Topgun Page 3

  At four hundred miles an hour, a Panther travels almost two football fields a second. You have to think a step or two ahead at all times, or the speed simply overwhelms your ability to respond. Get behind the aircraft, and the struggle to catch up will make you mistake-prone. The best pilots ride the wave and are always thinking a move or two ahead of the aircraft. You have very little time to react to something. So when something suddenly flashed between our three Panthers, I was stunned. Looking in my rearview mirror, I saw a red-lit radio relay tower stretching skyward into the overcast. We were at five hundred feet. Those radio towers were fifteen hundred feet tall. It was only an act of God that kept one of us from careening into it with fatal results.

  We landed back at Beeville shaken but intact. Our instructor taxied to the ramp several minutes later, and I felt a swell of anger rise in me. Where were you? Miles behind us out of sight when we almost flew into that tower?

  After I calmed down, the lesson came into focus. When you’re a fighter pilot, alone in that cockpit, your fate is in your hands. Blaming others is just a dodge. It’s no way to grow or improve. It was up to me to see that radio tower. No one else.

  Near misses aside, I ranked near the top of my class in the final stage of advanced training. I felt myself developing into a confident young pilot. Inevitably, such self-realizations will lead the universe to knock you down a peg. Mine was a brutal humbling with lifelong implications.

  That day I was supposed to fly a graded check flight in a T-bird with an instructor named Tony Biamonte. We planned and briefed a flight to Foster Air Force Base near Victoria on a day when a solid wall of clouds marched over the Lone Star State to twenty-five thousand feet. Visibility was at a minimum, even down on the deck. In the days before ground control radar, pilots navigated by low-frequency radio signals called LFR. It was still in use as a redundant backup system in the 1950s, and every cadet needed to know how to use it in a pinch. This weather called for it.

  We took off into the soup, spiraling upward until we broke into blue skies above twenty-five thousand. Tony sat in the rear seat; I was in the front. Victoria was only about fifty miles away, so this was a quick flight. After checking in with Foster control, I started our descent. We went from blue skies to a world of swirling grays so thick I could barely see our wingtip fuel tanks.

  Being inside a cloud is a disorienting experience. Look outside the cockpit too long at the dark heart of a cloud, and you’ll lose all sense of up or down, inverted or upright. Mesmerized, you won’t be able to tell if your wings are level, if you’re in a bank, or if you’re dropping out of the sky. With no frame of reference, your senses go haywire. The same thing can happen while flying at night. In moments like these, you bet your life on your instruments. You have to trust them, not what your body is telling you. It can be hard to believe the gauges over the wisdom in your own gut.

  I was wrestling with that phenomenon while trying to carefully listen to the LFR signals telling me where I was in relation to the runway. I could feel myself starting to stretch to keep hold of the situation and stay ahead of the aircraft.

  As we began our descent, I tried to keep a mental picture of where I thought we were. That mental picture was crucial. You have to see your bird in the air in your mind’s eye, erasing the clouds and overcast until the landscape below comes into focus. You build the picture with the radio signals. Each Morse code letter, either an A, an N, or a Null, gave you a sense of your position. As I dropped into the pattern, I listened as the letters changed. With each new Morse code signal, I updated my mental picture.

  At about two thousand feet, I had us on our downwind leg of the pattern. This meant we were running parallel to the runway a few thousand feet to the side. As we passed ninety degrees to the edge of the runway, I heard the Morse code letter change. That was the cue to make a turn onto the final approach. One more turn and I’d have this box checked.

  We were still in heavy overcast, the T-bird buffeted by turbulence. Between studying my instruments, prepping the aircraft for landing, and trying to listen to the radio signals, I grew confused and uncertain.

  Is my mental picture wrong?

  The signal changed. New letter.

  Wait, which end of the runway have I reached? Which way to turn?

  I thought I knew where we were, but my confusion destroyed my confidence.

  I turned the wrong way, sending the T-bird directly away from the end of the runway. I realized my mistake within seconds. Stopping our descent, I called the tower, fessed up, and asked to return to a holding pattern.

  I could feel Tony’s presence behind me right then. I had screwed up. Naval aviation is an unforgiving calling. One error and people—including yourself—die. In training, even a few seconds’ worth of a wrong turn will count against you.

  It certainly did here. Tony scrubbed the exercise, telling me to return to Beeville instead. I flew back, tense and upset with myself, seething at the mistake. When we got back on the ground, he asked, “You know what you did wrong?”

  “Yeah.” I explained what had happened, mentioning that I corrected the mistake very quickly.

  He nodded agreement on that last point. Still, he did not let me off the hook. “I want you to fly this check ride again.”

  I’d failed a flight, the only one in eighteen months of training. He saw the expression on my face and tried to reassure me. “Listen. Dan, everybody gets one down check. Don’t worry about it. It is a good lesson in humility.”

  I hit the books harder than ever. I studied LFR approaches. I flew the mission profile in the base simulators every day. I went back to the basics and studied Morse code again. There was no way I was going to fail again. In my obsession to succeed, I jettisoned every routine aspect of my life and used the extra minutes to study. That first night, my head hit the pillow, and as I fell off into an exhausted near-coma, a part of my brain felt like I’d forgotten to do something.

  I haven’t written Mary Beth.

  For the first time since I’d left home for cadets, I’d failed to finish a letter to her.

  The next night, the same thing happened. I was falling behind. Her letters arrived like clockwork. Now I’d missed two days and I foolishly let my responsiveness slide even further.

  All week, I remained singularly focused. Life distilled down to one thing: Learn LFR approaches and do it right the second time. Mary Beth and every other aspect of my life took a temporary backseat as I worked to overcome my error. No cell phones or long-distance to explain; besides, I was too embarrassed. Big mistake.

  This was my initiation into the constant battle all naval aviators face: the demands of the job versus the need for a personal life. The job is so demanding that it almost always wins. In a civilian career, balancing professional and personal lives requires careful attention, but it can be done. In naval aviation, there is no balance. The job always has to come first.

  At home, she checked her mailbox every day to find it empty. She went from puzzled to alarmed to deeply hurt as each afternoon brought the same empty box. My grandkids would call this “ghosting.” Imagine you and your love have been texting on your phones day after day while separated for some reason. Suddenly, one of you stops. A few hours might not seem significant, but the communication becomes one-way. The stress level rises. A day passes. Then two. Wondering becomes an agony. No explanation—the person simply vanished, became a ghost.

  The word ghosting hadn’t made it to Webster’s English Dictionary yet, but that week in 1957, it’s exactly what I did to Mary Beth as I focused on passing the check ride. When I climbed back into the T-bird for the do-over, the hard work paid off: I aced the flight, landed the aircraft without issue, and returned to Beeville with my confidence restored.

  Tony died two months later during a similar LFR check ride with another naval aviator. Life in aviation, even in training, was deadly serious. It required everything you have. Living an intensely focused, out-of-balance life wasn’t just an expression of our passion
for flying. It was required in order to survive.

  That was one of my last check rides. I finished advanced training and didn’t slip in the class rankings. With the ordeal behind me, I wrote Mary Beth for the first time in several weeks. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about my brush with failure. How could I explain my poor judgment in a letter? I decided to wait until I returned home to explain it to her in person. I needed her to see me as infallible, the confident pilot who’d climbed out of the T-bird at Christmas, rocking those Ray-Bans and beige chukka boots. So I took the path of least resistance: I wrote as if nothing had happened. I didn’t even acknowledge vanishing for all those days. I just picked up where I’d left off.

  On March 1, 1957, I got my wings. The graduation ceremony in Corpus Christi was almost anticlimactic. I wanted Mary Beth to pin my wings on me, but flying to Texas was not financially feasible for her or my folks. Instead, my flight training roommate and friend from home, Al Clayes, pinned my wings on my chest that day. I did the same honor for this newly commissioned U.S. Marine aviator.

  The Navy commissioned us all ensigns and made Big Al a Marine second lieutenant. We were officers and gentlemen at last, waiting for our first assignments with increasing trepidation. Through the grapevine, I’d heard that there were very few jet fighter pilot slots available on the West Coast that spring. I wanted to be back in California, close to home and Mary Beth, so I’d asked for duty on my side of the country.

  When my orders arrived, I tore open the envelope, running through my worst-case scenarios, the first of which was blimps. Yes, the 1950s Navy still flew airships. We called them “poopy bags.” Nobody wanted to go from flying Panthers and T-birds to puttering around at seventy knots with a gigantic bag of gas over your head. No thank you. Then there was ASW. Antisubmarine warfare. This meant multiengine flying and interminably long patrols over open ocean, where everyone aboard tried not to fall asleep.

  I took a breath, looked down at my orders, and read the official verbiage directing me to report in thirty days to San Diego.

  I read it twice. Then a third time just to be sure I wasn’t dreaming.

  I was going to a squadron known as VF(AW)-3.

  V stood for heavier than air. No blimps for me.

  F stood for fighters.

  AW stood for all-weather.

  I’d done it. I was going to be a jet fighter pilot.

  I was on the road to Topgun.

  CHAPTER TWO

  FIRST TRIBE

  Texas to Naval Air Station North Island, San Diego

  Spring 1957

  It’s 2300 here in the California desert, eleven o’clock in the civilian world. I come out every night and sit by the pool at the same time with my wife’s two little white-poofball Maltese pups. They curl up under my lounge chair, which I’ll adjust to be flat. Then I’ll lay here and look up into the night and wait.

  The stars are old friends, of course. We all did our share of night flying. At sea aboard an aircraft carrier, the air wings assigned the rookie pilots night flights based on the phase of the moon. A first-timer would need to land by the light of a full moon. If he hit that forty-foot zone in which the tailhook can catch a wire—as it will have to on a carrier or heaven help you—the next time he flies, the moon will be a crescent. Less light, more challenging. The biggest test came on nights with no moon—and bad weather. Nothing gives a naval aviator more gut-check moments than a night carrier landing in a heavy sea. It takes a special breed of cat to do it consistently, that’s for sure.

  Whenever the moon looks like the base of a thumbnail, I remember when I commanded the carrier USS Ranger. Somewhere in the Pacific, under a sliver moon, our air wing conducted night ops. One of our young pilots had trouble getting get his F-14 Tomcat back down on the deck. As he made his approach and the landing signal officer (LSO) talked him toward that number-three wire, I watched from my bridge chair. I could tell he was “killing snakes in the cockpit.” That means he was overcontrolling the aircraft. He was feeling overwhelmed and his heart rate was spiked. We’d all been there. The LSO told him to go around and try again. We call that a wave-off.

  He did, and the same thing happened. His bucket was full. He was battling fear, the darkness, his instruments, the procedures needed to bring the bird back aboard. It got away from him again.

  All night, he tried to land on the Ranger. Twice he had to climb above the clouds to refuel from an airborne tanker. I finally had to call him on the radio, something ship captains almost never do. We leave talking to the pilots to the air boss or their squadron commanders.

  “Look, son, we’re into the wind and we’re not going anywhere. We’re here for you, and we’ve got all night. Just relax a bit and smooth it out.”

  Those are the moments I loved the most—the kind of mentoring and loyalty to each other I never found anywhere else but inside the brotherhood of naval aviation.

  That nugget took twelve passes before he was safely on the flight deck. Now think about that. Each approach is a gut-check moment. The deck may be moving with the swells and you can’t see the horizon in the darkness. You’re utterly reliant on the LSO and your instruments. A mistake can kill you. Worse, if you make that mistake as you touch down, you’ll probably kill others, too. Even when we weren’t in combat, the stakes were high.

  Twelve tries in, he made a perfect landing. Maybe in the civilian world, some manager would give a young employee twelve chances, but I doubt it. In our world, we knew what to do. We sent him right back up the very next night. And when the time came to land, he rolled into his approach like a fleet veteran and caught the number-three wire like a seasoned tail hooker. Later in his career he flew with the Navy’s famous demonstration team, the Blue Angels.

  Love of aviation led us to our careers, but we all stayed in the service because of the people. Men like the ones who had gotten us through nights like that.

  My first unofficial act as an ensign in the U.S. Navy was to buy a car. My gang of new officers, at lunch for the first time at the officers’ club in Corpus Christi, Texas, decided that at least one of us needed to have a set of wheels. We rolled dice to see who would go down to the dealership, and I lost.

  I picked out a brand-new 1957 Ford Fairlane. Raven black with black and colonial white matching interior. Sidewalls straight out of American Graffiti. I drove home from Texas in my new ride, eager to see Mary Beth, make amends, and take her for a spin. I had thirty days of leave before I needed to report to VF(AW)-3, and I intended to use every minute of it courting my girl.

  The morning after I got home, I drove the Fairlane over to Whittier College. I found Mary Beth working at the cafeteria in the student union. She seemed unusually quiet. As I showed her the new car, I knew something was wrong.

  “Beth, is something on your mind?”

  She hesitated, searching for words.

  “You didn’t write,” she said. “I didn’t get any letters for a while.”

  I was about to explain, when she said, “Dan, I’m seeing someone. When you didn’t write. Well, he was persistent. I gave in.” I didn’t know what to say. He was a football player at the college. They’d been seeing each other for only a few weeks.

  I went home to regroup. My folks’ house was a sad place that evening. I stayed around town for two more weeks, marking time and feeling increasingly like an outsider in my own home. It was the first taste of alienation most of us naval aviators experienced as we began our journey into the brotherhood. The layers of our old lives would fall away like leaves in the months to come. Nuggets—rookie naval aviators—still had some connections to the outside civilian world, but already we were seeing them strained to the limits by the demands of flying high-performance aircraft. Increasingly, our lives were whittled down to the job, the people working with us, and a few problematical connections on the ground.

  It was a brutal process for all of us. Hollywood often portrays us as skirt-chasing, hard-drinking types without delving deeper into the situation. The trut
h was, by the time you reached your first squadron, those superficial nights with beautiful girls were all that naval aviators had room for in their lives. The problem arose when we tried to form deeper connections. The love of my life was the first sacrifice I made for those wings of gold.

  When sticking around town became intolerable, I decided to report early to my new squadron. While I was packing, my mom came to me and watched me fill my suitcase.

  “Dan,” she said gently, “Mary Beth has made her choice. You’ve got to respect that.”

  I wanted to win her back. My mom could see right through me.

  “Don’t do it. Don’t interfere. That isn’t your place. It wasn’t meant to be.” One thing we did not do in the Pedersen household was defy our mother. Her words followed me all the way to San Diego.

  Joining your first squadron is a life event for naval aviators. You make lifelong friends and the lessons in the air come at you like a firehose. Your mind needs to be clear; you’ve got to be ready for the challenges ahead. If you’re not, you’re going to have an accident. No matter what area of naval aviation you’re in, it is deeply unforgiving of mistakes.

  In downtown San Diego, I found the Coronado Ferry at the end of Broadway and drove the Fairlane aboard. My mind was anything but clear. I wasn’t joining the squadron two weeks early that day, I was running from home and the life I’d wanted but could not have.

  At North Island, the guard at the front gate gave me directions to VF(AW)-3. I barely noticed the planes coming and going off the runways as I drove past long lines of attack jets, patrol planes, and fighters. The squadron had its own high-security compound. Fenced off, patrolled by guards with leashed attack dogs, it stood in stark contrast to the relatively relaxed security at the main entrance. It was my first indication that my new squadron was a distinctive one.