Topgun

by Dan Pedersen

  In January 1969, a plain-spoken carrier skipper named Frank Ault wrote a report to the chief of naval operations detailing deadly flaws in our fighter tactics and weapons systems. His list of complaints was a long one, and the Navy decided to act. Unfortunately, many in senior commands worried more about their careers than about fixing the problem. By approving the creation of an air combat postgraduate school—which we quickly named Topgun—they gave the appearance of doing something to change things. Under President Johnson’s and Secretary McNamara’s leadership, the Navy bureaucracy seemed more interested in appearing to solve problems than risking failure by actually trying to solve them. They gave the leadership of Topgun to a relatively junior officer—me.

  The eight men who joined me in a condemned trailer at Naval Air Station Miramar in late 1968 had gone into the war thinking we were the best pilots in the world flying the best aircraft armed with the best weapons. The North Vietnamese showed us otherwise. We were ready to do whatever it took to find a way to win.

  The community we loved was in crisis, and for whatever reason it fell to us to help find a way forward. As we got started, not a man among us was willing to put his career over doing the right thing. We went to war against conventional thought. We asked questions, sought out answers, chopped red tape. We broke rules. We borrowed, stole, or horse-traded for everything we needed. Ultimately, the Bros created a revolution from nothing but pride and devotion.

  I want to tell you about the Bros. I want to tell you about our community, how it was in the years before Vietnam when we frittered away the birthright of victory that our forebears had handed and chose to stake our future on untested technology. I want to tell you about a few of us who kept the legacy alive, flying off the books, in ways that were never discussed in professional spaces, lest the wrong ears hear. Most of all, I want to tell you about the founding days of Topgun and its enduring legacy. It stands as proof that a small group of driven individuals can change the world. We live today in times of great uncertainty with problems that seem unsolvable. The Bros faced that in 1968. Topgun is a reminder that things can be changed.

  Along the way, I hope to leave you with an appreciation of the cost. Naval aviation back then wasn’t just a job or career; it was a monastic calling. You had to love it more than anything else in your life to stick with it when things went so wrong. That primacy of position in our lives wrought havoc with everything else not connected to our ready rooms. We became outsiders in our own nation, unable to relate even to the people we grew up with back home. Darrell learned this when he attended his high school reunion in Oakland. He had nothing in common with even his oldest friends. Alienated by the experience, he turned around and flew straight back to the brotherhood that had become his home. He never attended another reunion.

  It wasn’t just old friends we left behind. Our families took a backseat to our flying and our responsibilities as officers. The glamour of marrying a handsome, fit fighter pilot with a bright career ahead soon wore thin as we served at sea and our spouses remained behind. How many women stand for another love in their husband’s life? Each night when we were on Yankee Station, the unknown gnawed at them. They feared for their pilots. Our wives never knew when a contact team might appear on the porch. Every time the doorbell rang, they cringed with dread. Late-night phone calls produced a panic. So it had to be. For us, flying always came first.

  One night I was aboard ship, ready to take my first ship command, when I got a phone call. Somehow my eight-year-old son had found my direct number. I answered. He was crying. He begged me not to leave.

  “Please, Dad. Come back… everyone else has a dad home with them. I don’t.”

  Those words linger. Neither of us ever forgot them.

  Every naval aviator had moments like these. It was our reality on the ground. I have one regret in my twenty-nine-year career: It was brutal on my family.

  That’s the deeper story, beyond the Hollywood portrayal of us. All too often, we are painted with the Val Kilmer “Iceman” stereotype—cool, capable speed addicts who live on the edge for the sheer thrill. We live harder, party harder, womanize harder, and are somehow larger than life.

  This book will challenge the stereotype. We are flesh and blood. We live in a dangerous world that whipsaws us from elation to fear in a heartbeat. This brotherhood conceals its emotions to outsiders, so perhaps some of it is our fault. Yet to me, what I saw my brothers achieve out in the fleet is even more remarkable because we are only human and as fallible as everyone else. The difference is the consequences of those fallibilities. When you are dodging missiles over Haiphong or landing aboard a flattop in the middle of a tropical storm, mistakes are often fatal.

  I can’t fly anymore, but my heart is still up there. Lying in my yard and watching these jets stream past, I try to figure their speed and altitude. I’ve been doing it so long I know their schedules. When an aircraft is late, I wonder if the crew got hung up at the gate, or if the taxiway was jammed. It’s one of many ways I keep myself in the game. Pushing a jet through the sky will always be my abiding love.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ADMISSION PRICE

  Over Southern California

  December 1956

  Sixty-five and sunny; blue skies all the way home. God, how I loved December in California. No snow, no shoveling the walk to the driveway. Just plans for Christmas dinner in the backyard as the last rays of sunlight bathed the L.A. basin in golden hues.

  From the matte gray cockpit of my Lockheed T-33 jet trainer, I looked down at the suburban sprawl born of the postwar housing boom. The orange groves were vanishing, replaced by blocks of little pink houses and picket fences that looked like Legos from my twenty-thousand-foot vantage point.

  I used to shine shoes down there. Lee’s Barbershop in Whittier.

  I shifted my eyes from the scene below to scan the instrument panel of my “T-bird.” Altimeter, heading, airspeed indicator, turn and bank indicator, vertical velocity gauge. I swept them all in a heartbeat, trained to do so by the best pilots in the world until each scan of the dials and gauges was an act of unconscious muscle memory.

  My path to Pensacola began right down there. At Los Alamitos, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy as a seaman recruit. The naval air station was full of World War II vintage aircraft. As an apprentice engine mechanic in a reserve squadron, I worked on the F4U Corsair. When that legendary gull-winged beauty became a relic in the jet age, the unit I was attached to became the first in the reserves to get jets. A young lieutenant helped me to make the transition. He took me flying in his two-seater. Inspired, I applied to the Naval Aviation Cadet program, which sent enlisted men to flight training in Pensacola. With the help of that generous lieutenant, I passed the exams and made the cut. In 1955, I decamped to the famous naval aviation training center on the Florida panhandle.

  Now the long-sought reward was close enough to touch. As long as I kept my grades up, I’d stand an excellent chance of flying jet fighters with gold Navy wings on my chest.

  That morning over the L.A. basin, we whistled through the wild blue in technology that would have dazzled those who flocked to California looking for work two decades before. The age of the Joads and Okies was long gone. The jet age was upon us, and I embraced it with all my heart.

  To the people down below, this may not have meant a thing. They were going about their peaceful lives, caring for family, stressed out over work and the growing traffic. Some would open the Los Angeles Times as they sipped their morning coffee for a keyhole view to the outside world. Eight hundred and ninety-six drunk driving arrests in the county this Christmas season was a headline in the Times that morning. Beside that story, a tiny blurb described how the Japanese were detecting radiation in the atmosphere. That could only mean the Russians had detonated yet another nuclear bomb.

  Vice President Richard Nixon talked of the ten thousand Hungarian refugees the Air Force was flying to the United States for a new lease on life. Victims of Soviet oppression, they�
��d fought and lost in the Budapest uprising. When Russian armor rolled through their streets, they were lucky to have survived.

  The people below me could not imagine such a life. Living in their orderly tract houses, they enjoyed well-kept lawns, sidewalks full of playing kids, and a sense of peace underwritten by men such as I had come to know in the past year. Home for the holiday, I would soon join them guarding our ramparts in the Cold War. The morning was simply gorgeous. The engine’s whine was like music to me, the soundtrack to my new life. I was entering a profession unlike any I’d ever dreamed of.

  My dad, a veteran of World War II, had served in Europe in the Army Signal Corps, keeping communications flowing between the front lines and headquarters. He came home to Illinois in 1945 to find his job had been filled. Victory in Europe cost him his career, and he found himself forced to start over in middle age with a family depending on him. Never showing us the fear he surely felt, he moved us to California, believing that every problem can be overcome by hard work. He got a job laying pipelines in Palm Springs. After a shift in the sun, which baked his Scandinavian skin to leather, he would come home with twelve-hour days in his eyes. He never complained; he worked and lived for us. His example of resilience instilled in me that same devotion. I was blessed and knew it.

  There was a difference, though. I loved every second in the cockpit. This wasn’t work; it was freedom. Every flight pushed our personal boundaries and revealed that we were capable of more. With each test, we grew as aviators and young men. Along the way, achievement became a drug. I couldn’t wait for the next jump forward toward a fleet assignment. From the tie-cutting ceremony after I soloed to the first time I landed aboard an aircraft carrier, it was a journey marked with memorable moments. A year at Pensacola gave me a sense of identity and purpose that I never felt back home.

  I wanted Mary Beth Peck to pin my aviator’s wings on me at graduation. We had met in high school at a church function; I was seventeen, she was fourteen. Even in Southern California, with probably the highest concentration of beautiful girls anywhere, she made everyone else look ordinary. Blonde hair, eyes like the sky at twenty thousand feet. It took only one conversation to realize she wasn’t just a beautiful face. Mary Beth possessed a soft-spoken eloquence and powerful intellect.

  We courted properly, and our families grew close as we fell in love. She had written me every day since I’d left home to seek this new path through life. No matter how tough it got at Pensacola, I never let my head hit the pillow until I’d filled a page for her in return.

  We had not seen each other since I left Los Alamitos for Pensacola. I’d left home a boy, working my way through junior college. That morning, I returned at the controls of a modern jet trainer, the double solo bars of an advanced naval aviation cadet on my chest. Christmas break was my chance to show her and our families the man I was becoming.

  Wings banked now, the T-bird’s polished aluminum skin reflected the sun as Bill and I began our approach to Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in Irvine. The base’s distinctive double-cross runways stuck out among the tract homes and orange groves. El Toro served as home to some of the greatest combat aviators America ever produced: Joe Foss, Marion Carl, John L. Smith—the men who had stopped the Japanese advance in the Pacific during World War II. Most of the people in Orange County knew little of that legacy, but from the moment I started training, we naval aviation cadets were immersed in the heritage that was ours if we proved ourselves worthy.

  At Pensacola, we flew the SNJ Texan and the T-28. On my first morning there, our drill sergeant woke us in the barracks with the rattle of his nightstick along the steel frames of our bunks, then double-timed us out to an aging hangar beside the seaplane ramp. In the very same building where some of naval aviation’s pioneers established our tradition, the drill sergeant smoked us with forty minutes of PT. Each morning started with the same ritual. We worked out in the hangar among the ghosts of those who had paved the way for us. Thanks to them, naval aviation became the rebel branch of the service, always striving to develop new ideas, new technology, and new ways of fighting that would send the age of the battleship into history. From the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway to the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, they transformed the U.S. Navy into the most effective naval fighting force on the planet.

  Everywhere we went at Pensacola, we felt that tradition and it was an honor to be invited to be part of it. Would my generation contribute to perpetuate it in the years ahead? One thing for sure, I was not going to be the one who washed out and went home to be just another college kid with ducktail hair, working odd jobs to cover tuition.

  Where other cadets bought cars and spent time in town, drinking at Trader John’s and other local aviator watering holes, I made a point of staying on base. My dad’s ethic became mine. I studied and worked hard. I was determined to be among the top cadets who upon graduation would be handed the keys to the latest and greatest fighter jets our country produced.

  After Basic School at Pensacola, we were required to take a cross-country instrument flight to California, the final stage before we finished Advanced School in Beeville, Texas. The fringe benefit of this last evolution was a chance to visit home.

  As we started our descent toward El Toro, Bill Pierson, my instructor in the rear seat, coached me over the intercom. I eased the throttle back and entered the landing pattern. Gear and flaps down, nose flared, I set the T-bird onto the runway. I taxied to the ramp by base operations, shut down the engine, and opened the canopy. Bill jumped out to grab a cup of coffee while our airplane got refueled. I pulled my helmet off and slid on the pair of Ray-Bans that I’d purchased at the Pensacola PX. They were a little over-the-top Hollywood for a cadet. In Florida and Texas I usually only wore them to the beach. What the heck. It was California.

  Mary Beth stood on the tarmac, looking up at me with my parents at her side. She was a vision in an angora sweater and below-the-knee skirt. Wearing flat-heeled shoes and with her hair down, she had a smile on her face. Maybe just a hint of awe as well. I could hope.

  I unstrapped and climbed out, dressed in a khaki flight suit, a matching jacket, and Navy-issue chukka boots. I’d barely made it down the ladder when she wrapped her arms around me. In an instant, the year of separation seemed like an eyeblink. I knew beyond a doubt, this was the woman I wanted to marry.

  Bill watched from the doorway to base ops, a paper cup of coffee in hand. He was a veteran of Korea and countless days at sea. He had shared moments like this one and knew their power. He also knew to stay clear and let me have it; for that I was grateful. The holiday break passed quickly.

  I was born in Moline, Illinois, in 1935, and my father served in the army during World War II. My parents were immigrants and I was a first-generation American. Dad, named Orla or Ole, was born in Denmark in 1912 and his parents, Olaf and Mary Pedersen, immigrated the next year. My mother, Henrietta, was one of three beautiful sisters from the Isle of Man. She met Dad at a high school basketball game.

  I remember the smell of potato sausage in Mom’s kitchen on the evening we ate Christmas dinner on the back porch. That was a Danish tradition passed down from my paternal grandfather. When I was a kid in Moline, I’d rush from school to his little Scandinavian specialty store, passing barrels of pickled fish. A pot of that potato sausage would be simmering on the stove, filling the place with the scent of home and warmth.

  My first flying experience had been in 1946, not long after dad returned from Europe. My father was intrigued with aircraft, as he had some experience with B-25 bombers near the end of the war. One evening, at Moline Airport, he said we were going flying. What a surprise for a ten-year-old boy. The flight was in darkness, early in the evening in a prewar Ford Trimotor, distinctive with its three clattering Wright engines and corrugated aluminum skin. I marveled even then at the beauty of being aloft at night.

  Before I went to Beeville, Mary Beth gave me a Christmas gift. I unwrapped it to discover a gold signet ring with a tiny d
iamond inset on its flat face. She had my initials inscribed on it along with 1956 and Love, Beth on the inside. She was a freshman at Whittier College working in the student union cafeteria. She must have gone into debt to pull this off.

  All too soon, this beautiful interlude ended. My instructor met me at El Toro a few days after Christmas. I wore the ring on my right hand as I kissed Mary Beth goodbye on the ramp. Soon I would be an officer and a gentleman. I’d ask her father for permission to propose. We’d start a life in the Navy together. A final hug, no tears, and I scrambled up the ladder and into the cockpit. As Bill Pierson and I taxied out to the runway, I saw her waving goodbye to her naval aviation cadet.

  When I landed at Beeville, my first jet fighter awaited me on the flight line. She was a Grumman F9F Panther, a well-traveled aircraft whose dark blue aluminum skin was dotted with patched-over bullet holes. Like my instructor, she was a veteran of Korea, her paint dulled by years of service. With her straight wing and her sub–Mach 1 top speed, the Panther had been relegated to stateside pastures, where she helped train the next generation of naval aviators.

  I stood under my bird and shared a Bridges at Toko-Ri moment. How many times had I seen that movie? A dozen? The flying scenes were spectacular. The poignancy of the love story and the fact that pretty much everyone dies in the end was lost to my visions of glory. That first morning with that Panther, I climbed into the cockpit and fell in love.

  She was a delight to fly, balanced on the controls and fast for a first-generation, single-engine jet. Alone in the cockpit, I tried aerobatics with her and shot up towed sleeves with her four 20mm cannons. The thrill of it left me craving more.

  As we closed in on the final lap of our training, a few boxes remained to be checked. One included a cross-country formation flight to Dallas and back. Three of us cadets took off with a storm closing in on us. The cloud ceiling was under a thousand feet. Speeding over the Texas countryside, we hugged the earth in an arrowhead formation at about five hundred feet, each of us taking turns in the lead. Two miles behind, our instructor trailed along in another F9F observing us at the edge of visibility. The weather worsened. Visibility diminished. We reached Dallas, landed safely. After resting and refueling, we flew back in the afternoon.