SAN DIEGO - Retired Vice Adm. James Stockdale was a highly decorated Navy pilot who ran for vice president as Ross Perot's running mate in 1992, but by his own admission he was no politician.

"Who am I? Why am I here?" Stockdale asked rhetorically in one of the most enduring moments of the 1992 presidential campaign, as he debated Dan Quayle and Al Gore on national television.

Stockdale, who endured 71/2 years in a North Vietnamese prison and earned the Medal of Honor for valor, died Tuesday at his home in Coronado at the age of 81. The Navy did not provide a cause of death but said he had suffered from Alzheimer's disease.

Stockdale, who said he joined the race to repay Perot for working to help free POWs in Vietnam, fared poorly in his one attempt at running for office. He fumbled his way through the 1992 debate, even asking the moderator to repeat a question because he didn't have his hearing aid turned on.

Still, he had endured far worse.

During the Vietnam War, Stockdale was a Navy fighter pilot based on the USS Oriskany and flew 201 missions before he was shot down on Sept. 9, 1965. He became the highest-ranking naval officer captured during the war, the Navy said.

Stockdale was taken to Hoa Lo Prison, known as the "Hanoi Hilton." His shoulders were wrenched from their sockets, his leg had been shattered by angry villagers and a torturer, and his back was broken. But he refused to capitulate.

Rather than allow himself to be used in a propaganda film, Stockdale smashed his face with a mahogany stool.

"My only hope was to disfigure myself," Stockdale wrote in his 1984 autobiography "In Love and War." The ploy worked, but he spent the next two years in leg irons.

After Ho Chi Minh's death, he broke a glass pane in an interrogation room and slashed his wrists until he passed out in his own blood. After that, captors relented in their harsh treatment of him and his fellow prisoners.

Stockdale spent four years in solitary confinement before he and 115 fellow prisoners were freed in 1973. When asked by a reporter if he knew a man had walked on the moon, Stockdale replied, "No, I did not."

"No, I was not surprised. And, no, I did not think getting a man to the moon was the greatest news I had ever heard," he wrote in his autobiography.

Stockdale received 26 combat decorations, including the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest medal for valor, in 1976. The citation reads, "By his heroic action at great peril to himself, he earned the everlasting gratitude of his fellow prisoners and of his country."

He retired from the military in 1979, one of the most highly decorated officers in U.S. Navy history, and became president of the Citadel, a military college in South Carolina. He left in 1981 to become a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

Stockdale came to know Perot through his wife Sybil Stockdale's work establishing an organization on behalf of families of prisoners held during the Vietnam War.

Perot, who was out of the country Tuesday and could not be reached for comment, once described Stockdale as "a man of steel."

"He has been hammered on the forge of brutality," Perot said.

Stockdale is survived by his wife and four sons.

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