Topgun

by Dan Pedersen

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Dan Pedersen

  Cover design by Richard Ljoenes

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  ISBN 978-0-316-41627-6

  E3-20190129-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword by Darrell “Condor” Gary

  Prologue

  Palm Desert, California, 2018

  1. Admission Price

  Over Southern California, December 1956

  2. First Tribe

  Texas to Naval Air Station North Island, San Diego, Spring 1957

  3. The Navy Way

  North Island, June 1958

  4. Fight Club

  Off San Clemente Island, California, 1959

  5. Where Are the Carriers?

  Off the Saigon River, South Vietnam, November 3, 1963

  6. The Path to Disillusionment

  Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, January 1967

  7. Yankee Station Education

  Yankee Station, off the coast of Vietnam, Early 1968

  8. Starting Topgun

  Naval Air Station Miramar, California, Fall 1968

  9. The Original Bros

  Miramar, 1969

  10. Secrets of the Tribe

  Miramar, 1969

  11. Proof of Concept

  Miramar, 1969

  12. Topgun Goes to War

  Yankee Station, Spring 1972

  13. The Last Missing Man

  Yankee Station, January 1973

  14. The Peace That Never Was

  Yankee Station, February 1973

  15. End of the Third Temple

  Tel Nor Air Base, Israel, October 6, 1973

  16. Return with Honor

  Forty miles off South Vietnam, April 29, 1975

  17. Topgun and the Tomcat

  18. Black Shoes

  Aboard USS Wichita, 1978

  19. The Best and the Last

  Somewhere in the Indian Ocean, November 1980

  20. One More Goodbye

  Somewhere in the Pacific, Spring 1982

  21. Saving Topgun

  22. Will We Have to Lose a War Again?

  (or, Back to the Future in an F-35)

  Photos

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary of Acronyms and Terms

  Topgun Officers in Charge and Commanding Officers

  Photo Credits

  Newsletters

  For Mary Beth

  God bless all naval aviators, past, present, and future.

  FOREWORD

  We who served at the Navy Fighter Weapons School are bound together as brothers. It is a fifty-year-old culture of excellence, and an extraordinary aviation legacy. The pilots call it Topgun. Where did it come from? How did I get to be a part of it? How did they?

  Our journey is brilliantly portrayed in this book, seen through the eyes of the man whose innovative leadership was based on the enduring principles of our tradition. Dan Pedersen risked his career to accomplish a seemingly impossible task. His success has endured for more than fifty years now.

  I first met “Yank” in 1968, when I was assigned as an instructor in Fighter Squadron 121 (VF-121) at Naval Air Station Miramar, California, also known as Fightertown USA. Our job was to transition pilots and naval flight officers into a new fighter aircraft, the F-4 Phantom. Over the course of six months we trained them to fly the Phantom day or night, in any weather, anywhere in the world, from the pitching decks of aircraft carriers.

  As a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant with two combat tours to Vietnam, I was in awe of the Navy’s fighter community, and the people with whom I served. Dan cut an imposing figure at six feet three inches, with penetrating hazel eyes and a John Wayne swagger that exuded self-confidence, with the ability and experience upon which reputations are built within our tight-knit community. He was the Hollywood image of a fighter pilot, seldom appearing without his Ray-Ban sunglasses.

  As the head of the tactics phase of VF-121’s curriculum, Dan was disciplined, focused, and demanding of himself and others. He established high standards of performance, constantly reinforcing the mantra that “In combat second best is dead last.” Yet he also possessed a good sense of humor, insisted upon leading by personal example, and seldom phrased anything as a question. One exception: Sometimes he would stride up to a student and ask, “Hey there, tiger. Are you ready for this hop?” When Dan was named to start the new fighter aviation schoolhouse, we all knew it was in good hands. General George Patton said it best: “Wars are fought with weapons, but they are won by men.” Even in today’s environment of geopolitical complexity and the sophistication of the fifth-generation jets and weapon systems, it is still the man in the machine who will bring victory. That human resource is the work product of Topgun.

  Topgun’s mission was to challenge the status quo. To do that, Dan selected eight young, very junior officers with unique experience, ability, and passion. His vision and leadership gave us direction. His words gave us inspiration: “There is an urgency here beyond anything we have ever done.” We were using “Yankee ingenuity,” hard work, combat experience, and imagination to fix a problem. Too many of our brothers were dying over Vietnam, and we could make a difference.

  Topgun became a culture of excellence that over the past five decades has consistently produced the Navy’s most accomplished, innovative, and adaptive warriors as well as the most compassionate and inspirational leaders. The course has expanded from four weeks to twelve and a half. The school is responsible for providing training in air combat maneuvering and weapon systems deployment for Navy and Marine Corps squadrons, advanced predeployment training for fleet units, and the development of new tactics to confront emerging threats. Its founding principles have been carefully guarded and preserved. The extraordinary qualities of leadership demonstrated by each generation have ensured its survival in the face of resource constraints, professional envy, and PC careerists.

  When I have the opportunity to meet the young instructors today, I recognize that while we are from different eras with different equipment, the mission remains unchanged: to control the skies over the battlefield and do whatever is necessary to support our forces on the ground or at sea and ensure their survival.

  As I reflect on the humble beginnings of this storied institution, I am struck by several facts. None of us among the original nine officers who established Topgun imagined that we would be a part of an aviation legacy that
would span five decades, change the course of tactical aviation in the United States and around the world, and influence aircraft and weapon systems design and pilot training.

  The current sophistication and capability of the Navy’s aircraft and weapons is beyond anything the original nine could have imagined at the time. Today, the complexity of the battlefield and volume of information available to the pilot are nearly overwhelming. What has not changed are the human elements that make Topgun relevant. The school is still run by junior officers. Then, as now, the focus was upon finding individuals who possessed the following traits:

  • A passion for the mission, necessary to sustain the individual in an extreme environment.

  • Leadership by personal example—a compassionate, inspirational person willing to take responsibility.

  • Extraordinary airmanship required to operate in so unforgiving an environment.

  • Humility derived from a sense of being part of something much greater than oneself.

  • Subject matter expertise that is beyond reproach.

  • A work ethic that will drive that person to do whatever it takes for however long it takes to ensure success.

  • Personal discipline to endure the rigorous training and attention to detail required to constantly perform at an optimum level.

  • Integrity, adaptability, innovation, and a willingness to challenge the status quo.

  • Credibility established through demonstrated performance sustained over time.

  All of this is refined in the furnace of uncompromising peer review. The extreme selection process and the rigorous training ensure that Topgun’s culture of excellence and its legacy will endure.

  As I meet the young officers serving on the staff today, it is strongly affirming to see that our legacy and the future of this nation are in such good hands. The brotherhood of Topgun today remains strong.

  For the first time, in this book, the story of Topgun’s creation and evolution is told by the man who made it happen at the start. Dan is rightly regarded as the “Godfather of Topgun.” His book will take its place among the finest combat aviation memoirs of his generation. It deserves the interest of anyone who appreciates high performance and how it is handed down through generations.

  —Darrell “Condor” Gary Topgun’s junior Original Bro

  PROLOGUE

  Palm Desert, California

  2018

  Though I’m eighty-three years old, I still look up like a kid whenever I hear an airplane passing overhead. Sometimes it’ll be a pair of Super Hornets smoking over the desert. Watching them thunder past just under the Mach, I’ll get the same electrified thrill I got the first time I lit the afterburner on an F4D Skyray and blasted off North Island’s runway to find myself two minutes later at fifty thousand feet.

  There is no other rush like it. It is visceral. It fills you with a sense of rapture that only exists out there on the razor’s edge.

  We flew almost whenever we wanted, and often whatever we wanted. It was all about who you knew. If you wanted a new flying experience after duty hours, there were certain guys, like the Navy chief in maintenance control—the keeper of the keys—who’d give you a wink and send you up for the sheer fun of it. After all, you were a naval aviator.

  Sometimes, a World War II F6F Hellcat from the local Palm Springs Air Museum will fly over our house. I’ll look up and think, Yeah. Flew one at North Island. Beautiful ride, that old tail dragger. The museum also owns a P-51 Mustang that sometimes buzzes by on weekends. Seeing it takes me back to a poker game in Monterey one night. We’d taken a dentist for his last dime, but he wanted to keep playing. He asked for credit. Having heard that he owned a hangar with two P-51s in there, I asked him for a ride. He agreed, and I beat him. Twice. And that’s how many times I got to fly that sleek Luftwaffe killer.

  When my dad died and I moved my mom up to Port Angeles, Washington, I’d take an F-4 Phantom and cruise north through the Sierra Nevadas and the Cascades, seldom getting above five hundred feet. With nobody in sight, just pristine wilderness, lakes, and rivers, I wound around those mountain peaks, feeling freer and more alive than I ever did on the ground. I’d land at Whidbey Island and spend the weekend with my mom before returning to my command on Sunday afternoon.

  We have some helicopters in our area, Jet Rangers and such. Their choppy, eggbeater sound puts me in the cockpit of a Sea King I once flew all the way up the West Coast, tracing the beach, just above the whitecaps, from San Diego to Washington State. Beachcombers, swimmers, kayakers, surfers—they all looked up toward the thup-thup-thup of our rotors. Sometimes I waved back, feeling blessed for such moments, doing something so few ever get to do.

  Where else could you do such things but in the Navy?

  I don’t fly anymore. It’s a function of age, not of desire or heart. One of my “Original Bros” at Topgun, seventy-four-year-old Darrell Gary, still straps himself into his own Russian Yak and stunts about the sky. It was the same plane our enemies learned to fly before tangling with us over Vietnam. Darrell formed his own precision aerobatics team with a group of former U.S. pilots and one Brit. “I hate taking time out of my day to eat, sleep, and excrete,” Darrell likes to say. “We can sleep when we’re dead.”

  How can you not love that man? We nine Original Bros were cut from that same cloth. Darrell and Mel, Steve, Smash, Ski, Ruff, J. C., and Jimmy Laing. In civilian life, you rarely encounter people of similar temperament, focus, ability, and passion. Maybe it’s because only rarely are people thrown together to fight for a failing cause on guts and pride, while surrounded by hostility that pushes you ever closer together.

  In the 1960s, America fought in Vietnam with the wrong planes, unreliable weapons, bad tactics, and the wrong senior civilian leadership. A lot of important things were broken. But we loved what we did, and treasured the relationships built in aircraft carrier–ready rooms and bars from North Island to the Philippines. The Navy had given us a home filled with committed, driven men who shared the same passion. When the air war started in earnest, we were tested by months of exhaustion that showed the deeper meaning of our connections.

  Operation Rolling Thunder began in 1968. As we flew combat missions, striking Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s hand-selected targets, we lost planes and men almost every day. Flying from Yankee Station, the area in the Gulf of Tonkin where the aircraft carriers operated, we learned what it was like to sit at a wardroom table surrounded by empty chairs. Half the time we never knew what happened to them. Maybe another pilot noticed an enemy surface-to-air missile launch or caught a fleeting glimpse of a burning American plane heading toward the jungle below. Sometimes we’d hear the aircrew requesting help on the ground, dodging enemy patrols and calling for rescue. When the helicopters went in, the North Vietnamese were often waiting. They shot up the helicopters and their escorting planes. We sometimes got our man and lost three more in the process.

  We were flying not just for each other. We were flying for each other’s families. The man on your wing usually had a wife, maybe some children. You took care of him to take care of them. We all faced moments where we risked our lives for each other to ensure the contact teams did not knock on our brother’s door back in San Diego, Lemoore, or Whidbey Island.

  When the enemy scored, the families were devastated. You seldom see that written about. But we’ve all come home to tell widows and fatherless kids how sorry we were. We gave them what peace we could. The truth is, that loss never goes away. It warps the rest of their lives as they wrestle with the pain. That old adage “Time heals all wounds”? Bull. Fifty years on, I’ve seen those families still break down in tears as they talk of their fallen aviator.

  You don’t get over that kind of pain. You just learn to live around it. It becomes part of who you are, and for us out on Yankee Station, that grief motivated us to sacrifice for each other.

  Not everyone could hack it. There were days on Yankee Station when I watched aircrews lose their nerve. All o
f a sudden, some mysterious mechanical issue came up and a flight had to be scrubbed. Sometimes it happened when the plane was on the catapult and ready to launch. They just couldn’t bring themselves to face—again—the most fearsome air defense network in the world, erected by the North Vietnamese, with Russian help, around Hanoi. On rare occasions, some men turned in their wings and went home rather than face that crucible again. It was easier to fly for an airline.

  Twenty-one different aircraft carriers operated for more than 9,100 total days in the Gulf of Tonkin. In three years, the Navy lost 532 aircraft in combat. Including other operational losses associated with that war, the Navy had 644 aviators killed, missing, or taken prisoner of war. The total fixed-wing aircraft losses of the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force together exceeded 2,400. Of course, it was intensely personal. Darrell Gary lived with nine guys in two houses on the beach in La Jolla when he went through training. After their first trip to Yankee Station, six came home.

  Worse, we were losing the larger war. Destroying the targets given to us by the Pentagon seemed to make no difference in the war to the south. The losses mounted, and the MiGs started seeking us out. The North Vietnamese possessed a small but well-trained air force, proxied by their Chinese and Soviet allies. As good as it was, they were not in the same league as the Soviet Air Force, so it sent shock waves through the Navy when North Vietnamese pilots started shooting us down. During the Korean War, the North Korean Air Force was virtually wiped out in the opening months. A decade later, the Vietnamese MiGs gave us a real fight. They shot down one of ours for every two MiGs that we claimed. We considered the loss rate intolerable, given our long history of deeply one-sided kill ratios. In World War II, U.S. naval aviators crushed the Japanese in the central Pacific on the way to Tokyo, with Hellcat pilots, who scored three-fourths of the Navy’s air-to-air victories, posting a kill ratio on the order of nineteen to one. In Vietnam, we simply were not allowed to win, so the Navy bureaucracy did what bureaucracies do best: It continued on course. Micromanaged from Washington, D.C., we made the same mistakes month after month. It nearly crippled U.S. naval aviation.