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USS Stockdale (DDG 106)

USS STOCKDALE is one of the ARLEIGH BURKE Flight IIA guided missile destroyers and the first ship in the Navy named after Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale.

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Crew List:

This section contains the names of sailors who served aboard USS STOCKDALE. It is no official listing but contains the names of sailors who submitted their information.

• Click here to view the list.

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• Click here to see which USS STOCKDALE memorabilia are currently for sale on ebay.

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About the Ship's Coat of Arms:

The Shield:

The eagle, symbol of vigilance and courage, represents Vice Admiral Stockdake's exemplary resistance to his captors’ brutality and pressure to use him and his fellow captives as propaganda tools. The eagle refers also to Stockdale’s award of aviator wings represented in the crest and his distinction as pilot and instructor. Dark blue represents the U.S. Navy, the white of the eagle’s head denotes integrity and idealism. The demi-trident refers to leadership and the Vice Admiral’s commitment to uphold in captivity the Navy standards of conduct. The silver and scarlet bordure represents the cohesion of Navy personnel under stress and their tradition of sacrifice and courage.

The Crest:

Vice Admiral Stockdale’s distinction as the only three or four star officer in Navy history to wear both aviator wings and the Congressional Medal of Honor is signified by the wings, the three stars above and the Celeste blue octagon which recalls both the Medal of Honor and the Aegis-class capabilities of the DDG 106. The many combat decorations awarded the Vice Admiral during his distinguished career are also recalled by the three stars at top. The laurel wreath traditionally conveys honor and achievement.

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About the Ship's Name:

On September 9, 1965, then-Commander James Bond Stockdale serving as Commander Carrier Air Wing 16, catapulted his A-4E Skyhawk off the flight deck of the ORISKANY (CV 34) on what turned out to be his final mission over North Vietnam. Approaching his target, his plane was riddled with anti-aircraft fire. Within seconds, his engine was aflame and all hydraulic control was gone. He "punched out," watching his plane slam into a rice paddy and explode in a fireball. Stockdale himself best describes what happened next:

"As I ejected from the plane I broke a bone in my back, but that was only the beginning. I landed in the streets of a small village. A thundering herd was coming down on me. They were going to defend the honor of their town. It was the quarterback sack of the century."

They tore off his clothes and beat him mercilessly. Stockdale suffered a broken leg and paralyzed arm before a military policeman took him into custody. He was now a prisoner of war, the highest ranking naval officer to be held as a POW in Vietnam.

Stockdale wound up in Hoa Lo Prison - the infamous " Hanoi Hilton" -- where he spent the next seven and a half years under unimaginably brutal conditions. He was physically tortured no fewer than 15 times. Techniques included beatings, whippings, and near-asphyxiation with ropes. Mental torture was incessant. He was kept in solitary confinement, in total darkness, for four years, chained in heavy, abrasive leg irons for two years, malnourished due to a starvation diet, denied medical care, and deprived of letters from home in violation of the Geneva Convention.

Through it all, Stockdale's captors held out the promise of better treatment if he would only admit that the United States was engaging in criminal behavior against the Vietnamese people, but Stockdale refused. Drawing strength from principles of stoic philosophy, Stockdale heroically resisted. His courage was an inspiration to his fellow POWs, with whom he communicated in an ingenious code, maintaining unit cohesion and morale. His jailers increased the level of torture, so Stockdale determined to fight back in the only way he could.

Told that he was to be taken "downtown" and paraded in front of foreign journalists, Stockdale slashed his scalp with a razor and beat himself in the face with a wooden stool. He reasoned that his captors would not dare display a prisoner who appeared to have been beaten. When he learned that his fellow prisoners were dying under torture, he slashed his wrists to show their captors that he preferred death to submission. Stockdale literally gambled with his life, and won. Convinced of Stockdale's determination to die rather than cooperate, the Communists ceased trying to extract bogus "confessions" from him. The torture of American prisoners ended, and treatment of all American POWs improved. Upon his release in 1973, Stockdale's extraordinary heroism became widely known, and he received the Congressional Medal of Honor in the nation's bicentennial year. He was one of the most highly decorated officers in the history of the Navy, with 26 personal combat decorations, including four Silver Star medals in addition to the Medal of Honor.

Throughout Stockdale's captivity, his wife Sybil campaigned for respectful treatment for the families of all POWs by founding the League of Families. Sybil Stockdale was presented with the U.S. Navy Department's Distinguished Public Service Award by the Chief of Naval Operations. She is the only wife of an active-duty officer ever to be so honored.

After serving as the President of the Naval War College, Stockdale retired from the Navy in 1978 and embarked on a distinguished academic career, including a term as President of the Citadel, and 15 years as a Senior Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. In 1992 he graciously agreed to a request from his old friend H. Ross Perot to stand with Perot as the vice presidential candidate of the Reform Party, and throughout the campaign he comported himself with the same integrity and dignity that marked his entire career. Together, the Stockdales told their story in a joint memoir, In Love and War. Admiral Stockdale and his wife lived quietly on Coronado Island, off of San Diego, until his death in 2005.

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USS STOCKDALE History:

USS STOCKDALE was authorized on September 13, 2002, built by Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine, and christened by Sybil Stockdale on May 10, 2008. The Navy accepted delivery on September 30, 2008, and the ship was commissioned at Naval Base Ventura County, Port Hueneme, California, on April 18, 2009, before taking up her homeport at Naval Base San Diego.

After post-commissioning trials and fleet integration, STOCKDALE departed San Diego on November 30, 2010, for her maiden Western Pacific deployment, spending eight months in the U.S. Seventh Fleet area. Her schedule combined presence operations with partner engagement: ports included Guam; Sepangar, Malaysia; Sihanoukville, Cambodia; Laem Chabang, Thailand; Singapore; and Chinhae, Republic of Korea. During February 2011, she joined Exercise COBRA GOLD alongside ESSEX (LHD 2) and regional partners, and earlier that winter conducted a passing exercise with the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, before returning to San Diego on July 22, 2011. The deployment reflected the post-2009 emphasis on Southeast Asian maritime cooperation and freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.

In mid-2012, STOCKDALE shifted to large-scale multinational training at RIMPAC 2012 out of Pearl Harbor. She worked in the Hawaiian operating areas - at times maneuvering in the constrained Kaulakahi Channel near the Pacific Missile Range Facility - while the exercise focused participants on coalition maritime warfare and logistics at scale.

STOCKDALE sailed again in early 2013 with the JOHN C. STENNIS (CVN 74) and later NIMITZ (CVN 68) strike group rotations that moved from the Western Pacific into Fifth Fleet. In April she called at Jebel Ali, United Arab Emirates, during theater security cooperation and maritime security operations in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. As Syria's chemical-weapons crisis escalated late summer 2013, the NIMITZ Carrier Strike Group - accompanied by destroyers including STOCKDALE - shifted into the Red Sea as a contingency force before shifting back to Pacific tasking. Throughout the period STOCKDALE continued presence and escort work in Fifth Fleet.

Following workups in Southern California, the ship participated in exercise NORTHERN EDGE in the Gulf of Alaska in June 2015 and conducted a port visit to Esquimalt/Victoria, Canada, reflecting renewed high-latitude training as the North Pacific gained strategic salience.

From January 20 to August 11, 2016 STOCKDALE deployed with the JOHN C. STENNIS Carrier Strike Group as part of the Navy's Great Green Fleet initiative, combining routine presence with energy-efficiency demonstrations. She conducted South China Sea patrols en route to Northeast Asia and moored in Busan, Republic of Korea, alongside JOHN C. STENNIS and CHUNG-HOON (DDG 93) while MOBILE BAY (CG 53) and WILLIAM P. LAWRENCE (DDG 110) visited other Korean ports. After operating across Seventh Fleet she participated in RIMPAC 2016 in Hawaiian waters and returned to San Diego on August 11, 2016.

STOCKDALE's next major deployment began in the autumn of 2018 as part of the JOHN C. STENNIS Carrier Strike Group's transit west. By December she was in the Arabian Sea conducting anti-submarine warfare events. On December 24, 2018, the ship made a port visit to Muscat, Oman, amid intensified coalition maritime security and escort tasking tied to Iran-related tensions and the Syria and Iraq aftermath. In the spring she re-entered Seventh Fleet, visiting Suva, Fiji, on April 30, 2019, to support outreach in the South Pacific, and returned to San Diego on May 20, 2019.

In July 2021, STOCKDALE deployed again with Carrier Strike Group ONE to the Western Pacific. While underway in early 2022, divers discovered a significant rupture in the ship's sonar-dome rubber window while she was in Sasebo. Naval Ship Repair Facility Japan Regional Maintenance Center divers executed an unprecedented emergent underwater hybrid patch that enabled a restricted-speed transit to Yokosuka for dry-dock repairs. STOCKDALE completed repairs and returned to San Diego on July 15, 2022, closing a deployment that underlined both the operational tempo in the Indo-Pacific and the Navy's forward repair capacity in Japan.

The destroyer's most intense operational period to date began when she departed San Diego on July 24, 2024. After initial operations with the ABRAHAM LINCOLN (CVN 72) Carrier Strike Group from August to November 2024, STOCKDALE remained in Fifth Fleet as regional tensions rose following Houthi attacks on Red Sea and Gulf of Aden shipping. Early in the deployment she made a replenishment visit to Colombo, Sri Lanka, on August 22-23, and later conducted a port call at Safaga, Egypt, paired with a sailing exercise alongside the Egyptian Navy frigate ABU QIR, reflecting increased coalition coordination around the Suez approaches. From late 2024 through early 2025, STOCKDALE shifted heavily to convoy escort, air- and missile-defense, and maritime interdiction around the Bab el-Mandeb and in the Gulf of Aden. On December 1-2, 2024, while escorting three U.S. merchant ships with O'KANE (DDG 77), she helped defeat a mix of anti-ship ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones launched from Yemen. In subsequent December escorts STOCKDALE and O'KANE again intercepted multiple weapons without damage to the convoy. In January 2025, U.S. Central Command's deputy commander disclosed that STOCKDALE's crew had employed the ship's 5-inch gun to shoot down a Houthi uncrewed aerial vehicle during a Bab el-Mandeb transit, an unusual engagement underscoring the density of the threat and the layered defense demanded of Red Sea escorts at that time.

STOCKDALE returned to San Diego on February 21, 2025, after seven months spanning U.S. Third, Fifth, and Seventh Fleet areas. The ship received the Destroyer Squadron 21 Battle "E" for 2024 and a Combat Action Ribbon for combat operations during the deployment. Embarked HSM-71 "Raptors" also recorded an air-to-air kill against a hostile uncrewed aircraft during the same period.

Less than two months later, on April 11, 2025, the destroyer got underway again - this time under U.S. Northern Command tasking - to augment maritime homeland defense patrols in the Eastern Pacific and along the southern approaches to the United States, a mission that highlighted the flexibility of West Coast destroyers to swing from high-end air-defense and escort operations abroad to domestic security support.

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Homeports of USS STOCKDALE:

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USS STOCKDALE Image Gallery:

The photos below were taken by me and show the STOCKDALE at Naval Base San Diego, Calif., on March 23, 2010.

The photos below were taken by me and show the STOCKDALE at Naval Base San Diego, Calif., on May 10, 2012.

The photos below were taken by me and show the STOCKDALE returning to Naval Base San Diego, Calif., very early in the morning on October 11, 2012.

The photo below was taken by Lydia Perz and shows the STOCKDALE at BAE Systems San Diego Ship Repair for a Selected Restricted Availability (SRA). The photo was taken on May 3, 2014.

The photos below were taken by Michael Jenning and show the STOCKDALE at Naval Base San Diego, Calif., on December 27, 2014.

The photos below were taken by Michael Jenning and show the STOCKDALE at Naval Base San Diego, Calif., on October 2, 2015, shortly before getting underway for San Francisco, Calif., to take part in Fleet Week San Francisco.

The photos below were taken by Michael Jenning and show the STOCKDALE participating in the Parade of Ships during Fleet Week San Francisco on October 9, 2015.

The photos below were taken by Michael Jenning on October 10, 2015, during an open house aboard USS STOCKDALE as part of Fleet Week San Francisco.

			Click here for more Photos.

The photo below was taken by Michael Jenning and shows the STOCKDALE at Naval Base San Diego, Calif., on October 6, 2016.

The photo below was taken by Sebastian Thoma and shows the STOCKDALE at Naval Base San Diego, Calif., on November 10, 2017.

The photos below were taken by Michael Jenning and show the STOCKDALE at Naval Base San Diego, Calif., on September 28, 2018.

The photos below were taken by Michael Jenning and show USS STOCKDALE at BAE Systems San Diego Ship Repair undergoing a Selected Restricted Availability (SRA) on October 10, 2022.

The photos below were taken by me and show USS STOCKDALE departing San Diego, Calif., for a scheduled deployment on July 24, 2024.

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