Charles G. Boyd, Air Force general and former POW, dies at 83After his fighter plane was shot down in North Vietnam, he spent nearly seven years in captivity.
By Harrison Smith March 24, 2022 at 11:12 a.m. EDT
Charles G. Boyd, a highly decorated Air Force general who was shot down as a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War, endured nearly seven years of captivity and rose to become the only former POW from that conflict promoted to a four-star rank, died March 23 at a hospital in Haymarket, Va. He was 83.
The cause was complications from lung cancer, said his son, Dallas Boyd.
A 36-year veteran who held posts in Europe, Southeast Asia and the Pentagon, Gen. Boyd retired from the Air Force in 1995 after serving as deputy commander of the U.S. European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, with an area of responsibility spanning 82 countries. He later served as executive director of the Hart-Rudman Commission, a congressionally chartered panel that reviewed the state of national security and — seven months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks — called for the creation of a new agency similar to what became the Department of Homeland Security.
Active in the realm of foreign affairs long after his retirement from the military, Gen. Boyd went on to warn against a unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq, declaring that the “cakewalk” that some observers anticipated for American forces trying to replace Saddam Hussein would “never happen.” He was also a senior vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations, president and chief executive of Business Executives for National Security and chairman of the Center for the National Interest, a Washington think tank.
But as he saw it, “the defining experience” of his life was the 2,488 days he spent in confinement in North Vietnam, where he was tortured and beaten at prisons including Hoa Lo, a notorious detention center that American POWs nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton. For about 18 months, he occupied a cell next to a young naval officer, John S. McCain, and got to know the future U.S. senator and Republican presidential candidate by communicating through a series of coded taps on the wall, which POWs used to share stories and information.
The prolonged malnutrition he suffered in captivity led to vision problems that ended his career as a military aviator. Long after he was released in 1973, he returned to Southeast Asia to retrace his wartime steps and found himself overwhelmed by memories. For years, he rarely spoke about his experience as a prisoner, saying he wanted to look forward, not back.
“I made a significant effort in my life, and I think fairly successfully, to put that all behind me,” he told Airman Magazine, an Air Force publication, in 2016. “I’d lost about a fifth of my life at that point,” he added, “and I didn’t want to waste any more feeling sorry for myself or fussing over what otherwise might have been.”
Charles Graham Boyd was born in Rockwell City, Iowa, on April 15, 1938, and grew up working on his family’s farm. At age 7, his father paid for him to take a 15-minute flight on a crop duster. It was his first plane ride, and transformed an interest into an obsession.
“For a preteen farm boy from Iowa in bib overalls, in a family of very modest means, that was a really big dream — rather like, say, going to the moon,” he recalled in a 2019 oral history interview with the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.
Gen. Boyd studied for two years at Baylor University in Waco, Tex., before learning about the Air Force’s aviation cadet program, which offered him a chance to become an officer and a pilot without receiving a degree. He signed up in 1959 and was deployed in 1965 to Thailand, where he went on bombing missions to North Vietnam and Laos, flying a supersonic F-105 Thunderchief fighter-bomber.
On April 22, 1966, during his 88th mission over North Vietnam, he volunteered to participate in an operation to destroy surface-to-air missile sites on the outskirts of Hanoi. He evaded a pair of missiles and continued his attack before being hit by antiaircraft fire, according to his citation for the Air Force Cross, the service branch’s highest decoration after the Medal of Honor.
“The selfless act of making repeated attacks through intense ground fire after barely avoiding two missiles was far beyond the normal call of duty,” the citation said.
Gen. Boyd recalled that his plane was damaged so severely he was forced to bail out at a dangerously high speed; his helmet was ripped off his head as he exited the aircraft. Parachuting into a rice paddy, he landed with scraped cheeks but no broken bones and was immediately captured by North Vietnamese wielding AK-47s. Much of his captivity was spent in isolation, either in solitary confinement or with a fellow POW or two in his cell, although a few months after his capture he and some 50 other prisoners were forced to participate in a propaganda demonstration known as the Hanoi March. Paraded through the North Vietnamese capital, they were beaten and attacked by civilians along the way.
Gen. Boyd was released in February 1973, days after the Paris Peace Accords ended U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. By then he had vowed to return home “a different and better man,” including a better husband. His marriage to Millicent Sample, a schoolteacher, had been strained, he said, but they renewed their vows at a hospital chapel shortly after he returned, and remained together until her death in 1994.
Readjusting to life outside of captivity, he enrolled at the University of Kansas to pursue Latin American studies, an interest he had developed while in Vietnam, where a fellow POW used the “tap code” to teach him basic Spanish. “The big calluses on my knuckles from tapping so much lasted close to 10 years after I came home,” he told a University of Kansas interviewer.
He received a bachelor’s degree in 1975 and a master’s in 1976, and continued his military education at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama.
Gen. Boyd later served as vice commander of Strategic Air Command’s 8th Air Force in Louisiana, director of plans at Air Force headquarters and commander of Air University in Alabama before being appointed to U.S. European Command in 1992. His military decorations included the Distinguished Service Medal, Silver Star, Legion of Merit, Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star Medal and Purple Heart.
In 2005, Gen. Boyd married Jessica Tuchman Mathews, a former member of The Washington Post editorial board and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, retiring with her to a farm outside Marshall, Va. In addition to his wife and son, of Falls Church, Va., survivors include a daughter, Jessica of Corona, Calif.; a sister; and four grandchildren.
Although vision problems stymied his career as a fighter pilot, Gen. Boyd rode a BMW motorcycle into his late 70s and continued to fly until last fall, including on a T-34 Mentor, the same single-engine aircraft he had trained on. Some of his other habits started to change, however. He noted that he had been “a Republican, but quietly” since his return from Vietnam, and served as a military adviser to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) in the 1990s. Yet he largely stayed out of national politics until 2020, when he joined nearly 500 former senior military and civilian leaders in signing an open letter in support of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
“I fervently believe that military officers should not get involved in presidential politics, even when retired,” he said in a video he recorded for the group’s Twitter account. “But this year is different. Donald Trump’s assault on the rule of law that makes a democracy possible has been so egregious I’ve decided to speak out.”
He was voting for Biden, he added, and hoped others would do the same.
Unprotected Russian soldiers disturbed radioactive dust in Chernobyl's 'Red Forest', workers say
"Ukraine Live Updates [Mar. 27]: Russian Forces Pull Back After Struggling to Take Ukraine’s Capital [...] Ukrainian forces have gone on the offensive in areas where the Russian lines are stretched the thinnest. Having suffered heavy losses, a large formation of Russian soldiers has fallen back to regroup in an area around the defunct Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Ukrainian officials said."
Russia wouldn't have put any of their young conscripts into any danger of radiation poisoning, would they. Surely not. Planning would avoid that, eh.
March 29, 20224:20 AM GMT+11Last Updated 10 hours ago
Reuters
1/2 = A general view shows the New Safe Confinement (NSC) structure over the old sarcophagus covering the damaged fourth reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, in Chernobyl, Ukraine November 22, 2018. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich/File Photo
Summary
* The two workers at site when Russian force took control * Say Russian soldiers, specialists not in protection gear * Site got name when trees turned red after 1986 explosion * Russia said after capture radiation within normal levels * IAEA said at time radiation rise no threat to population
LONDON, March 28 (Reuters) - Russian soldiers who seized the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster drove their armoured vehicles without radiation protection through a highly toxic zone called the "Red Forest", kicking up clouds of radioactive dust, workers at the site said.
The two sources said soldiers in the convoy did not use any anti-radiation gear. The second Chernobyl employee said that was "suicidal" for the soldiers because the radioactive dust they inhaled was likely to cause internal radiation in their bodies.
Ukraine's state nuclear inspectorate said on Feb. 25 there had been an increase in radiation levels at Chernobyl as a result of heavy military vehicles disturbing the soil. But until now, details of exactly what happened had not emerged.
The two Ukrainian workers who spoke to Reuters were on duty when Russian tanks entered Chernobyl on Feb. 24 and took control of the site, where staff are still responsible for the safe storage of spent nuclear fuel and supervising the concrete-encased remains of the reactor that blew up in 1986.
Both men said they had witnessed Russian tanks and other armoured vehicles moving through the Red Forest, which is the most radioactively contaminated part of the zone around Chernobyl, around 100 km (65 miles) north of Kyiv.
The regular soldiers one of the workers spoke to when they worked alongside them in the facility had not heard about the explosion, he said.
Asked to comment on the accounts from Chernobyl staff, Russia's defence ministry did not respond.
The Russian military said after capturing the plant that radiation was within normal levels and their actions prevented possible "nuclear provocations" by Ukrainian nationalists. Russia has previously denied that its forces have put nuclear facilities inside Ukraine at risk.
OFF LIMITS
The site got its name when dozens of square kilometres of pine trees turned red after absorbing radiation from the 1986 explosion, one of the world's worst nuclear disasters.
A vast area around Chernobyl is off limits to anyone who does not work there or have special permission, but the Red Forest is considered so highly contaminated that even the nuclear plant workers are not allowed to go there.
The Russian military convoy went through the zone, the two employees said. One of them said it used an abandoned road.
"A big convoy of military vehicles drove along a road right behind our facility and this road goes past the Red Forest," said one of the sources.
"The convoy kicked up a big column of dust. Many radiation safety sensors showed exceeded levels," he said.
Valery Seida, acting general director of the Chernobyl plant, was not there at the time and did not witness the Russian convoy going into the Red Forest, but he said he was told by witnesses that Russian military vehicles drove everywhere around the exclusion zone and could have passed the Red Forest.
"Nobody goes there ... for God's sake. There is no one there," Seida told Reuters.
He said workers at the plant told the Russian service personnel they should be cautious about radiation, but he knew of no evidence that they paid attention.
Reuters was not able to independently establish what the radiation levels were for people in the immediate proximity of the Russian convoy that entered the Red Forest.
Ukraine's State Agency of Management the Exclusion Zone said on Feb. 27 that the last record it had on a sensor near nuclear waste storage facilities, before it lost control over the monitoring system, showed that the absorbed dose of radiation was seven times higher than normal.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Feb. 25 that radiation levels at the Chernobyl site reached 9.46 microsieverts per hour but remained "within an operating range" recorded in the exclusion zone from the moment of its creation and posed no threat to the general population.
The safe levels, by IAEA standards listed on the agency's official website, are up to 1 millisievert per year for the general population and 20 millisievert per year for those who deal with radiation professionally - where 1 millisievert is equal to 1,000 microsieverts.
On March 9, the IAEA said it stopped receiving monitoring data from the Chernobyl site. It gave no response on Monday to the workers' allegations.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone is still considered by Ukrainian authorities to be dangerous. Entering the disaster site without permission is a crime under Ukrainian law.
In the weeks the two plant employees were sharing the complex with Russian troops, they also said they saw none of them using any gear that would protect them from radiation.
Specialists from the Russian military who are trained in dealing with radiation did not arrive at the site until about a week after Russian troops arrived, the workers said. They said the Russian specialists did not wear protective gear either.
One of the employees said he had spoken to some of the rank-and-file Russian soldiers at the plant.
"When they were asked if they knew about the 1986 catastrophe, the explosion of the fourth block (of the Chernobyl plant), they did not have a clue. They had no idea what kind of a facility they were at," he said.
"We talked to regular soldiers. All we heard from them was 'It's critically important infrastructure'. That was it," the man said.
FORCE PREPAREDNESS
The accounts about Russian troops in Chernobyl chime with other evidence suggesting the invasion force sent into Ukraine was not fully prepared for what they encountered.
The Kremlin says that what it calls its special military operation in Ukraine is going to plan and is on schedule.
But Ukrainian officials and their Western allies say Russia's initial thrust deep into Ukrainian territory stalled after encountering logistics problems and facing stiffer-than-expected Ukrainian resistance.
Ukrainian intelligence has said Russian soldiers often use open radio frequencies or mobile phones to communicate among themselves, which means Kyiv's forces could eavesdrop on their conversations.
Video footage shared on social media in Ukraine showed multiple cases of Russian military vehicles that had no combat damage but which had been abandoned after breaking down or running out of fuel.
VIDEO 00:45 - Russia says it will 'radically reduce military activity' around Kyiv and Chernihiv – video
Jon Henley, Pjotr Sauer and Shaun Walker in Kyiv Wed 30 Mar 2022 08.24 AEDT First published on Tue 29 Mar 2022 20.34 AEDT
Russia has pledged to drastically cut back its military activity in northern Ukraine to help advance peace talks, but experts and western diplomats expressed doubts that the move was more than a ploy to dress up setbacks on the ground.
Russia’s deputy defence minister, Alexander Fomin, said after talks in Istanbul on Tuesday that Moscow wanted to “increase mutual trust, create the right conditions for future negotiations and reach the final aim of signing a peace deal with Ukraine”, and that the Kremlin would “radically reduce military activity in the direction of Kyiv and Chernihiv”.
However, while Moscow presented the move as a goodwill gesture, it came as Russia’s advance appeared to have stalled on several fronts, with the Kremlin’s forces thwarted by stiff Ukrainian resistance, heavy losses and logistical and tactical failings.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said he had not seen anything indicating that talks were progressing in a “constructive way” and suggested Russian indications of a pullback could be an attempt by Moscow to “deceive people and deflect attention”.
Speaking on a visit to Morocco, Blinken said that there was “what Russia says, and what Russia does, and we’re focused on the latter. What Russia is doing is the continued brutalisation of Ukraine.”
GRAPHIC
A spokesperson for Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, said the UK had seen signs of “some reduction” in Russian bombardment around Kyiv, but added: “We will judge Putin and his regime by his actions, not by his words … We don’t want to see anything less than a complete withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory.” Advertisement
Western officials were “very wary” about the promises, saying the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, could be temporising. “Certainly in terms of the negotiations, nothing that we have seen so far has demonstrated to us that Putin and his colleagues are particularly serious,” one said. “It’s more of a tactical exercise in playing for time.”
John Kirby, press secretary at the Pentagon, warned against “fooling ourselves” over the Kremlin’s claims. “Has there been some movement by some Russian units away from Kyiv in the last day or so? Yeah, we think so, small numbers,” he said. “But we believe that this is a repositioning, not a real withdrawal, and that we all should be prepared to watch for a major offensive against other areas of Ukraine.”
Rob Lee, an expert on the Russian military, tweeted: “This sounds like more of an acknowledgment of the situation around Kyiv where Russia’s advance has been stalled for weeks and Ukrainian forces have had recent successes. Russia doesn’t have the forces to encircle the city.”
Ukraine presented Russian negotiators in Istanbul with a framework for peace under which it would remain neutral with its security guaranteed by third-party countries including the US, the UK, France, Turkey, China and Poland, in an arrangement similar to Nato’s article 5, which commits members to defend one another.
It also said it would be willing to agree to a 15-year consultation period on the status of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, with both countries agreeing not to use their militaries to resolve the issue in the meantime, and called for Russia to drop its objection to Ukrainian membership of the EU.
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, addresses the Russian and Ukrainian delegations before the talks at the Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul. Photograph: Murat Cetin Muhurdar/Turkish presidential service/AFP/Getty Images
The Turkish foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavusoglu, said “both sides are getting closer at every stage”, adding that the Istanbul talks could lead in the first instance to a meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian foreign ministers.
However, analysts warned that the demands were unlikely to be readily accepted by the Kremlin. “I would be very careful about getting too optimistic. We have only heard the Ukrainian proposals. We need to wait for Russia’s responses,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Centre.
Gabuev said Kyiv’s proposals “would look like a loss to Putin, who in his mind already settled the Crimean question a long time ago”. Russia’s military pullback “could just be a temporary strategic move”, he added.
The senior Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak described Kyiv’s proposal on guaranteed neutrality as “an effective tool for protecting our territory and sovereignty”, with “the leading armies of the world becoming guarantors and assuming specific legal obligations” to intervene in the event of aggression.
The proposal on Crimea was also “revolutionary”, Podolyak said, not only because it meant “the return of the topic of Crimea to the negotiating agenda” but because it would “allow us to preserve the current legal interpretations of Crimea, since Crimea is, of course, a part of Ukraine for us”.
VIDEO - 01:42 - Full peace is needed to agree treaty with Russia, says Ukrainian negotiator – video
Even as the peace negotiators began their work, however, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said in a speech to the Danish parliament that at least seven people had been killed and 22 injured in a Russian strike on a regional government building in the southern port of Mykolaiv. “People are still going through the rubble,” he said. Advertisement
Zelenskiy also called the Russian bombardment and siege of the port city of Mariupol, where local officials have said at least 5,000 people have died, a “crime against humanity … happening in front of the eyes of the whole planet, in real time”.
In a video message after the talks on Tuesday night, he said that only a concrete result from the discussions could be trusted. “We are not reducing our defensive efforts. The enemy is still in our territory,” he said. “The shelling of our cities continues. Mariupol is blocked. Missile and airstrikes do not stop. This is the reality. These are the facts.”
insert-text-here The aftermath of the strike on the regional government building in Mykolaiv. Photograph: Mykolaiv Regional State Administration/Reuters
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had earlier opened the talks at the Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul, urging both sets of negotiators to “put an end to this tragedy”. He said each side had “legitimate concerns”, but added: “We have now entered a period where concrete results are needed.”
Roman Abramovich, the oligarch who has been playing an unspecified mediating role, was in the room for the start of the negotiations, which according to Ukrainian TV began with “a cold welcome and no handshake”.
Both sides had played down hopes of an early breakthrough, as Kyiv sought a ceasefire without compromising on its sovereignty or territorial integrity. Peskov said it would become clear “on Tuesday or Wednesday” whether the talks were promising.
Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, which began on 24 February, has killed an estimated 20,000 people, forced more than 10 million from their homes – including more than 3.8 million who have fled the country – and triggered an unprecedented range of western economic sanctions against Russia.
Kyiv has suggested Moscow may be more flexible in the wake of its military failings. “We have destroyed the myth of the invincible Russian army,” said the capital’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko. “We are resisting against the aggression of one of the strongest armies in the world and have succeeded in making them change their goals.”
Ukrainian intelligence said on Tuesday that Putin was now seeking to compensate for his “weakened, disoriented” forces by trying to destroy cities through “indiscriminate artillery fire and rocket-bomb attacks”.
Zelenskiy has previously hinted that some compromise over Donbas might be possible, but has also said repeatedly that the country’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity” remained its top priority.
Putin has demanded the “demilitarisation and denazification” of Ukraine, as well as the imposition of neutral status and recognition of Donbas and Crimea, which Moscow seized in 2014, as no longer part of Ukrainian territory.
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