The World of Epictetus

I ! "#$% I &'( a forty-one-year-old commander, the senior pilot of Air Wing "$, flying combat missions in the area just south of Hanoi from the aircraft carrier Oriskany. By September of that year I had grown

quite accustomed to briefing dozens of pilots and leading them on daily air strikes; I had flown nearly )** missions myself and knew the countryside of North Vietnam like the back of my hand. On the ninth of that month I led about thirty-five airplanes to the +anh Hoa Bridge, just west of that city. +at bridge was tough; we had been bouncing %**-pounders o, it for weeks.

+e September # raid held special meaning for Oriskany pilots because of a special bomb load we had improvised; we were going in with our big- gest, the )***-pounders, hung not only on our attack planes but on our F– fighter-bombers as well. +is increase in bridge-busting capability came from the innovative brain of a major flying with my Marine fighter squad- ron. He had figured out how we could jury-rig some switches, hang the big bombs, pump out some of the fuel to stay within takeo, weight limits, and then top o, our tanks from our airborne refuelers while en route to the target. Although the pilot had to throw several switches in sequence to get rid of his bombs, a procedure requiring above-average cockpit agility, we routinely operated on the premise that all pilots of Air Wing "$ were above average. I test-flew the new load on a mission, thought it over, and approved it; that’s the way we did business.

Our spirit was up. +at morning, the Oriskany Air Wing was finally going to drop the bridge that was becoming a North Vietnamese symbol of resistance. You can imagine our dismay when we crossed the coast and the weather scout I had sent on ahead radioed back that ceiling and visibility

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were zero-zero in the bridge area. In the tiny cockpit of my A-! at the front of the pack, I pushed the button on the throttle, spoke into the radio mike in my oxygen mask, and told the formation to split up and proceed in pairs to the secondary targets I had specified in my contingency briefing. What a letdown.

"e adrenaline stopped flowing as my wingman and I broke left and down and started sauntering along toward our “milk run” target: boxcars on a railroad siding between Vinh and "anh Hoa, where the flak was light. Descending through #$,$$$ feet, I unsnapped my oxygen mask and let it dangle, giving my pinched face a rest—no reason to stay uncomfort- able on this run.

As I glided toward that easy target, I’m sure I felt totally self-satisfied. I had the top combat job that a Navy commander can hold and I was in tune with my environment. I was confident—I knew airplanes and flying inside out. I was comfortable with the people I worked with and I knew the trade so well that I often improvised variations in accepted procedures and encouraged others to do so under my watchful eye. I was on top. I thought I had found every key to success and had no doubt that my Academy and test-pilot schooling had provided me with everything I needed in life.

I passed down the middle of those boxcars and smiled as I saw the results of my instinctive timing. A neat pattern—perfection. I was just pulling out of my dive low to the ground when I heard a noise I hadn’t expected—the boom boom boom of a %&-millimeter gun—and then I saw it just behind my wingtip. I was hit—all the red lights came on, my control system was going out—and I could barely keep that plane from flying into the ground while I got that damned oxygen mask up to my mouth so I could tell my wingman that I was about to eject. What rotten luck. And on a “milk run”!

"e descent in the chute was quiet except for occasional rifle shots from the streets below. My mind was clear, and I said to myself, “five years.” I knew we were making a mess of the war in Southeast Asia, but I didn’t think it would last longer than that; I was also naive about the resources I would need in order to survive a lengthy period of captivity.

"e Durants have said that culture is a thin and fragile veneer that super- imposes itself on mankind. For the first time I was on my own, without the veneer. I was to spend years searching through and refining my bag of

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memories, looking for useful tools, things of value. !e values were there, but they were all mixed up with technology, bureaucracy, and expediency, and had to be brought up into the open.

Education should take care to illuminate values, not bury them amongst the trivia. Are our students getting the message that without personal integrity intellectual skills are worthless?

Integrity is one of those words which many people keep in that desk drawer labeled “too hard.” It’s not a topic for the dinner table or the cocktail party. You can’t buy or sell it. When supported with education, a person’s integrity can give him something to rely on when his perspective seems to blur, when rules and principles seem to waver, and when he’s faced with hard choices of right or wrong. It’s something to keep him on the right track, something to keep him afloat when he’s drowning; if only for practi- cal reasons, it is an attribute that should be kept at the very top of a young person’s consciousness.

!e importance of the latter point is highlighted in prison camps, where everyday human nature, stripped bare, can be studied under a magnifying glass in accelerated time. Lessons spotlighted and absorbed in that labora- tory sharpen one’s eye for their abstruse but highly relevant applications in the “real time” world of now.

In the years since I’ve been out of prison, I’ve participated several times in the process of selecting senior naval o"cers for promotion or important command assignments. I doubt that the experience is significantly di#er- ent from that of executives who sit on “selection boards” in any large hier- archy. !e system must be formal, objective, and fair; if you’ve seen one, you’ve probably seen them all.

Navy selection board proceedings go something like this. !e first time you know the identity of the other members of the board is when you walk into a boardroom at eight o’clock on an appointed morning. !e first order of business is to stand, raise your right hand, put your left hand on the Bible, and swear to make the best judgment you can, on the basis of merit, without prejudice. You’re sworn to confidentiality regarding all board members’ remarks during the proceedings. Board members are chosen for their experience and understanding; they often have knowledge of the particular individuals under consideration. !ey must feel free to speak

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their minds. !ey read and grade dozens of dossiers, and each candidate is discussed extensively. At voting time, a member casts his vote by select- ing and pushing a “percent confidence” button, visible only to himself, on a console attached to his chair. When the last member pushes his button, a totalizer displays the numerical average “confidence” of the board. No one knows who voted what.

I’m always impressed by the fact that every e"ort is made to be fair to the candidate. Some are clearly out, some are clearly in; the borderline cases are the tough ones. You go over and over those in the “middle pile” and usually you vote and revote until late at night. In all the boards I’ve sat on, no inference or statement in a “ jacket” is as sure to portend a low con- fidence score on the vote as evidence of a lack of directness or rectitude of a candidate in his dealings with others. Any hint of moral turpitude really turns people o". When the crunch comes, they prefer to work with forth- right plodders rather than with devious geniuses. I don’t believe that this preference is unique to the military. In any hierarchy where people’s fates are decided by committees or boards, those who lose credibility with their peers and who cause their superiors to doubt their directness, honesty, or integrity are dead. Recovery isn’t possible.

!e linkage of men’s ethics, reputations, and fates can be studied in even more vivid detail in prison camp. In that brutally controlled environment a perceptive enemy can get his hooks into the slightest chink in a man’s ethical armor and accelerate his downfall. Given the right opening, the right moral weakness, a certain susceptibility on the part of the prisoner, a clever extortionist can drive his victim into a downhill slide that will ruin his image, self-respect, and life in a very short time.

!ere are some uncharted aspects to this, some traits of susceptibility which I don’t think psychologists yet have words for. I am thinking of the tragedy that can befall a person who has such a need for love or attention that he will sell his soul for it. I use tragedy with the rigorous definition Aristotle applied to it: the story of a good man with a flaw who comes to an unjustified bad end. !is is a rather delicate point and one that I want to emphasize.

We had very very few collaborators in prison, and comparatively few Aristotelian tragedies, but the story and fate of one of these good men

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with a flaw might be instructive. He was handsome, smart, articulate, and smooth. He was almost sincere. He was obsessed with success. When the going got tough, he decided expediency was preferable to principle.

!is man was a classical opportunist. He befriended and worked for the enemy to the detriment of his fellow Americans. He made a tacit deal; moreover, he accepted favors (a violation of the code of conduct). In time, out of fear and shame, he withdrew; we could not get him to communicate with the American prisoner organization.

I couldn’t learn what made the man tick. One of my best friends in prison, one of the wisest persons I have ever known, had once been in a squadron with this fellow. In prisoners’ code I tapped a question to my philosophical friend: “What in the world is going on with that fink?”

“You’re going to be surprised at what I have to say,” he meticulously tapped back. “In a squadron he pushes himself forward and dominates the scene. He’s a continual fountain of information. He’s the person everybody relies on for inside dope. He works like mad; often flies more hops than others. It drives him crazy if he’s not liked. He tends to grovel and ingrati- ate himself before others. I didn’t realize he was really pathetic until I was sitting around with him and his wife one night when he was spinning his yarns of delusions of grandeur, telling of his great successes and his pend- ing ascension to the top. His wife knew him better than anybody else; she shook her head with genuine sympathy and said to him: ‘Gee, you’re just a phony.’ ”

In prison, this man had somehow reached the point where he was will- ing to sell his soul just to satisfy this need, this immaturity. !e only way he could get the attention that he demanded from authority was to grovel and ingratiate himself before the enemy. As a soldier he was a miserable failure, but he had not crossed the boundary of willful treason; he was not written o" as an irrevocable loss, as were the two patent collaborators with whom the Vietnamese soon arranged that he live.

As we American #$%s built our civilization, and wrote our own laws (which we leaders obliged all to memorize), we also codified certain princi- ples which formed the backbone of our policies and attitudes. I codified the principles of compassion, rehabilitation, and forgiveness with the slogan:

“It is neither American nor Christian to nag a repentant sinner to his grave.” (Some didn’t like it, thought it seemed soft on finks.) And so, we really gave

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this man a chance. Over time, our e!orts worked. After five years of self- indulgence he got himself together and started to communicate with the prisoner organization. I sent the message “Are you on the team or not?”; he replied, “Yes,” and came back. He told the Vietnamese that he didn’t want to play their dirty games anymore. He wanted to get away from those will- ful collaborators and he came back and he was accepted, after a fashion.

I wish that were the end of the story. Although he came back, joined us, and even became a leader of sorts, he never totally won himself back. No matter how forgiving we were, he was conscious that many resented him—not so much because he was weak but because he had broken what we might call a gentleman’s code. In all of those years when he, a senior o"- cer, had willingly participated in making tape recordings of anti-American material, he had deeply o!ended the sensibilities of the American prison- ers who were forced to listen to him. To most of us it wasn’t the rhetoric of the war or the goodness or the badness of this or that issue that counted. #e object of our highest value was the well-being of our fellow prisoners. He had broken that code and hurt some of those people. Some thought that as an informer he had indirectly hurt them physically. I don’t believe that. What indisputably hurt them was his not having the sensitivity to realize the damage his opportunistic conduct would do to the morale of a bunch of Middle American guys with Middle American attitudes which they naturally cherished. He should have known that in those solitary cells where his tapes were piped were idealistic, direct, patriotic fellows who would be crushed and embarrassed to have him, a senior man in excel- lent physical shape, so obviously not under torture, telling the world that the war was wrong. Even if he believed what he said, which he did not, he should have had the common decency to keep his mouth shut. You can sit and think anything you want, but when you insensitively cut down those who want to love and help you, you cross a line. He seemed to sense that he could never truly be one of us.

And yet he was likable—particularly back in civilization after release— when tension was o!, and making a deal did not seem so important. He exuded charm and “hail fellow” sophistication. He wanted so to be liked by all those men he had once discarded in his search for new friends, new deals, new fields to conquer in Hanoi. #e tragedy of his life was obvious to us all. Tears were shed by some of his old prison mates when he was

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killed in an accident that strongly resembled suicide some months later. !e Greek drama had run its course. He was right out of Aristotle’s book, a good man with a flaw who had come to an unjustified bad end. !e flaw was insecurity: the need to ingratiate himself, the need for love and adula- tion at any price.

He reminded me of Paul Newman in !e Hustler. Newman couldn’t stand success. He knew how to make a deal. He was handsome, he was smart, he was attractive to everybody; but he had to have adulation, and therein lay the seed of tragedy. Playing high-stakes pool against old Minne- sota Fats (Jackie Gleason), Newman was well in the lead, and getting more full of himself by the hour. George C. Scott, the pool bettor, whispered to his partner: “I’m going to keep betting on Minnesota Fats; this other guy [Newman] is a born loser—he’s all skill and no character.” And he was right, a born loser—I think that’s the message.

How can we educate to avoid these casualties? Can we by means of educa- tion prevent this kind of tragedy? What we prisoners were in was a one-way leverage game in which the other side had all the mechanical advantage. I suppose you could say that we all live in a leverage world to some degree; we all experience people trying to use us in one way or another. !e di"erence in Hanoi was the degradation of the ends (to be used as propaganda agents of an enemy, or as informers on your fellow Americans), and the power of the means (total environmental control including solitary confinement, restraint by means of leg-irons and handcu"s, and torture). Extortionists always go down the same track: the imposition of guilt and fear for having disobeyed their rules, followed in turn by punishment, apology, confes- sion, and atonement (their payo"). Our captors would go to great lengths to get a man to compromise his own code, even if only slightly, and then they would hold that in their bag, and the next time get him to go a little further.

Some people are psychologically, if not physically, at home in extor- tion environments. !ey are tough people who instinctively avoid getting sucked into the undertows. !ey never kid themselves or their friends; if they miss the mark they admit it. But there’s another category of person who gets tripped up. He makes a small compromise, perhaps rationalizes it, and then makes another one; and then he gets depressed, full of shame,

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lonesome, loses his willpower and self-respect, and comes to a tragic end. Somewhere along the line he realizes that he has turned a corner that he didn’t mean to turn. All too late he realizes that he has been worshipping the wrong gods and discovers the wisdom of the ages: life is not fair.

In sorting out the story after our release, we found that most of us had come to combat constant mental and physical pressure in much the same way. We discovered that when a person is alone in a cell and sees the door open only once or twice a day for a bowl of soup, he realizes after a period of weeks in isolation and darkness that he has to build some sort of ritual into his life if he wants to avoid becoming an animal. Ritual fills a need in a hard life and it’s easy to see how formal church ritual grew. For almost all of us, this ritual was built around prayer, exercise, and clandestine commu- nication. !e prayers I said during those days were prayers of quality with ideas of substance. We found that over the course of time our minds had a tremendous capacity for invention and introspection, but had the weak- ness of being an integral part of our bodies. I remembered Descartes and how in his philosophy he separated mind and body. One time I cursed my body for the way it decayed my mind. I had decided that I would become a Gandhi. I would have to be carried around on a pallet and in that state I could not be used by my captors for propaganda purposes. After about ten days of fasting, I found that I had become so depressed that soon I would risk going into interrogation ready to spill my guts just looking for a friend. I tapped to the guy next door and I said, “Gosh, how I wish Descartes could have been right, but he’s wrong.” He was a little slow to reply; I reviewed Descartes’ deduction with him and explained how I had discovered that body and mind are inseparable.

On the positive side, I discovered the tremendous file-cabinet volume of the human mind. You can memorize an incredible amount of material and you can draw the past out of your memory with remarkable recall by easing slowly toward the event you seek and not crowding the mind too closely. You’ll try to remember who was at your birthday party when you were five years old, and you can get it, but only after months of e"ort. You can break the locks and find the answers, but you need time and solitude to learn how to use this marvelous device in your head which is the greatest computer on earth.

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Of course many of the things we recalled from the past were utterly use- less as sources of strength or practicality. For instance, events brought back from cocktail parties or insincere social contacts were almost repugnant because of their emptiness, their utter lack of value. More often than not, the locks worth picking had been on old schoolroom doors. School days can be thought of as a time when one is filling the important stacks of one’s memory library. For me, the golden doors were labeled history and the classics. !e historical perspective which enabled a man to take himself away from all the agitation, not necessarily to see a rosy lining, but to see the real nature of the situation he faced, was truly a thing of value.

Here’s how this historical perspective helped me see the reality of my own situation and thus cope better with it. I learned from a Vietnamese prisoner that the same cells we occupied had in years before been lived in by many of the leaders of the Hanoi government. From my history lessons I recalled that when metropolitan France permitted communists in the government in "#$%, the communists who occupied cells in Vietnam were set free. I marveled at the cycle of history, all within my memory, which prompted Hitler’s rise in Germany, then led to the rise of the Popular Front in France, and finally vacated this cell of mine halfway around the world (“Perhaps Pham Van Dong lived here”). I came to understand what tough people these were. I was willing to fight them to the death, but I grew to realize that hatred was an indulgence, a very ine&cient emotion. I remember thinking, “If you were committed to beating the dealer in a gambling casino, would hating him help your game?” In a pidgin English propaganda book the guard gave me, speeches by these old communists about their prison experiences stressed how they learned to beat down the enemy by being united. It seemed comforting to know that we were united against the communist administration of Hoa Lo prison just as the Viet- namese communists had united against the French administration of Hoa Lo in the thirties. Prisoners are prisoners, and there’s only one way to beat administrations. We resolved to do it better in the sixties than they had in the thirties. You don’t base system-beating on any thought of political idealism; you do it as a competitive thing, as an expression of self-respect.

Education in the classics teaches you that all organizations since the begin- ning of time have used the power of guilt; that cycles are repetitive; and

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that this is the way of the world. It’s a naive person who comes in and says, “Let’s see, what’s good and what’s bad?” !at’s a quagmire. You can get out of that quagmire only by recalling how wise men before you accommo- dated the same dilemmas. And I believe a good classical education and an understanding of history can best determine the rules you should live by. !ey also give you the power to analyze reasons for these rules and guide you as to how to apply them to your own situation. In a broader sense, all my education helped me. Naval Academy discipline and body contact sports helped me. But the education which I found myself using most was what I got in graduate school. !e messages of history and philosophy I used were simple.

!e first one is this business about life not being fair. !at is a very important lesson and I learned it from a wonderful man named Philip Rhinelander. As a lieutenant commander in the Navy studying political science at Stanford University in "#$", I went over to philosophy corner one day and an older gentleman said, “Can I help you?” I said, “Yes, I’d like to take some courses in philosophy.” I told him I’d been in college for six years and had never had a course in philosophy. He couldn’t believe it. I told him that I was a naval o%cer and he said, “Well, I used to be in the Navy. Sit down.” Philip Rhinelander became a great influence in my life.

He had been a Harvard lawyer and had pleaded cases before the Supreme Court and then gone to war as a reserve o%cer. When he came back he took his doctorate at Harvard. He was also a music composer, had been director of general education at Harvard, dean of the School of Humani- ties and Sciences at Stanford, and by the time I met him had by choice returned to teaching in the classroom. He said, “!e course I’m teaching is my personal two-term favorite—!e Problem of Good and Evil—and we’re starting our second term.” He said the message of his course was from the Book of Job. !e number one problem in this world is that people are not able to accommodate the lesson in the book.

He recounted the story of Job. It starts out by establishing that Job was the most honorable of men. !en he lost all his goods. He also lost his reputation, which is what really hurt. His wife was badgering him to admit his sins, but he knew he had made no errors. He was not a patient man and demanded to speak to the Lord. When the Lord appeared in the whirlwind, he said, “Now, Job, you have to shape up! Life is not fair.” !at’s my inter-

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pretation and that’s the way the book ended for hundreds of years. I agree with those of the opinion that the happy ending was spliced on many years later. If you read it, you’ll note that the meter changes. People couldn’t live with the original message. Here was a good man who came to unexplained grief, and the Lord told him: “!at’s the way it is. Don’t challenge me. !is is my world and you either live in it as I designed it or get out.”

!is was a great comfort to me in prison. It answered the question “Why me?” It cast aside any thoughts of being punished for past actions. Sometimes I shared the message with fellow prisoners as I tapped through the walls to them, but I learned to be selective. It’s a strong message which upsets some people.

Rhinelander also passed on to me another piece of classical informa- tion which I found of great value. On the day of our last session together he said, “You’re a military man, let me give you a book to remember me by. It’s a book of military ethics.” He handed it to me, and I bade him good-bye with great emotion. I took the book home and that night started to read it. It was the Enchiridion of the philosopher Epictetus, his “manual” for the Roman field soldier.

As I began to read, I thought to myself in disbelief, “Does Rhinelander think I’m going to draw lessons for my life from this thing? I’m a fighter pilot. I’m a technical man. I’m a test pilot. I know how to get people to do technical work. I play golf; I drink martinis. I know how to get ahead in my profession. And what does he hand me? A book that says in part, ‘It’s better to die in hunger, exempt from guilt and fear, than to live in a"uence and with perturbation.’ ” I remembered this later in prison because perturba- tion was what I was living with. When I ejected from the airplane on that September morn in #$%&, I had left the land of technology. I had entered the world of Epictetus, and it’s a world that few of us, whether we know it or not, are ever far away from.

In Palo Alto, I had read this book, not with contentment, but with annoyance. Statement after statement: “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view that they take of them.” “Do not be concerned with things which are beyond your power.” “Demand not that events should happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do happen and you will go on well.” !is is stoicism. It’s not the last word, but it’s a viewpoint that comes in handy in many circumstances, and it surely did for me. Particularly this

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line: “Lameness is an impediment to the body but not to the will.” !at was significant for me because I wasn’t able to stand up and support myself on my badly broken leg for the first couple of years I was in solitary confine- ment.

Other statements of Epictetus took on added meaning in the light of extortions which often began with our captors’ callous pleas: “If you are just reasonable with us we will compensate you. You get your meals, you get to sle

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