The Lavelle hearings in the House of Representatives lasted only one day, June 12, 1972, and generally went well. In closed session as a result of security constraints, U.S. Representative Bill Dickson (R-Alabama) looked directly at Lavelle and said: ‘I am not sure why we are here today. But I think, if I had been in your position, I would have done the very same thing. And if that means stretching the rules is part of it, then good for you.’

But the Senate hearings, which lasted from September 11 to September 22, 1972, were another matter. Ostensibly, the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing was to determine what rank Lavelle should hold upon retirement. Major general and rear admiral (two stars) are the highest permanent ranks in the military. Three-star (lieutenant general and vice admiral) and four-star (general and admiral) ranks are temporary and are held only when occupying a position calling for those ranks. To carry three-star or four-star ranks into retirement requires a special dispensation that is usually routinely granted. But that would not be true for Lavelle.

The routine Senate hearing turned into an inquisition. All that was missing were torches burning in wall brackets and a torture rack in the background to make it a scene right out of a Hollywood B movie. For more than a week and a half, Senate committee members hurled questions at Lavelle; at Admiral Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs; and at Army General Creighton Abrams, the overall U.S. commander in Vietnam, who had been called home from Saigon to testify. At one point, Lavelle told an old friend: ‘I wish they’d court-martial me. Then everything would come out.’ He never explained what he meant by ‘everything.’ After his retirement, however, he did record an oral history of his tribulations, but his family has decided to indefinitely withhold the tape from public release.

As if the Senate inquisition was not bad enough, a media circus developed as well. Fed by leaks from Senator Hughes and interviews with Sergeant Franks, the media turned the matter into a cause célèbre, reflecting the passions and deep divisions in American society over the Vietnam War.

One exchange between Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, an Air Force Reserve major general, and General Lavelle was revealing. ‘You didn’t have the authority to hit a MiG because it was sitting on an airfield below the 19th parallel?’ asked Goldwater. ‘Yes, sir, that’s right,’ replied Lavelle.

‘It’s a hell of a way to run a war,’ responded Goldwater. But before he could say more he was cut off by Democratic Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, the committee chairman. The truth was evidently too painful for the senators to hear.

With a sinking feeling, Jack Lavelle realized he was about to be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. A few days later, he was told that he would lose his four stars and retire as a two-star major general. For the first time in history, Congress had demoted a high-ranking Air Force officer. Old friend John Dyas later went to see General Ryan, the Air Force chief of staff, to ask his help in getting Lavelle reinstated to at least three-star level. Ryan refused.

While on the surface, Lavelle’s relief from duty and his demotion appear to be the work of a pernicious Congress (which three years later would break its solemn pledges and betray an entire country, the Republic of Vietnam, leaving it at the mercy of its enemies), the truth is far more complex. Civilian bureaucrats may have played the leading part in this sad story, but military bureaucrats and interservice rivalries played a major role as well.

To outsiders, the United States had one Air Force during the Vietnam War. But in reality there were three: the transport pilots and crews of Military Airlift Command (MAC), the fighter pilots of Tactical Air Command (TAC), and the bomber pilots of Strategic Air Command (SAC). The rivalry between TAC and SAC was particularly intense during the war, and it played a major part in the Broughton and Lavelle affairs.

Individuals who wore the label ‘fighter pilot’ were very disdainful of pilots who were not flying fighter aircraft. Sometimes they were downright nasty toward their brethren of the skies. To them, a bomber pilot was a ‘SAC weenie’ and a transport pilot was a ‘trash hauler.’ Fighter pilots knew they were regarded as the elite, and they developed tremendous egos.

But when the U.S. military entered the age of ‘massive retaliation’ after World War II, SAC, charged with the nuclear weapons delivery mission, and its bomber generals like Curtis LeMay came to dominate the Air Force. The bomber generals had little faith in tactical air power. They believed that the heavy bomber could win any war–as, in their eyes, had been the case in Europe in World War II and, with the delivery of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the case in the Pacific as well. With the development of the hydrogen nuclear bomb and Boeing B-52 strategic bomber, SAC became even more powerful.

The TAC conventional-war missions of air-to-air combat and close air support of ground troops, perfected at great cost in World War II and Korea, were considered to be of little value in the nuclear age. As Jack Broughton put it, the Air Force had become ‘SACumcized.’ Even the head of TAC, General Walter C. Sweeny, was a bomber general and a SAC disciple.

But in Vietnam nuclear devices had no significance. It was an old-fashioned, conventional war. Tactical air power was reasserting itself in Vietnam. Not only were TAC aircraft like Broughton’s F-105s taking bombs to the enemy, TAC fighters were shooting down MiGs as well.

Although TAC had the major combat role in Vietnam, SAC bomber generals still ran the Air Force and were the ones–PACAF General John Ryan in particular–who brought Broughton, the consummate TAC fighter jock, to trial. The role they played in General Lavelle’s demotion is less well-known, however.

Sergeant Lonnie Franks’ complaint letter to Senator Hughes about General Lavelle finally ended up on the desk of bomber general Ryan, by then the Air Force chief of staff. (A bomber pilot in World War II, Ryan had had a finger shot off while on a mission over Germany and was known, behind his back, as ‘Three-Fingered Jack.’) Within 24 hours, Ryan had dispatched Lt. Gen. Louis J. Wilson, the Air Force inspector general, to Seventh Air Force headquarters at Tan Son Nhut.

The bomber generals had taken the first step to bring down Jack Lavelle. They believed he had committed the ultimate crime–not the unauthorized ‘protective reaction’ strikes but, in their eyes, the more heinous offense of defecting to TAC.

Jack Broughton says the first time he met Jack Lavelle was at Yokota Air Base in Japan. ‘As I recall,’ Broughton said, ‘he was a very intense individual. He was always rushing from place to place. He was really ‘Mr. SAC.” But after he assumed command of the Seventh Air Force, Lavelle had a change of heart. ‘I can only say with pride I saw him do a 180-degree turn,’ recalled Broughton, ‘and get back with the fighter pilot people.’

‘There is something about a fighter pilot,’ Broughton wrote in Thud Ridge, ‘that is both unique and hard to describe. Tell him you are going to send him to hell, and that things will be rougher than he’s ever seen, and he will fight for the chance to go.’ That’s the kind of man Jack Lavelle was. He was the antithesis of the ‘good old boy’ military bureaucrat, and the military bureaucrats then running the Air Force could never forgive him for that.

And there was another thing for which they could never forgive Lavelle. One anecdote tells the tale. In Vietnam the heavily bomb-laden B-52s of SAC were referred to as BUFFs, or ‘Big Ugly Fat F–s.’ That sobriquet so angered a bomber general on Guam, the headquarters of SAC’s Eighth Air Force, that he issued an official order, saying that B-52s would no longer be called BUFFs by Air Force personnel. Jack Lavelle called the bomber general–a man he knew well–and laughed at the nickname as well as the order. Lavelle, a former SAC leader himself, was forever after considered a turncoat. Thus, when General Lavelle later came under fire for unauthorized protective reaction strikes to safeguard the lives of his pilots, the bomber generals at the Pentagon, instead of closing ranks in his defense, betrayed him.

Of the 25 people interviewed for this article, not all liked Jack Lavelle personally. But they all agreed he was a ‘workaholic,’ a ‘perfectionist,’ a’stern, but fair, disciplinarian,’ a man who ‘lived by the book’ and who ‘never tried to outsmart the system.’ But in return, the system did him in.

Living in Oakton, Va., with his wife, Josephine, and family, Jack Lavelle tried to make the best of his military retirement. He had nothing to do for the first time in 32 years. He puttered around the house, played a lot of golf and gave some thought to writing his memoirs but then rejected the idea.

On July 11, 1979, Jack Lavelle dropped dead on a golf course in Virginia at age 62. Attending physicians gave the official reason for death as a heart attack. But the real reason was more likely a broken heart, shattered by his supposed comrades-in-arms seven years earlier.

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This article was written by Joe Patrick, an Air Force veteran of the Vietnam War, and originally published in the December 1997 issue of Vietnam Magazine.

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