Topgun

by Dan Pedersen

  But the war didn’t care, not a lick. And the war was the reason Topgun was born. It awaited our return, ready to kill any of us who showed up unprepared. Next time we reported in for a WestPac cruise, we would need to perform a lot better. Lives hung in the balance.

  I’ve always tried to keep in mind something that was famously well expressed by another fighter pilot in another day: God is my copilot. When I look back at how we pulled it together, it’s clear to me that the acting hand was far mightier than my own. I prayed for the gift of discernment to make it work. It wasn’t going to be easy, but everything we would need was at our fingertips there in Fightertown USA.

  Captain Ault described what had to be done, but—bless him for his wisdom and foresight—he said nothing about how it should be done. He prescribed the creation of the Navy Fighter Weapons School but did not say what it should teach, how it should be taught, or how it should be set up. Today, an initiative like that would involve millions being spent on special studies and outside experts. Until they were unanimous in their conclusions, nothing would start happening. The paper pushing would take years. In 1969, I was left to my own devices. With the wise council of Hank Halleland and some other trusted voices around Miramar at my disposal, I thought I might have a puncher’s chance. I went right to work.

  Topgun was best understood as a graduate school. It functioned essentially like a teachers’ college for fighter pilots. Our job was not just to teach pilots to be the hottest sticks in the sky. It was to teach pilots to teach other pilots to be the hottest sticks in the sky. Our first class of students, handpicked by their squadron commanders to join us at Miramar in sixty short days, would spend about five weeks with us and then return to their units to spread to their peers what we had taught them. In this way the Navy hoped to leverage a multiplier effect, seeding new ideas in a geometric progression as a class of eight went out to teach eight times sixteen more.

  The way to true mastery of anything is to learn it to the point that you can teach it to someone else. My first task, then, was to find instructors with a talent for teaching, pilots with the gift for delivering a complex lesson in a way that made it stick. Our expectations were sky-high. Not just of our students, but of ourselves. With only sixty days to develop new offensive dogfighting tactics for the Phantom, redefine the way Sparrows and Sidewinders were used, write the curriculum and lesson plans, create a flight syllabus with briefing and debriefing guides, and recruit our first class of pilots from the fleet, there was hardly an hour to waste.

  Around the time Sam Leeds showed me the Ault report, I hosted a group of Israeli pilots at my home in San Diego. Heading the group was Lieutenant Colonel Eitan Ben Eliyahu. He had a superb reputation as a fighter pilot and leader. Danny Halutz, another future head of the Israeli Air Force, was part of the group. When I met these guys, the IAF was making the transition from the French-built Dassault Mirage to the Phantom. They were visiting Miramar to learn what they could. I learned a few things from Ben Eliyahu in particular, and we became good friends.

  Over good American barbecue, listening closely to everything they said, I discerned that Israeli fighter squadrons believed strongly in the power of technical specialization. In each technical area, Ben Eliyahu explained, one man was designated to serve as the lead specialist. Radar, weapons, ordnance, aerodynamics, tactics—each domain had its wizard. The division of labor would prove to be an efficient way to assemble a team and develop a technical curriculum on a short schedule. That was the approach I used in selecting Topgun’s first instructors.

  Reflecting on what the Israelis had revealed to me, I decided that eight men would be the right number to cover the subjects we needed to master. Four pilots and four RIOs would join me as Topgun’s founding cadre of instructors. These eight dynamic, smart, persuasive, and articulate young officers would help me pull our program together ahead of our hot start in March. I didn’t think I could manage more people than that while developing the school and continuing to teach and fly in the RAG—all of our instructors would have double duty—and doing everything that serving as the OIC entailed. There was little time to waste in assembling the team, designing a curriculum in collaboration with them, corralling assets, and finding a way to turn around the air war that was going south eight thousand miles away on the other side of the Pacific.

  Look around any room and you’ll realize that your people are everything. It doesn’t matter if it’s a business, a charity, a government agency, or a military unit. Your people are your destiny. We had to be successful or our careers and reputations would be finished. And that would be the least of it. If we failed, we would return to a war using the same tactics burdened by the same politically driven rules of engagement. That would just mean more of the same: lost friends and a brotherhood strained to the limit by the demands of war we were not allowed to win.

  I didn’t have to look far for good people to help me fulfill this unexpected charge. The pool of combat-seasoned talent at the RAG was deep, which was helpful because there was no time to do the paperwork necessary to transfer people to us from other units. The instructors who had been teaching with me in the tactics phase were all combat-experienced, with lots of flight time in the F-4. They flew every day, putting new pilots through the paces. I knew all of them—and not just as pilots, but as teachers. Their reputations among the student pilots at Miramar were as important to me as their standing as warriors. When the time came to choose my “original eight,” the right names came quickly to mind. I talked to each of them, had them read the Ault report, and described the enormous task we faced in building a graduate-level program with an advanced curriculum and preparing to teach it within sixty days.

  I don’t remember the exact words of my initial presentation, but it was based around the sentiment that we were being challenged to revive our heritage as naval aviators—to learn how to dogfight again. Captain Ault had empowered line aviators to have a voice. I was not surprised when I learned that the author of the section of the report that recommended creation of Topgun was a salty F-8 Crusader pilot, Captain Merle Gorder. In spite of the rivalries between the Crusader and Phantom communities, we were virtually the same tribe, going all the way back to World War II when our predecessors flying piston-engine, propeller-driven fighters had purchased our birthright in blood. With this as my message, I was able to get every one of my recruits to join me in the new venture.

  The pilots I invited to join Topgun as instructors were Lieutenants Mel Holmes, John Nash, Jim Ruliffson, and Lieutenant j.g. Jerry Sawatzky. I called them into my office one by one and explained the idea of the Fighter Weapons School as referenced in the Ault report. To a man, they did not hesitate to sign on. We had long been vocal about the changes we thought were needed to win the air war in Vietnam. Here was the chance to do something about it.

  Mel Holmes was a first-round pick in anybody’s book. I had seen a lot of pilots fly, fight, and work. None was better than Mel. I considered him to be hands down the finest F-4 Phantom pilot in the world in early 1969. Tall, handsome, and self-confident, he was a natural leader with strong opinions. He had been born and reared in northeastern Oregon, a rural outback that bred tough, independent people. One time when Mel was golfing at the base course at Miramar, he hit a drive into the weeds. That was bad news for the nest of rattlesnakes he walked into while looking for his ball. When his buddies saw him hacking away with his seven-iron, slaughtering those serpents in the grass, Holmes had his nickname: Rattler. He had one trait in spades and I strongly doubt it’s teachable: a bone-deep, hardwired, electric-fire sense of aggression. It manifested itself on the basketball court, where he was hell on wheels. An athletic scholarship had paid for an education his family could not otherwise have afforded. But its biggest dividends were paid in the air. When Mel strapped himself into the cockpit of a fighter aircraft, whatever separated the flight surfaces from the man at the controls simply disappeared. He had as much natural talent as anyone I’ve known. No pilot I ever knew b
eat Mel consistently one-on-one. So he was a perfect candidate to specialize in tactics and aerodynamics at Topgun.

  I chose John “Smash” Nash for the way his heart and mind worked together. Though he was the one member of the original eight who hadn’t taught in the RAG’s tactics phase, I knew him well from our early days flying McDonnell F3H Demons from the Hancock back in ’63, a year that he and I were both lucky to have survived. John was at his best when he was pitted against a supposedly superior fighter pilot. Any suggestion that a mismatch was at hand triggered his competitive fire. His motto, “I’d rather die than lose,” bore it out. Most combat pilots are wired that way. What made Nash special was the way he combined that fire with hyperattention to detail. Anyone who showed any degree of inattention to the fine points of something he was trying to teach got a hard dose of his Mississippi wrath. Most of our students were smart enough to avoid a second helping. Nash expected perfection from them and usually got it. He was as much an asset on the ground as in the air. His talent for technical research kept our ideas about tactics built on a deep base of fact. Nash was a systems guy. He told his students, “Automobiles, aircraft, and air-to-air missiles are built to fail. Expect problems and anticipate them.” I considered his fusion of traits—detail-driven aggression—to be the best possible mind-set for a Topgun instructor.

  Jim Ruliffson probably put out more pure intellectual wattage than any of us. No one understood the Phantom’s electronic and avionics systems better than he did. With his superb technical mind and training in electrical engineering, he was a natural to spearhead our effort to master the Sidewinder and Sparrow missile systems. In the subtle differences in performance between these high-tech weapons, not to mention the optimal parameters of their use, was the critical margin between life and death. This was Jim’s specialty. A fine stick and great tactician, he was a protégé of Duke Hernandez, a great one from the East Coast fighter community. “Cobra” Ruliffson distinguished himself with his superb gift for teaching this complex material to aircrews in a way that let them retain and use it.

  Jerry Sawatzky, or “Ski Bird,” as I called him, had played linebacker for Bear Bryant at Alabama. He was big, imposing, and highly energetic, but also very unassuming and one of the most likable people I ever flew with. He had survived a horrific fire on the carrier USS Forrestal, which claimed thirty-nine men from his squadron in July 1967. A born teacher, he was one of the first ensigns assigned to fly the Phantom when it was the fleet’s hottest, newest ride. He knew the plane inside and out, and he was magic in an F-4. With his keenly aggressive way, he was known to “bend the jet,” as we said. Jerry had great situational awareness, which was vital in fighter combat. It’s very easy and all too dangerous to focus on the enemy you’re about to shoot. A pilot has to stay alert to what’s happening in the cube of air that extends several miles around him as all the players move at high speed in different directions. Jerry could teach others how to develop their awareness and retain it. He was also good at looking at an aerial encounter from the enemy’s point of view. Holmes and Nash rated him very highly, which told me a lot. Ski Bird was a prince of a teammate. We appreciated him for being as reliable as gravity, usually showing up ten minutes early for a scheduled brief. He was just the kind of instructor we needed, since our job was to throw away the manual and push our aircraft beyond its factory limits.

  Holmes, Nash, Ruliffson, and Sawatzky were my first four pilot instructors. But I hope I’ve made clear how important the radar intercept officers are. Without a good back-seater in his F-4, no fighter pilot gets far in an air battle. Topgun’s four founding RIOs were the best that were available anywhere. At the head of the pack was John “J. C.” Smith, whom I invited right away. He might have been the finest RIO there ever was.

  In June 1965, flying from USS Midway, J. C. and his pilot, Commander Lou Page, scored the Navy’s first air-to-air kill of the Vietnam War. The head-on tangle with a pair of MiG-17s was a by-the-book radar intercept, and their Sparrow performed as advertised. Moments later, their wingman, Jack Batson, shot down a second MiG. Of course the Pentagon was elated. As far as I know, these were the only “pure intercept” victories the Navy scored in the entire war. Soon thereafter the Vietnamese stopped playing our game and the radar-guided AIM-7 Sparrow seldom again delivered on the promises of its marketing brochure.

  J. C. was colorful. He talked a mile a minute and at times never seemed to stop. That element of his personality made him a great RIO. A good back-seater never stops talking until his pilot issues the command “Go cold mike.” J. C. was especially good with new pilots. Whenever I had one who needed some help, I’d prescribe for him a flew flights with J. C. in his rear seat. That always got him up to speed. J. C. lived the Christian life with his wife, Carol. Teaching others was his forte. He was a pretty fair negotiator too.

  Another of my RIOs was Jim “Hawkeye” Laing. A youngster, just twenty-three, he was so quiet in person that you’d never know what a tiger he was in the rear seat. During his two combat tours in Vietnam, flying from USS Kitty Hawk, he and his pilot flamed a MiG-17 in a wild fight near Haiphong Harbor. Laing survived two ejections in barely a month. The second was harrowing in the extreme. Hawkeye and his pilot, Denny Wisely, landed well inland in a thick jungle, where they became the objects of an epic search and rescue mission. As the helo looked for them, John Nash courageously remained overhead, covering the rescue to the limit of his fuel while under fire from enemy gunners. He received a well-deserved Silver Star. Laing, with his notable history of survival against the odds, gave Topgun an element of moral strength and never-quit resilience that was enormously valuable. He took all of his hard lessons in stride and always came back for more. A deeply religious family man, Jim imbued Topgun with his never-say-die spirit. He was one of the steadiest, most stalwart, spiritual, and reliable men I have ever known. When he spoke, everybody listened. He was a generalist who contributed to each area of the curriculum. He could teach with the best and was a quality leader who was always ready to help anyone who needed it.

  Our other Smith—Steve—had all the essential skills of a top-grade RIO but stood apart from everybody for his skills as a salesman, organizer, and grifter for all seasons. Steve-O could talk a Bedouin out of his camel, ride it to Alaska with a load of shaved ice, and sell it all at a premium to an Eskimo. He had a great laugh and darkly handsome looks that drew an enviable share of female attention. I guess we didn’t begrudge him those successes, because he was a world-class organizer and had a work ethic that outdid mine. He was a self-starter, keeping a daily to-do list in his pocket, and it was a rare sunset when he hadn’t scratched off every item. “Rebel” was at his best when I gave him free rein and didn’t ask too many questions.

  Our junior RIO, Lieutenant j.g. Darrell Gary, was the youngest man in our cadre of founders. He had every attribute I wanted in an instructor—mature (beyond his years), confident (beneath his years), and very hardworking. If Darrell looked a bit too much like a movie star fighter pilot to be an actual fighter pilot, we had to accept what God gave him and be glad for it. It was plentiful. Some pilots were smarter than he, and others were more experienced, but none was more driven. Though his after-hours activities were diverse and even legendary, as often as not they involved important professional work. In cadet training, while everybody else was asleep in their racks, Darrell would often be found sequestered in the head, sitting on a throne with a flashlight in one hand and a textbook in the other. That’s part of the reason he graduated at the top of his class in naval flight officer school. He came to VF-121 in 1968, after two combat tours in the Kitty Hawk. It was hard to miss his extreme self-assurance. Because evolution tells us that birds with that trait tend to become extinct, we gave Darrell a call sign to match: Condor. It was designed to encourage him toward humility. But all these years later I can finally say it. Darrell was one of Topgun’s sharpest lecturers, gifted with a probing tactical mind. He is one of the most aggressive, intelligent men I have ever k
nown and is a natural innovator whom people followed willingly.

  Our last find was an ace in the hole of sorts, even though he was a nonaviator. When Steve Smith met Chuck Hildebrand, Chuck was working as an intelligence officer, bored and unhappy, in one of Miramar’s F-8 photoreconnaissance squadrons. Steve talked him up a little, recognized his useful talent, and helped arrange his transfer—all on the same day. Chuck was the perfect man to serve as Topgun’s intelligence officer. He was a human vacuum cleaner. He got the inevitable nickname “Spook.” Tall, studious, professorial in bearing despite his youth, he never stopped collecting documents for our reference library, detailing the capabilities of enemy aircraft and pilots. Without Spook, Topgun would have needed many more years to emerge as a research library for fighter pilots and the center of knowledge that it quickly became.

  And that was our team. I like to think that their being in one place, the right place, at precisely the right time was the work of a power greater than me. With the team assembled, all we needed was a place to call home.

  One Friday afternoon, Steve Smith, foraging in a remote part of NAS Miramar, near the base operations center, found an abandoned, dilapidated modular trailer. It was perfect. He chatted up an off-duty public works crane operator and offered him a case of scotch if he would make delivery to our area of the base. Later that afternoon, the ten-by-forty-foot structure was hoisted aloft and relocated to a space adjacent to VF-121’s hangar. Over the weekend, we laid in new flooring, repainted it with bright red trim, and hung a sign on the door announcing the existence of the Navy Fighter Weapons School.

  While the rest of us renovated our find, Steve went scrounging and stole a bunch of office furniture and a couple of classified document safes from God knows where. Legend had it he bagged some of it from the Air Force. Wherever it came from, we filled our formerly condemned trailer with all the trappings of a real classroom and called it home. By Monday morning, Topgun was officially in business.