Thomas McLaughlin, decorated Vietnam fighter pilot

Decorated repeatedly for bravery and gallantry while piloting F-4 Phantoms in Vietnam, he was awarded the Silver Star, the Air Medal, and the Distinguished Flying Cross with four oak leaf clusters, which meant he was awarded the cross five times.

“He never talked much about the war; he was very humble,’’ said his son Brian of Newton. “He has this picture of this bridge. We always asked, ‘What’s this bridge?’ He always said, ‘It’s just some bridge I bombed.’ ’’

Turns out it was a key railroad and highway bridge in Hanoi that eluded destruction until Mr. McLaughlin, an Air Force captain, dropped steeply out of the sky to fly just above the Red River. He fired rockets that destroyed the bridge “despite bad weather . . . many surface-to-air missiles fired at his flight, and countless rounds of antiaircraft artillery,’’ according to the Distinguished Flying Cross citation for his third oak leaf cluster.

Mr. McLaughlin — a cofounder and president of Teamworks, a Rhode Island-based company that provides indoor arena space for sports and other activities — died of cancer Sunday in his home in the Newton part of Chestnut Hill. He was 63.

Top military officials were so pleased with Mr. McLaughlin’s success that they signed and sent him a photo of the destroyed bridge.

“Tom being Tom, the distinguished son of an average family, never told anybody,’’ said Dick Forsyth of Marblehead, a friend since the two were sixth-graders in Melrose. “I knew about it because I was his good friend. None of his friends or even his family knew about it until I told them.’’

One moment in their childhood seemed to presage Mr. McLaughlin’s bravery, first on the football fields of Melrose High School and Yale, then in the air during the Vietnam War.

A neighbor in Melrose “claimed to be a clairvoyant and asked his mother if she could do a reading on Tom,’’ Forsyth said. “His mother said sure, and one of the things the psychic said to Tom was, ‘You’re a fortunate man; you’re impervious to serious injury,’ and, honest to God, he believed it. He was the most daring individual I’ve ever met. He literally lived his life thinking, ‘Hey, the laws of science may apply to you, but not to me.’ ’’

Mr. McLaughlin was awarded a Silver Star for being “the lead pilot in a flight of F-4D Phantoms defending an allied fire support base which was under heavy mortar, rocket, artillery, and tank attack,’’ according to the citation. He “made repeated low altitude attacks in the face of intense ground fire, destroying 100 hostile troops before falling prey to the accurate ground fire.’’

That last sentence is military jargon for being shot down. Mr. McLaughlin and his copilot ejected from the jet and landed in hostile territory in Laos, where they spent most of 21 hours in a ditch about 60 feet from enemy troops until they were rescued.

“It didn’t look like we would ever get out,’’ Mr. McLaughlin told the Globe in February 1971.

Born in Everett, he was the youngest of three children and the only son. His father was a shop steward at General Electric in Lynn, Forsyth said.

“Tom was a big physical guy who intellectually was a giant, as well,’’ Forsyth said. But because Mr. McLaughlin grew up in a family of modest means, “that sort of built a part of his character in which he never mentioned anything about him that was exceptional in any way.’’

Mr. McLaughlin went to Yale on academic and football scholarships, graduating in 1968 with a bachelor’s in economics and playing on the football team with the likes of future NFL star Calvin Hill. A defensive tackle, Mr. McLaughlin was injured and sat out the famous 1968 tie game against Harvard. Because undefeated Yale was favored to win, the Harvard Crimson famously ran the headline “Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29,’’ to acknowledge the moral victory of a tie.

“Tom used to joke to me that the reason Yale tied Harvard was because he wasn’t able to play in that game,’’ Forsyth said with a laugh, “and, of course, I believed him.’’

With the potential of being drafted into the Army looming, Mr. McLaughlin enlisted in the Air Force. After two tours in Vietnam, he went to Harvard Business School, graduating with an MBA in 1977.

A year earlier, he married Sally Hughes, whom he had met in Arizona. She had recently graduated from college and was visiting her sister, who was living with friends in Phoenix.

“They wanted to set me up with all these flier pilots and I said, ‘I’m not big on blind dates,’ ’’ she recalled, but her sister persisted and she went with them to a party.

“I walked into this house, and he walked out of this room,’’ she said. “And you can ask anyone who ever met him, he had the bluest, bluest eyes you’ve ever seen. You’d see them across the room. He was very handsome and a very quiet guy. I, of course, was immediately taken with him.’’

The couple lived in the New York City area, where Mr. McLaughlin worked in real estate development. He later helped revitalize a marina in Portsmouth, R.I., before founding Teamworks.

In addition to his wife and son, Mr. McLaughlin leaves two other sons, Thomas of San Francisco and Christian of Newton; and a sister, Elizabeth Cahill of Fairfield, Conn.

A funeral Mass will be said at 10 a.m. today in St. Ignatius of Loyola Church in the Newton section of Chestnut Hill. Burial will be in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the psychic’s prediction that he was impervious to serious injury, Mr. McLaughlin took up rugby while at Harvard Business School, and it became a passion the rest of his life. He coached his son’s soccer teams, and his boys tagged along to watch him play rugby with men who became lifelong friends.

Last week, Mr. McLaughlin’s condition deteriorated rapidly. Over a couple of days, doctors revised his long-term prognosis from months to weeks to days. His wife invited his rugby friends to visit Saturday, and Mr. McLaughlin, true to form, declined pain medication the night before so he could be alert for their visit.

“They filled the room and started singing rugby songs, and there was a big smile on his face,’’ his son said.

“A bunch of them held their cellphones up and guys across the United States were singing along and listening to everything that was going on,’’ his wife said.

Mr. McLaughlin’s family also spent those last hours reading letters from friends all over the country, telling of how he had touched their lives.

“As awful as it was to have to let him go,’’ his wife said, “it was just really nice for him to know his rugby group loved him so much and the people who wrote these letters loved him, too.’’

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bmarquard@globe.com.