Return To The United States
Stockdale was released as a prisoner of war on February 12, 1973. His shoulders had been wrenched from their sockets, his leg shattered by angry villagers and a torturer, and his back broken.
He received the Medal of Honor in 1976. Stockdale filed charges against two other officers who, he felt, had given aid and comfort to the enemy. However, the Navy Department under the leadership of then-Secretary of the Navy John Warner took no action and retired these men "in the best interests of the Navy."
Debilitated by his captivity and mistreatment, Stockdale could not stand upright and could barely walk upon his return to the United States, which prevented his return to active flying status. In deference to his previous service, the Navy kept him on active duty, steadily promoting him over the next few years before he retired as a vice admiral. He completed his career by serving as President of the Naval War College from October 13, 1977, until August 22, 1979.
Read more about this topic: James Stockdale
Famous quotes containing the words united states, return to, return, united and/or states:
“The United States is the only great nation whose government is operated without a budget. The fact is to be the more striking when it is considered that budgets and budget procedures are the outgrowth of democratic doctrines and have an important part in developing the modern constitutional rights.... The constitutional purpose of a budget is to make government responsive to public opinion and responsible for its acts.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty.... From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now.”
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
“To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
“An inquiry about the attitude towards the release of so-called political prisoners. I should be very sorry to see the United States holding anyone in confinement on account of any opinion that that person might hold. It is a fundamental tenet of our institutions that people have a right to believe what they want to believe and hold such opinions as they want to hold without having to answer to anyone for their private opinion.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor yet toward the wholly like because it is stale—identity must always be dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but not actual.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)