While attacking a surface-to-air missile site, he evaded two missiles that streaked toward his aircraft. On April 22, 1966, he undertook the mission that would earn him the Air Force Cross, the branch’s second-highest military decoration after the Medal of Honor. He joined in 1959, graduated the next year as a second lieutenant with pilot wings and entered the Air Force in 1961.īy 1965 he was running bombing missions from Thailand to North Vietnam and Laos. He enrolled at Baylor University in Texas in 1956 and stayed for two years until he learned about the Air Force’s Aviation Cadet Training Program, which did not require a college degree. “My single, undeviating dream was to fly.” “From that moment on there was no turning back,” General Boyd said in a 2019 oral history interview with the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. He was much keener on airplanes and, at the age of 7, cajoled his father into buying him a 15-minute ride in a crop duster. His mother, Vernal (Staton) Boyd, was a homemaker.Ĭhuck, as he was called, was not enamored of farm work. His father, Henry Graham Boyd, ran a corn, soy and dairy farm. His prescience made him what one Washington group later called “one of the intellectual pioneers of homeland security.”Ĭharles Graham Boyd was born on April 15, 1938, on his family’s farm outside Rockwell City, Iowa. 12, 2001, The Washington Post published an opinion essay by General Boyd in which he wrote, “While we may feel at the moment as though we are in a trance, we are, in fact, awakening.” and be recognized for that and nothing else.” He said he did not want to “spend the rest of my life as a returned P.O.W. “This is behind me,” he told NBC News of his captivity. McCain, who would go on to become a United States senator and presidential candidate.īut once General Boyd was released in 1973, he was determined to focus on his future, not his past. He spent the next 2,488 days enduring torture, isolation, malnutrition and interrogation in various squalid prisons, including the so-called Hanoi Hilton for 18 months, he was imprisoned in a cell next to the Navy flyer John S. He had to eject, and, shortly after landing in a rice paddy, he was captured. After repeated passes through enemy fire, his F-105D plane was hit and set ablaze. In 1966, General Boyd, who was a captain at the time, volunteered for a dangerous mission in Vietnam - attacking surface-to-air missile sites around Hanoi. His son, Dallas, said the cause was complications of lung cancer. Boyd, an Air Force fighter pilot who was held captive as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for nearly seven years, rose to the rank of four-star general and later forged a civilian career as an expert on homeland security and foreign policy, died on March 23 in Haymarket, Va.
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