Stockdale, POW for 7 1/2 Years, to Revisit Vietnam

Retired Adm. James Stockdale, who ran for vice president last year as Ross Perot’s running mate, will return to Vietnam in January for the first time since he was released from a Hanoi prison 20 years ago.

The 69-year-old war hero, who as a captain and the highest-ranking Navy prisoner of war was repeatedly tortured, will go to Vietnam this time with his wife, Sybil, and give lectures aboard a cruise ship on a trip sponsored by Stanford University.

Stockdale is perhaps best known for asking, “Why am I here?” during a nationally televised vice presidential debate last year. But before he was thrust onto the political stage, he proved his stamina and leadership ability during 7 1/2 years as a prisoner of war.

Stockdale said in an interview Wednesday from his Coronado home that the trip has no special emotional significance for him, but he is curious to see the country where he was imprisoned until 1973.

On the voyage, he said, he really will be viewing the country for the first time. As a prisoner, he was blindfolded and handcuffed whenever he was moved from one prison to another.

“I’m going to see some things I’ve never seen before,” he said. “We’re going to Cambodia too. I’ve flown over it, but I’ve never been there.”

Stockdale, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, said he will lecture primarily about the purported Gulf of Tonkin attack used by President Lyndon Johnson to bring the United States into the Vietnam War.

As a Navy pilot, Stockdale witnessed what happened Aug. 4, 1964, and reported to his superiors that there was no attack on a U.S. vessel and no sign of enemy ships in the region.

On the day after the Tonkin Gulf incident, Stockdale led the attack that dropped the first U.S. bombs on Vietnam. He was shot down over Vietnam the next year.

Although repeated torture by the North Vietnamese could never extract his secret of the Tonkin Gulf, he has insisted since his release that the incident was a farce used by the Johnson Administration for its own political purposes.

“It was an extra load to carry in prison,” he said. “I lived in fear all of those years they would learn of my being flight leader in the Tonkin Gulf.”

Texas billionaire Perot, who worked for the release of the prisoners of war, became friends with Stockdale and last year asked him to be his running mate.

Stockdale ran a low-key campaign and acknowledged that he was not familiar with many of the issues facing the federal government. “I was caught flat-footed here and there,” Stockdale said, “but I wouldn’t have missed it.”