It's hard to read Dan Pedersen's “Topgun” and not think of Tom Cruise rock-'n'-rollin' through the California mountains in the similarly named motion picture more than 30 years ago. The name—when it refers to the naval-aviator training school—is properly presented as a single word, though the movie splits it in two. “I guess it looks better that way on movie posters,” the author concedes.
Now 83 and living near Topgun's former base near San Diego, Capt. Pedersen was Topgun's founding commander in the 1960s. “I still look up like a kid whenever I hear an airplane passing overhead,” he writes. “Sometimes it'll be a pair of Super Hornets smoking over the desert.”
As it happens, the McDonnell Douglas F-18 Hornet is the successor to the twin-jet Grumman F-14 Tomcat fighter that was featured in the 1986 film. The Hornet is now the primary fighter at Topgun, which the Navy prefers to call the Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program and which has since moved inland to Fallon, Nev.
When Capt. Pedersen looks up at the Hornets these days, he finds himself recalling San Diego's air base long ago. “I'll get the same electrified thrill I got the first time I lit the afterburner . . . and blasted off North Island's runway to find myself two minutes later at fifty thousand feet. There is no other rush like it.”
The Topgun school was born in 1968, to lessen the terrible price that American airmen were paying in Southeast Asia. The Navy alone lost 644 aviators over North Vietnam during the war—killed, captured (the late John McCain among them), or simply and awfully vanished. Amid this carnage, the job of reducing the toll was given to nine junior officers, commanded by Dan Pedersen, then a lieutenant commander, 6-foot-3 and “the Hollywood image of a fighter pilot,” as one of his comrades recalls, “seldom appearing without his Ray-Ban sunglasses.” He has since given the shades to his granddaughter, he says, but he wore them all through his Navy career.
When the school was founded, the Navy had recently acquired the McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom, and Topgun's job was to train up a generation of men who could “fly the Phantom day or night, in any weather, anywhere in the world, from the pitching decks of aircraft carriers”—and come back alive. To the frustration of the men who flew the plane in combat, the Phantom had no guns. It was armed only with Sidewinder and Sparrow missiles that too often missed or malfunctioned and anyhow were intended for targets 10 miles distant. Yet the official rules of engagement obliged American aviators to be close enough for a positive identification of the crude but agile (and cannon-equipped) Russian fighters flown by the North Vietnamese. In a close-quarters dogfight, the MiG-17's cannon gave it the edge unless the man in the Phantom was very good indeed. The Topgun program aimed to give him such skills. As its graduates percolated through the Navy, the official kill ratio went from break-even to a lopsided American advantage.
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