Topgun

by Dan Pedersen

  As my Skyray pushed toward Mach 1, the F-86 stayed on me. I pulled back up into the vertical, but found I couldn’t shake him. I had the superior aircraft; he was the superior pilot. In two and a half minutes, with the Sabre on my six, I had to admit defeat. I rocked my wings. He joined up on me as we made a slow turn toward the L.A. basin. He nodded and saluted me. I returned it, then headed for North Island.

  Not long after I landed, somebody told me I had a phone call from the Air National Guard’s 146th Fighter Wing at Van Nuys. A lump formed in my throat. Had I been reported? On the other line was a major, probably one of the wing’s squadron leaders. He asked me if I’d been up in an F4D over Edwards airspace. I said yes.

  “You’re not bad, son,” he said, “but you’ve got a lot to learn.”

  We talked the fight over. I learned his F-86 had an afterburner too. Earlier versions didn’t. I wondered if that’s how he beat me. At length, I finally said, “Hey, no other phone calls, okay, sir?”

  “Oh, no calls. I wouldn’t do that to you, son.” He knew the rules of the game.

  We hung up, and I never spoke to him again. But boy, the lesson he gave me that holiday’s eve lingered for the rest of my career. When you pick a fight, you better know the capabilities of the aircraft you are facing. And it’s a dangerous mistake to assume you’re better than your opponent. When you start a fight, you should always assume you’re facing the very best. Otherwise, chances are you’re going to have a really bad day.

  The road to my longest season of bad days began almost as soon as I got my orders to leave VF(AW)-3. I reported to VF-121 at Miramar to transition to a brand-new McDonnell Douglas bird, the F3H Demon. In late 1962, I joined the Black Lions of Fighter Squadron 213 (VF-213). In February 1963, we deployed on board the carrier USS Hancock and spent the next eight months in the western Pacific.

  Naval aviation is the tip of the American spear. Wherever trouble brews, the aircraft carriers go. When the Hancock went into the South China Sea our purpose was to send a message to the Red Chinese: Lay off Taiwan.

  It was not a pleasant experience.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WHERE ARE THE CARRIERS?

  Off the Saigon River, South Vietnam

  November 3, 1963

  Black night. No moonlight for the nuggets. Not even a star visible thanks to the storm clouds stacked from a thousand feet on up to heaven. USS Hancock’s wooden flight deck was slick from intermittent tropical downpours. The old girl was almost twenty years old now, a carrier built in wartime with funds raised by the John Hancock life insurance company. This wooden deck had seen everything from fires inflicted by exploding Japanese kamikazes to raging typhoons off Southeast Asia. She sat in mothballs during Korea, but as the Cold War intensified, the need for more flight decks grew urgent. The Navy pulled her from the fleet reserve in Bremerton, Washington, and updated her with an angled flight deck and four steam catapults for jet operations.

  Two decades after joining the fight against Imperial Japan, the Hanna found itself in the middle of a new crisis in the western Pacific.

  Aboard this storied flattop, I sat in the cockpit of my McDonnell F3H Demon interceptor on the alert five catapult, watching the deck crew hustle around me. Lacking inspiration? Watch a deck crew in action, especially at night. It was one of the most tightly choreographed performances you’ll ever see. Every member of that team worked in complete harmony in one of the most dangerous work environments you can imagine. Their margin for error is so slight—one wrong move and the sailor can get sucked into an engine or blown overboard by the exhaust blast. Yet they work in this danger zone of roaring afterburners and high-tension cables with fearlessness and focus. It is an awesome sight to see.

  That night, I couldn’t see much. Just flashlights moving around and glowing yellow wands giving me signals from the deck on the left side of the cockpit. I could just make out the dim outlines of the flight-deck crew by the glow of their lights.

  The conductor of this little symphony was called the shooter. An experienced commissioned officer, he wore a yellow shirt and carried a pair of those yellow glowing wands. He gave the order to fire the catapult when the time came to send me on my way.

  Getting ready to go, another yellow shirt, the flight-deck director, waved me forward to the catapult track. I eased off the brakes. As the nose wheel reached the catapult shuttle and nestled in, I set the brakes again and made sure the foldable wings were locked in place. Sailors swarmed under the Demon. Red-shirted ordnancemen pulled the arming pins out of my four AIM-7 Sparrow missiles, our radar-guided air-to-air weapons. Another team slung a bridle behind my nose wheel and attached it to the shuttle in the catapult track. I felt a bump as the Demon went into tension, the catapult locked and loaded, ready to sling me off the bow.

  I wasn’t supposed to be on the catapult that night. I was due for shore leave in Hong Kong, one of the best of all possible ports of call. Great food and nightlife, and deals on Rolex watches. Before we could enjoy any of it, the Hancock received an emergency sail order. We weighed anchor at 0830 and sped southwest with a pair of destroyers. We had no idea what was happening, other than that some kind of crisis was afoot and a carrier was needed off Vietnam.

  My very first cruise gave me a front-row seat to U.S. naval power projection in action. Deployed to WestPac, we guarded the sea lanes, trained off the coast of Japan, and flew the flag at various ports of call. Our F3H Demons intercepted Soviet bombers that periodically dropped down to snoop on us. We’d chase them as soon as our radars caught them coming down from Vladivostok. When the Tupolev Tu-95 Bears took their photos of us, we wanted a Demon in the frame. Proving up our ability to destroy them at will was a game we played with the Russians for the entire Cold War. More than once, I watched a Russian gunner wave at me as I snapped pictures through the canopy. Such moments were rare and fleeting, just two aircrew at the tip of the spear, making momentary personal contact at altitude over the world’s largest ocean.

  Truth was, my transfer to VF-213 and the two ensuing deployments were like the sophomore blues. On my first deployment, the Black Lions were led by a skipper who pushed the young guys hard. Too hard, occasionally. As the squadron safety officer, I watched him make several bad decisions and finally couldn’t stand idly by. After one of our pilots, apparently exhausted, died in a preventable deck accident—after landing and getting free of the arresting cable, he just slid to the edge of the flight deck and fell over to his death—I urged the skipper to dial it down or other guys were going to die. He ignored me, and later wrote up an unsatisfactory fitness report that described me as “disloyal.” This second deployment went more smoothly without him.

  When it was conceived in the early 1950s, the Demon was powered by a Westinghouse J40, supposedly a world-beater. It proved to be a dog. It failed constantly, killed pilots, and never produced the thrust the Demon needed to be an effective interceptor. The Navy canceled the Westinghouse contract and equipped the F3H with an Allison engine designed for the B-66 bomber. Even with the upgrade, transitioning from the Skyray to the Demon was like trading in a Porsche for a Dodge.

  In cold, wet weather, the engines tended to fail when the metal housing around the Allison shrank, causing the turbine blades to scrape the inside of the enclosure. Though this merited a full redesign of the engine, there was no money in the Navy budget for it. Instead, the manufacturer shaved a small amount off the turbine blades. Problem solved, right? Yes. But the solution detuned the engine, leaving the Demon underpowered and slow to accelerate. Once up to flying speed, it handled nicely enough, though it was no bat-winged Ford.

  I do miss my days flying that plane. You never forget taking off from a carrier. At night and ready to launch, the deck crew raises the jet blast deflector, a sheet of hardened steel that protects everyone aft of my Demon from the engine’s exhaust. Scanning the instruments, I see that everything is in the green. A quick glance forward reveals nothing but blackness. I can’t even see the end of the flight deck. />
  The red shirts back out from beneath my wings, having armed my missiles. A final check by other crewmen and I’m clear to go. Advancing the throttles, I hear the engine spool up.

  I look over at the shooter’s yellow wands. He signals me to light the afterburner. A whoosh and bright reddish glow erupt behind me as a long tongue of flame shoots out the Demon’s exhaust pipe. Seconds away now.

  I lean my head back, pressing against the ejection seat. If you don’t, you’ll have a sore neck as the catapult slings you forward. Simultaneously, I use the catapult grip that holds my throttle in place, so my hand doesn’t reflexively pull it backward as I accelerate. Lastly, I jam my right elbow into my hip, so I don’t accidentally pull the control stick back, overrotate the nose, and stall out. You can easily do that on a pitch-black night with absolutely no horizon. What a way to go.

  The shooter leans forward and brings his wand down to the deck—the launch order.

  The catapult fires, and the shuttle rushes in its track toward the bow. I go from zero to a 150 miles an hour in two seconds flat.

  God, I miss it.

  Halfway toward the bow of the deck and I am already flying the aircraft. In such moments, you don’t look out at the darkness ahead. Rather, you’re entirely focused on the instruments once your eyeballs are uncaged and your vision returns. A moment later, I feel the wheels leave the deck. The bridle drops free, and I raise the landing gear.

  Nothing to it, really. That night, I sped to altitude and to my assigned patrol station off the Saigon River, never breaking clear of the weather. What a terrible night to be flying, but the situation in South Vietnam was briefed to be critical. Of course, they didn’t give us any details. If we’d been able to watch the evening news broadcast back home, we’d have learned that an Army-led coup was underway in Saigon against Ngo Dinh Diem, the despot who had run the country into the ground over the past eight years. Regime loyalists and rebels battled in the streets as chaos engulfed the nation. Diem and his brother had been captured by rebels the day before and rumors abounded that they had either committed suicide or had been executed.

  The Navy wanted the Hancock on scene should the situation spin out of control. If an evacuation of the American military advisers in the country was necessary, we would provide air cover. That night, though, exactly what I could do with my air-to-air missiles, in storm clouds above twenty thousand feet, was anyone’s guess.

  I patrolled in complete darkness. Somewhere behind me was my wingman, but we never had visual on each other from the moment we left the Hancock’s deck. It was that kind of night.

  I don’t remember who was up with me that night, but if it was Lieutenant John Nash, I know I wouldn’t have needed to worry about him. Nash joined the Black Lions not long after I arrived. He was serious, intense, and utterly driven. What he lacked in humor aboard ship he more than made up for in the air. He was a relentless, aggressive pilot who backed up his self-confidence with simply incredible flying. He was one of the rarest: a man seemingly born to fly, as if it were coded into his DNA. In later years, I counted him among the ten best fighter pilots I’ve ever known. He coined the phrase “I’d rather die than lose.” That was his mission statement. He lived it fully, in training and in combat. I would later use his enormous talent when I chose him as an Original Bro at Topgun.

  The Demon was equipped with an excellent airborne radar system. As I bored holes in the cave-dark night, I kept my eyes on the radar. Could those Russian Bears drop down for a visit this far from Vladivostok? Did the North Vietnamese have an air force? I had no idea. But somebody wanted us up there that night for a reason.

  I peered out into the darkness for a moment. It was easy to get vertigo in such black conditions. Try standing in a closet with the lights off for ten or twenty minutes, and you’ll start to lose your balance. Your inner ear gets confused. Your senses send confusing messages to your brain. Now imagine that closet moving at 450 knots, without any point of reference in sight. Again, you embrace your instrument training and trust the gauges and dials on the panel in front of you.

  This is all well and good until the power fails and your panel lights go out. A Demon did that to me on our first cruise the year before, and I never quite trusted the bird afterward.

  That night was very similar to this one, except we broke out above the cloud layer at fifteen thousand feet. No moon, no visible horizon. My Demon suffered electrical failure and the lights went out in the cockpit. A wind-powered auxiliary unit was supposed to deploy in such a situation, but that failed as well. There I was, surrounded by absolute darkness, using a ninety-degree-angled flashlight to periodically check my instruments. I was flying that mission with our squadron executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Joe Paulk, who realized my predicament and came to my rescue.

  Joe signaled to me with his flashlight, Follow me, and pointed back to Hancock’s latest position.

  It was an eerie sensation flying on his wing in the dark en route to the Hancock’s waiting deck. I forced myself to keep my wings level relative to his wing and belly navigation lights. I used small, precise control inputs, made easier by Joe’s smooth flying.

  We broke out of the cloud layer about a mile and a half astern of the ship. We could see the white strobes beckoning us. I continued flying Joe’s wing until his lights went out and he turned away to give me a clear shot at the deck.

  The electrical failure had knocked out my radio, which meant I could not talk to the landing signal officer. All I could do was watch his lights: A green one meant to keep coming. Flashing reds would be the dreaded wave-off—go around and try again. I didn’t have enough fuel for that, so if I missed I’d have to eject, trusting that somebody would find me in the stormy sea.

  I made it down and felt the tail hook catch one of the deck wires. The Demon lurched to a halt. A close call for sure, but it wasn’t over.

  The next night, while flying the same Demon, the same thing happened again. I was on Joe’s wing, and he brought me back to the Hancock in an encore performance. I landed safely after another gut-check approach. Perhaps we joked about him saving me twice. Fighter pilots never like to reveal weakness or fear to each other. The fact is, I went belowdecks and sat alone for a while, trying to drink a cup of coffee as I tried to figure the odds of two electrical failures on consecutive moonless nights. That same aircraft had flown perfectly twice during the daylight between my events.

  I said a prayer in the wardroom, coffee cup in hand. Thank you, God, for making sure Joe was there to help me get back to my family.

  Over the South Vietnamese coast, a year later, my radar swept the sky ahead of me and found nothing. The panel lights glowed reassuringly as my eyes scanned across the instruments. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just another night in heavy weather on the ocean frontier. Still, those two electrical failures remained in the back of my mind. Should the worst happen, I had triple checked my ninety-degree flashlight to make sure it worked and remained in easy reach in a flight suit pocket. Little pieces of gear can make all the difference in a critical moment.

  My radio crackled. The controller on the ship below gave me a vector. Something was up offshore and he wanted us to drop down to investigate. Into the heart of the scud layer we went, navigation lights burning orange holes in the milky soup around us.

  At fifteen hundred feet, we still had not found the bottom of the cloud layer. Suddenly, a muzzle flash lit the blackness below. Another flash strobed the sky, revealing holes in the cloud layer. A warship was down there on the water, firing its main batteries. I began to get vertigo.

  Get a hold of yourself, Dan. Trust the instruments.

  Dizzy and lightheaded, I felt like I was floating. My body told me we were heading one way while my instruments told a completely different story. I might have been descending but did not know how to move the stick. Finally, returning to my instruments, I was able to recover from the vertigo.

  A final salvo of naval gunfire, like yellow-red lightning, flared underne
ath me. I forced myself to focus on the instrument panel while my world tilted crazily. When the sensation passed, I leveled off and reported the gunfire to our controller on the Hancock. “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  What could we do? We didn’t have bombs or unguided rockets. The Demon was configured for an air-to-air fight. It had a pair of cannon, but the Black Lions rarely flew with loaded guns—the shells were extra weight that the already underpowered bird didn’t need. The Hancock ordered us to return to the ship. We banked away from whatever fighting raged on the wavetops and fought our way through the overcast for another white-knuckle carrier landing.

  When I was three miles astern, they gave me corrections to stay on the centerline of the glide path all the way to the deck. The ship appeared ahead of me. I held my approach and listened as the LSO coached me down. I dropped on the deck and felt the hook catch the three wire. Good landing. The aircraft functioned beautifully, and I lived to record another night landing in my logbook.

  After my wingman got down safely, we went below for the debrief. Who had been shooting at whom? We never learned. Maybe it was one of our destroyers offshore, supporting some of our advisers in some battle right off the beach. Maybe it was a South Vietnamese warship shooting at rebel units involved in the coup. It was a foretaste of what was to come in the years ahead. We’d just witnessed a naval action almost a year before the Gulf of Tonkin incident pulled America into Vietnam’s civil war.

  Somewhere after midnight, my head hit the pillow. Sleep did not come. I couldn’t help dwelling on the narrow margin we lived in on these night missions. Bad weather. Vertigo. System failures. Landing in total darkness. The risks never gave me pause. Well, unless we lost somebody. I just never thought it might be me. But things were different for me now, and in that moment, I felt mortal.