He did it not by force but largely by example and maintaining communication with all the POWs through the tap system - a five-across, five-down alphabet grid recalled by one POW from his Boy Scout days. For brevity the tap system, or tap code, came complete with military-style acronyms, such as GBU for "God bless you." Four of Stockdale's seven years in Hanoi were spent in solitary confinement, including two of those solitary years in leg-irons.
"'God,' 'duty,' 'honor' and 'integrity' were not philosophic abstractions," he wrote later. "The ideas I had studied became principles to live by."
Stockdale embraced Thucydides' "suffer what you must." But most of all he embraced the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, a crippled former slave who said: "Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens."
Empowered by Epictetus through Stockdale, the POWs endured unspeakable torture, deprivation and sometimes death. Stockdale himself smashed his face with a mahogany stool and slashed his wrists with shards of glass to prevent the Communists from using him for propaganda. Most of the POWs ultimately came home.
As John McCain said Saturday of Stockdale: "He inspired us to do things that we otherwise never could have done. He was our beacon and our strength." Stockdale once framed the ordeal this way: 'The commissar and his barbaric lackeys should have shut us out 10-0, but I think the final score was, as someone put it, Lions 2, Christians 8.'"
About 40 POWs attended the final Stockdale tribute - they and nearly a dozen Medal of Honor winners, who served as honorary pallbearers.
The service had it all for the 81-year-old vice admiral who led the POWs: soaring rhetoric, cadenced steps, cannon booms, precision fusillades, a low-level flyover by F-18s, an admiral in dress whites on bended knee before Stockdale's devoted widow saying, "Please accept this flag from a grateful nation," and finally a long languorous Taps.
On hallowed ground in a cultural hour of spiritual penury and solemn lunacies, Taps for CAG - a man who refused to acquiesce to a better tyranny. And among those for whom the defense of liberty is no momentary enthusiasm, former POWs who - without CAG Stockdale's exemplary discipline and his suffering for them, never would have made it to his funeral - tearful murmurs of GBU.