James Stockdale Soldier Quotations

It just - the whole thing reminded me of a May pole dance. I was standing there trying to figure out how I could get my oar in and never really did.

There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.

Sybil's my wife, and on the first day of October, that's the first time I knew Ross was going to run.

But there were highs as well as lows, it was as though they said everybody was picking on the man who had more practical real life experiences than the whole batch of them put together.

We couldn't generalize on the people. Some of them were known to be tough guys and they didn't say much, but some of them were kind of soft-headed, but they did that. That was an East German film.

And we had our own laws. I mean, I wrote them. And we had our own customs, and traditions, and proprieties.

I was commanding officer of a supersonic fighter squadron, FA Crusaders.

They were heading out to the middle of the bay - the Gulf - that's another thing that became kind of standard practice, we didn't hurry the destroyers around the beach any more, when it got dark, we'd take 'em out thirty or forty miles out in the middle of the Tonkin Gulf.

So the first thing that went on was to decide... trying to find a time when we could get reprisal raids out.

I was tortured fifteen times, that's total submission. They did that with shutting off your blood circulation with ropes, giving you claustrophobia and pain at the same time, bending you double.

I mean, I really think that I would expect somebody that's leading the country to have some kind of - some kind of courage physically, personally.