Earle Sean J.

Mendoza English
Grade VIII- Rigel Ms. Grace Banal
Character Analysis
 Character Analysis

Jacksel Markham "Jack" Broughton (January 4, 1925 – October 24, 2014) was a career
officer and fighter pilot in the United States Air Force. He retired in the rank of colonel on
August 31, 1968, with 43 separate awards and decorations, including four Distinguished Flying
Crosses, two Silver Stars and the highest Air Force service decoration for heroism, the
presidentially-awarded Air Force Cross. Broughton avowed that his proudest accomplishment
was being combat-qualified in every air force fighter from the P-47 to the F-106. He authored
two personal memoirs of the Vietnam War that were highly critical of the direction of the air war
there and the rules of engagement.
From October 1954 to February 1957 Broughton commanded the Thunderbirds, the
USAF aerial demonstration team, leading them through the transition from the straight-wing F-
84G to the swept-wing F-84F, and then to become the world's first supersonic acrobatic team in
the F-100C Super Sabre. After assignments at Vincent Air Force Base, Arizona, and Tyndall Air
Force Base, Florida, commanding a fighter weapons systems training squadron, Broughton spent
a year in Ankara, Turkey, as a member of the U.S. Military Assistance Group there. His tour was
cut short by a medical emergency involving his son, and he transferred in 1961 to the staff of the
78th Air Defense Wing at Hamilton Air Force Base, California.
From September 1962 to June 1964, when he was promoted to colonel, Broughton
commanded the 5th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, an Air Defense Command squadron of
Convair F-106 Delta Darts at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, and was instrumental in
getting the aircraft's deadly ejection seat replaced. He graduated from two professional military
education schools, the Air Command and Staff College in 1958, and the National War College in
1965. He was then assigned as deputy commander for operations (DCS/Ops) of the 6441st
Tactical Fighter Wing at Yokota Air Base, Japan. The 6441st TFW had been activated in 1964 to
control both the nuclear strike mission and rotational combat duties in Thailand of three
squadrons of Republic F-105 Thunderchiefs.
His final assignment was as vice commander of the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing at Takhli
Royal Thai Air Force Base between September 1966 and June 1967, leading 102 missions
against targets in North Vietnam in the F-105
Boughton authored two books, Thud Ridge (1968) and Going Downtown: The War
Against Hanoi and Washington (1988), in which he discussed his perceptions and history of the
air war over Southeast Asia. The latter book was based largely upon his subsequent court martial
resulting from an attack on a Soviet ship in Haiphong Harbor (the "Turkestan incident"). In 2007
he published Rupert Red Two: A Fighter Pilot's Life from Thunderbolts to Thunderchiefs, an
autobiography of his USAF career.
Thud Ridge was a contemporary wartime memoir of his tour in Southeast Asia.
Broughton was highly critical of the U.S. command structure then directing air operations
against North Vietnam. The book resulted from the court martial of Broughton and two of his
pilots for allegedly conspiring to violate the rules of engagement regarding U.S. air operations.
Although acquitted of the most serious charges at his court martial, presided over by then-
Colonel Chuck Yeager, Broughton was subsequently transferred to an obscure post in The
Pentagon, allegedly as a vendetta because his punishment was so slight.

Required by office protocol to work only two or three days a month, he used both his
extra time and his bitterness at the Air Force senior bureaucracy and civilian political appointees
in the Department of Defense and Department of the Air Force to compose Thud Ridge while he
awaited approval of an application to appeal of his conviction to the Air Force Board for
Correction of Military Records. After his conviction was overturned and expunged from his
record because of "undue command influence", Broughton retired from the Air Force in August
1968 and had the memoir published by J.B. Lippincott.