Topgun

by Dan Pedersen

  It became a race against time. The school could not afford to keep canceling class. That would attract too much attention from the wrong crowd above Topgun. So Mugs reached out to an old friend from his test pilot school days, Major Richard “Moody” Suter, who played the central role later on in establishing the Air Force’s big multinational exercise, Red Flag. Mugs made a backroom deal with Suter, trading a shipment of stylish USN leather flight jackets for the parts and equipment Topgun needed.

  An Air Force C-130 flew the gear into Miramar, which caught the eye of an AirPac admiral, who reportedly began asking questions.

  “Is there an Air Force detachment arriving?”

  “No sir, all that gear is for Topgun.”

  “What?”

  Mugs embodied the attitude that had played a foundational role in Topgun’s history: Don’t ask for permission—get it done and beg for forgiveness. Quickly the T-38s were up and flying, filling the gap until other aircraft arrived.

  Not long after, in January 1974, Mugs lost his executive officer. Jerry called him one night and told him he couldn’t hack the pace anymore. He was a former enlisted pilot who had become an officer like I had, through the Naval Aviation Cadet (NAVCAD) program. He was trying to finish college and had just gotten married. Too many balls in the air, and he knew Topgun needed an XO with his entire heart in the job. He asked to be relieved, and Mugs let him go.

  The next morning, Jack Ensch walked into the Topgun offices to find Jerry cleaning out his desk. Jack had just come off nine months of medical rehab for his wounds and injuries incurred during his shootdown and imprisonment in North Vietnam.

  “What’s going on?” Jack asked his friend.

  “I quit,” Jerry answered. “You’re the XO now.”

  The news caught Jack by surprise. He had come to Topgun as Mugs’s special projects officer, a slot created for him so he’d have a place to work until his next assignment.

  The connection between Mugs and Jack is one of the finest examples of the bond naval aviators build with each other. Mugs was an only child growing up, and in his most serious moments, he told Jack, “You know, you’re the brother I always wanted and never had.”

  The two men flew in combat together, knocking a pair of MiG-17s out of the sky in May 1972. During one fight, as they were vectored after some MiGs, Jack called out from the RIO’s position in their F-4, “Let’s go get ’em, Mugs. I’m right behind ya.”

  Chuckling, Mugs told him, “Knock that shit off. This is serious.”

  Thirteen days later, Mugs left Yankee Station to take over Topgun. Jack stayed on the carrier. He was flying with another pilot, Mike Doyle, when they took a SAM hit and ejected. Doyle was killed. Jack suffered grievous injuries during his ejection, and was captured and taken to a North Vietnamese prison camp.

  As Mugs heard the news, he had just learned that they were to receive the Navy Cross for their two-kill engagement in May. It was the second-highest award for valor that existed. Mugs said he would accept it only with Jack by his side. Eight months after Jack was released, he and Mugs stood shoulder to shoulder in a ceremony attended only by their families and a few VIPs. Together as brothers, they received their Navy Crosses.

  Now at Topgun, Jack would be right behind Mugs again. The two would help usher in a new era for the school and its capabilities, ensuring that Topgun kept Navy fighter aviation the best in the world during some difficult years.

  In the spring of 1974, I was still in the Med with the America and my Dogs. I was in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, during a port of call, having a drink in a waterfront hotel, when I noticed an airline flight crew entering the lounge. They were from El Al, the Israeli airline. One of the flight attendants approached me.

  “Are you Commander Dan Pedersen?”

  “I am.”

  “I have something for you from your friends in Israel.”

  She handed me a small box. No note. No card. Just a box. She walked away without another word.

  Inside, I found a beautiful fourteen-karat gold Star of David attached to a gold link chain. The gift was completely anonymous.

  How did they find me?

  I thought right then of the barbecue at my place in San Diego, where I met Colonel Ben Eliyahu, Dan Halutz, and the other Israelis for the first time. No-nonsense, secretive, eager to learn. Professional to the core. Then I remembered a conversation we had had. I asked Ben why his people were so serious.

  “Daniel, you will understand when you are in combat, getting ready to fire at your enemy, and you realize you are flying over your home, where your wife and children are.”

  They had lived our worst nightmare and prevailed.

  I resolved to visit Israel someday to renew those friendships. Maybe I would even find out who had sent that beautiful gift.

  I put it on and wore it for the rest of my Navy career as part of my basic kit. Little mouse. Fifties Ray-Bans. Star of David on my chest, reminding me that friendships can sometimes help save nations.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  RETURN WITH HONOR

  Forty miles off South Vietnam

  April 29, 1975

  For naval aviation, the problem of Vietnam never seemed to go away.

  Lieutenant Darrell “Condor” Gary stood before the assembled pilots and RIOs of VF-51. In Darrell’s short career, he’d been thrown into the air war over North Vietnam before completing his RAG training back in the late ’60s as an F-4 back-seater. Two tours there and he came home in time for me to pull him into Topgun as one of our instructors. He subsequently went to flight school, became an F-4 pilot, and went through Topgun as a student before heading out to the carrier USS Coral Sea and his first overseas deployment as a fighter pilot.

  In 1975, he was a young lieutenant tasked with delivering one of the most painful briefs the squadron would ever receive: It fell to Condor to bring them the news that we were abandoning our allies once and for all.

  The disaster began the previous month, when North Vietnam launched a new offensive against our allies in the Central Highlands. For the past eighteen months, Congress had steadily whittled down U.S. military aid to South Vietnam. Suffering shortages of spare parts, ammunition, and lubricants, the army of the Republic of Vietnam was in a deplorable state of readiness. America was partially responsible for that.

  The North Vietnamese offensive threw eighty thousand troops into the Central Highlands. Our allies buckled under the onslaught. As we pulled out in the early 1970s, we tried to train the South Vietnamese Army, but never overcame the corruption, malfeasance, and frequent cowardice of their officer corps.

  Prime Minister Nguyen Van Thieu appealed to President Gerald Ford for $300 million worth of emergency military aid. Congress balked, in part because everyone could see that the South Vietnamese Army was coming apart at the seams.

  Thieu ordered the army to stage a strategic withdrawal to defend key cities and strategic locations. Under heavy pressure, the South Vietnamese Army found roads clogged with fleeing refugees. The withdrawal bogged down. Officers panicked. One general told his troops, “Every man for himself.” It became a rout.

  This surprised the North Vietnamese. Sensing an opportunity, the Communist army converged on Saigon, overrunning our former air base at Da Nang and capturing dozens of South Vietnamese Air Force aircraft.

  Chaos descended on the South. By April Fools’ Day, it was clear our allies were doomed unless the United States came to the rescue. No amount of money could save the South Vietnamese military by this point; only a massive employment of airpower and ground troops could turn the situation around. We flew in dozens of heavy transport aircraft to Tan Son Nhut Air Base to extract as many people as possible.

  There were horrible tragedies as the evacuation unfolded. On the fourth of April, a C-5 Galaxy, the largest aircraft in the world, suffered mechanical failure with 250 orphaned children aboard. The crew turned around and crash-landed at Tan Son Nhut, killing 153 children and adults. The Communists marched on the air base as
the evacuation gained steam. As the North Vietnamese advanced, commercial airliners were thrown into the effort. Should Tan Son Nhut become unusable, helicopters would be our only other option to get our people out of harm’s way. The air base was soon untenable as the NVA closed.

  The U.S. task force off the South Vietnamese coast, anchored by the carriers Enterprise, Coral Sea, Midway, and Hancock, were the evacuation’s last best hope.

  On April 29, Darrell briefed his squadron as it prepared to serve as MiG combat air patrol (MiGCAP) for the last-ditch evacuation off rooftops and makeshift helicopter pads around Saigon. At the American embassy, the final embarkation point, personnel chopped down trees to create a second helicopter landing zone. The situation was chaotic in the extreme.

  Darrell reviewed the latest intel as dispassionately as he could, but beneath the façade he felt an overwhelming sense of disappointment and grief. The war that had consumed his youth was coming to an end with America abandoning her ally. We were finally about to quit on the conflict that had spanned his entire adult life. The mood at VF-51 was somber. There was none of the usual wisecracking. If the Communists took over, the consequences would be horrific. Tens of thousands of innocents would be rounded up and shot or thrown into labor camps. With four U.S. carriers offshore, why should we let it happen?

  Darrell went over the rules of engagement. As ever, Washington-style thinking prevailed. We could not engage unless our planes or helicopters came under direct fire first. If MiGs attempted to intercept the rescue effort, Fighting 51 was cleared to shoot only if they posed a threat. The eighty helicopters used in the evacuation would fly to USS Midway, the receiving ship. The other carriers would support. The surface fleet formed a barrier between coast and carriers, ready to help in any way they could. When Darrell was finished, the aviators rose from their seats and headed toward their aircraft.

  The helicopters began arriving over Saigon as the lead elements of the North Vietnamese army reached the outskirts of the city. Yet the Communists did not interfere with the evacuation. Fearing it could trigger full-scale American intervention at the eleventh hour, the North Vietnamese held back. The MiGs made no appearance, nor did the attack aircraft they’d captured at Da Nang. The biggest threat to the helos came from rogue disgruntled South Vietnamese troops. Small-arms fire raked them as they landed on rooftops and at the embassy tennis courts.

  Overhead, Darrell and the other aviators of Fighting 51 could see smoke rising over the embassy in downtown, where the last of the staff burned top-secret documents and millions of dollars’ worth of cash. Toasted hundred-dollar-bill ashes rained down on the crowd from the incinerator’s smokestack. Helicopters touched down on rooftops, picked up loads of people, and turned for the fleet.

  Some neighborhoods under curfew looked empty. The only vehicles on the streets were ambulances that had been pressed into service. Mobs of people hauled their luggage and all the cash they could scrounge up, desperate to get out of the city with their children before the Communists stormed the palace gates. Streaming out of every inlet, moorage, and slough came boats, sampans, luggers, rafts, scows of every sort, hundreds flowing into a great exodus, looking like ants on leaves as they rode the waves in search of salvation. It was a humanitarian crisis unlike anything since the final days of World War II. Millions would be consumed by it.

  Darrell and the rest of his flight loitered as long as fuel allowed, then turned for home as another group of F-4s arrived to take up station. The flight back to the Coral Sea was one that the youngest of Topgun’s Original Bros would never forget. Below his F-4, the evacuation armada carpeted the ocean to the horizon, pushing through the swells toward the Navy task force. It represented one thing: freedom. The sight of it was heartbreaking.

  Toward midmorning, the first South Vietnamese Army helicopters appeared above the fleet. Flown by pilots who knew their country was in its death throes, they sought now to save themselves and their families. As the boats struggled along, the helos raced back and forth, delivering refugees to the Midway before turning around and going back for more.

  As Darrell landed aboard the Coral Sea, steaming about ten miles from the Midway, he headed to debrief, helmet in hand, sobered by what he had witnessed. This was the end. We had never been allowed to win. He had a bird’s-eye view of the consequences of it that day. They would be felt for decades to come.

  The next morning, at 0500, the U.S. ambassador to a country that no longer existed climbed aboard a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter and departed the embassy in Saigon. Three hours later, the last Americans—U.S. Marines—were pulled out and carried out to the fleet. That was it. South Vietnam surrendered unconditionally later that morning.

  One Memorial Day, years after the war, Jim Laing and Darrell Gary were drinking a beer at Bulley’s together. Both were well into their civilian lives. They started wondering about their old friends and how many in their circle they really lost back in those days. They grabbed a cocktail napkin and started writing down names. The first three names belonged to fallen aviators from the nine guys they had rented beach houses with in the early days of Topgun at the Lafayette Escadrille. From there, the list grew. They reached for more cocktail napkins. By the time their memories ran out, forty-three names filled a small pile of napkins. Those were just their friends. Half had been lost in combat, half in training. The personal cost of a war lost will always be the names and faces of friends. The larger consequences beggared the imagination.

  With the last flight to the Midway from the embassy grounds, 1,373 Americans and 5,595 Vietnamese were helicoptered to the naval task force. Another 65,000 fled by boat, later to be picked up by one of the forty ships offshore. The fixed-wing airlift from Tan Son Nhut pulled out another 50,493, including almost 2,700 orphans. They were the lucky ones. In the immediate aftermath of South Vietnam’s collapse, more than 150,000 civilians vanished, most either executed outright or thrown into concentration camps. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, a memorial to the unknown masses of dead. Somewhere between 1 and 4 million Vietnamese perished from 1955 to 1975. In Cambodia, another 300,000 were killed. Laos lost between 20,000 and 60,000. In the years ahead, the killing would continue as Communist insurgents toppled the governments of Laos and Cambodia. From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge, a regime that swept to power in the wake of America’s exit from the region, murdered or starved to death about 2.5 million people out of a population of 8 million—more than 30 percent of the entire nation. When Americans look back at Vietnam, we remember the domestic unrest. We think, too, of the 58,000 names memorialized on that long black marble wall in Washington. Those are important to remember. But few want to discuss the other consequences of America’s lost war.

  As the naval armada covered the evacuation off the Vietnam coast in April 1975, I was headed for the Philippines. The honor of serving as squadron commander had prepared me for a higher command. At Subic Bay, I caught up with the Coral Sea and went aboard as the prospective commander of Air Wing Fifteen.

  I won’t belabor the mood aboard ship. Everyone was ready to forget. Fortunately, the ship was scheduled to steam south for Perth, Australia, to celebrate the Battle of the Coral Sea, the 1942 naval victory that helped save Australia from Japanese invasion.

  The air wing needed the lift of a friendly port of call with one of our closest and most loyal allies. The Aussies always treated us sailors with tremendous affection and kindness, even when our own countrymen didn’t. It was also a good way for me to get to know the men and make the transition from the current skipper, Commander Inman “Hoagy” Carmichael.

  We departed Cubi Point after only a short stay, steaming through the Sunda Strait, where the heavy cruiser USS Houston had made its epic last stand a generation before. The men were looking forward to the excitement waiting for them in Perth. Each morning, I saw Condor running on the flight deck, getting back in shape for the merriment ahead.

  It was not to be. As Darrell put it, “One morning, I woke up and went for my run, and r
ealized the sun was on the wrong side of the ship.” Another emergency had developed, and so the president had asked where the carriers were. The Coral Sea was the closest, and we received orders sending us racing north at flank speed.

  The Cambodians had seized an American-flagged and -owned cargo container ship. Now the ship was in Khmer Rouge hands, and the crew was somewhere ashore, locked up in what looked like an exact repeat of the 1968 Pueblo incident.

  Would we never be free of this place?

  The ship was named the Mayaguez. It had departed South Vietnam with cargo that included almost eighty containers full of military equipment and material from the American embassy in Saigon. The skipper of the Mayaguez was supposed to sail to Thailand. En route, he accidentally passed inside Cambodian territorial waters. On May 12, 1975, as we headed south for Perth, a small boat crewed by Khmer Rouge forces sped out to the Mayaguez and fired a rocket-propelled grenade across its bow only a few miles off the island of Poulo Wai. The captain of the Mayaguez, Charles Miller, ordered full stop and began broadcasting an SOS. The Khmer Rouge boarded the ship and ordered the vessel to Poulo Wai.

  The next morning, two U.S. Navy patrol aircraft discovered the Mayaguez and took ground fire while making a low-level pass to confirm the ship’s identity. The Khmer Rouge moved the ship to an anchorage just north of Koh Tang island, where our planes found her.

  President Gerald Ford announced to the world that he considered this an act of piracy. The Pueblo incident in 1968 had become an open wound for the United States, for months embarrassing the Johnson administration. After the humiliation of South Vietnam’s defeat and the blow to American prestige it inflicted, the president was in no mood to show weakness. He ordered the ship seized and the crew rescued. The Coral Sea’s air wing would provide air support and strike targets on the Cambodian mainland.