Topgun

by Dan Pedersen

  Master Chief Dave Hobbs and I settled on a creative approach. The morning after the event, in my daily address over the intercom, I explained what had happened and the damage it had done. “Whoever did this, I’m offering you a deal. Today, and today only, I urge you to come forward to discuss this with us. We’ll help you.” I provided a secure phone number that our saboteur could call.

  That night my bedside phone buzzed. Dave was on the line. “He’s called in,” he said. After a short negotiation, the culprit walked into the master chief’s office. I hustled down to confront him and find out what the kid thought he was doing. As I entered, I saw our saboteur. He was a desperate-looking, emaciated kid of maybe twenty—hollowed eyes, the gaunt, skeletal face of a person in the grip of addiction. Looking at him, I couldn’t be angry. Here was the embodiment of the cancer afflicting our navy, and our culture back home. What started out as a fun diversion for this kid had taken over his life.

  He admitted he was addicted to angel dust—PCP. He couldn’t explain his behavior, but was devastated by what he was doing. He pleaded for help.

  We put him in protective custody. The damage and extra work he had caused everybody earned him considerable wrath from the crew. Had his identity become known, Dave and I feared he would be beaten by angry sailors or sent for a nighttime swim with the sharks. Later, we sent him to San Diego, where he underwent treatment for his drug addiction.

  The obvious answer to the drug problem aboard our ships was to interdict the supply. All we needed to do was check the incoming packages sent from the States, and our long days at sea would have taken care of the situation. Whatever supplies had been smuggled aboard before our departure would have been quickly consumed, and our addicts would have been forced to go through withdrawal as a result.

  We couldn’t do that. The legal system ruled that our sailors had a right to privacy, and their packages could not be opened or searched. This changed later, and during the post-9/11 years, anything coming or going to or from a war zone was thoroughly searched. Contraband, including alcohol (often disguised as mouthwash), drugs, weapons, and weapon parts, was confiscated by the postal system. If only we could have done that in 1980, lives could have been saved.

  Personnel issues occupied the majority of my time. Talk to any teacher, and they will tell you that the disciplinary cases in their classroom may include only two or three kids, but those two or three kids take up half their day trying to keep everything under control. It was the same aboard the Ranger.

  Occasionally I glimpsed the stress and hardship the sailors endured as a result of their home lives back in the States. Dear John letters flowed into the ship with depressing frequency, and many of my men suffered serious heartbreak while we patrolled our nation’s distant ramparts. Some dealt with it by focusing on their jobs and throwing themselves into their work with renewed intensity. Others tried everything they could to get home. This included jumping overboard. We had a number of cases like that until we broadcast on the ship’s internal television system photos of the sharks in our area that fed on the garbage the Navy’s ships released from our compactors. Once the men saw the teeth on those things, nobody willingly went overboard.

  One evening while in port, I got a call telling me we had a sailor sitting on a flight-deck rail, bleeding from his arms. He was threatening to jump seventy feet to a concrete pier beneath him. I was attending a dinner reception at the time and was wearing my tropical white uniform. I dropped everything, sped back to the ship, and found the young sailor brokenhearted and sobbing. He held a pair of scissors in one hand, which he’d used to slash his wrists.

  I talked to the young fellow, trying to coax his story out. Haltingly, he related to it me. It was a sad story, a mess of his own creation that now left him trapped. In his mental condition, death seemed to be the only way out. At length, I was able to coax him off the rail. He came over to me and grabbed me, hugging me desperately. We got him below to sick bay where the corpsmen treated his self-inflicted injuries. As I watched him depart, I realized my tropical whites were smeared with his blood. It turned out he had gotten both of his girlfriends pregnant.

  Through it all, we showed the flag at ports of call from Thailand to Kenya and Sri Lanka while operating in the Persian Gulf on what we called Gonzo Station. This was near the end of the Iran hostage crisis, and we anxiously awaited word to attack. That word never came, but we were armed and ready.

  The Iranians never tested us with their air force, which included a batch of F-14 Tomcats we had sold them just before the revolution deposed our ally, the shah. I sure wanted them to try. I had two squadrons of Tomcats—the two oldest and most storied units in the Navy (VF-1 and VF-2)—filled with hard-charging, type A fighter pilots who wanted a crack at Iranians as bad as anyone.

  We didn’t face the kind of threat from the Iranians that we did from the Soviet Backfire regiments, so we usually armed our F-14s with a mix of Sparrows, Sidewinders, and Guns, leaving the Phoenix missiles aboard ship. Whenever we went through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf, we cycled our Tomcats off the deck and pushed them out between our ship and the edge of international waters within sight of the Iranian coast. Any low-flying Iranian bandits would have been caught the moment they were “in play” over neutral waters, and we would have torn them apart.

  Instead of risking aircraft, they decided to harass us with fast-moving PT boats, something our battle group’s destroyers and cruisers dealt with very effectively.

  During intense operational cycles, a typical air wing usually loses five or six engines a month to “foreign object damage,” or FOD. This can be any stray piece of metal like a screw, a bolt, or a nut that has fallen onto the flight deck that gets sucked into an intake and wrecks the engine’s turbine blades. It is a constant problem, both at sea and on land, that is solved by frequent walkdowns by our sailors to find anything that could harm our aircraft. Of course, with the available crew, it was impossible to find every little nut or screw that fell into the tie-downs in the deck.

  We computed that we needed three hundred to four hundred men for a thorough FOD search, but the flight-deck crew just couldn’t provide that many bodies. I hit upon an idea from my visits to the ship’s belowdecks spaces. I announced that at a specific time, called by the air boss who runs the flight deck, everyone not engaged in an essential job could report to the deck, breathe the sea air, get some exercise, and help eliminate FOD.

  Sometimes I got on the 1MC circuit and encouraged the crew to come up and “smell the roses.” While I got some laughs, it worked, and I often saw engineering “snipes” and mess cooks stretching themselves in search of the elusive FOD. Moreover, I offered three days’ liberty to those who found a very small screw painted a particular color, usually black. That got the crew’s attention. We even had cooks in aprons doing walkdowns.

  Ranger’s program was a huge success. We went 107 days without FOD damage, and the concept spread Navy-wide.

  We stayed out on Gonzo Station keeping an eye on the Iranians and flying every day through the first weeks of 1981. In March, we headed back to Subic Bay and a much-needed break. As we reached the Strait of Malacca, the busiest shipping bottleneck in the world, my air wing commander asked if we could launch a few aircraft. I agreed. It made sense to get some eyes up there. It was a Friday morning, March 20, 1981, a day none of us ever forgot.

  From my seat on the port side of the bridge, I watched the deck crew launch a couple of A-6 Intruder bombers. They fanned out ahead of us as we steamed east through the strait and into the South China Sea.

  As our birds flew along, they caught sight of a tiny boat drifting on the swells. Circling back, they made a pass and reported it crowded with people. Apparently it was without power. It had no sails. They were just drifting with the tide. It was a humid, steamy day without even the benefit of a small breeze. The people on the boat were largely exposed to the sun’s full strength.

  We plotted the boat’s position, and I ordered our ship to
intercept it. Late that afternoon, we spotted it. The vessel was perhaps forty feet long with a tiny enclosed wheelhouse, and every square inch of it seemed to be covered by people. They were lying inert, one atop another, piled together in such terrible physical condition that some were said to be hallucinating. Most were too weak to even sit up and stare at the enormous supercarrier bearing down on them. A few had scraps of clothing. Most were bare from the waist up. Some had no clothes at all.

  Our helicopters circled overhead, snapping photographs as we hove to and began rescuing these people. Some had to be taken aboard in stretchers lowered down to the boat. They had been at sea for two weeks after fleeing the violence continuing to plague Vietnam. Not long into their journey to freedom, the boat’s engine failed. Food ran out first. Water soon followed. There were 138 people aboard a boat meant to hold, at most, 25. They grew weak. Several people died. The day we rescued them, we were told the survivors were considering cannibalism to survive.

  We arrived just in time.

  Our crew sprang into action, doting on the survivors with incredible tenderness. Our medical staff treated them for dehydration, heat exhaustion, and many other ailments, getting fluids in them with IV bags. Our tailors and parachute riggers sewed them clothing while our cooks prepared meals. It didn’t take long for the crew and the refugees to bond. It was a beautiful sight, one of those unexpected moments in life where what you do plays a critical role in the well-being of others.

  They were ordinary folks from Vietnam who had risked everything to escape an oppressive regime still killing or imprisoning its own people. Among those we rescued was a Vietnamese soldier who had deserted to seek a new life away from the fury and violence. It was impossible not to be affected by their ordeal, and by what they had risked everything for—the same things that drove generations to American shores.

  We took them to Subic Bay with us, where the Philippine government gave them sanctuary. We later found out their ordeal was far from over. The Filipinos treated them poorly. Food and clean water became scarce in their refugee camp. Ultimately, though, most of the 138 were able to immigrate to the United States, where they started new lives on the West Coast as American citizens.

  As they waited for their chance to fly east to our nation, my ship’s company suffered a terrible tragedy. A young airman named Paul Trerice collapsed and died while we were in Subic Bay about three weeks after we rescued the refugees.

  Trerice was a sad story, a twenty-year-old from Michigan whose time in uniform was a case study of the devastation wrought by drugs in our Navy. Having served for three years, he had never been promoted. In fact, he was in frequent trouble and even tried to desert twice. His squadron commander disciplined him repeatedly, though he was no stranger to our correctional custody training unit [CCU]. (Some people mistakenly call it the brig, which was totally separate.) Nothing seemed to work. He remained an often belligerent hard case who frustrated his squadron commander. I never met this sailor, but his death changed my life forever.

  The ship had just returned from a five-day visit to Hong Kong, where he was an unauthorized absentee. He was next in the CCU that April of 1981. My understanding from the Navy investigation that followed his death is that, combative as always, he fought with a couple of our senior petty officers, who then took him up on the flight deck and ordered him to start jogging. It was routine exercise in the sweltering Subic Bay heat. Trerice had previously been restricted to bread and water as a result of his combativeness. As he was running, he collapsed. Taken below, he began to have seizures. Thirty minutes later, medical personnel arrived to treat him, but sadly, he died soon after. The Navy determined he had gone into cardiac arrest as a result of heat exhaustion.

  During the investigation, it came to light that he’d been smoking marijuana with several other sailors inside one of our S-3 Vikings in the hangar. Our chaplain came to see me months after Paul Trerice’s death to tell me that he’d been treating him and his addiction for a year as part of the CREDO Program. It wasn’t just pot; much more serious and dangerous drugs were in the picture. I asked, “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” The chaplain shook his head, saying, “That was between him and God.”

  The captain is ultimately responsible for everything that happens on his ship. Despite all the good things we accomplished and the high level at which the crew had performed, I knew this tragedy would have a reckoning. We commenced a Judge Advocate General investigation on the way home.

  We arrived in San Diego in May, where I was summoned before the commander of Naval Air Forces, Pacific, Vice Admiral Robert “Dutch” Schoultz. Based on the way Trerice was treated while in the custody unit, the admiral issued me a nonpunitive letter of caution.

  After he announced his decision in the matter, Schoultz said, “Dan, I’d like you to take Ranger on her next cruise.”

  Of course I said yes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ONE MORE GOODBYE

  Somewhere in the Pacific

  Spring 1982

  I sat in my captain’s cabin, holding Mary Beth’s letter like a precious gem. Two pages. I read and reread it until I had committed every sentence to memory. I still could not believe it had found its way to me, that she would be thinking of me all these decades after our parting outside the Whittier College cafeteria.

  Dan, I want you to know that I know the kind of man you are and will always be. Your friends know it too, and they refuse to believe the things being said about you in the newspapers. The tragedy had been big news in the Detroit Free Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Diego Union-Tribune.

  She reached out to me, knowing how devastating the media storm must have been. Then the New York Times, Playboy magazine, and the network nightly news all picked up the story. It became a national spectacle. Paul Trerice’s death was without a doubt a terrible tragedy, but how it sparked a media frenzy shocked and mystified me. In 1981, 4,699 members of the U.S. military—all branches—died while in service to their country. It was a time of peace, and none of those deaths resulted from combat operations. Accidents, suicides, a scattering of murders, heart attacks, strokes—they happen.

  Of all those, Trerice’s was the only one that riveted the press for months. The death was a terrible tragedy that inflicted lifelong suffering on his family. For that, there was no excuse. Could it have been prevented? I asked that question every day for years. I just don’t know. I think if we had known the extent of his apparent drug addiction, we might have been able to steer him to treatment instead of to the Correctional Custody Training Unit for his desertions and other acts. I thought about the saboteur we had sent to drug treatment, giving him another chance at a good life. I wish we had been able to do the same for Paul Trerice and his family. By the time his drug use came to light, it was too late to help him.

  The West Coast press wasn’t interested in my view of this. It tore into me with astonishing cruelty, relying on sources that included the two drug dealers we’d kicked out of the Navy to show me as a nautical tyrant, recklessly endangering the lives of my crew with sadistic punishments meted out on a whim. I became a Cold War version of Captain Bligh. Calls came from all over the country for my head.

  My family received death threats almost daily for months. Hate mail poured in, especially from Michigan. The Trerice family filed several lawsuits against the Navy. One named me as a defendant. It was almost unheard of for an active-duty officer to be sued over something that happened in the line of duty.

  In all the turmoil, this letter from Mary Beth arrived. We hadn’t spoken since the Eisenhower years. I hadn’t seen her since the football game where she gave me that cautious half-wave from the hip, tears in her eyes. It didn’t matter. I thought about her very often.

  I resolved to write her back and thank her, to tell her what her words of support meant to me. I had gone from being a respected naval aviator and ships captain whose peers had put my name on the admiral’s list a year early, to the embodiment of every negative stereotype
about the Navy and its officers.

  I was putting my pen to the paper when I paused. Don’t do it. She made her choice. You have to honor it.

  Mary Beth was still married to her football player. I was married too. Given how I still felt for her, writing her back would be a betrayal. It would also open up that wound again. I’d be in touch with the person I’d always loved and could never share my life with. As bad as the media attacks had been, suffering that would be far worse.

  I never wrote her back. Instead, I carried the letter with me aboard the Ranger for a month as the media firestorm continued. Each night, I reread it to remind myself that there were those I cared about who refused to believe what was being written about me and my style of leadership.

  One day, I realized I was beginning to rely too heavily on it. I couldn’t write her. I couldn’t reestablish contact. In the moment, I needed to focus on my crew and my ship, and find the strength to ignore the publicity.

  A federal court finally tossed the lawsuits, a decision that was upheld on appeal. But the blowback from Trerice’s death affected a lot of good officers and petty officers aboard the Ranger. I did what I could to protect them, and by then my own career hung in the balance.

  On June 11, 1982, I left the Ranger for a shoreside staff position. This was the classic career progression on the way to flag rank, and I was given a plum job serving as deputy chief of staff for current operations under the commander in chief, Pacific Fleet, at Pearl Harbor. It’s probably the busiest I had ever been in the service, but the job historically had its rewards. It was known as an “admiral maker.” About a year into this job, I got a summons to Washington from the chief of naval operations. In his office, with the door closed, we discussed what I faced going forward with the Navy. One of Michigan’s senators had made Trerice’s death a personal crusade. The CNO believed that this was motivated by the fact that Trerice’s family members were substantial donors to the senator and the CNO saw the senator’s attacks on the Navy as essentially political theater as he faced a difficult reelection campaign.