Welcome to the Daily Blade. The Word of God is described as the sword of the spirit, the primary spiritual weapon in the Christian's armor against the forces of evil. Your hosts are Joby Martin and Kyle Thompson, and they stand ready to equip men for the fight. Let's sharpen up.

The year is 1966, and the location is North Vietnam.

United States Navy Vice Admiral and Aviator James Stockdale has been placed in front of a camera.

He has been a prisoner of war for almost a year. At this point, he has been tortured in many ways.

He's had both of his shoulders dislocated. He's been beaten repeatedly. He has been

kept in isolation, and he has been deprived of sleep. He's in the process now being forced to

participate in a propaganda film that will be broadcast internationally with the intention of

proving that American POWs are being treated well by the enemy. So the cameras begin rolling,

and Stockdale looks directly into the lens

of the camera and begins to blink. Dot, dot, dot, dot, dash, dash, dot, dot, dot. To the astute observer,

Stockdale is using Morse code and slowly and deliberately, he delivers a short message. S-O-S. And after that, he continues to

signal one word on repeat. T-O-R-T-U-R-E. Torture. This propaganda is broadcast around the globe and the incredible intelligence analysts for the United States military received the message loud and clear. It is the first confirmed evidence during the Vietnam War that American prisoners of war are being systematically tortured. The North Vietnamese figured out what James Stockdale did as well, and the beatings and torture

began to get much, much worse.

Stockdale spends seven and a half years at the Hanoi Hilton.

For four of those years, he was in solitary confinement.

He is tortured relentlessly, and on one such occasion, he is told that he is going to be

paraded through the streets of Hanoi in a propaganda display,

so he takes a concealed razor and slices his own scalp open so that the blood will run down over his face

and disfigure it too much for the film to be effective.

And even after seven and a half years of torture and captivity, he emerged from the situation unbroken.

He had maintained his resolve. He had been forged. So it became clear that one of the main reasons for Stockdale's survival was because he

controlled the controllables. He could not control his circumstances, and he could not control what was

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