The Vermont Air National Guard commander forced to resign for flying an F-16 jet to Washington, D.C., to spend time with a female Army colonel while in town for a work conference had a reputation as a womanizer.
Though married, Col. Thomas “TJ” Jackman, a 55-year-old aviator whose callsign was “Snatch,” was frequently spotted by current and ex-Guard members flirting with other women, according to VTDigger Wednesday.
“I saw [Jackman] with tons of women, he was a ladies’ man,” a former male Guard member said. “But when we were deployed, every single one of us was a ladies’ man.”
Jackman was forced out after it emerged he had planned to meet the Pentagon-based Army colonel in January 2015 when Jackman was scheduled to join the conference at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, VTDigger reported this week.
After informing his superior about the trip, Jackman, who has denied having an affair, was instructed to take a commercial flight back north and stepped down shortly thereafter for violating military regulations. Both Jackman and the Army colonel reportedly did not provide comment to VTDigger.
While the reasons behind Jackman’s departure weren’t publicly known, the wing commander’s colleagues were aware of his Lothario reputation. The female Army colonel Jackman coordinated with once joked about his callsign in an email to Jackman and two other high-ranking officials.
“Stop calling him Snatch. It’s as bad as Pussy! OMG!” she wrote.
Although he left the Guard in relative disgrace, one of Jackman’s planes, nicknamed “The Lethal Lady,” still sits at the state’s South Burlington base. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., lobbied in 2008 for the aircraft, which features a curvy brunette woman on its nose, to be kept in a prominent place given it was the nation’s longest-flying F-16 at the time.
Jackman, whose 32-year military career included two tours each to Iraq and Afghanistan, is now USPS postmaster at Essex Junction, Vt., where he lives with his wife Linda.
