In this case, Epictetus said everybody should play the game of life-that the best play it with “skill, form, speed and grace.” But like most games, you play it with a ball. Your team devotes all its energies to getting the ball across the line. But after the game, what do you do with the ball? Nobody much cares. It’s not worth anything. The competition, the game, was the thing. You play the game with care, making sure you are never making the external a part of yourself, but merely lavishing your skill in regard to it. The ball was just “used” to make the game possible, so just roll it under the porch and forget it, let it wait for the next game. Most important of all, just don’t covet it, don’t seek it, don’t set your heart on it. It is this latter route that makes externals dangerous, makes them the route to slavery. First you covet or abhor “things,” and then along comes he who can confer or remove them. I quote Enchiridion (The Little Book) 14: “A man’s master is he who is able to confer or remove whatever that man seeks or shuns. Whoever then would be free, let him wish nothing, let him decline nothing, which depends on others, else he must necessarily become, a slave.” Discourses 1/121: “Who is your master? He who has authority over any of the things upon which you have set your heart.” These last quotations constitute the real core of what a person needs in order to understand the POW situation.

So I took those core thoughts into prison. I also remembered a lot of attitude shaping remarks from the Enchiridion on how not to kid yourself into thinking that you can somehow stand aloof, be an “observer of the passing scene,” aloof from the prisoner underground organization. Enchiridion 17:

Remember that you are an actor in a drama of such sort as the Author chooses: if short, then in a short one; if long, then in a long one. If it be His pleasure that you should enact a poor man, or a cripple, or a ruler, or a private citizen, see that you act it well. For this is your business, to act well the given part. But to choose it belongs to Another.

The capital A’s on Author and Another are Stoic code markings for “another name for God.” Our minds are part of the Divine Mind of God; it is like a flame, and individual consciousnesses are sparks in it. Conversely, we are fragments of God; each one of us has within us a part of Him. We’re part of God and he’s part of us.

Another attitude-shaping remark: When in tight straits, you should stifle what’s in you of that Student Body President personality, of give-and-take, openness, being responsive, offering counter-options rather than outright refusal to go along. We called people who acted like student body presidents “players” in prison, and tried to prevent them from digging their own graves. Enchiridion 28: “If a person had delivered up your body to some passer-by, you would certainly be angry. And do you feel no shame in delivering up your own mind to any reviler?”

All that, over those three years (between graduate school and being shot down), I had put away for the future. Right now, and I’m back on chronology, it’s very quiet in a parachute, and I can hear the rifle shots down below and can match them up with bullet rips occurring in the parachute canopy above me. Then I can hear the noontime shouting and see the fists waving in the town as my chute hooks a tree but deposits me on a main street in good shape. With two quick-release fastener flips, I’m free of the chute, and immediately gang-tackled by the 10 or 15 town roughnecks I had seen in my peripheral vision, pounding up the street from my right. It felt to me like the quarterback sack of the century. I don’t want to make a big thing of his, nor indicate that I was surprised at my reception, but by the time the tackling and pummeling and twisting and wrenching were over, and it lasted for three or more minutes before the guy in the pitch helmet got there to blow his whistle, I had a very badly broken leg that I felt sure would be with me for life. And that hunch turned out to be right. And I’ll have to say that I felt only minor relief when I hazily recalled crippled Epictetus’s admonition in Enchiridion 9: “Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will; and say this to yourself with regard to everything that happens. For you will find it to be an impediment to something else, but not truly to yourself .”

As an insider, I knew that whole setup on POWs: that the North Vietnamese already held about 30 prisoners in that early September 1965, probably up in Hanoi; that I was the only Wing Commander, Navy or Air Force, to survive an ejection; and that I would be their senior, their Commanding Officer, and would remain so, very likely, throughout this war, which I felt sure would last at least five years. And here I was starting off crippled and flat on my back.

Well. Epictetus turned out to be right. After a crude operation just to get my knee locked and splayed leg under me, I was on crutches within a couple of months. And the crooked leg, healing itself, was strong enough to hold me up without crutches in a few more. I took command (clandestinely, of course) of the by-then 75 pilots-due to grow to just over 500 over the 71/2 years-determined “to play well the given part.”