spots and never facing up to the fact that this modern government of ours was as much a problem as a solution.”

Stockdale criticizes members of the Administration of then-President Lyndon B. Johnson, describing them as “conscious-seeking pissants” who felt guilty over the United States’ involvement in the war. Stockdale said, however, that he is not bitter toward them or his captors.

If anything, he said, it probably was his lack of belligerence that saved his life during his eight years in prison.

“I couldn’t be as tricky and nasty with my captors when I was hateful as I could be when I was cool,” he said.

In addition, Stockdale credits publicity surrounding his wife’s lobbying efforts on behalf of POWs with his captors’ decision to save his life after a suicide attempt in September, 1969.

“My picture had been widely publicized in the world press, and for me, the husband of the founder of the National League of Families of American Prisoners Missing in Southeast Asia, to suddenly die in Hanoi would have presented North Vietnam with a major public relations problem,” he writes in the book.

Sybil Stockdale said she started the organization out of frustration in trying to get the government to first acknowledge that her husband was a prisoner and then to acknowledge the prison torture described in secretly coded letters Stockdale sent from prison.

The organization allowed her to do more than sit on her hands at home, as she said the Navy had instructed prisoners’ families to do.

“I was taught not to speak unless spoken to, taught that a Navy wife doesn’t call Washington, D.C., and ask tough questions,” she said. “I’m sure I would have been a lot less healthy person mentally if I hadn’t done something.”

Stockdale retired from the Navy in 1979 after more than 30 years as an officer. He is now a senior research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and teaches undergraduate philosophy courses at the university.

Sybil Stockdale teaches dyslexic children at a private school but has taken a leave of absence to answer the hundreds of letters the couple said they’ve received in response to the book. They said none of the government officials portrayed in less than a flattering manner in the book has contacted them.

The book took four years to write and was not started until eight years after Stockdale returned.