Topgun

by Dan Pedersen

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE ORIGINAL BROS

  Miramar

  1969

  The famous movie that borrowed our name—and we all still love it—might make you suspect that we were a self-obsessed bunch, that it must have been a constant battle of egos between the students and even the instructors inside that stolen trailer and on our training flights out of Miramar. Television shows like Baa Baa Black Sheep, with its over-the-top portrayal of Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington and Marine Fighter Squadron 214 as a gang of misfits, created that sense too.

  Speaking for the Original Bros, I’ll say that for six and a half days a week, we were scholars, even monks. No PhD in astrophysics ever worked harder to understand the facts of the physical universe than we did at Topgun ahead of the arrival of our first class of students in early 1969. Our mission was to master the full combat capability of our airplane and its weapons and turn around the air war. As skipper I set the tone and made decisions. But the Topgun instructors emerged as the intellectual drivers of our attempt to redefine the flight envelopes of the F-4 Phantom and its missiles. That was our most important work, and the foundation of the Topgun legacy.

  Pilots were dying because our missiles were not designed to operate in a dynamic, high-G, high-angular-rate environment. That’s a technical way of saying that an air-to-air brawl moves so fast that a fighter pilot should never trust a missile to win it for him. Certainly, the pilot had to be smarter than the missile. It was simply a killing tool, like a throwing knife. But a man must know how to use it perfectly, every time.

  One thing we saw was that our missiles were taking a beating day and night aboard ship. Carrier ordnance personnel had to manhandle those heavy things, and they got knocked around. Whenever a pilot landed with his missiles still aboard, the weapons absorbed a stiff, debilitating concussion. You have to know your weapon and its limitations as surely as you do your airplane. So we went to school on them to uncover every shortfall. There were many shortfalls and some very technical solutions.

  The forward thinkers in Washington who had eulogized the day of the dogfight knew nothing of what it was like to be part of an alpha strike arriving over Hanoi. They couldn’t picture thirty Navy planes inbound, with sometimes fifteen enemy SAMs rising toward you. They couldn’t see the crowd of unidentifiable radar and visual contacts in the sky swelling and commingling as MiGs reached altitude and approached us, or the surprise of an Air Force formation arriving unannounced over the target, right when things were getting sporty. The ever-present AAA and even small-arms fire made for a chaotic dynamic as you rolled along at six hundred knots.

  As I’ve perhaps belabored, the rules of engagement required us to make visual identifications of targets before firing. Telling friend from foe meant getting close enough practically to see him through your windscreen. Good luck with that. By the time you got within recognition distance of a MiG closing head-on with you, your advanced radar-guided missile was about as useful as a fence post strapped to your wing. In the first three years of the war, our pilots had fired nearly six hundred missiles at enemy planes, scoring a kill on about sixty. If you’re keeping score, that’s one in ten. More often than not, those agile little MiGs, having ducked our first swing, would be on our tails showering us with explosive cannon shells sooner than our wingmen could shout, “Bandit on your six—break right!” Something had gone wrong. It was our job to follow Captain Frank Ault’s suggestion and solve the problem from the ground up.

  Some of the most productive hours of my professional life were spent in the trailer. A couple of cinder blocks were the staircase to the left-side door that put you in our operations center. It had a desk and a chair, some cabinets, a pair of safes that Steve Smith had liberated to hold our classified documents, plus the inevitable Navy coffee mess. For students there were six tables in two rows of three, flanking a narrow center aisle, and a dozen chairs. At the far end of the room was a chalkboard and a podium, with barely enough room for an instructor to stand. There was a small window on one end and two on the side. Armed with our youthful ideas about what the U.S. Navy was doing wrong, we went about rewriting the rules of tactical air warfare in the F-4 Phantom.

  Mel took charge of our effort to deconstruct the aerodynamic capabilities of the F-4, revise its performance envelope, and discover its true capabilities in the air, well beyond the parameters set by McDonnell Douglas. We developed the Topgun curriculum in searching, impassioned conversations, illustrated by fast work at the chalkboard. To build a curriculum in air-to-air tactics, all you had to do was get Mel Holmes, John Nash, and Jerry Sawatzky talking a bit. The others would join in, and we’d be on our way. Once it got rolling, you’d better be strapped in with a five-point harness and taking notes fast, because it was going to be a wide-open discussion.

  Rattler might lead off by discussing his thoughts on a trick of the tactical trade that was too advanced to teach in the RAG. By the time we were finished, we had something important in the making: an outline that became a lesson plan that became a flight syllabus and a curriculum, broken down and assigned to the instructor specializing in that technical area. All of it was reviewed over and over again as each instructor presented the material to the other Bros.

  John Nash was my expert on air-to-ground tactics. Phantoms were, after all, sold to the military as “fighter-bombers,” and we couldn’t ignore the second part of its mission while going to school on the first. Nash was the best among us in that specialty. He was a master air-to-air tactician as well.

  Cobra Ruliffson did a lot of his best work away from Miramar. He was a frequent visitor to the Raytheon offices in Massachusetts. Working with the engineers who built the Sparrow, he took apart the flight dynamics of our problematic missile. The actual parameters of the Sparrow’s sensors and electronics had never seemed to inform the tactics. There were optimal times and places to fire a Sparrow, and if you didn’t know the kinematics and the process times, or the shifting matrix of G forces, angular rates, and track crossing angles that your choice of moment to fire imposed upon your missile, you weren’t going to hit anything. Jim grasped all the factors of time and space that defined the air-to-air missile’s proper use. By the time his study was aligned with our new understanding of the Phantom’s own performance parameters, its flight envelope, we had a better weapon on our hands.

  Doing all of this on a sixty-day deadline meant for some busy days.

  Our beautiful F-4 had some important things going for it. One of them was the pair of General Electric J79 turbojets that made the plane accelerate like a rocket. Earlier U.S. fighters had used their superior engine power to gain an advantage over the agile MiG, soaring high above a fight and diving back down when they saw a chance to kill. We called this tactic “using the vertical.” Developing it for the Phantom, for which it had never been envisioned, would be one of our top priorities.

  While we were preparing the curriculum, I joined Chuck Hildebrand and J. C. Smith on trips to Langley, Virginia. Only by visiting CIA headquarters, we discovered, could we get access to the highly classified air action reports from the carrier squadrons off Vietnam. It was funny that they were originally unavailable to us, seeing as the squadrons we had belonged to were their authors in the first place. Still, without top-secret clearances, we needed cooperation from our contacts at the CIA. On one trip from Washington back to Miramar, J. C. and I hand-carried two briefcases full of classified debriefs—reports that were full of valuable lessons that had been paid for with blood.

  Before we could teach our material we had to study and learn it cold ourselves. We created, collated, and corrected the curriculum at a fever pace, working all hours to refine it, hunting and pecking with two fingers on manual typewriters, red-lining each other’s drafts, and rehearsing our lectures to each other. This last part was key. As we took turns at the podium in the trailer, we faced withering scrutiny from our fellow instructors. In the military, this is known as a “murder board.” No hiccup in presentation
style, no slip of the tongue, no glitch in dress or personal appearance was too small to be seized upon and corrected on the spot. We knew we would be ineffective lecturing to our top-notch students if we were anything less than bulletproof. How would they believe in us at Topgun if we couldn’t deliver a graduate-level lesson well? In the meantime, we began reaching out to the fleet squadrons to recruit our first students.

  The founding class would consist of two representatives from four Phantom squadrons, a total of four pilots and four RIOs. Steve Smith, our best salesman, was put in charge with the guidance that he recruit from both the East and West Coasts. He had quite a time of it making these cold calls. He would ask for the executive officer, inviting him to nominate his best junior officers, one pilot and one RIO, to join us for a five-week class in advanced tactics. After Steve made his pitch, the XO usually said something like this:

  “Sorry, who the hell are you?”

  Steve would explain. If he ever suggested that the XO’s higher headquarters might already know of our existence—“Sir, haven’t you been briefed about our school by your air wing commander?”—he often found the situation escalating. The squadron CO himself would get on the horn. And that’s when the inquisition really got going.

  “I don’t know who are, son. Do you really expect me to cut loose my best guys and send them to you? By the way, what makes you think you can teach tactics better than I can?”

  At that point Steve would have to up the ante by explaining that participating squadrons were responsible not only for sending us two aviators, but also a Phantom and some maintenance people to keep it up. Sometimes this news was agitating.

  Steve didn’t close every sale. Often the CO, miffed, hung up and queried the Pentagon about Topgun’s status and standing. That’s when our top cover paid off. The Navy Department’s highest headquarters for air warfare, known as “OP-05,” always set the skipper straight.

  Steve’s persuasive gifts paid off best when he was talking to East Coast guys. The fact that Topgun was based at the gateway to the Southeast Asian war zone was useful. “Are you aware of what’s going on here at Miramar?” Steve would say. “We’re considering inviting one of your squadrons to join us. Their chances will be better if they have combat experience. Do they?” With East Coast units the answer almost always was no. This had a way of building desire. Over time, Steve created buzz—and demand.

  As the roster of Class One came together, we tested some of our finished lesson plans on students in the RAG. We were seeing them regularly anyway, because all of Topgun’s instructors were still teaching the basics in VF-121. One day in the middle of February, Mel Holmes and I did a two-plane training hop, putting a pair of student RIOs through the paces in long-range radar interception. I was cooking along in full afterburner about a hundred miles off the California coast, approaching San Clemente Island, when I felt a thump. My warning panel lit up. There was a fire in my right engine.

  As I shut it down, my back-seater, Lieutenant j.g. Gil Sliney, ran through the emergency checklist while Mel eased in close for a visual inspection, trying to see through all the smoke. We were about thirty miles from Miramar, off La Jolla, when the seven-liter liquid oxygen canister mounted in the tail of my Phantom exploded. It tore the tail section clean off my bird. End over end we tumbled. Time slowed down. We plummeted. In my headset I think I heard Mel’s voice.

  “Dan, you guys eject, eject!”

  Gil pulled the handle and we rocketed out of the doomed jet. We fell in a parabola toward the ocean, strapped into our ejection seats at twenty-one thousand feet.

  It’s odd how time passes in a crisis. Inspired by the flood of adrenaline into my system, I had the time to look down over La Jolla and notice the scenic cove. My helmet visor was gone, but somehow my Ray-Bans were still hanging on. I’ve got to save them, I thought. Those sunglasses had been with me since my Pensacola training days. No way did I want to lose them now. I reached up, shucked them off my face, and stuffed them into a zippered pocket on my flight suit.

  It was then that I realized, as I fell through space, that I was still attached to my ejection seat. This was a problem. The heavy apparatus was supposed to separate automatically by action of a powerful spring activated by a barostat at twelve thousand feet.

  Falling toward the sea, I looked around for Gil’s chute and was relieved to see it drifting down, behind and above me. Disengaging myself manually from the ejection seat and falling clear, I pulled the D-ring to pop my chute. Nothing happened. I yanked it again, harder, and the cable broke off in my gloved hand. I was falling at terminal velocity, fourteen feet per second or like a rock. Somehow, I had to get my hands on the chute pack.

  Short on time and altitude, I pulled myself up the risers and reached my chute pack. I thought of my wife and kids and home and it was God who gave me the strength, I’m sure. Reaching the parachute pack, I opened it with my hands and the chute flew free. The beautiful white blossom swelled above me, jerking me upright and into a lazy but short descent. Thank you, my dear Lord.

  Looking down at the cold water, I saw dark sleek shadows swimming just below the surface. There wasn’t much time to think about what that meant. My chute had opened so low—Mel said it was about twenty-four hundred feet—that I had time only for two swings back and forth in the harness before I hit the drink. Almost at once, my small life raft deployed. When I climbed in, I did double time, because I thought I was avoiding the sharks. A moment later, a pair of large gray sea creatures launched themselves up against my raft, parking their snub noses on the edge of it. Dolphins. Chortling excitedly, they stayed with me until the rescue helo arrived from the carrier Bonhomme Richard.

  As the rotor wash sprayed me with salt water, the helo crew hauled me heavenward. I wondered about Gil, and there he was, reclined on the deck of the cabin and beaming. The rescuers had been quick to snag him. As Gil, elated, gave me a sidelong man-hug, I warned him that I’d kill him if he tried to kiss me. He didn’t. Clearly it was not the day for either one of us to die.

  An accident investigation revealed a defect in the aging original bar springs of the Phantom’s ejection seat. The Navy surmised that this problem, which was fleetwide, was the reason five pilots had been lost during night ejections. I doubt Gil and I would have made it if our mishap had happened after dark. After a medical checkup on the Bonnie Dick, we boarded a C-1 Trader and with a nighttime catapult shot were on our way home to Miramar.

  It was just another day in the life, full of routine danger and little of what passes for glory. As for the nights, my young instructors knew how to blow off steam. The Topgun social circuit was in place from our first day at Miramar. It reached from Downwinds, the beachfront O club at Coronado, to Bully’s in San Diego and all the way up to La Jolla, where Bully’s had another location and where Condor and Hawkeye Laing rented a house that became famous. Right on the beach, at 259 Coast Boulevard, was a little white stucco house that we started calling the “Lafayette Escadrille.” A refrigerated keg was always on tap and the doors were never locked. It and the two houses across the street, which were rented by other young Miramar pilots, attracted an entourage that included everybody from San Diego State coeds to members of the San Diego Chargers pro football team. Darrell never knew who he was going to have to throw out of his bedroom when he rolled in from Miramar on a Friday night. But all of us lived and breathed for the work we did at Topgun. Of course, anything we did off base was meant solely to keep our edges sharp for the work that really mattered.

  A few days after my unprogrammed cold swim, I was back to work. Having finalized the Topgun curriculum and completed most of the murder-boarding, we were ready to receive our young sticks from the fleet. We would have to be on our game. Because we were going to make these guys into world-beaters.

  On March 3, 1969, in our stolen trailer at Fightertown USA, Topgun’s Class One convened. All eight attendees had come from Pacific-based squadrons, VF-142 and VF-143, just off a Vietnam deployment with USS Const
ellation. They were some of the finest junior officers in the fleet, all combat-experienced aviators, all graduates of the Naval Academy, career Navy. We didn’t take reservists. Their names were Jerry Beaulier, Ron Stoops, Cliff Martin, and John Padgett. The RIOs were Jim Nelson, Jack Hawver, Bob Cloyes, and Ed Scudder. The instructors and I sensed quickly that their COs had chosen well. All were sharp and well prepared.

  After fifteen years in the Navy, I had learned a few things about leadership. If you had not attended Annapolis or ROTC in college, you learned it not by express instruction, but by absorption of example. You got it on the job. Some of it came by negative example: “Don’t be like Commander What’s-his-name.” But most of my role models were helpful and even inspiring. I’ve mentioned Gene Valencia and Skank Remsen. But many fine aviators were mentors to me. Their lessons always resonated. They taught me what kind of leader I needed to become.

  When the legendary Swede Vejtasa was a wing commander at Miramar, he welcomed every new class in the RAG more or less like this. “Okay, boys, training command was fun, because each of you did well. You wouldn’t be in fighters if you hadn’t. Now the fun’s over. When you finish, you are headed to war, maybe immediately. Pay attention! Learn everything you can about your aircraft and its capabilities, the tactics, and the standard operating procedures. They may well save your life. Dismissed.”

  Swede was telling those nuggets what they needed to hear. With advanced talents such as these eight, however, I felt no need to be heavy. I issued a heartfelt “Welcome aboard” and said we had been charged with an important purpose. I introduced my instructor team and told them who they all were. I explained that we would all learn together along the way. The main thing for any skipper to bear in mind is this: The troops need to know he’s interested in their welfare. This is true regardless of the leader’s personal communication style. Hard-asses can care, too. Some leaders give lip service to caring, but what a leader does to show it is far more important. I wanted my instructors to challenge them—but always constructively. We would aspire to build their confidence, not destroy it. They were professionals and future mentors in training. So we were going to show them how it was done.