A World Apart: Growing Up Stockdale During Vietnam
Sid Stockdale’s memoir traces his young life from 1965 to 1973, when he was age 11-18, and his father, Navy CDR James Stockdale, was a POW in the “Hanoi Hilton” while his mother, Sybil Stockdale, founded the National League of Families of POWs and Missing in Southeast Asia. Early letters from his father in prison brought joy to the family but as a young boy Sid didn’t recognize the innuendos that made clear to his mother and US intelligence his father was suffering in a brutal extortionist prison system. Sid’s mother’s connections grew with Naval intelligence and within a year she was secretly coding letters to her husband and a scheme developed for him to clandestinely reply. Told through the eyes of a young boy enduring horrific emotional struggles, Sid’s memoir presents the Stockdale family story using his parent’s book, In Love and War (1984), and his mother’s diary which he first acquired in 2016, one year after her passing.
From the onset, 11-year-old Sid assumed the role of supporting his mother by caring for his younger brothers, age 7 and 4. But as the years passed this became more challenging as his mother became increasingly overwhelmed and exhausted, and Sid watched her move closer and closer to an emotional breakdown. Sid’s freshman year of high school was disastrous, and the next fall he attended South Kent School in Connecticut where he found peace with his circumstances and faculty mentors and friends who changed his life.
This memoir concludes when the war in Vietnam ends and Sid’s father and the other POWs return home. The life altering effects of these traumatizing events end with the reunion of his family, Sid finally getting to know his father as a young adult and beginning to become a whole person.
