Topgun

by Dan Pedersen

  One evening at the Miramar O club while Class One was winding down, we designed what has endured ever since as the official Topgun flight-suit patch. Steve Smith and Mel Holmes sketched it out on a napkin: a MiG-21 in a Phantom’s gunsight reticle and pipper. In Washington, people who had time to worry about such things thought it might offend the Russians. I made one call to Vice Admiral Bringle’s office and the complaint went away. The patch design perfectly reflected the origin story of Topgun, and it has survived basically unchanged for fifty years. Every graduate of the Navy Fighter Weapons School wears it with pride.

  As that small emblem got around the fleet, people noticed. As the reputation of Topgun flourished and grew, the fleet squadrons began calling us. Very soon Steve had the pleasure of explaining that all our billets were full, but that he’d be glad to keep their names on file.

  The story of the patch, like so many other stories about Topgun, suggested the wisdom of letting junior officers be in charge. If the Navy’s decision to put a fresh-caught lieutenant commander in charge seemed like risk avoidance at first, I see now that our insurgency could have succeeded in no other way. Without the great creativity, focus, and pace of younger men, we wouldn’t have gotten it done. We were never more openly controversial than we had to be, but we had to rock their boat. You can get away with it, if you know what your mission is and you’re damn good. We were.

  The graduates of Class One returned to the fleet with a changed way of thinking, a patch, and a Topgun training manual. It was a master document that captured everything we had taught them and made it teachable. As training officers, they were the evangelists of the Egg and the lords of the Loose Deuce, and they set to work remaking the fleet squadrons in our image. Meanwhile, Class Two showed up, and we started the cycle all over again, hustling hard to update the lessons and the program documentation. There was no time to breathe easy.

  To think all of this came together in about ninety days and took root in a stolen trailer. On the day Steve got that crane operator to perform a little larceny in exchange for a case of scotch, we never imagined it would become the nerve center of the Navy’s evolving effort to improve its fighter tactics and doctrine for the next fifty years. But that’s exactly what happened. Never was a man more fortunate to have God as his copilot.

  Right after Class Two graduated, Vice Admiral Bringle, as ComNavAirPac, made a formal request to his boss, Admiral John J. Hyland, the commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, officially to establish the Navy Fighter Weapons School at Miramar effective July 1, 1969. This meant everything to our fledgling graduate school. For the first time, we had explicit validation from the top of our chain of command, unprecedented for a project led by junior officers. Around the same time, that world-beating RIO, J. C. Smith, relieved me as Topgun’s officer in charge. The handover was easy. He had been with me every step of the way. Continuity like that helped Topgun grow roots—just what Sam Leeds had ensured by letting me have the job in the first place.

  In October, I went to Washington to brief the Pentagon on our experiences at the Topgun schoolhouse. Our syllabus was approved by the CNO himself. Later that year, Commander Richard Schulte relieved Hank Halleland as skipper of VF-121, our parent command. In Dick Schulte, Topgun continued to be fortunate in its friends. He personally arranged for the acquisition of four new adversary aircraft for our school. The A-4E Mongoose was far more capable than the two-seat TA-4s we had been flying as adversaries in “dissimilar” air combat maneuvering.

  One Friday at the O club in the early days, Tooter Teague tried to sell me on using the Air Force’s F-86H Sabre as our principal aggressor. The debate went long into the night and was settled the following morning in the air, F-86 versus A-4E. We bent those two jets hard. The moment of truth came when Tooter tried to match me in a vertical climb. He had no chance, not even in burner. It ended with his aircraft stalling, going into an inverted spin, and falling out of control like a dropping maple leaf. At that point he agreed with me that the Mongoose should be Topgun’s aggressor of choice. No more borrowing aircraft from the RAG, in other words. We were free to soup them up as we wanted, removing all excess weight. The Mongoose’s superior performance and constant availability enabled us to develop an expanded dissimilar ACM curriculum as well. A few months later, the Topgun curriculum got its first test in the crucible of war.

  When our student Jerry Beaulier deployed with Fighter Squadron 142, the Ghostriders, on USS Constellation in March 1970, it continued to be a strange time on Yankee Station. The air war was still on hold while President Johnson’s White House held peace talks with North Vietnam. Though the carriers were striking at enemy supply lines running into South Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia, targets in North Vietnam were off-limits. That meant U.S. planes weren’t flying where the bandits were. As usual, there had not been much of a threat to our carriers from enemy aircraft. Not since September 1968 had a U.S. pilot killed a MiG.

  In the twelve months since receiving his Topgun patch and returning to his squadron, Jerry had been serving as VF-142’s weapons-and-tactics officer, teaching what he knew but enjoying little opportunity to see anyone use it. That changed in March, when it seemed the MiGs were ranging farther south than they had been.

  On Saturday, March 28, Jerry and his RIO, Steve Barkley, were idling in their F-4J, standing on the catapult in alert five status, ready for a quick launch. When the radar control ship reported four bandits inbound toward the carrier that afternoon, Beaulier and his air wing commander, Paul Speer, were launched off the Constellation’s deck. Directed to take a westerly vector toward the oncoming enemy, still eighty-seven miles out, they were cleared to fire at once (they got a break from the usual rules of engagement requiring visual identification).

  As the radar calls kept coming and the range closed, they saw no sign of the MiGs. The Phantom pair pressed ahead. It was Beaulier who first sighted the enemy fighters ahead and above him, at about twenty-five thousand feet. Following the Loose Deuce doctrine, Jerry alerted Speer and took lead, stoking his afterburners and accelerating into a climbing turn to intercept. The two MiGs spotted the Americans and separated, the leader climbing and his wingman breaking into a right turn. Beaulier took the enemy wingman while Speer went after the leader.

  As he closed with the number two MiG, Beaulier realized, I suspect, in the space of those first twenty seconds, that his excitement had led him to stray from proper technique. He was fighting in the horizontal. In climbing to engage his enemy directly, he had lost too much airspeed to attack effectively. He dove again to regain it, pulling seven Gs at the bottom. He found the MiG descending with him. Looking to avoid a turning fight, he returned to what we had taught him. He pulled up sharply to initiate the Egg maneuver, rocketing vertically. The MiG had no chance to keep up.

  Meanwhile, down below, Commander Speer had seemed to unnerve his own MiG. Its pilot turned wide and left the fight. Speer was turning back toward Beaulier to clear Jerry’s tail when Jerry’s MiG saw Speer. The North Vietnamese pilot fired a heat-seeking Atoll missile at the approaching Phantom. The head-on shot missed.

  Up and up Beaulier’s Phantom went. With RIO Barkley keeping him oriented, telling him the MiG shooting at Speer was no threat, Jerry focused on setting up his shot. Arcing over the top, he saw that their opponent was vulnerable. The MiG had lost sight of him. The enemy pilot banked right then reversed sharply left, as if looking for his pursuer.

  This last maneuver was a fatal mistake. It gave Jerry a clean shot up the enemy’s tailpipe. With the tone of a Sidewinder lock buzzing in his helmet earphones, he pressed the trigger and his missile left the rail. It tracked true and exploded underneath the MiG. A shower of steel fragments sliced into the enemy plane and set it on fire.

  Trailing flames like a torch, the MiG sailed along, rocking its wings. Beaulier pulled up sharply to avoid running past him, slid in behind him again, and fired another missile. This one finished him. Just like he had done in the drone shoot at Topgun.

>   Back on the flight deck of the Constellation, the celebration started immediately. Paul Speer, a large man, gave diminutive Jerry a bear hug and lifted him off his feet. Champagne, strictly forbidden, flowed. Later that day a Hanoi radio broadcast confirmed the MiG loss. In Washington, the politics of the peace talks forced the Pentagon to make smoke. Other than a brief announcement of a MiG being downed—the kill was said to have been scored by Phantoms that were escorting photoreconnaissance aircraft—the Navy kept a lid on the story.

  Back at Miramar, we wondered who the MiG killer was. We worked our private channels as best we could. When word came back that an unnamed aircrew from the Constellation had gotten it, we were thrilled. The carrier’s two fighter squadrons had sent us Topgun’s first class. We had wondered if there would ever be another dogfight over Vietnam, and were thrilled to think we might have a case study bearing out our tactics. When it was finally confirmed that the MiG killers were Beaulier and Barkley, we were ecstatic. It validated not only what we taught, but our school’s very existence.

  The highly classified after-action report of their engagement went back to the Pentagon, where the aviation and intel offices studied it in depth. Eventually we listened to the voice tapes of Jerry, Barkley, Speer, and his RIO. As we expected, there was no excitement there. They sounded like they were discussing a particularly important grocery list. Jerry went on to fly 220 missions in the F-4 Phantom. Topgun never taught a better one. Some said his success produced the impetus, then and there, to begin the process of turning Topgun into a proper naval command.

  As our humble detachment within VF-121 saw its influence grow, we attracted some interesting visitors. Some very good foreign pilots served on exchange at the RAG. Foremost among these, in terms of talent and experience, was the British contingent. As their Fleet Air Arm had been transitioning to the F-4, the Brits sent some capable pilots and back-seaters to train with us. They passed through VF-121 much as other foreign exchange pilots did, serving in the RAG tactics section at the time we were forming Topgun. Their senior man was Commander Dick Lord, who was exceptional in the air. All of them, including Dick Moody, Peter Jago, and Colin Griffin, were very professional. While I could not involve them officially in Topgun—Dick had returned to England by the time we started—the Royal Navy exchange pilots performed valuable service within the RAG, especially flying as adversaries.

  And they were great fun on the ground. As Condor sums it up, “What we learned from them was how to play mess rugby in our whites at the Admiral Kidd O Club in San Diego; how to pass out in our plates at a dining in; and how to leave our breakfast on the ramp and still make our takeoff times.” Contrary to headlines in the British press a few years ago, British pilots had nothing to do with the formation of Topgun. The revisionist history has been disappointing. But it never diminished our affection for the exchange Brits, whether it be in a tavern or in the air.

  In 1970, the Great One himself came for a visit to our trailer: Brigadier General Robin Olds. His fighting days were behind him now, but what glorious days they were. In World War II, he became an ace in both the P-38 Lightning and the P-51 Mustang, something no one else ever did, finishing the war as a squadron commander at the age of twenty-two. In 1966 and 1967, his fighter wing was so prolific that the comedian Bob Hope called it “the world’s leading distributor of MiG parts.” Robin led the way with four kills—a record that stood until 1972. He walked on water as far I was concerned.

  When Dick Schulte and I invited Robin to be a guest of honor at one of our monthly Super Happy Hours at Miramar, Olds was serving as commandant of cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. He quickly accepted, but on one condition. He said he would come only if we let him fly. Though he was a second-generation West Pointer, he had none of the high attitude you often find in academy graduates. Robin cared only about results. It didn’t matter what ring you wore. But we were happy to give him this little perk. We put him on the schedule for an ACM hop in an F-4.

  I didn’t know whether Robin was current in that aircraft. We figured he had never flown a Navy model. He arrived with flight gear and was clearly ready to go. After we gave him a quick cockpit checkout, away he went. J. C. Smith was his rear-seater and Mel Holmes flew on his wing.

  The first engagement was a 2 vs. 1. The skilled duo of Robin and Rattler made short work of the aggressor. Rattler went low and got the bogey turning, leaving Robin to fly free and get the kill. So far so good. In the next engagement, a 2 vs. 2, Robin and Mel took on a pair of A-4Es flown by Dick Schulte and T. R. Swartz, a MiG killer from the A-4 tribe. (T.R., a former F-8 pilot, scored the only air victory of the war by a Skyhawk pilot.)

  It was Mel who located them. Mel and Robin had briefed in advance how they would use the Loose Deuce formation, and Mel took the lead, turning toward them, reaching the Merge, and beginning a turning horizontal dogfight against the closest aggressor plane. The other A-4 wasn’t to be found at the moment. Mel, as the “goat,” was setting up his A-4 enemy to be bagged by Robin. That’s when things fell apart.

  The Air Force legend did not show. Having spotted the other Mongoose, he went tearing off after it. As Mel radioed to Olds, “Hey, I’m engaged,” Robin was on the chase, leaving Mel in favor of trying to get his fangs into the second bandit.

  Meanwhile, Swartz gained an edge on Rattler, conducting the dogfight expertly at low altitude, exploiting all the dancing ability of the lightweight, fast-rolling, tightly turning, rapidly accelerating Mongoose. It ended with Mel getting bagged. Believe me, that didn’t happen often. It happened here only because his partner quit the tactical plan.

  Back on the ground Robin climbed down from the cockpit, enthused. He had enjoyed the chance to wring out a fighter again and get a kill. But he pulled me aside. “Your back-seater talked the entire time. He never shut up!” He was right. J. C. usually never stopped talking. Especially when there was a serious mistake to correct. I still have to laugh. If a triple ace wearing a star was doing it wrong, Lieutenant Commander Smith would not be too shy to tell him. It was part of what made him the best RIO of his day.

  At the debrief, J. C. Smith continued talking to Robin—just the way junior officers always talked at Topgun. He was just reviewing our rulebook, dogging his superior officer for not staying with Mel. If Robin ever got his wing out of joint over it, we saw no sign. Despite his deeply ingrained ideas about fighter tactics, and his commitment to the Air Force’s Fluid Four, he finally conceded the wisdom of our tactic. “You’ve got it right,” he told me. I doubt the Air Force ever adopted our formation afterward, but it did me a world of good to know that Robin Olds seemed convinced. He would eventually upset the wrong people with his outspokenness on the errors of his service over Vietnam. I would have done anything to persuade this brilliant tactician, warrior, and disruptor to transfer to Miramar. Major command should have been his due.

  Handsome, well spoken, and charming, he filled the bill like a rock star that evening, drawing a huge crowd. His speech was superb and very well received.

  In May 1971 Commander Roger Box succeeded J. C. Smith as officer in charge of Topgun. A two-tour combat aviator and Navy test pilot, Roger had an agenda. He believed the time had come for Topgun to become a stand-alone command. At the time, it was still just a department within the Phantom RAG. The RAG had the authority to move aircraft and people in and out of Topgun at its discretion. Without control of its own assets, the school in theory could have been out of business overnight if the RAG decided its needs were more important than the Fighter Weapons School’s.

  But Roger had an ace up his sleeve: the sympathy of the commander of Fleet Air Miramar, Captain Armistead “Chick” Smith. Roger, having served on his fighter wing staff, enjoyed good relations with him and approaching him for help springing Topgun free of control by the RAG. But there were problems. The CO of the RAG squadron at the time was Commander Don “Dirt” Pringle, a highly capable, well-respected officer who could overwhelm people merely with his presenc
e. Under pressure to keep the RAG producing, Pringle didn’t want to lose any of his prized aircraft to a separate Topgun command. He needed the A-4Es especially for his tactics shop. He was also hoping to begin doing what Topgun had been doing.

  A key player in the fight for Topgun independence turned out to be Lieutenant Commander Dave Frost, one of Roger Box’s instructors and a brilliant tactician who succeeded Cobra Ruliffson as schoolhouse specialist in the Sparrow missile. He was member of the Annapolis class of 1963, and had graduated in the second Topgun class.

  Dave and his fellow instructors wanted to build on what the first generation of Topgun had accomplished. The manual needed updating, particularly because of all the real-world data the fleet was sending back as they began bagging MiGs. With our program getting results over North Vietnam, there was increased demand as well. We needed more adversary aircraft and skilled pilots than ever. But those resources were being pulled in three directions: training RAG students; supporting Topgun classes; and working with the fleet’s adversary training program to prepare deploying squadrons for combat. Something had to give.

  On the way back from a tactical conference at VX-4, Frosty and fellow instructors Dave Bjerke, Goose Lorcher, and Pete Pettigrew stopped for dinner in Malibu. They compiled their notes and drew diagrams on paper napkins. The changes that emerged from the “Malibu Conference” were used to update the F-4 tactics manual and maintenance plans.