It's been a few months since VADM James B. Stockdale passed away, but the arrival of Veterans Day brings him vividly to mind. One month after 9/11 and the weekend of the first air strikes in Afghanistan, I spent three hours with him in his home in Coronado, California. I had come to interview him for my book, Stoic Warriors, since he was for me the living example of a stoic warrior. As a senior Navy pilot shot down over Vietnam, he had muttered to himself while parachuting into enemy hands, "Five years down there, at least. I'm leaving behind the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus." Epictetus was a slave who taught Stoic philosophy in the time of Nero. Epictetus's famous Handbook had become Stockdale's bedtime reading in the carrier wardrooms he occupied as he cruised the waters off Vietnam in the mid-60's. Little did Stockdale know on that shoot-down day of Sept. 9, 1965, that Stoic tonics would hold the key to his survival for seven and a half years of POW life. They would also form the backbone of his leadership style as the senior officer in the POW chain of command.

Finding human dignity in slavery became Stockdale's preoccupation in his years as a POW, more than four of which were spent in solitary, and the first two of those in leg irons.

The Handbook had been a parting gift from a philosophy professor at Stanford, where Stockdale studied for his master's degree. Stockdale himself was a no-nonsense aviator, a graduate of Annapolis, where engineering and technical sciences were then, as now, the principal fare. After a first and second read through of Epictetus, he was sure that the ancient philosopher had little to offer him. He joked with me: What did this martini-drinking golfer and tough aviator need with a text like that? But out of respect for his professor, he kept returning to the book, and soon had committed it to memory. During our visit, he recited many of the verses that had been his salvation. His voice merged with Epictetus's. The voices had become one.

Physically, too, Stockdale and Epictetus both shared the same fate of being crippled in the left leg (Stockdale's as a result of being pummeled by a street gang as his parachute landed in a village in North Vietnam). When I reminded Stockdale of the uncanny coincidence, again, he shot back Epictetus at me in his Cagney-like voice, "Lameness is an impediment [only] to the leg, not to the Will." When Jim sat, his leg would jut straight out, sixty degrees from his hip. But this didn't stop him from swimming most mornings.

Stockdale described to me that morning the ordeal of "taking the ropes" -- the euphemism for the methodical torture the American POW's endured: "They would start by clanging a big heavy iron bar down [about eighty or ninety pounds in weight], and then tie your feet to it so that you couldn't lift it. Then they'd sit you up and jackknife you over and tighten the ropes around your arms. Next, they'd put you through extortions to the point that they would be pulling the rope so hard that the blood circulation in your upper chest would shut off." At this point, he continued, the guard would dig his heels into the back of your head and push your nose into the cement. With panic and claustrophobia setting in, the prisoners could be made to blurt out information, some of which would be false, but other bits of which would be true. The confession was followed by a "cold soak" -- six or eight weeks of total isolation "to contemplate one's crimes."

Stockdale was not a preacher, and he never tried to convert anyone to Stoicism, except once, he confided to me, when tapped out in code to a prison mate whose spirits he was trying to raise. The response through the cell wall was a deadening silence; a boundary had been crossed. After that, he said, "you soon learned that if the guy next door was doing OK, that meant that he had all his philosophical ducks lined up in his own way."

I keep thinking of Jim Stockdale as the administration wrestles with its stance on torture and the headlines announce the next scandal regarding the treatment of the enemy; I wish I could talk to him again. Here was someone who knew all too intimately the inhumanity of torture. And his wife Sybil knew better than many the protections of the Geneva Accords for which she advocated tirelessly on behalf of the men in the Hanoi Hilton. Jim said to me on that October morning in 2001 that his torture had allowed him to become strengthened by Stoicism. In his unwavering attachment to Sybil, and she to him, he was strengthened, too, by the humanity of the deepest kind love. Another famous Roman Stoic, Seneca, writes, "Let us cultivate humanity." Jim Stockdale taught us how.