Hỏa Lò Prison

That is what is called the Stockdale Paradox in the book Good to Great.

It comes from Admiral James Stockdale from the Vietnam prisoner of war camp, the Hanoi Hilton, is what it was called.

And he said that the men who made it out of the prison camps alive were the men who had the ability to confront the brutal facts while maintaining an unwavering faith in their final outcome.

This idea of confronting the brutal facts is massively huge and important.

And I'm outing Lucinda's previously registered Republican ass.

Nothing but respect for my favorite guest at the Hanoi Hilton, and I kept the elephant registration to vote in the primaries before, like, things really went off the rails.

[laughs]

But I can confirm that neither of us felt the cloud of existential dread that [laughs] we did in 2016 and 2024.

But being parked right there at show center, the American Airlines jet pulling up and all of the Honor Flight people walking out, the veterans.

And it turns out one of them we know, and he's a Vietnam POW, and he's featured in our Hanoi Hilton exhibit here.

Unbeknownst to me, here he was, and he went on that honor flight and he came back into Oshkosh that evening.

That was probably the highlight of the week for me, and I think for all of us, was seeing that patriotism, all the people lined up, the American flags, the cheering for these guys as they came off the airplane and walked on by and then had the presentation.

So I'm sitting in my office in Fayetteville and my secretary gets on the line and says, Mr. Feeney, there's a guy on the phone by the name of Everett Alvarez and he'd like to speak to you.

Well, I don't know how much you know about POWs, but Everett Alvarez was listed as the longest held POW in Hanoi Hilton.

Well, after I got done standing up at attention, I answered my phone.

And I said, sir, how can I help you? And he said, well, Don, I got your name from a friend, which was...

This isn't a unique circumstance.

When I went to Vietnam and I was in Hanoi and I'm going to the Hanoi Hilton and we're talking about things and we're doing a, there was a tour of the Hanoi Hilton where, you know, prisoners were kept and all that.

And famously, John McCain was there for a period of time.

And they would talk to it and talk about the American war.

Obviously, he was a great war hero.

He did a lot more than you think when he was staying at the Hanoi Hilton, if you will.

And his contributions to this country, a lot of them were not noticed at the time.

But I will tell you very much that it's shaped a lot of world events.

This idea that you can only control what's inside you.

You can't control the outside world.

And that mentality is what allowed him to not simply survive, but to thrive, as it were, in the horrible conditions of the Hanoi Hilton.

I want to talk about that.

I, it's funny, all these things that I had worked on, I had worked with Admiral Stockdale on telling his story about being...

And I don't mean to-- My experiences cannot compare to what he went through because he was in the Hanoi Hilton.

He was shot down over Vietnam.

He goes to the Hanoi Hilton.

He's there for seven years eating pumpkin soup and being tortured every day.

And when I was working on his life story, I asked him, "How do you survive that?" And he just said, "You know, the only thing that they can't touch is in here.

I didn't really explicitly think of it, but as I think about it now, that's kind of what I was applying.

In that case, Admiral Stockdale was imprisoned by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War and was in the Hanoi Hilton and had to have this mindset of, we're not going to get out by Christmas, but we are going to get out of here.

eventually and it was kind of like that it was like you know i don't dictate what this day is going to bring and people will give you reports of the trail and things that you might see but you know that's their perspective of it sometimes it was worse than they thought and you know you you took in and other times it was better when we first got into this area of milk creek the top parts of that descent and on both sides of the valley weren't that bad and we actually went in there like oh whatever this is like overblown and then we got to the lower part like No, it's now earning its reputation.

You can definitely break an angle in here.

Admiral James Stockdale talked about this when he talked about what became named as the Stockdale Paradox.

He was a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton during Vietnam for I believe seven years and was tortured daily.

And he said he survived when so many others didn't, in his mind, at least in part, because he never lost sight of the absolute reality of where he was and what was happening.

And he never lost hope that someday.

And we got a very short helicopter ride from where we were near the Voochoo Railroad Yard to downtown Hanoi.

And we checked into the Hanoi Hilton on the 14th of June, 1967.

Was that a five star then? It was still a brand new property actually under the It was an old place.

It had been built by the French in the 1890s.