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REMARKS OF WING COMMANDER JAMES B. STOCKDALE TO THE PILOTS OF CARRIER
AIR WING 16 ABOARD USS ORISKANY ON 29 APRIL 1965, AT SEA, EN ROUTE
TONKIN GULF, ONE WEEK BEFORE THEY ENTERED COMBAT.

.... having reviewed for you the terrain of Vietnam, the enemy's order
of battle, the rules of engagement, and to some extent the modern
history of the conflict and the evolution of America's strategy, I
think I owe you in addition a straight from the shoulder discussion
of pilots' mental attitudes and orientation in "limited war" circum-
stances. I saw the need for this last summer aboard TICONDEROGA - after
the start of the war had caught us by surprise and we had gone through
those first, exciting days pretty much on adrenaline. In the lull that
followed, as we prepared for a next round, I could sense that those
fine young men who had measured up so well in the sudden reality of
flak and burning targets, wanted to talk and get their resources and
value systems lined up for the long haul. Like most of you, they were
well read, sensitive, sometimes skeptical - those educated in the
American liberal tradition to think for themselves - those who are often
our most productive citizens - and just as often, our best soldiers.
They realized that bombing heavily defended targets is serious business
and no game - that it is logically impossible, in the violence of a
fight, to commit oneself, as an individual, only in some proportion of
his total drive and combative instinct. It has to be all or nothing;
dog eat dog over the target. I think they were asking themselves, as
you might - Where do I as a person, a person of awareness, refinement
and education, fit into this "limited war", "measured response" concept?

I want to level with you right now, so you can think it over here
in mid-Pacific and not kid yourself into imagining "stark realizations"
in the Gulf of Tonkin. Once you go "feet dry" over the beach, there can
be nothing limited about your commitment. "Limited war" means to us that
our target list has limits, our ordnance loadout has limits, our rules
of engagement have limits, but that does not mean that there is anything
"limited" about our personal obligations as fighting men to carry out
assigned missions with all we've got. If you think it is possible for
a man, in the heat of battle, to apply something less than total personal
commitment - equated perhaps to your idea of the proportion of national
potential being applied, you are wrong. It's contrary to human nature.
So also is the idea I was alarmed to find suggested to me by a military
friend in a letter recently: that the prisoner of war's Code of Conduct
is some sort of a "total war" document. You can't go half way on that,
either. The Code of Conduct was not written for "total war" or "limited
wars", it was written for all wars, and let it be understood that it
applies with full force to this Air Wing - in this war.

What I am saying is that national commitment and personal commitment
are two different things. All is not relative. You classical scholars
know that even the celebrated "free thinker" Socrates was devoted to
ridiculing the sophist idea that one can avoid black and white choices