Moral philosophy, in particular the Stoics, helped Stockdale survive. As he puts it, after he ejected from his plane, "I left my world of technology and entered the world of Epictetus." Epictetus was a Greek-born philosopher in first-century Rome, whose Stoic beliefs arose from his brutal treatment as a slave. Stockdale explains, "Stoics belittle physical harm, but this is not braggadocio. They are speaking of it in comparison to the devastating agony of shame they fancied good men generating when they knew in their hearts that they had failed to do their duty ... " When Stockdale writes about Epictetus, Socrates, Homer, Cervantes, Calvin, and other writers and philosophers, their work achieves a soaring reality because he relates them to his own, extraordinary experiences as a prisoner in one of the 20th century's most barbaric penal programs. Stockdale reminds us about something that much scholarship, with its obsession for textual subtleties, obscures: The real purpose of reading the classics is to develop courage and leadership.

Stockdale explains—drawing on Napoleon, Clausewitz, and other military strategists—that "the word moral" bears an "unmistakably manly, heroic connotation." (Virtue or virtu in Machiavelli's Italian derives ultimately from vir, Latin for "man.") He says that while we think of immorality in terms of categories like sexual abandon and fiscal irresponsibility, such vices, as serious as they may seem to civilians, are not in the same category as failure of nerve (his italics) in war. For a professional warrior, "doing your duty" is not to be confused with "following orders." The latter implies routine and mechanistic repetition; the former an act of potentially painful and devastating consequences, in which serving a larger good may mean something worse than death even.