Chapter One: The Right Wife
1. Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (New York: Picador, 1979), 13.
2. Dr. Ganesh A and Dr. Catherine Joseph, “Personality Studies in Aircrew: An Overview,” Indian Journal of Aerospace Medicine 49, no. 1 (2005): 54–62.
3. Anne Briscoe Pye and Nancy Shea, The Navy Wife (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 101.
4. Marian Novak to the author, April 10, 2017.
5. Pye and Shea, Navy Wife, 94–95.
6. Ibid., 4.
7. Donna Moreau, Waiting Wives: The Story of Schilling Manor, Home Front to the Vietnam War (New York: Atria, 2005), 151.
8. Nancy Shea, The Air Force Wife (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), 1.
9. Ibid., 6.
10. Jim Stockdale and Sybil Stockdale, In Love and War: The Story of a Family’s Ordeal and Sacrifice During the Vietnam Year (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1990), 65.
11. Ibid., 65–69; Alvin Townley, Defiant: The POWs Who Endured Vietnam’s Most Infamous Prison, the Women Who Fought for Them, and the One Who Never Returned (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2014), 8–9; “Admiral James B. Stockdale, USN,” American Academy of Achievement, accessed October 26, 2016, www
12. Craig Howes, Voices of the Vietnam POWs: Witnesses to Their Flight (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 242.
13. Stockdale and Stockdale, In Love and War, 37.
14. Sybil Stockdale résumé, collection of Sid Stockdale.
15. Bebe Woolfolk, in conversation with the author, November 27, 2015.
16. Stockdale and Stockdale, In Love and War, 41.
17. Bebe Woolfolk, in conversation with the author, November 27, 2015.
18. Stockdale and Stockdale, In Love and War, 45.
19. Ibid., 45–46.
20. Ibid., 49–52.
21. Marian Novak to the author, April 10, 2017.
22. Michael J. Allen, Until the Last Man Comes Home: POWs, MIAs and the Unending Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 25.
23. Stockdale and Stockdale, In Love and War, 53.
24. Jeremy Allen, “SERE School Celebrates 50 Years of Training,” United States Navy website, accessed August 5, 2018, www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=68336.
25. Rod Powers, “United States Military Code of Conduct: Military Rules for Prisoners of War,” The Balance Careers, accessed August 5, 2018, www
26. Rachel Starnes, The War at Home: A Wife’s Search for Peace (and Other Missions Impossible)—A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 2016), 40–41.
27. Stockdale and Stockdale, In Love and War, 72–73; Jim Stockdale Jr., email message to author, February 24, 2016.
28. Jim Stockdale Jr., email message to author, December 17, 2016.
29. Ibid.
30. Sid Stockdale, in conversation with the author, June 17, 2015.
31. Jim Stockdale Jr., email message to author, December 17, 2016.