Its said that history is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of men. It is wise men and women who pay careful attention to the lessons of history. When prisoners of war returned home from their ordeal in the infamous hanoi hilton nearly 50 years ago, they brought with them hard won lessons about the value of unity and about the benefits of communication that they returned with their honor intact holds out funding, mental lessons. As our society deals with racial and political upheaval and an isolation imposed by a global pandemic. What lessons can we learn from those who have gone before . Before its too late. We will. Military men. We will professional warriors. They took me out to interrogation and they said, youre a criminal and you will be treated as a criminal, as was to be experienced in the next eight years. They did indeed resort to torture. Heres me getting beat with a van built. Things started to get rough. Things scratched when you got harsher and harsher. I took it as long as i possibly could, and i finally had to say i give. It was the most devastating moment of my life. Jim stockdale had to figure out what are these two guys after . They were after propaganda. This is straight from cagney. Figure out what they want and deny it to them. That is your battle every day. For us, the war did not end because we were all prisoners. We were just in a different phase of it. I read america return with honor is not just a catch phrase. Do you want to go back as a sniveling coward or you want to go back as a hero . And the choice that we made was certainly not to be heroic. From the very beginning, at the Naval Academy, we were following heroes. History is made up in Naval Academy. For the first time ever, a black woman will lead the brigade of midshipmen. This is midshipman first class sydney barber. I just wanted to give you the opportunity to get to know me a little bit better. The genius of stockdale or anyone who wants to be a stockdale, capable leader is not only know yourself, but know your people. My leadership style personally is its all about people, know their strengths, know their weaknesses, the things that make them tick, the things that drive them. And then be that person for the people that they can look to as an example. These young women and men are impressive. They can make a difference. You dont have to think of it in terms of being a p. O. W. , for god sake, and everyday life. The same principle will work. And then if this was my last interview, what point would i like to make . What are you willing to die for . Suffer for, fight . Its very important that you know not what it is, but that you know what it is. Earlier today, former congressman and war hero was laid to rest. Sam johnson died at the age of 89. There were 11 alcatrazz members and were now down to three because of deaths. We have lost a family one by one, like lose in any family. Sad. Its heartbreaking. But its also part of life. He realizes the curtains about to fall. One of these days. And you hope that what you did and how you influenced other people was for the better. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce the moderator for this evenings panel. Mr. Alvin townley, a bestselling New York Times reviewed author and emmy winning storyteller. Alvin townley has traveled to five continents and four Aircraft Carriers to discover Inspiring Stories of leadership, legacy and purpose among his five nationally acclaimed books are flying. To fight. Mr. Townley also helped produce the pbs film jeremiah, which won four emmys, including best documentary. He has talked leadership with icons like Justice Stephen breyer, j. W. Marriott and apollo 13. Jim lovell, cnn, fox and npr have featured his expertise, and he has shared his message at venues including the white house and u. S. Capitol as an eagle scout and ncaa athlete. Mr. Townley graduated from washington and lee university. He studied economics in frankfurt, brussels, paris and london for working congress, managing global strategy for a top consulting firm, and leading external affairs for grammy and tony, Winning National arts center. Hes a founder of the skill Point Foundation and a former senior fellow at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the United StatesNaval Academy. Please welcome mr. Tommy. Thank you, charlie. Thank you for being such a fine represented div of the class of 23. This audience pleases me. Thank you very much, everybody. If i take the right hand, say it up, snap. Whats more sound again . One more time. So its a fun sound. Its kind of fun to do here together. Its also how quickly life can change. Its like that. Its the time it takes to go from being healthy to getting a bad diagnosis. Time it takes. I mean, control of your automobile to being in a skid off the road at a time. It takes for surface to air missile to rip off your right wing and set your engines on fire. And thats what were gonna talk about this evening. So i want everybody to imagine for a second that youre a naval aviator, which, of course, means that you think youre a singularly the best pilot in the entire world. So i know there are a bunch of folks here who who think im just kidding, but there are a bunch of others that think that i am the best. Youre commanding an air group at war and you go in for your 43rd mission over enemy territory, and youre flying in your a4 skyhawk feeling completely invincible, because nobody is going to shoot you down if anybodys going down in your mission. Its the guy next to you. Certainly not you. And you roll in on your target, you drop your ordnance, you begin to pull out and you start thinking about getting back to the Aircraft Carrier out there on yankee station. Lets go ahead and say that its a 1960s. And so that means that theyre mess stewards. Theyre letting cover tablecloths. Youre coming home to hot showers. Thats what youre thinking about when all of a sudden your plane shudders. Just like that. One more time, everybody. Just like that. Your world is change and you have about 3 seconds. So really, three starts to figure out what youre going to do. You look at your instruments, you look at your wing or your wing is not there anymore. You check your engine lights, your engines are on fire and youre going down and you got to bail out and youre not bailing out over the ocean or over lemoore, california, or anything like that. Youre bailing out over the place you just bombed. So nobody is going to be happy to see you there. Right. And so in the course of about 15 seconds, you go from being an invincible aviator in complete control of your world to being a dirty, muddy p. O. W. On the ground, getting kicked and beaten on the ground in a foreign country, in this case, north vietnam. And you cant believe this has happened. And as youre sitting there, everythings getting stripped away from you. Your weapon, your radio, your flight suit, they basically take everything away from you except, your honor and your will to survive as youre getting thrown in a truck and taken up to god knows where. Actually, its hanoi. You start thinking, well, this is pretty bad, but, you know, theres no way that im going to be here now next year. My country is going to get me home this year. Well, lets say you got shot down like Jim Stockdale in september of 1965. Right. So you thought youd be home by christmas of 1965, right . Oh, youre not. 1966 is your year. Thats when youre going to get home. Here we go. Home in 66. Youre still there in 67. Youre getting skinny. Youre not getting fed. Well. Youre getting tortured. You get beaten. Youre getting despondent. Youre starting to lose faith in my country. Ever going to get me home. 1968. 1969. Still there. 1970 americans starts pulling out of vietnam. Youre wondering, is my country going to leave me behind . 1971, 1972, p. O. W. I didnt come home until february of 1973. 50 years ago now, no one signed up for that mission. No one expected that mission. But that was the mission. That over 500 american men received during vietnam. So they had to do their best in this terrible prison called wallow prison. You all know it better by the name hanoi hilton. And by the way, the man who gave it that name is with us tonight. Youll meet him in a minute, but all these americans got together in the north vietnamese, tried to isolate them because they knew the prisoners could communicate with prisoners that could cooperate and conspire and ruin their program to manage the p. O. W. S and use them for propaganda. So the p. O. W. S had to come up with some way to communicate and they did. They came up with the p. O. W. Tap code and through the p. O. W. Challenge. Well be learning more about that here in the coming weeks. Basically, they figured out how to communicate, and it seems crazy that people could communicate using knocks and taps, but they had nothing but time in their cells, and thats how they communicate. So tonight i want to give you a little taste of that. And im going to tap out something and when you figure out the phrase just shout it out and shout it out. If youre the first word to shout it out, theyll come see us after the after program. Well give you little something. All right. Ready . Everybody ready . Here we go. Wow. Very good. I thought at least get to e yall come see me afterwards. But lets tell you this p. O. W. S or sometimes that quick, though. Once they knew the give the guy the next cell, they just double tap and tell him to go to the next word. It was an extraordinary way they learned. They learned to communicate and they had to communicate. So anyway, the americans kept foiling the north vietnamese efforts to sign propaganda statements and to give them intelligence and information beyond the geneva convention. And so eventually the north vietnamese started using some more difficult measures, some more strenuous measures, and they began torturing the p. O. W. S. So again, imagine youre a p. O. W. Youve lost everything there in that muddy riverbank down and where youre bombing and youre there in Interrogation Room with control only over what you say. As the last bit of control you have left. And theyre asking you to say that this war is unjust, that youre a war criminal, and you do not want to do it. Youre not going to do theres no way theyre going to make you do it. Well, then a guy named pig guy walks in and he ropes up your your arms and makes your elbows touched. Anybody that has enough room in their jackets can see you through elbows, can touch. Right now, it probably cant because pig eyes not here. So these p. O. W. So eventually break. No one can take that kind of pressure. And they would sign a confession and they go back to their cell or they would crawl back to their cell because they couldnt walk anymore and not even want to go home. Then that here youll hear the story later tonight. Then theyll hear it. They hear taps coming through the wall and theyd hear their fellow p. O. W. Is encouraging of them and letting them know that everybodys been there and theyre all going to get home together. And most importantly, theyre all going to return home with honor. And that became the driving vision of the p. O. W. S to return home with honor. And every p. O. W. Had in his mind what it looked like for one day, someday far in the future, perhaps to return home, walk off an aircraft with his head held high, and tell his family and his fellow Service Members that he did his best. But it was gonna be a long journey and it might not have ever happened. That homecoming that were celebrating today might not have ever happened had it not been for the women who loved these men the most. Before i wrote defiant. I really didnt know what this flag was. This flag is ive learned. Is the symbol, for one, the most extraordinary womens movements in american history. And far too few people know about it. But the wives of these p. O. W. S ended up in their own prisons at home because the military and the government told them to keep quiet anything they said might harm their husbands or hurting negotiations with north vietnam. Well, eventually these wives, these housewives turned heroines, realized that if they were going to get their husbands home, they were going to have to do it themselves. So they united across the country into the National League of p. O. W. Mi families and fought and advocated for their husbands and their sons and their loved ones who are p. O. W. S and because their advocacy and hard fighting. In 1973, the pr ws finally came home. And they came home from war. The longest and harshest deployments in all of american history. And tonight we were very fortunate to have three of those men with us. And so first, id like to invite to the stage commander of alvarez, who was unfortunately. Now now i know military aviators are among the most competitive people in the world, but there is one, number one, that nobody wanted, and that was to be the first man taken prisoner of war over north vietnam. F alvarez was shot down on august 5th, 1964, after the very First American raid after the gulf of tonkin incident. And he was there by himself for over eight months. Not sure what was going to happen, but he set the standard for p. O. W. S and hes here with us tonight. Commander alvarez. Thank. Thank you so. Before you sit down, please, please tell us, you know what it was like, not to have anyone else have been having been shot down before and to be a pilot one second and being shot out of the sky and heading towards the water the next one . Well. When i was shot down and of course, i was fortunate enough to eject from the airplane and survived because i was very low. My plane was falling apart and i knew if i if i stayed in the plane, i wasnt going to make it. And so i ejected, you know, and all kinds of things go through your mind. And before long and actually within seconds, i find myself with the water just off the coast. And i recall im trying to get rid of my helmet. Im trying to get rid of my parachute. Ive tried to swim and i wanted to get out to sea. But the current was taking me back that way towards land and and out of the for some reason, all these crazy thoughts. I thought, you know, todays wednesday and wednesday is roast beef night on the ship. And i said, im going to miss roast beef, not as a you know, of all the thoughts going around. But i recall that was well thought. I like to today. I just wondered, you know, i think back on that and i said and i said, what in the world was i thinking . But i was fortunate i made it. I was captured, by the way, and i was taken to the hanoi hilton a few days later. My friend bob will tell you the story. He gave it that day when they when he was shot down. But i think to answer your question, talking about being there by myself. The lonely, the loneliness of being there just by myself for over six months, actually, until bob came along with but it was another eight months before i saw him. This difficult because i had a really cold through the exercise, you know, fearing what i did, i didnt know what was going to happen. And they were threatening me, you know, i was going to be taken before a tribunal. I was going to be executed. All these Different Things and i really didnt i really didnt know how to handle this. So at some point, maybe two months later, i realized that i wasnt going to make it unless i put my mind in a different place. And thats when i decided that no matter what happened, i was not going to do anything. That when i eventually went home, i would not be ashamed of. And that was really what i realized. I had to conduct myself. I had to be a loyal to my country, to the navy, my comrades and and to my family. And i just that was foremost. I was not going to do anything that would cause. Anyone to be ashamed of me or be ashamed of myself. And that was pretty simple, pretty straightforward. But its something we just had to stick to. I had to stick to it. Thank you very much. I have. Elevators, naval officers hate to come in second. The next guest came in second to commander alvarez. Was the second p. O. W. Taken in north vietnam, and he is part of a group of p. O. W. That caused so much frustration, so much irritation. They were so obnoxious, uncooperative and effectively subversive that the north vietnamese actually through this gentleman and ten other p. O. W. S, including academy graduates, Jim Stockdale and jeremiah denton, out of the hanoi hilton, you know how bad you have to be to get thrown out of a p. O. W. Camp so that the Naval Academy had extra security tonight when rear admiral Robert Harper shoemaker walked through the door. Class a distinguished graduate of the class of 1956 coming up, how about shoemaker. Thank you so much. So, commander alvarez was a p. O. W. For eight and a half years. Really . A shoemaker was a p. O. W. For eight years. And one day and i had to tell his personal story real quickly because my daughter, suzanne, i gave our daughter his middle name, harper. And so hes been a very special person in our life and in our daughters life to my to thank you, especially on stage with you. But hes also a ph. D. In aeronautical engineering and one the smartest people i know. And with a communication and mastermind in the hanoi hilton, so am a shoemaker. Tell us a little bit about developing some of the communications and why those were important. Well, i will. But first of all, i have a couple of classmates that im happy are attending here tonight and one classmate that probably wont isnt here tonight, but is very instrumental in the leadership conference. And he and his wife have been for a decade or more. His name is mitch hart and his wife linda. So theyve kept this conference going for a long time. But thank you, hearts. You bet. I mean, thank you very much for being with us. As we celebrate 50 years of freedom. And, you know, freedom is something you dont miss until you lose. And that was our situation. And its wonderful. Have it all back again. Yeah. One of the sponsors or the sponsor, i guess for this meeting. Why is the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership with emphasis on the word ethical . And so that brings to mind the question who is this guy, stockdale . Well, theres three guys Walking Around in the audience here that look like him, because these are his sons and theyre here. And we we want to hear your father and your mother as well. She was very instrumental in not so much getting our freedom, but getting the vietnam to stop the torture, which they did for about the last two years or so. But you asked about communication, and you have to understand or appreciate first, i think what the psychic of the or the loss of the i guess of the vietnamese. Yeah. Toward our group of people and their idea was to keep them separated so they wouldnt talk. They couldnt talk to each other, like to hear almost as many guards as there were prisoners to keep us from talking. And they were pretty serious about it. They caught it. A cell mate of mine was in beat them to death just for communicating. But after about three months of incarceration, the place story started getting kind of crowded and the vietnamese brought in three other guys temporarily into my cell. And i was the senior guy. Then it as a Lieutenant Commander and i told them, we all recognize that theyre going to separate us. We had to develop some means for communication. And so one of them came up with the idea hed heard you in a Survival School called the tap code and you saw it on the film here. And that really saved our lives, i think, for for eight years we were able to communicate with each other, spirits and and thwart the efforts of the vietnamese to propagandize us that. Thank you, ira. Okay. I think this next piece is a really great story here because because our machine maker was such a great communicator, he always tried to bring new shoot downs into the community. And so one day in 1967, charlie plumb class. Of 1954. Class of 1924 54. So our charlie anyway, so charlie plumb and a hanoi hilton. I let him tell you that hes in a bad spot. And bob shoemaker is the first guy to reach out and make contact. Captain charlie plumb. Thank you. Thank you. Ever. 24 years old, f4 phantom pilot shutting down, captured, tortured for two days and tossed into a cell. Those eight feet long and eight feet wide. Retained me at my physical state. Those first few weeks in that prison camp, i was bleeding from for open wounds, no medical care at all, surviving on two bowls of rice and a little broth each day, developing boils all over my body burns from a from an airplane that was on fire. My physical state was the good news. The night it was my mental state, id given up. I surrendered. I tried my best to keep with the code of conduct, but the torture was too great and i felt very guilty about that. And my little eight foot by eight foot prison cell. How can i go home . How can i, how can i face my classmates . How can i how can i face my squadron mates . How can i even face my family . And admitting that id failed in my mission so miserably. It was with that mindset set of guilt and frustration, humiliation, loneliness. I heard in the far corner the chirping noise of a cricket. Im a farm kid from kansas. I knew what a cricket sounded like, yet the longer i listened, the more rhythmic that sound became. And i walked over to check it out in the corner of my prison cell. No cricket, but a little piece of wire sticking out. About four inches scratching on my concrete floor making stripping noise like a cricket. Heres what i thought i knew. The enemy is not sufficient. Ticketed enough to try to trick me with this. It has to be an american. If its an american, its also has to be a Fighter Pilot. Twin sets who is in these prison cells . Why would i like to talk to another Fighter Pilot . We can tell some stories about that guys tougher than i am. Hes probably older. Im only 24. Hes probably a better pilot, probably more mature. He probably didnt spill his guts when they tortured him. Im losing interest. I dont think i want to expose myself. Ever have those feelings . When you fail at something, you just dont want to ever let anybody know that you failed in the wire, kept scratching on the concrete floor. I finally reached over. I knelt down, i grabbed that wire, said a little prayer, and i tugged on the end of the wire. A life saving guy on the other end of that wire was Lieutenant Commander bob shoemaker. Bob, join me here. Tell me what you were doing there several months before you got that wire into myself, the cell between us was actually a storeroom. So. So, bob, tell tell the audience here, what was going through your mind . Did you know theres another and another american over there . Well, the various sections of this prison renamed after Las Vegas Casinos like the thunderbird and stardust and things like that. And i was in this little cell and not with one guy, but with a total of four. And and we knew somebody over there. And actually there was about five feet to separate us here. These are all concrete cells. There were bunks, one on top of the other. And and the corner of the cell. Thank you. You youre bringing back happy or unhappy memories for me. In the corner here was what we call a rat hole. It was really a drain hole to wash out the cells. And you could imagine how crowded we were with four people in a cell. And it one end of each bunk were some stockades where they could clap your ankles. Unit. But anyway, i somehow found a piece of wire and it wasnt quite as stiff as a coat hanger, but nearly so. And it was about five feet, feet long. And there was an alleyway between us here. It was filled with a bunch of junk and so the guards would take a siesta every afternoon. So id get down and sneak this wire through all this paraphernalia, and it wound up in charlies through his rabble. And you can pick up the story from there. So i tugged on the wire. Bob tugged back. I turned again and it disappeared right back to that rat hole. I sat back down on my bored bed thinking id really done something in bed and waited for the guards to come in and beat me up again. When the wire came back. This time the wire had a little note wrapped around the end of it. The note was written on a dirty piece of toilet paper, just blobs on a wad and a piece of toilet paper. I could barely make it out, but it said memorize this code. Then eat this note. I did it. I memorized the code, i ate the note. Now you know the code. The tap code is what bob shoemaker passed along to me, and it was absolute a lifesaver in my in my life. Not that we were passing around top secret escape plans, but just the simple validation of another human being in that prison cell. Because in some of the camps we were in, it was dark and you were alone in solitary confinement, and you begin to wonder if you were even alive or dead. The simple tug on a wire to have that wire tug back meant two things. Number one, somebody is trying to communicate with me. Im alive. Number two, somebody cares. So next time, charlie, ill of any of my iphone. So that really the first communication that i had was with bob shoemaker and that absolutely saved my life. And i love him to death. Bob, you take your beautiful, you know. So since we have two eight foot cells drawn out here ive heard charlie talk before. About the two different kinds of battles in the p. O. W. Had to wage in hanoi. What was the battle they had to fight between eight foot cell walls. The other was a battle they had to fight the eight inches between their ears. Id love to hear you talk about that for just for a minute. Absolutely. And it was a revelation to me that this was not a physical game. Okay. We were pretty tough guys. You know, we were in pretty good shape. We could take it physically the the bad was the mental game. And so really wasnt the restriction between those eight foot walls. It was a restriction between the eight inches between our ears and this was going to be the way we survived of being mentally in a lot of that, of course, was communicating with the other guys. The support group that we found, the prison camp. One of the extraordinary things to me about the mentality they had was they never had a victims mentality, as far as i know. And im going to ask alvarez to tell us more about in the second year, they always remembered that they were American Fighting men. They were never victims. They were all on a mission and they were going to complete that mission. And tell me how that that mentally of of a warrior changed that changed the game for you and for your fellow p. O. W. S. I think that you hit the nail on the head when you said that our, our, our objective was to win and winning was preventing them from taking control. Control. They had us physically but not mentally and with the staff code and other means of communication issue, i think that was that was why the the tap code and communicating were so key because it kept us together as an organization and together as an organization and as a as a military unit. It enabled us to fight because their effort was to punish us, course us until we no longer had the will to fight them. And if it ever reached that point, they would have won and we couldnt let that happen. So as a result, our our means of communication and our means of resistance and all of that was just paramount. It was total. And we talk about the court, the attack code and tapping between the walls and all. As i recall, at some point they wanted to they figured they could stop that by building double walls so that the tap noise would not go from one cell to the other. And what we did was we we looked at alternate means, one of the most effective means was the one hand viewed code. And i had to live with a fellow whose sister was deaf, mute, and so he knew the meter. And so we spent months practicing, talking to other in our little cell and then they split us up in about a year later when we were we couldnt tap through the one wall that we could get up and look out the little air hole at the top of the cells. And i looked out and i saw this fellow out there. So i got his attention and i started out like that. And thats the system we used to go from building the building and throughout. So we found ways to keep it going. We just couldnt let them defeat us. So my good friend from jackson, mississippi, and a member of the class of 23 had stood up. And that means that its time for a very quick lightning round of last questions with the panelists for me. Before we go to q a from the audience, the guys and women, please be thinking about questions. And i want to ask our p. O. W. Survive. Well start with you. What was the low point and the high point of your time in hanoi . Well, i think the low point is, is when i was broken. And it turns out that all these 591 people were eventually broken to give more than their name, rank, serial number and date of birth. And that has a really profound effect on your on your outlook. You know, you feel that youve let your country and your self and your family down. But it turns out that he we thought we were strong and we were strong, but they were techniques of torture that you just couldnt endure. So that was my low point. I guess one of my high points youre about to hear. Well start you. I was very fortunate in living was able to articulate times. But at one time we we lived about 40 feet apart and this staff code can be set not by tapping, but underneath the doors. We have a little crack and we could send our fingers down and count the fingers and he was a musician and i played the guitar and we were convinced beethoven was all wrong. But that instead of shirts and flats, we applied engineering technique to it. So we were concerned about the frequency relationship for one note to its neighbor and it took us three weeks to do what any mit in here could do in about 5 seconds, find a 12th root of two. But anyway, that was a great accomplishment. There was a high point and i would not have made a good p. O. W. Carson club high and low point. Everything would have been a great p. O. W. We would have appreciated your humor while you were there. And here what was a big part of what we did, you know, i mean, they would be surprised that we pass around jokes of all kinds. We have jokes on top of jokes and and we would try to trick the guards in one way or another. So it was really it if i remember back to some really fun times and sometimes my my stomach was was hurt because i was laughing so hard at something that was happening there. So there were some high points to it. I think one of the high points was the s. A. Raid, the paris peace talks are going on and it was going on forever and ever and ever, and we thought wed been forgotten. The s. A. Raid was in a bunch of green berets, came in and raided one of the camps, but they didnt get prisoners out of that camp. But oh, by the way, you know, it told us that oh, by the way, we were still remembered and we were valuable and they were still, you know, wanting to bring us home. So that was a great day in my life. Thank you. And lets open it up for for q a before we run out of time here. Id love to hear what you audience has to ask the audience. Theres three microphones on the lower side, four on the upper side, two on each side. So please make your way if youd like to ask a question. Up right. Hello. Good evening, midshipman. Third class. The young captain one. Ive read your book. Im no hero. Im hoping that you could give a little insight into how you used religion to get through the tough times. I am a man of faith. Im a christian. Im proud of that. And i think that that was one of the baselines that really allowed me to to get through the experience. I think that if you have, you almost have to have faith in yourself, your team, your country, that flag and your creator. And and so that was really a baseline of of my survival, i think was my faith in god. Thank you, sir. Bottom on the floor. Good evening, gentlemen. Im midshipmen jensen. Its such a pleasure to hear from all of you. Im really curious. In a time of such uncertainty, where did you find the structure in your lives. Oh, jesus. So the question is a time of uncertainty. Where do you find structure in your lives . I, i think that spirit, duality, a belief in god, was a major part. I gave a speech about a year ago and afterwards some somebody who was a parent in the audience came up and, you know, next thing i know, she was standing there facing me and she said, i think you talked to jesus. And without thinking twice, i said, every day. So in terms of structure youre in and existence, i think that was a most important part. The other part was from this case, we were in that together and we were to come back together and that was like, oh, our just our greatest objective and weve got to come back and but we were going to come back the right way. And that was with all our and thats our thats our motto return with honor, as you as youre aware, i committed to that. Also, if the question was about structure or that youre learning structure, im speaking to the midshipmen here now youre learning the structure as a result of your engagement in here with the Naval Academy. And you have the 591 people are there about two thirds, about one third of them were naval aviators. And among those navy, theres quite a number of graduates of the school, including people like john mccain and former superintendent Bill Lawrence and others like that. And whether you realize it or not, every day youre learning how to interact with people, how to structure things. And so i kudos to ucla for that. Thank top left. And you know, in addition, mentioning your class, i love to know where youre from, too. I think i studied from georgia and here georgia. Its all right. Thank you. Good evening, gentlemen. Midshipman fourth class huber, ninth company. Im from baltimore and i. Captain plum, after learning how to actually communicate from where i was. Shoemaker when was the first time you interacted with him face to face . All right, so the question is, wheres the first time captain plum and admiral shoemaker interacted, met each other face to face . It was not really until we came home. We had a meeting in we had a meeting in washington, dc. The president put out the biggest meal white house has ever served for. The podium is and our first ladys that was some of us came home two divorces and so i took my mother as my first lady and that was the first time i ever was face to face with bob. Now, i knew everything about him, you know, because he had given me his whole history of back and forth. And i and i, you know, i knew that he played a guitar and he flew airplanes and he was a an astronaut candidate. And and his cat was matilda. And so so first thing i said, hey, hows matilda . And he said, okay, charlie. Yeah. See, i was pretty, pretty well separated and in this camp we called alcatraz was where everyone stockdale resided. I live next to a guy who wanted to learn how to speak french. Now i know you miss him. You have your own academic pursuits. But in my day we only had one curriculum here, and the only elective was a choice of language. Mine was french and the fella next to me who later became a congressman for 27 years and three years time, we never got further apart than the ten feet, but i never saw. Yeah, but i would give him five words of french a day again tapping through the wall and amplifying it with rhymes with some english word. And after almost three years and again with a scientific grade, they broke us out of solitary confinement and put us in larger groups. And i met sam johnson, who was his name, and he could speak french better than i could. And i had no idea. I believed. We have time for one last question. Top left midshipmen third class anthony couvert seventh company. Im from houston, texas. Oh, the texas gentleman, thank you for your time tonight as the grandson of a south Vietnamese Naval officer who spent eight years under a northern prison, my grandfather worked with the french, the americans and ive grown up my whole life hearing about the experience of his time, but not from him, particularly from my mother and my uncles. My question tonight is, did yall have any interaction with either french or vietnamese or any other prisoners while you were there. So the question is what kind of interaction did you personally or did the americans have with the vietnamese p. O. W. S . Well, id say very little. And, you know, i think the secret to surviving this thing is to be the dumbest guy they ever captured in. In my case, it was an easy role to play, but true. But we had kind of uncomplimentary names for our guards, which some of which i cant repeat right now, but we tried to you know, we had interrogations and we call quizzes and the little the least you could tell these guys, the better off you were. And if you thought you could match wits with them, they had the upper hand, you know, and they would come back if you tell them a lie or so like they wanted to know what my role was on an Aircraft Carrier. And i said i was in of all the pool tables on the ship and but if you told them a lie had to remember it for five years or so because they tape record this, things come back at you. But i know that there were a couple of south vietnamese p. O. W. S in camp unity in the last couple of years of the olympics. Was there some interaction there . Yeah, that was a south vietnamese pilot shot down that he and a couple of laotian p. O. W. S also. But that was a very very instrumental because he sort of gained a trustee status. You might say. So they would be out there in the yard colored leaves or clean things up. So he had more freedom, move around and he was very very helpful at passing messages to, you know, various portions of camp unity, which was a big part of the hanoi hilton. They had all these big cells that held a lot of guys higher. You know, and by the way, only got home. That was not released with us. But he came out due to pressure for Us Government pressure, and they released him later and he he came to the United States. He worked and married a vietnamese refugee lady in the San Francisco area. He worked for ross perot. His company and their oldest daughter went to the air force academy. Thats a great story. You know, tonight has been a real honor for me to be here speaking to the brigade and to be on stage with member of the class of 1954 and six and 1964. And 23. And i know that speaking for me, i think the p. O. W. Here, we wish we could talk a little bit longer. Well be down here if you want to come see us and ask us questions, wed be happy to to answer them and talk with you at length. And i think we were talking in the radio room before we came out here, and i think that we all agreed that there are a lot of things we want everyone to take away from this. The value of response, reliance, resilience. I think most of all, we really want everyone to remember to beat army. So thank you. And i know we have a couple west pointers in here, so we hope you all enjoy your stay here in annapolis forever. Thank. Thank you. Thank you very much. And then i love the p. O. W. Stand and let you all recognize them. One last time i. Really