We were taught “control what you can control” in the army. Was that Stoicism?
I served twenty-two years in the Korean army. In my last years "resilience training" was introduced, and the instructors sometimes quoted Epictetus. Control what you can control. Let the rest go. Some officers had read about James Stockdale, the American pilot who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for more than seven years and said that Epictetus's Handbook helped him survive. It is a powerful story.
I want to describe a problem I saw. Resilience training helps with stress you did not cause: bad weather, bad orders, long deployments. It is much less helpful, sometimes harmful, with what is now called moral injury: the damage that comes from doing, or failing to prevent, something that violates your own conscience. A soldier who followed an order he believed wrong is not helped by "that was outside your control". Often it was not outside his control. That is the wound.
When I read Epictetus himself, I found something surprising. For him, the one thing fully in our control is our own choice and judgement. So the Stoic answer to moral injury would be stricter than the training, not softer: you are responsible exactly for what you chose, and only for that.
So was the training Stoicism? It seems to me it took the half of the doctrine that consoles and left the half that judges. I would like to hear from others who have met "resilience" teaching at work.