by Dan Pedersen
Skank was about to fire when our radios squawked, “Silver King, this is Red Crown, Salvo! Salvo! Salvo!” It was an order to break off the attack and get out of the area.
We turned back toward the fleet, puzzled. A moment later, our controller amplified the warning. The guided missile cruiser USS Long Beach had been hiding offshore with its electronics shut down. Steaming in her place in our defensive screen was a smaller destroyer. The North Vietnamese knew the general range of our surface-to-air missiles and knew that the destroyers carried older variants that didn’t have very good range. Thinking they were clear of any surface-to-air missile threat, they launched those MiG-21s. They ran right into that cruiser.
After we detected them, the Long Beach lit up its radar and weapon systems. From sixty-five miles away, they locked on to the MiGs—just as we were about to engage. A barrage of Talos surface-to-air missiles from that warship went streaking over us. We were forced to break contact. The MiG-21s ran for home. One was shot down and another one was probably hit as well. It was one of only three surface-to-air missile kills by the Navy during the Vietnam War.
I could have not cared less about that success. Those cruiser sailors had poached our MiGs and denied us a chance to see how good we really were. And they had actually fired, it seemed, with no regard for our presence, a dangerous roll of the dice. We landed on the Big E bitterly disappointed. If we had fired at twelve miles, maybe things would have been different. The missions continued, but I didn’t see another MiG.
It was a tough cruise, but it left us all with an indelible lesson in what real leadership looks like. Some time later, leading a strike mission at low altitude, Skank Remsen took a rifle round through the cockpit, straight through both thighs. He took his leg restraints, slid them up both legs, cinched them tight, and used them as tourniquets. He then flew one hundred and fifty miles and successfully landed aboard the carrier. Flight deck medical staff got him out of the airplane and rushed him to surgery. He refused medical evacuation to a stateside hospital and remained on board to heal. Two weeks later that tough old hombre was back in the saddle, flying combat missions with his boys. Now that’s my idea of real leadership.
On June 14, F-4s from our sister carrier, USS America, got into a scrap with some older MiG-17s. The Phantom crews tried to knock them down with Sparrows and managed to get four off in the short fight. All four missed. Two days later, the America lost an F-4 from VF-102 in a dogfight with MiG-21s. Four more Sparrows went downrange, but not a single one struck home. The crew ejected over North Vietnam. The pilot was captured, his rear-seater killed.
We’d lost two Phantoms in a month, fired more than a million dollars’ worth of high-tech smart weapons, and suffered one KIA, one MIA. This was a shocking development, especially since neither the air wing from the Big E nor the America had managed to offset the losses with a kill.
A couple nights later, I was part of a flight of F-4s that provided air cover for a Navy helicopter searching for two Phantom crewmen from VF-33 off the America. They’d been shot down by a SAM deep inside North Vietnam, and the helo, piloted by Clyde Lassen and LeRoy Cook, ran a gauntlet of ground fire while skirting the treetops in the darkness.
My back-seater Duffy and I circled the scene. We carried air-to-air missiles and nothing else that night, which made us feel truly useless. A 20mm gun at least would have allowed us to dive down and strafe the enemy gunners shooting up the helicopter. No gun gave us no recourse but to stay above and help coordinate the rescue and communications while stewing over our helplessness.
Lassen couldn’t find the F-4 crew, and the crew couldn’t locate the helo. His rotors hit some trees on his first rescue attempt. Lassen decided to try again. Low on fuel, he flicked on his navigation lights. And every North Vietnamese soldier in the area opened fire on them. The jungle below was a web of muzzle flashes and tracers.
The aviators on the ground spotted the lights and tried to move toward the helicopter. John Holzclaw, the pilot, dragged his back-seater, Zeke Burns, to a clearing. The ejection and hard landing had broken Zeke’s leg, and his survival depended on his front-seater’s stamina and determination.
Lassen touched down in a rice paddy, his crew chief and copilot laying down fire to suppress the North Vietnamese with his M-16 rifle. LeRoy Cook, the copilot, fired his weapon through the helicopter’s open side window. The downed Americans reached the helo and were helped aboard. The crew chief, Bruce Dallas, jumped in, and the battle-damaged bird sped for the coast. They made it to an offshore cruiser and landed on her helo deck with five minutes of fuel remaining. Lassen earned America’s highest award for bravery, the Medal of Honor, for his actions that night. In my many months of combat on Yankee Station, it was the bravest and most selfless act I witnessed. After that night, I never forgave the Navy for failing to arm the F-4 Phantom II with a gun.
That rescue proved to be one of the last missions we flew from Yankee Station that June. We were getting ready to head home by this point, having been out since the beginning of the year. The MiGs were getting increasingly active, and in June we fought them three more times. Thirteen Sparrows were fired in those three engagements, but none of them hit.
We left Yankee Station in July, just as things reached a boiling point. On July 10, a VF-33 Phantom crew brought down a MiG with a Sidewinder shot. That helped ease the pain a bit, but a month later, the air wing that replaced ours launched off USS Constellation and was intercepted by MiG-21s. In the ensuing fight, a Sidewinder fired at a MiG locked on to a passing F-4 and brought it down. The crew ejected and reached the ground, only to be captured before the search and rescue helo could get to them.
As those two final summer acts played out, the Big E and Air Wing Nine returned to the United States. We were worn out, beat up, and bitter. Between the end of February and the end of June, our hundred-man air wing had lost thirteen killed or captured, ten bombers, an F-4, and a Vigilante reconnaissance plane. Something was very, very wrong.
If we were going to regain the dominance that was naval aviation’s birthright, we would need to make changes. My orders were cut: I had been assigned to the Phantom fleet replacement squadron at Naval Air Station Miramar. As luck would have it, there, in the bustling enclave of Fighter Squadron 121, I would have the chance to help solve our costly, tragic problem.
CHAPTER EIGHT
STARTING TOPGUN
Naval Air Station Miramar, California
Fall 1968
Fightertown USA. That’s the long-standing nickname of the naval air station whose Spanish name, Miramar, doesn’t seem to suit the place. There’s no “view of the sea” from its location fifteen miles north of San Diego, five miles in from the coast—at least not until you’ve gone wheels up and are flying west on what the air controllers call a Sea Wolf departure. No, the unofficial nickname painted on Hangar One is a much better fit. On the runways, ramps, and taxiways of the sprawling complex, the shriek of jet engines and the smell of aviation fuel was constant.
If my love of flight had been tested by the war, I still never shook the habit of lifting my eyes to the sky whenever a jet roared overhead. Who was it? How was he doing? What’s going on? As an instructor, it was my job to keep track of my nuggets.
When I parked my sea bag at Miramar again, this time to serve as a tactics instructor at Fighter Squadron 121, I found the pace of daily life clipping along at a fast wartime tempo. The whole West Coast naval shore establishment had ramped up to support the war in Vietnam, and VF-121 was hauling a heavy load. As the fleet replacement squadron for all F-4 Phantom squadrons based on the West Coast, it had a clientele that included all the carrier air wings in the Pacific. As I mentioned earlier, we called it the RAG, based on its name during World War II, a replacement air group. Each type of aircraft had its own RAG squadron supporting it: the A-1 Skyraider, A-3 Skywarrior, A-4 Skyhawk, A-6 Intruder, A-7 Corsair II, F-8 Crusader, and various antisubmarine and early warning aircraft. Fighting 121 handled the F-4 community. Anytime a ca
rrier lost a Phantom, we produced a replacement plane and a two-man crew. It was but a short flight from our runway to the flight deck of a carrier bound for Yankee Station. We understood the reality that loss and death were a part of our trade. A lot of good men never came home. Whenever word came of another aircrew killed, captured, or missing, it haunted us. In 1968, no one at Miramar was in the mood to fool around.
Our fighter squadron was the largest in the whole Navy when I was there. It had an average of about seventy F-4Bs and F-4Js assigned to it, and 1,400 officers and enlisted men, including administrative and maintenance staff. A squadron that big did not go to war. A home-bound training command, it made sure the squadrons that operated from our aircraft carriers at sea were at full strength and ready to go. Given how poorly the air war was going, the squadron’s nickname, the Pacemakers, was apt. You might say the war was on life support as our losses mounted. So we did our part to keep the pipeline full, turning out new aviators as the war whittled away at our ranks. In 1969 the RAG would graduate more than 150 pilots and RIOs to fly the Phantom. No group of F-4 drivers, RIOs, maintainers, and mechanics that I ever knew had a stronger claim on their pride.
I was an instructor in the advanced tactics phase (or department) of the squadron. A good man, Lieutenant Commander Sam Leeds, was head of tactics. Our students had been through the mill by the time they got to us. After they got their wings, ground schools somewhere had taught them how to fight fires; survive isolation on water, on land, and as prisoners; read and report air intelligence; use their cockpit instruments; and master the many systems of our McDonnell Douglas fighter aircraft. Basic air combat tactics was my area. Young pilots always had smiles on their faces when they got to our phase of training. With me, they got to do some real flying. At the same time, they were going through a series of intensive lectures; this flight phase had them learning basic aircraft aerodynamics, instrument flying, basics of air-to-air interception, weapons, navigation, electronic warfare, and carrier qualifications (it can’t be said often enough: finding a moving carrier at night and landing on its flight deck is not for the faint of heart). The tactics we taught them were nothing advanced. The syllabus was standard Navy tactical doctrine, complying with all the restrictive published guidelines about how the F-4 Phantom should be flown. They learned how to fire their weapons, drop bombs, and use long-range radar to intercept a distant target. It was like an undergraduate education, about as advanced as Biology for English Majors, just the essentials of flying and maneuvering in an F-4 and using its weapons to defeat another pilot or destroy a target on the ground.
What kept us from pushing the aerodynamic limits was the attitude of risk aversion that commonly afflicts training. The worst thing we could do, as far as our higher headquarters was concerned, was lose a plane. So twice a day, when I took new Phantom pilots and their back-seaters up to fly, we played it safe. We did air combat maneuvering, or ACM, but always within strict safety parameters. We never let them fly below ten thousand feet. You might say the Navy didn’t want to risk voiding the warranties on their new planes. As a result, the program lacked combat realism. The first time RAG pilots saw the radical maneuvers that modern jets were capable of, tracers were flying. Their eyes had not been opened. That’s not how you want to send a young man off to war.
Even still, by the time the students finished our phase of training, they were ready for further training, and ready for assignment to the fleet. The daily tempo of flight training was dangerous enough. The enemy took things to another level. He always gets a vote, a wise person once said, and in the skies over North Vietnam the enemy was voting in droves. Finally the time came for the Navy to do something about it.
Not long after my arrival, late in December, Sam Leeds called me into his office and showed me a thick document bound in a blue cover. It was a study issued by the Naval Air Systems Command. Its title, “Report of the Air-to-Air Missile System Capability Review,” hardly sounded like a blockbuster. But this study, produced by Captain Frank Ault, the captain of the Coral Sea, was an impressive, consequential piece of work.
About two hundred pages long, it was a top-to-bottom exploration of the reasons for our failure in air-to-air combat over North Vietnam. Captain Ault’s project had been a long time coming. It began in the summer of 1968, when he led a team that tackled the problem of the Sparrow missile. Building on that and other studies, he pulled in more than two hundred people to a symposium at the Naval Air Missile Test Center at Point Mugu, north of Los Angeles. There were pilots, commanders, and managers and technicians from Raytheon, Westinghouse, and McDonnell Douglas, all the major fighter weapons contractors. No one had put together the entire picture of the problem like Ault had. It was the first time the whole air combat system—our fighters, their missiles, and fire-control systems—had been studied holistically, from design and acquisition to operations and logistics. Ault wanted to understand weapons systems “from the womb to the tomb,” as he liked to say. His conclusions were far-reaching.
Sam Leeds called my attention to one particular recommendation in the report. He flipped to here and pointed to the eleventh of the fifteen items listed in paragraph 6, “Aircrew Training.” It was there that Ault advised the chief of naval operations and the commander of Naval Air Forces, Pacific, to “establish, as early as possible, an Advanced Fighter Weapons School in RCVW-12* at NAS Miramar for both the F-8 and the F-4.” These were the words that gave birth to Topgun. Apparently, the idea of such a school had already been under discussion at the RAG’s parent command. Like any good idea, it required a brave soul to stick his neck out to become reality. Captain Ault’s report put the idea front and center on some important desks.
Sam and I knew that any Miramar-based tactics training program would run through us. He looked at me and said, “Dan, why don’t you take it?”
I suppose this was generous of him. He had both experience and seniority over me. He could have led the effort himself. But he already had a great job waiting for him. He was in the final running to command the first fighter squadron that would fly the new F-14 Tomcat. (Tom Cruise would help make that beautiful Grumman jet famous in the movie.) Sam could easily have taken the assignment to start the new schoolhouse and then handed it off to me when his time came to go fly F-14s. But he felt that the school should have the same leadership from the beginning, for continuity’s sake. He said as much, and strongly.
It was settled then and there. I made a quick, fateful decision: I’d do it.
When Sam and I informed our skipper, Commander Hank Halleland, that I had agreed to serve as the Navy Fighter Weapons School’s first officer in charge (OIC), he had only one directive. “Don’t kill anybody, and don’t lose an airplane.” That did happen from time to time, so we took the warning seriously. He also made it clear that the Navy was funding us on thin wooden nickels. We would have no classroom space, ready room, or administrative office, no maintainers and mechanics assigned to us, no airplanes of our own, only loaners. And, of course, we would have no money. The new graduate school would subsist by forage, hunting and gathering in the forgotten corners of Miramar. There was one more thing. Our deadline for preparing a curriculum and having it ready for the first class of students was short: sixty days. Aside from all that, I suppose the job was a real plum.
Soon we started calling the school Topgun. We weren’t the first to use this fine nickname. There was an annual air weapons competition that used the name until about 1958. The aircraft carrier Ranger, which I would later command, called itself “the Top Gun of the Pacific Fleet.” Our friends and rivals at Miramar who flew the older F-8 Crusader called themselves “the last of the gunfighters.” Their own schoolhouse was established by the same paragraph in the Ault report that gave birth to us, but as that old fighter was on its way out, their tactics initiative did not last long.
I’ve often reflected on the sheer happenstance of how leadership of Topgun fell to me. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was larger and more importan
t than anything I had ever undertaken before. It was the chance of a lifetime to effect much-needed change. Its success would take the passage of years, requiring the work of the many fine aviators who followed me. But our new graduate school in fighter combat was greater than any one man or group of men. It would grow roots and flourish. It would transcend its own mission and stand for excellence and commitment of the purest kind. Its legacy would last for decades. None of that was expected in December 1968. It was a job to do.
The program almost seemed designed to fail. I say that because the Navy considers nothing very important that’s not run by an admiral. I was a thirty-three-year-old lieutenant commander, three pay grades below flag rank. That the Navy gave leadership of Topgun to someone so lowly speaks to what it thought of our chances. We easily could have crashed nose first. We were going to disrupt the traditional way of teaching tactics. I’ll say more on that later, but most real tactical aviation training took place out in the fleet. The skippers of the fleet squadrons thought they owned tactics. Topgun threatened that approach. Thus, we could easily fail.
In the Navy, the failure of any group can inflict collateral career damage on superiors in the chain of command. The damage was usually in proportion to the rank of the failing commander. If Topgun crashed and burned, my own career would take a hit. Yet my humble rank meant that the senior officers standing over us would suffer no blemish on their record. Our failure could be written off to the stumbling of youngsters who, while well intended, were not up to the task. That’s probably why a guy like me got to be the first OIC of Topgun. It sounds like a much bigger deal today, knowing what we know.
Being in that dicey position, I took comfort in having Hank Halleland’s support. He quickly proved himself a friend from the beginning, helping us find people and resources. The pedigree of the Ault report helped too. The higher echelons at Pacific Naval Air Forces headquarters and at the Pentagon had to pay attention, since the CNO himself had endorsed the study.