Topgun

by Dan Pedersen

  Resentment against the fighter community and Topgun ran high in the mid-1990s. Not all of that was a result of the rock-star status the movie seemed to give us within the public. The controversy over the alleged sexual assaults at the Tailhook Convention in 1991 left a stain on naval aviation. As Rolland G. “Dawg” Thompson, then Topgun’s CO, put it, “Topgun represented, to many, the last bastion of fighter aviation—the hallmark of what many on the outside of our culture despised at the time.”

  From the beauty, beaches, and pulse of Southern California, Topgun decamped for a place that seemed at times like the edge of civilization. The press paid a lot of attention to this, and as our trucks moved out, people lined the freeway holding signs, saying goodbye and wishing us well. More than one Topgun wife cried as they drove into Fallon, seeing the valley’s desolation, feeling the high desert heat on their faces, and thinking of what they had left behind in San Diego. Their beautiful homes and fine schools—gone.

  The chief of naval operations at the time, Admiral Jeremy Michael Boorda, protected us quite well, mandating that while the graduate school would come under the umbrella of Strike U, it would remain its own command. Based on Topgun principles of training, Strike U had once set high standards for the attack aviators that it trained. But by the time Dawg’s boys began arriving, along with their eighteen Hornets and four Tomcats, the strike aircraft instructors were no longer even murder-boarding their lectures during instructor qualification. They didn’t even have their own aircraft to fly and teach with.

  Nineteen ninety-six was a year of tragedy for the Navy. The CNO, Admiral Boorda, took his life, leaving a note that explained his shame over wearing an unearned valor award on his uniform. After his death, Topgun apparently lost the last flag officer in a position to protect the school. With his passing, Topgun was demoted from an independent command to just a department of Strike U, under a two-star, a rear admiral.

  I tell you, it broke my heart when we lost that fight. It broke the heart of all of us who’d devoted so much of our lives to create and foster Topgun, who had risked their careers to keep it going in the face of increasing hostility. Our success was living testimony to the ability of dynamic, creative, motivated junior officers to do great things. Was this message considered dangerous or something? I don’t know.

  I do know they even tried to take the name Topgun away from us. When Dawg showed up at Fallon one day after Admiral Boorda’s death, he found that the Strike U headquarters building no longer had a sign reading “Topgun.” It had been replaced with “N7,” an obscure bureaucratic designator for the Navy Fighter Weapons School.

  Boorda was replaced by Admiral Jay Johnson (who to this day remains the last aviator to become CNO). Dawg took this as a bad sign at first, as Johnson was a friend of the incoming Strike U commander, Rear Admiral Bernie Smith. Merging the attack and fighter communities into a single entity threatened to dilute our culture. But give Admiral Smith credit. Seeing what was at risk, he put Thompson in charge of all training. At the decommissioning change-of-command ceremony, Dawg invited his boss as guest speaker, just to make sure he was in attendance. That’s where the Topgun skipper made a dramatic declaration: “I will compromise my career before I compromise the standards of this organization.” He would make good on the promise.

  The Strike U establishment at Fallon ended up leaving the Topgun Bros alone, though their wives were very unhappy with the way they were treated by the established social clique at Fallon. It mattered. The divisive atmosphere hurt morale badly, which was part of why more than a few well-qualified people turned down orders to go to Topgun. Its prestige had been badly diminished by making it just a department in the “Strike U” with command leadership going from a junior officer to a rear admiral.

  Dawg realized he had to change things. Leveraging his position as director of training, he required Topgun’s instructors to become involved with the strike curriculum too. “The game plan was that they were not going to absorb us; we were going to absorb them,” he said. That was easier said than done. The schism persisted.

  But so did Topgun. With Dawg flying top cover to preserve the integrity of the program, his junior officers did what they’ve always done—they continued the mission. This is how bureaucratic warfare is waged in the military. Organizations come and organizations go, but they can often be saved by someone who is willing to swallow his pride and pursue a matter of principle with calm conviction. I credit Rolland Thompson for saving the program in a very difficult time. When one of his instructors, Richard W. “Rhett” Butler, returned as CO of the Topgun department six years later, he was gratified to notice that the “N7” label on the wall was gone. It had been changed to “Topgun Training Department.”

  It’s not well realized even in our community how precarious our existence was during the move from Miramar to Nevada. Reportedly about 80 percent of the junior instructor pilots were prepared to leave the Navy. But with Dawg’s leadership guiding the success of the combined strike fighter training program, most all of them stayed for a full tour. If not for our resilient group of JOs, who were given strong direction by their devoted leader, Topgun might well have ceased to exist.

  I try not to think about all this needless bureaucratic infighting, especially on gorgeous nights like this one. I come out here by the pool for peace. Sometimes I relive the best moments of my career and feel that old sense of pride return. You know, though? As much as I loved the flying, the best moments to me now were those where we saved lives. The couple stranded off Baja, the boat full of dying refugees we rescued in the South China Sea. Those were the best moments.

  It is one of life’s great beauties—and mysteries—how things put in motion years before can well up from the past to alter your present. The boat full of refugees turned out to be one of those pivotal episodes in my life. Many years later, in 1998, I received a call from the Navy’s chief of information in Washington. He told me that one of the survivors we rescued in the South China Sea back in 1981 wanted to meet with me. He had been thirteen years old when his mother, brother, and two sisters paid for passage aboard that decrepit boat. He never forgot the sight of our carrier pulling alongside, the big number “61” painted on the side of the island superstructure. Now he wanted to thank me in person for stopping and saving 138 strangers.

  I readily agreed, thinking we would just talk on the phone. Instead, the Navy asked if we could meet on the set of Good Morning America. I’ll tell you what, I never thought that a moment on a soundstage would lead to so many great things in my life. Lan Dalat came on camera next to me, and from that first greeting, I knew we were destined to be close.

  His family stayed for several months in the refugee camp on Luzon before emigrating to Washington State. Later, they moved to Southern California in search of a warmer climate that was a bit more like home for them. Lan and his siblings suffered bullying in the public school system. They were called names, derided for being “boat people.” It was a tough and sometimes cruel end to childhood as he came of age in his adopted country, but the opportunities America offered were seized upon by his family.

  All four kids graduated from college and embarked on highly successful careers, starting families along the way. Lan asked me to come speak at his college graduation, and later at his commissioning ceremony in the U.S. Army. I did the same with his brother Tony, who served in the Army’s Special Operations Command during the war in Afghanistan.

  More than just about anyone I’ve ever known, Lan Dalat and his family understand the real heart and real power of America, and they devoted their lives to defending those things.

  Want to know the best part of their story? At least to me, anyway, but I’m biased of course. When Lan got married and had a baby boy, they named him Dan, after me. I think about that and get emotional. I almost lost my tribe, my brotherhood, when I left the Navy in 1983. In my worst and most isolated moments, I made plans to refit a 110-foot oceangoing tug so I could once again sail away to sea. I was going
to ride the Pacific waves to Japan, the Philippines, or wherever else the wind and stars took me. It sounded romantic. It would have been desperately lonely.

  I went from that low point to reconnecting with Mary Beth. Then Lan Dalat and his family entered my life. Old friends retired from the Navy, and almost all the Original Bros settled down close by in Southern California.

  On March 1, 1983, I started my new life as an alienated civilian, unsure what my path might be in a country I had defended all my life but no longer knew. In the end, my new normal became a full and happy life, filled with love and friendships and family—my kids, Beth’s kids (we have a Brady Bunch–sized clan these days), and the men I went to war with back in our youth.

  Topgun’s Original Bros get together for dinner periodically, though there are only seven left of the original nine as I write this. Beth and I waited over a year after our doorway moment, then I flew her to Denmark and married her in the church my dad had been baptized in as a child before his family, just like Lan’s, made the journey to America’s shores.

  Beth and I made up for lost time in the 1990s and after the turn of the millennium. We worked together, built things together, explored and traveled and celebrated life. She was my missing part, and when she fit into my heart again, there were no more bad days.

  I do worry, though, that those who took our place in the cockpit will face bad days in the years to come.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  WILL WE HAVE TO LOSE A WAR AGAIN?

  (or, Back to the Future in an F-35)

  Just like the old F-4 Phantom, the F-14 Tomcat will live long in the memories of fighter pilots. The famous plane met its end in 2006. Focused on acquiring the Tomcat’s replacement, the F-18 Hornet, and the A-12 Avenger II stealth bomber, an upgrade for the A-6 Intruder, the Navy decided there wasn’t enough money to keep the Tomcats flying. It didn’t help the old bird’s cause that the secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, seemed to have it in for New York’s congressional delegation. Grumman Aircraft was located on Long Island. As the Pentagon’s axe fell, it was a sad case of the new and the expensive driving out the affordable and the reliable. When Secretary Cheney ended the lives of those two iconic Grumman carrier planes, the Intruder and the Tomcat, the future got a whole lot more costly.

  The Navy’s $4.8 billion contract with McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics to build the A-12 became a fiasco of lawsuits. It never produced a single aircraft. The litigation lasted twenty-three years, ending with the contractors repaying some $400 million to the government. Stealth technology was at the heart of the dispute. The contractors said that they could not deliver on schedule with the government withholding classified data on its requirements for radar-evading features. They had a point. According to former Topgun skipper Lonny “Eagle” McClung, “The A-12 was in the black world”—highly classified. “You could not take the material to your desk. You had to read it in a vault.” But the Pentagon seemed to be putting a great deal of faith in stealth.

  “We were selling our soul for stealth,” Eagle said. “The attitude in the Pentagon was that if we did not come up with stealth, the USAF would own the strike mission. I kept saying that somewhere in some dark basement in Eastern Europe was a group of guys wearing glasses about as thick as Coke bottles who were figuring out how to defeat stealth.… The airplane had a lot of problems. Cancelling the thing saved the Navy from itself.”*

  In the end, the F-18 was reengineered to handle the A-12’s mission. Today the Super Hornet, as the F/A-18’s E and F models are known, is performing that role well enough, though with a combat range that doesn’t come close to the old Tomcat’s.

  How sad that the only F-14s that you’ll find in service today are flying for the government of Iran, which began acquiring them in 1976, when Tehran’s leaders were friendly to the United States and we were happy to help them counter the Soviet Union’s vaunted MiG-25 Foxbat. Decades after America lost Iran, following the rise of the ayatollah, Secretary Cheney killed the F-14 in part to shut down the availability of spare parts for the Persian Tomcat squadrons. But somehow, to this day, Iran is proving up the F-14’s reliability and maintainability by flying it alongside Russian bombers on strikes into Syria. (I can remember that some Iranian pilots were posted at VF-121 at Miramar on foreign exchange, back in the day. All they did, I remember, was chase American women and spend money on fancy new cars. They were lousy students.)

  When I poke around the Internet today, catching up with the posts on my naval aviation mail lists, I find a lot of comments from chief petty officers who maintained the F-14 when it was in its prime. Their constant refrain, in essence, is “OMG, if only we had that airplane again.” Most of these guys are really sharp. They want the Navy to retool and resume building Tomcats, upgraded a bit but mostly just like they were. I feel as they do. The evolution toward high technology has pushed us backward in many ways. And the Iranians are having a laugh, I’m sure, still flying one of the best fighter aircraft ever built to serve the U.S. Navy.

  There’s nothing new about an old guy with all the answers. So, at the risk of playing to type, please allow this former aircraft engine mechanic to complain that our country has been put at risk by the Pentagon’s fascination with stealth technology. We’ve lost the lessons we learned painfully in the 1960s. We worship at high technology’s altar and are on the verge of selling our souls. Stealth is like a zombie—a very expensive zombie. It’s coming back to life to haunt us.

  The new aircraft that is supposed to replace the F/A-18 someday is Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II. The stealth-equipped “multi-purpose aircraft” is designed to do all things. Three different models of this “fifth-generation” plane are in development to meet the needs of the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. We ought to have learned a lesson from the failure of Robert McNamara’s F-111 “Flying Edsel,” which was supposed to serve both the Air Force and Navy. But we did not. So now comes the F-35 in three flavors: the Air Force A model, the Marine Corps B model (a short takeoff/vertical landing model that will replace the AV-8 Harrier jump jet), and the Navy F-35C.

  With total program costs figuring to exceed a trillion dollars, the F-35 is the most expensive weapons system in history.* The unit production cost of the Navy variant (not counting development and testing costs) has been pegged north of $330 million and growing.†

  The late, great John Nash used to say that modern aircraft components are designed to fail. Defense contractors have done a good job ensuring the profit margin in “line-replaceable units,” as they call spare parts today. In total, over the life of the program, the parts will cost more than the aircraft do. Think of the inkjet printer you bought at the office warehouse for $75. The ink cartridges will set you back half again that amount every six months. That’s basically true in the high-performance aircraft business, too.

  The F-35 is so expensive I fear we’ll end up with a fleet full of beautiful new nuclear-powered supercarriers with partially empty flight decks. There’s simply no way the U.S. Treasury can afford to buy the numbers we’ll need to fill out the air wings.

  The F-35’s problems are many, from the tail hook, which basically just didn’t work, to the oxygen system for the pilot, to the super-sophisticated helmet, built with advanced sensors, an information-packed visor display, and the ability to aim weapons by line of sight, based on the pilot’s head movements. The unit price for that fancy dome was $400,000, but who knows what it really costs? The total program cost of this aircraft continues to rocket skyward like an F-4 Phantom heading to the top of the Egg. Meanwhile, the nickname for the F-35 among pilots who have lost confidence in it is “the penguin.” It flies like one.

  No one agency can fix this problem. Not the Navy or the other services, not the defense contractors, and not Congress. Each of these has powerful incentives to avoid doing the right thing. The lucrative subcontracts associated with the F-35 are spread strategically across most every congressional district in America. With so many House members having
a stake in the program, it is assured to have broad-based political support, regardless of its actual capabilities or costs. So when a defense contractor proposes a new feature for the new aircraft, even if it’s not one that the Navy’s frontline squadrons want or need, there’s nobody on hand to say no. Why would some rear admiral at the Pentagon stand in the way of a “yes” vote for the Navy’s appropriations in the House of Representatives by turning down the unwanted bells and whistles? A lot of those admirals, you know, have golden parachutes waiting for them after they retire—a well-paying job as an executive vice president at that one-and-the-same company. Should he risk the windfall by asking questions?

  One question deserves to be whether we even need such expensive capabilities as stealth in our planes. I’m not so sure. New sensors that are within the current capability of Russia and China to field don’t even use radar waves. These infrared search-and-track devices can detect the friction heat of an aircraft’s skin moving through the atmosphere, as well as disturbances in airflow.

  Yet the defense contractors’ marketing brochures, and a few pilots too, assure us that the F-35 is “transformational.” According to the Lockheed Martin website, “With stealth technology, advanced sensors, weapons capacity and range, the F-35 is the most lethal, survivable and connected fighter aircraft ever built. More than a fighter jet, the F-35’s ability to collect, analyze and share data is a powerful force multiplier enhancing all airborne, surface and ground-based assets in the battlespace and enabling men and women in uniform to execute their mission and come home safe.”