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Excerpt from an account of his experiences as a prisoner of war

Published in In Love and War by James and Sybil Stockdale, 1984

"I wrote the papers, and I signed them. But I made them beat it out of me. I felt like two cents when it was done."

During the Vietnam War, thousands of soldiers on both sides of the conflict were captured and imprisoned by enemy forces. These prisoners of war (POWs) included infantry soldiers, fighter pilots, and other military personnel, as well as people who participated in the conflict by spying, recruiting, or providing other direct assistance to the enemy army.

As the Vietnam War progressed, neither the Communist leadership of North Vietnam nor the U.S.-supported government of South Vietnam paid much attention to international guidelines on proper treatment of POWs. These guidelines were detailed in the Geneva Conventions, a...