Jocko Podcast - 360: If You Ever Caught A Fighter Pilot In A Defensive Mood, You'd Have Him Licked Before You Started Shooting. With Navy Fighter Pilot Tom Kopel

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

Tom Kopel. Navy Fighter Pilot.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 360 with Dave Burke and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Dave. Good evening. The Secretary of the Navy takes pleasure in presenting the Navy Commendation Medal to Lieutenant Thomas Coppell for services set forth in the following citation. For heroic achievement as a pilot of jet aircraft while attached to fighter squadron 142 embarked in USS Constellation. On 14 January 1970, Lieutenant Coppell flew the wing aircraft of a two-plane attack mission in Southeast Asia.

Despite heavy anti-aircraft fire in the area, he placed all of his bombs on target, resulting in five enemy trucks destroyed and many secondary explosions and many enemy casualties. His professional determination in spite of heavy anti-aircraft fire and adverse weather conditions resulted in a substantial damage. to the enemy's logistics efforts. Lieutenant Copel's superb airmanship, courage, and devotion to duty reflected great credit upon himself and were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.

The combat distinguishing device is authorized for the secretary M.F. Wisner, Vice Admiral, United States Navy. And that is a citation. That represents the types of missions that were flown by Navy fighters day after day night after night week after week month after month Year after year Those were the type of missions that resulted in

Solid battle damage to the enemy But also resulted in 532 aircraft lost in combat 401 aviators killed 64 missing 179 captured who became prisoners of war 75 of those aircrafts that were shot down were F4 Phantoms these missions were flown by pilots who took incredible risks to get the job done and eventually pilots that rewrote the book on air-to-air combat and laid the foundation

for how fighter pilots are trained to this very day and it's an honor to have one of these pilots here with us tonight. That pilot, in fact, is from the opening award citation. Tom Coppell. Tom, thanks for coming down. I appreciate you coming out here. Anyone know we got Dave. He used to keep me honest.

Well, he's always... He's always excited that a few times I've had some pilots on without having Dave on. He's not happy about it. So we got him here. and I guess let's just kind of start from the beginning and how you grew up and where you came from. So you were born in Queens. Is that right?

Yeah, Jamaica Hospital, a huge hospital in Queens, but we lived just over the city line and a new development that the house was built and my parents moved in with a brand new baby. And this was 19 what? 41. So you're pre-war? Yeah.

And my dad, was not drafted because of me. He was an insurance underwriter in the financial district of, insurance district of downtown, downtown Manhattan, Nassau Street in those places down there.

And a nice guy, I have to say. Well, that's good. How much, you know, so you're born in 1941, I'm assuming, before the war started, before Pearl Harbor? I was, yeah, August. and Pearl Harbor was in December. Okay.

So as you're growing up, is there any part of World War II that you remember? I remember my mother telling me that the war in Japan was over. I don't remember her telling me that the war in Europe was over. On the other hand, since I was four years old

and had a brand new sister, they sort of left me alone and I would go down to the corner, believe it or not. on what was then, I guess it probably still is, Hillside Avenue. And he used to seat low-boy trucks with Grumman. I assume they were F-6 fighters with the wings removed. They put the fuselage and the wings on the side. I think the engines and the propellers were on them,

but obviously they were on their way to South Pacific. And they asked your mother, what the heck is that? And she said, oh, they're going to war. and stuff like that. So I assume that was 1944. I was three years old sitting on the curb. And that's the first ever remember of any of that. But they told me that both Grumman and Republic were out in the island.

At that time, I guess it was, well, farms. Did that leave an impression on you seeing the fighters? I mean, first of all, I don't remember anything until I was about 17, I think. So you remember and stuff at three is pretty impressive. But did you think, oh, these are warplanes going to war? Did that make any sense to you? Oh, yes, oh, yes. But I never expected that I would be a guy who would fly them or anything like that.

And the other thing I remember about flying machines was not combat or war or anything like that. It was the fact that Idol Wild that became JFK when they expanded it, The airport was seeing the DC 7Bs coming in from Europe. In bad weather, they used the east-west runway and streaming fire out of the back of the, off the top of the wings. How the heck is that? So I finally, in my grown-up days, talked to a guy who's a retired naval aviator, P3s. So he's semi. I said, Dennis, why didn't you?

want to be a carrier guys. Many engines, Tom. Oh, sorry about that. But at any right, he was a flight engineer on DC 7Bs and he said that's because a flight engineer goes full rich and flames roaring out the back and especially in foggy weather when they were, you know... Oh, so that's what you'd be saying. Yeah, I wanted to do that. That's really hot stuff, you know. But, but and well, And jumping ahead, I guess. But why do I want to go with it? I wanted to, my father said, I graduated from college.

My dad said, what are you going to do? And I said, I don't know. He said, why don't you see if one of the services would teach you how to fly? I said, don't take guys like me. He said, they sure do. Well, before you get to college, what was growing up like? So did you grow up there just outside the city? Yeah.

And I was just a kid. A four-year-old kid. down on the corner of Hillside Avenue by yourself, which is cool. Yeah, but that was different time, I think, or something like it. Maybe there were as many monsters around men as there are now, but nobody talked about or acted that way. And as soon as I got a bike, you know, it was. Then it was really on.

Yeah. I was never there. Were you, how'd you do in school? Did you like school? It's terrible. I hated school. I hated school. I was a, my wife loves to tease me that.

I was such a terrible little monster that one of the classrooms that I was in in grade school had a, it was at the two classrooms at the end of the hallway and then a connecting room between the two. She put me in the connecting room with a door that opened so I could see the blackboard, but I was in the room with the door open about 10 inches wide. You're just a hyperactive kid? I think so. And bored with all of that. I could read before. I was, I could read when I was four. So, they were always buying me books.

So, stuff like that. So you were smart but bored? I guess, I don't know. What about sports? Were you into sports at all? Yeah, because I was the biggest kid and played touch football in high school, I'm sorry, in grade school, seventh and eighth grade,

and it gets a little rough. At least it did that. But I never got hurt or anything like that. And then when I got to high school, I played football and played first team. What year did you graduate high school? 59. So you grew up in like the iconic 50s. That's right.

When you see those movies or you just... I think it's awful. Why is it awful? The clothes that they wear and the nostalgia, the cars, we realize I do today are death traps. But they bring huge money, these cars in the 50s. Which one did you have? You must have one. Did you have one?

I guess maybe not in the city. No, it's not the city. It was real suburbs. The wooden houses on a little bitty lots. So did you have a car? No. You know what? I never owned a car until I was in flying school in Big Spring, Texas.

Never had a need of one. Got around. Back in the 50s, early 60s, you stick out your thumb, you got a ride. People were different then, somehow or other. I don't really understand how that is. But I went all of the eastern half of the United States with my thumb. I went everywhere and never worried about getting back or anything like that. But at one time, the worst time I ever had doing that was on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in West in Pennsylvania. I was there for 12 hours. What?

No one would pick me up. I have no idea why. And maybe I'd look scowly or something. I don't know. I don't think I would have been a great hitchhiker if it comes down to look at scowly. How we definitely have some issues. So you're growing up in the iconic 50s. How do those movies miss the mark, hit the mark? I mean, how are they? The 50s movies.

Yeah. I don't know. I don't, frankly, I don't remember. I don't remember what movies you might be talking about. What about Elvis? I thought it was awful. You thought Elvis was awful? I personally did.

I guess my sisters thought otherwise. I had three younger sisters. But I thought that was the dumbest thing I ever heard of. So that's, well, I thought. So what were you listening to? I have to admit, classical music. Minor story. My wife, when, before we were married,

somehow or other, I introduced her to the fact that I listened mostly to classical music. And she went home, she tells me now, or actually after we were married, said, this guy is a little bit weird. A suspect for sure. This is to classical music. I don't know. Rimsky Korsakov-Sharzad that everybody knows. I was really intrigued by that.

So I listen to classical music and still do today. So whatever. So the rock and roll thing was not your scene? Not until the California, the British invasion and California. And that was all together different. Okay, we'll get there. So you graduate from high school, 1959. So you lived through the Korean War as well.

I remember it well. I remember being a Boy Scout camp when they announced the armistice had just been signed that morning or whatever it was. That was a big deal. Everybody shared. But you still didn't get the impression that that was something that you might do one day? No, no. There was no military tradition in the family at all except for a grand uncle, maximum nice guy who was. a graduate of the same college as Donald Trump graduated still exists in New York State Military Academy, I think it's called.

But he graduated in 1936 or something like that, and he was part of the last combat cavalry regiment and the United States Army. And I was disbanded, I think, in 1939, as the storm cloud. were gathering and they disbanded that unit. But that was officers with real swords and two horses each and all the rest of everything else about that. But that was a combat unit, not a display unit. It was the last one. He wound up in Iceland for the duration of the war,

deriding the whole experience. But I only realized in my grown-up days that if Hitler had won. won the Battle of Britain. Iceland was next. And they probably, no doubt, knew that. But they all, I went to a reunion with him at one point. And they all derided their experience there and so forth.

But they would have been the first to be killed in the first super German raid, no doubt, on Iceland to flatten the place. Yeah, we used to get a similar thing in the SEAL teams where you'd get some platoons would be going over to Iraq or Afghanistan and some other platoons would be going to like Guam or somewhere there's no war going on and of course all the guys

that get sent to Guam are just angry that they can't be in Iraq or Afghanistan and meanwhile the guys in Iraq or Afghanistan are freezing or sweating to death or they're getting shot at or whatever. Yeah they use real bullets here and stuff like that. But that's what you know that's what people join the

SEAL teams for and Yeah. And apparently the horse cavalry as well. Yeah. It was for real. Swords and the whole deal with those guys. And he was a wonderful man, wonderful man. When sisters were born, I got farmed out with him twice in the summertime.

And he worked in Lower New York State, Bington and Elmira, those places around there. And he had grand aunts who had a... truncated farm there and he farmed me out with them. You're just slave labor for the summertime. I had a kid fun being a kid with cornfields and ponds and stuff like that all over the place there. And then where'd you end up going to college? I went to Albright College in Reading, PA, a commuter for me.

very small college at that time, 850 students at that time, and now it's about 12 or 1,300, maybe a little bit more than that. But wonderful teachers, they're absolutely wonderful, especially the men, but one notable woman who was a pacifist of all things, but she was absolutely a wonderful woman. How come she left such a big impression on you? Because she was so straight. I never met a woman quite like that.

She was straightforward and thoughtful and aggressive. I like a woman who is my wife. Tells you what's on her mind immediately. And she was that way, I guess. And she was a professor there? Yeah, she was. What was she teaching? English.

English and speech. And you got to be, she changed to with her. professional abilities and so forth. And I remember sitting there arguing with her silently. No, a ten minute lecture about using the atomic bomb in Japan. She was opposed to that. And I don't think she had read notably or widely enough about all that. And I had at that point, as opposed to that. But still, I thought she was really great, point of view sort of thing. What were you studying?

I was an econ major, not business, economics, and minor in history, and had some fabulous teachers there. A guy named Wilbur Gingrich, who was genuinely world-famous Greek. scholar and biblical scholar. A couple of other guys that nobody ever heard of, but a wonderful man. And a crazy guy who loved to teach European and Russian history. He took him for Russian. Don't take him for God's sakes.

You've got a D out of that and he'll blither you and you can't write fast enough. and his class, his name was Gingrich was the biblical scholar, a Greek scholar. Can you believe his name escapes me? But at any rate, Kistler, and they said, you'll get a D out of his class because you can't write fast enough

and stuff like that. But he was something. He smoked continuously. And always had the window open, and the butts went out. the window and he torch up another one. But he was, he was really something. And all of six be, all of six in the class. So at some point you, you got more into school than you were when you were in grammar school or whatever. Yeah, no, because it had smart people who was smarter than I was.

And how'd you put it? My parents weren't really educated, if you will. My mother had a college degree from NYU, but I think she skated as much as she could. And my dad, they kicked him out of grade school, yeah, out of school when he was after 10th grade, I think, because he was done. They did that at that time in the 20s. So both of them wanted me to be educated and so forth. So it was interesting to be in the company of genuinely educated people, and I didn't catch fire at first. by the time I was a junior, I understood that this is really an experience. You can get interesting things out of these people. By the time I was a senior, I didn't want to leave.

You get to talk as a grown-up with these grown-ups who listen to you and then tell you things you had never conceived of before and stuff like that. So I had a good time in college until they kicked me out. At what point did you start looking at the military as a legitimate option for you? Not until I was about to graduate. Back in the good old days, my dad worked, he was a New Yorker, New Yorker, New Yorker, but he got a job in Redding, Pennsylvania. And it was a shock to all of us.

I didn't want to leave the school I was in it. I was going to Progials. So this is back in high school? Yeah. I was two years into Shandah. I'm not out high school in Long Island, which is by entrance exams and tuition. And I liked it there. I was doing a little bit better, a little bit better.

But I didn't want to leave. And he came home and said he'd been offered a job in Reading, Pennsylvania. Where is that? We were New Yorkers and New Yorkers. I can do the accent, too. And, of course, when you get to Pennsylvania, the kids make endless fun of you because of your accent. and stuff. But at any rate, where was I in this?

We're just trying to figure out at what point did you think that military might be an option. I could go downtown Reading and go up the fire tower staircase and plop in the chair in my dad's office. And he said, so what are going to do? You're going to graduate here. And I said, I don't know. He said, have you considered maybe the government would teach you how to fly. in one of the services. And I don't take guys like me.

He said, they surely do. We got 20-20s and good shape. Nothing wrong with it. So I applied to the Navy guy and he was an embarrassment. Overweight, feet up on the desk, didn't seem to care about anything. I filled out all this paperwork and he never got back to me. went to the Air Force guy and he was close to his

quota probably and he drove me around to you have to go here and fill out these, I'll help you fill out the form and so I did that and the Air Force took me so but the

what was the question well that that was the question the question is how did you first get the idea of my dad my dad said see if you learn how to fly and he didn't know how to fly. So did they have like a contract that made you a pilot? Was that part of the enlistment process?

They, when they said, we like everything you do. Now you have to fill out a preference sheet and you can put whatever you like in there. We suggest this list of stuff over here and then you make them one, two, and three choices. And I said, well, I want to be a pilot because that's what I'm doing this whole thing for. He said, well, most people put a navigator for second and then something like, I don't know, auxiliary aviation or something like that. Well, that's not why I'm here. So I put pilot, pilot, pilot, one, two, three. Funny thing, too, the B-52 squadron and I was later in was a guy from my college class.

And I said, Danny, what are you doing here? navigator. He said, well, they told me, put pilot first, navigator second, and I said, you don't wear glasses or anything. He said, well, that's what they took me as. I said, well, I didn't want to rub it in, so I just let it alone. So what was your indoctrination to the Air Force then? I went to the Air OCS in San Antonio. It's not at Lackland. It's, I think they call it the Medina. the base, it's nearby. And I went through that. That's three months.

Was it a shock to your system? Were you wondering why the hell you did this? Well, I was fortunate. There were several previous enlisted guys there. And I thought, they know the ropes, do whatever they do. So that's what I did. And then they said, if you play a musical instrument, put your name on this list. And I said,

don't, the guy told me don't volunteer for anything before I went in. So I found out the guy was running this thing.

He loves to have live music for any parades that he has. And if you can play a musical and get your name on it, I did.

So there were... What instrument did you play? I play the trumpet and cornet. I can play baritone. I can play alto horn or

French horn or any of those. But I dropped that, you know, for a long, time in midlife. I'm back into it now. Anyway, you got out of everything. You straightened up your digs and your bed and whatnot. And when the Saturday morning inspection happened, we had

rehearsal. And that was, they, if you will, all knew that. So this is 19, what, 1963? No, no, 65. January 65. Because, see, I graduated in August because I was having too much fun that by that point in college. I found this. You ought to take that professor's history course. He's really interesting. And you should take comparative economic systems because you should do that. And I didn't have enough credits. I had two, if you needed 150, I had 175, but you don't have enough in your or in your minor. You took that course and you got the good grade and at any rate. So I wound up graduating in August. But how to get into that? So it's 1965. So you're starting to hear about Vietnam. You guys must be talking about Vietnam. No, no, because that happened in January of 65. Yeah. And summer of 64, I worked through college at a small

summer stock playhouse because I was in the drama club in college and you meet this guy and meet that guy and so forth and all very legitimate if you will good people, not these sorts of flaky, dumb people

that you might think when you think of theater sort of people and I had a mentor by this point a guy from New York who was old enough to be to my father And he said, when you graduate, where are you going to do? I said, well, I don't know.

I have this paperwork in to go to the Air Force to fly and stuff. And he said, they were looking for a guy like you at a theater in Baltimore that I am going to, he said. Should I mention you to them? Well, okay. So he called me in about a week or so, and he said, they want 15 minutes of. of drama and 50 minutes of comedy, if you can do that, they want to talk to you. So I went to a woman in the summer stock company, Grace Chapman, wonderful woman, and I said, can you help me?

And she did. I said, I want to do it like this. And she said, no, no, no, we're going to do it this way and so forth. So rehearsed with her. Have to memorize everything, of course, did all that, and went down to Baltimore. stood up on the stage, lights, boom. And there got what, a few people are watching you to judge you? The two bosses.

The two bosses. And they're thinking of giving you some kind of a role or? No, they had a program there with the, you actually worked as it were in the union deal. The actors union is called Actors' Equity. You work as a local jobber and it's called. This is doing what? What's your job? Well, when they've got you, they've got you by the short hairs, as they say.

And you will get rolled. Maybe the minor, maybe you were just a walk on for this one and maybe something serious. I got one very nice roll out of it. I was the elder son in Galileo by Bertolt Brecht. It was a notable European communist. but a good director there for that. John Marley, the guy who a lot of people, he was a workhorse, Hollywood movie actor.

He was the guy in bed with a horse during the first Godfather film. That was John Marley and a nice man as well. Anyway. So wait, so this was in the summertime you were doing this? Summer Stock in a barn, believe it or not, in Pennsylvania, and then Jerry Richards was a New York guy old enough to be my dad, said he was going to this equity company in Baltimore, relatively new, called Center Stage. It's still active today. And was I interested, did you have another thing in mind? And I went back and I said to my mother, in passing, I was thinking about this.

She said, do what you have to do, all right. So I hitchhiked once again. To Baltimore. To Baltimore. And how long did you stay in Baltimore for? Only until I got a big fat envelope in the mail from DOD. And it said, we will teach you to fly if you want to. And of course, the draft was there.

And I had already called the draft board. And I said, where am I? And they said, we can't tell you by the law. But I'll tell you this. you're close to the front of the drawer. I remember that very well. I thought, I got to do something about this. I wonder what to do about this.

And I went to a fellow guy who was in the same position I was in the company. And I said, I don't know what to do. And he said, do what I did. Tell them you like boys, not girls. I said, that's not true. He said, it's not true with me either, but it got me right. They could go sit on the bench over there. And they ask you, do you really like boys rather than girls?

And he said, I just said, that's right, I do. And that was the end of that. And I got off. I thought, oh, boy, that may be good advice some ways. But I thought somewhere down the road, somebody's going to drag that out 40 years from now. And so I didn't want to do that. And lo and behold, I get this big, fat envelope in the mail. I go to Jerry Richards, my mentor.

And I said, what should I do? He said he was a combat veteran of World War II. A dog-faced soldier had funny stories to tell about being on a line of March, hot, sweaty, an Italian farmer going by with a wooden tank on a little wagon pulled by a horse. And the second lieutenant, whoever he was, said, stay away from that tank. We all knew it was full of wine. or grape juice anyway. And he said, we got two-thirds of the line through there,

and somebody went, boom, boom, and that was it. Everything, everything collapsed. Anyway, super nice guy and whatnot. I went to Jerry, and I said, what should I do about this? And he said, well, you'll always come back to this, but you're never getting another chance to do that. So I signed on the dotted line, and I went into the Air Force, like the 2nd of January.

1975. 1965. Yeah. You said 75. Yeah, you said 75. That's right. Sixty-five. So, yeah, so that early part of Vietnam,

because I always think in the way the news kind of worked, it was the battle the I-drang Valley in 1965, where really hit the news, and there was casualties, and it seemed like the escalation really kind of started. Yeah. So you get done with the officer candidate school, and then is it you get done,

you get your slot to flight school? Right. And that was at Webb Air Force Base in West Texas, at Big Spring, Texas. Pretty much of a barren place, just east of the big, big oil fields, but there were plenty of oil wells around where I was, around Big Spring,

but the big oil fields around Midland and Odessa, Texas, Permium Basin, it's called. And there had been at least one crash at Big Spring, Texas. They made a very big deal rather than rightly so. The guy was confused about stars and oil fields. Every drilling, not their drilling rig, but every pumping deal has its own light bulb on it. And he got confused and rolled over and... Jeez.

Yeah, so really a shame. But I learned to fly there and then went to the... How was flight school? It was tough for me at first because I didn't know a wing from a tail, an aileron from an elevator, anything. And about half those guys had private licenses, at least half of them had private licenses. And a couple of them had commercial multi-engines. They were just walking through the thing. But I was slow to get going, but when I got into the second half, which was the T-38 at that time, I did very well.

But it's like a baseball player trying to bring his average up the second half of the season. So your grade point average was a problem for me. And I wound up getting B-52 assignment. And my roommates got C-130's, which was a very desirable deal if you didn't want to get shot at. It turned out to be very foolish. Because in C-130, you got shot at in Vietnam War. And one of my roommates got Air Defense Command F-104, which was considered to be crem de la crem until I got assigned to the F-4. But first you had to do your B-52 time.

Right. The G-model in Rome, New York, a wonderful place, wonderful people there. I liked everything about it except sitting alert. Awful. So this is now, what, 1960 or so? Yeah, that's right. And you're assigned to the B-52 Squadron in Rome, New York? Yeah, a very heavily decorated squadron from World War II.

I can't remember the number 488 or something like that. Eighth Air Force. I had a first guy they put me with was a guy of shorter stature, and I think he had a problem about that. And I was six feet tall and whatnot. And all the way down to him saying, I said to him, that's not so. He said, it is so.

And you shut up because I'm a major and you're just a goddamn first lieutenant. Whoa. Okay. But at any rate, he fired me, so to speak, basically. he didn't want to fly with me anymore because I may have made better landings than he did because the next guy I got, he was a family man,

and we got along like brothers and it was great. So the one lead pilot or whatever, is it called the lead pilot, the major? Yeah. He didn't like flying with you. Right. Well, he didn't like your attitude or something. And he didn't like my attitude either.

So he got rid of you, right. But then you just moved to another guy? Yeah. Well, they gave me another guy. You don't have any choice. about it, but we got along. They just had fun every day. And what's the deal with sitting alert?

Well, they did it two different ways. At Rome, New York, where I was, they had eight airplanes on alert at any one time. All the airplanes that I was on had two hound-dog standoff missiles with thermonuclear weapons in them there. The mark 28 at that time, I don't think it's classified anymore, but the highest yield on those, single warhead per, and there was a pop on there.

And then four thermonuclear weapons in the Bomb Bay, and then four quail decoy missiles in the Bomb Bay. and the targets for the ones I was on, well, I was on a mission that was downtown Moscow, believe it or not, and land in Turkey. I think all of the ones I was on were land in Turkey because you were out of fuel. By then you were fueled south of Iceland and then went in and then turned straight south and landed, pretty much on an abandoned airfield in central Turkey, and you were instructed to get fuel by Jerry Cann. This is silly, and we knew it. Jerry can was not enough.

He had eight J-57s on a B-52, and the H-model had modified J-57s. They were fan jet engines. It was silly. You'd never forget enough fuel to do it. refuel the thing to fly it anywhere. So, I mean, was that just because once you flew over Moscow and dropped nuclear weapons, it wouldn't really matter where you were getting?

What was the... Pretty much, because you're assuming that the world would be a conflagration and would be pretty much of a mess at that point. You wouldn't truly a thermal nuclear war would have finished by that time, I guess. And everything would be an awful mess. And are you sitting, like, are the weapons loaded on the aircraft, just sitting there stage? Absolutely positively with an armed guard on every airplane, walking around underneath every airplane, 24 hours a day. Was there any events that would heighten your readiness?

They would have practice alerts that could happen at any time. The SACC strategic air command worldwide would call on alert, and every SAC base on the planet, even in obscure places, would do what they were told to do. And they basically had three commands, one, to man the airplanes and start them, stay in place. Second, start the airplanes and taxi down the runway, just motivate the flying machines. And third would be a real launch.

Actually, there were two kinds of launches, launched to a holding point short of total commitment or four total commitment from minute one. So obviously, third and fourth never. happened with me. They would, the alert was at Rome New York at Griffiths, Air Force Base which is where I was, and wonderful people there too, was seven days. You had seven days on, and the rules were half your time on alert, you had free. But it didn't really work out that way because you didn't get away from the base until, in this case, Thursday. You know, you you had 12 o'clock or something like that and you lost half the day.

And then they would schedule you for a flight maybe Monday night at 8 p.m. So Monday was sort of gone because you had to sleep because you were going to fly for 12 hours. You took off at 8 p.m. you're going to land at 8 o'clock Tuesday morning. All those missions, those training missions were 8 hours. But training missions were sort of fun and interesting. I spent a lot of time with my hands on my lap, but nevertheless, they're interesting. And you went all over the United States, all over the United States, doing those things. And a lot of them were at low level, because that's what you do in the case of a nuclear war.

Oh, it's a low-level attack? Oh, yes. The B-52s were all assigned low-level. altitude. Like how low? 200 feet. Yeah. That's good underneath radar? Right. Yeah. As low as you want to go is what I was told at when I said how I said this is a poker deck route and this is published at 400 feet. How low are we going to talking about here if we have it actually do have a war? As low as you want to go. I said one point that you have charts that were accurate, accurate, and classified obviously, but I said to one of the guys who worked

in the vault, you had to do target study while you were on alert. And I said, you show telephone poles here. Here I am the co-pilot looking for the next turn. Can I count those telephone poles? Yes, you can. Whoa. They were all done by U-2 or by satellite. I think the satellites were just starting at that time. So I said, so it would be the 28th telephone pole. I can turn left to 030. Yep. Anyway, so you, what was the question? Where were the heck? Where are we? Well, it's very interesting to hear like sort of what your status was as a pilot. And I actually asked you what level of alert, what's the highest level of alert you are because obviously you missed the Cuban missile crisis.

That's right. Because I'm sure that would have been a very high alert. Right. Maybe they even, do you think they got airborne for that? I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't remember ever asking anybody. I don't, but I don't think that that happened.

No. And that had to be a little bit of a strange weight on your shoulders to think about, especially with your background, with your English teacher that didn't like the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Right. And here you are with a mission tasking that if you get this mission, you're going to fly and annihilate, you know, basically the world. Well, I have a little bit of a funny story about it.

Let's hear that. Let's hear that that turns into a funny story. I like that. In the G and the H, we had the gunner up front and the gun, the guns that were in the tail. So these are the G and H models of the B52. Right. And up to that, the gun erode in the tail. and if he were to bail out, he would jettison his turret, which weighed something like 2,000 pounds, everything,

his ammunition and his 50 calibers and everything short of his seat. He sat on a chemical toilet back there, incidentally, and then he would bail out. He did not have an injection seat. It was right in front of his toes, and he just stepped forward or leaned forward, and out he went with a conventional parachute. Anyway, the gunner and the G&H models up front, and the cockpit arrangement is different in the G&H than it was in the earlier up to the F model, B-52. The Gs no longer exists. They went with the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. The G's got pictures of them getting their wings cut off that they took airborne pictures of.

all that's complied with the Russians. To show the Soviets. But at any rate, the G&H internally are the same, and the ECM officer and the gunner ride facing backwards. And, oh, no, no, I was going to, oh, yeah. So on your charts, when you do your first day of alert target study, it's the same charts every time, The gunners, he's sitting across the table.

And I said, what, oh, you have L, P, B, N, that means something. And E3, 5, that means something across the route of flight. And I said, LPBO, in the same lettering, stencil, same ink, same everything. I said, what's LPBO? He said, last point of bailout. I said, that's over Finland. He said exactly right. I'm not going to anybody's nuclear war.

I'm leaving over Finland. I'm taking the seat pack with me with the 22 rifle, the sleeping bag, and everything. I'm out of here. But it never happened. He was a E6 enlisted guy and nice family man and everything else. But I'm not going to nuclear. Were you nuts? So how long did you do this job for?

A year. Well, including the rag, if you will, in Merced, California, a year and a half. But then I got the big, fat envelope that said, here is your inter-service transfer. If you want to do this, you can do this. And that's what you had applied for? Right. And why did you try and do an inter-service transfer to the Navy?

Because I didn't want two. two sides to them. There's popping your peas again there. I didn't want to sit alert anymore. I didn't like riding around with my hands in my lap and going way back. I had this idea in the back of my head. My first cross-country in the T-37 out of Webb Air Force Base, we stopped somewhere, I can't remember. And there were two Navy guys there wearing golf shirts underneath their flight suits. And through the open door, there were two A-4s parked out there, and they said something like USS Independence or USS, who knows, forestall or who knows what, I thought, isn't

that hot stuff? These guys can go to sea with those things and go, I don't know, anywhere they want. That's hot. And then I saw the back of a proceedings magazine. proceedings used to be magazine size then it became smaller format but it showed an A4 looking over the A4 shoulder like the wingman or something like that looking over and he's on short final for a carrier and I thought that's hot shit so that did it and was it hard to put in that inter-service transfer was it pretty straightforward well they bounced it back at me so oh no format's wrong has to be this way

and that way and have to do that. And I said, fine. Well, what do you want us to do? I said, well, you tell me it's wrong. I did it according to what was in the publications library. You do it. I said, well, I guess we have to. And they did.

And then I signed everything the second time and then away it went. And you got straight into the pilot pipeline? Well, no, I was, you know, when you're a military officer, You are an officer of the United States. You're not an Air Force officer or a Navy officer or even an officer of the, there's a land survey and mapping service. They have military uniforms. You are an officer of the United States. So it isn't like you change services.

You change uniforms and you change terminology and you change verbiage. and the name of your grade changes from first lieutenant to lieutenant junior grade but they can put you anywhere they want. You can be a seal who's a lieutenant commander and they can say, guess what? We want you in the embassy in Tunisia and it's only going to be six months.

But you'll be wearing civilian clothes and you'll be responsible for thus and so and so on us and so. And I can do that. Because remember, you're appointed by the president of the United States. You're going to serve in that capacity. So that's what happens with an inner service transfer. And I was told that when you make the transfer, it's basically a long table meeting of senior service. I have a doc who wants to come over to the Air Force, and you have a –

Junior lieutenant who wants to go Navy. I'll swap you for those to them. Okay, that's fine. I mean, do that and so forth and so forth and that's the way it's done, but every six months or something like that and it probably goes on right now. I don't know. But you ended up with the pilot slot somehow. Yeah, well, I had orders to Kingsville, Corpus Christi, and wound up standing in a guy's office, nice guy, with Lieutenant Commander. view of the parking ramp with S2s, Stoofs, parked behind him, Piston Engine, anti-submarine airplanes. It was a training facility for them. And a couple of lieutenant commanders standing over here, and me standing right here in front of his desk. And he said, what are we going to do with you? I said, I don't know. I just have these orders.

He said, you flew jets? I said, yeah. He said, well, then we send you to Kingsville. What should we do with him? What happens if you can't get aboard? I thought, I will get aboard. So what's Kingsville? Kingsville, the two advanced training bases.

I think is B-Ville still active? B-Ville's close, still Kingsville. Yeah, and Kingsville is bigger than ever. Navy advanced. At that time, they were F-9s there. And I went over to Kingsville and introduced myself and dropped my orders on the table, so speak, and all very nice and looked out the window.

and they had these ancient airplanes, F-9s, Kreme War Vintage. About what? Ancient equipment here. There was more fun to fly than you can imagine. You put the power up all the way and leave it there. And it's like your brother's MG with a little four-cylinder engine in it was so much fun to drive underpowered. Same way.

Fun, fun, fun, fun to fly. It was truly a flying. airplane with a wing, airfoil wing and everything else. You get into the phantom and you find, no, this is a machine. Now, at this point you're hearing about Vietnam. Vietnam now is 1967. Yeah. So now you know what?

You're in the pipeline. Your goal is to be a fighter pilot. You know that that pipeline ends up in Vietnam. Yeah. So your detailer calls you on the whole phone in the BOQ. And I think I was a lieutenant by this point, maybe not. Senior Lieutenant Junior grade anyway, I have two rooms and private bath. And you were in Kingsville in those?

I was, yeah. Big solid BOQs there, very nice and whatnot. But when you took a shower, the water was so bad, the ground water smelled like ancient sourcrow. Remember that? It's awful. At any rate, so at what point do you get assigned to go to the rag for F4? Well, your dealer calls you on the whole phone of all things.

And put Tom Coppell on. He's in room B7. The guy comes out, hey, Tommy, you got a phone call. It's my detailer again. He said, Tom, we really want you in the A6. That's just for you. Same as the B-52. You have experience with offsets and everything else.

it's going to be perfect. I said, I don't want that, Bob. You know that. Call me back next. A series of phone calls. The last one was the same thing. Tom, you're perfect for the A6. By now you probably looked around, talked around about it.

That's a heck of an airplane. Yeah, I know, Bob. I still won't fly the F4. Okay. Let me think about it. And about a week later, a guy called me and said, You have orders up there at Admin. Big Spring at that, I'm sorry, Kingsville at that time, was nowhere land.

And I did not have a car. I said, it's up at the other end of the main drag that parallel hangar area. I said, well, first of all, I said, Fred, what do my orders say? I wouldn't look at them. It's none of my business. Oh, gentlemen don't read each other's mail. So I walk up there and here I had F4 to Merroar. And the F4, what year did the F4 come out?

What year was that? I think the first prototype flew in 58. Is that right? That sounds about right. Just real quick. All right. So you go through all Air Force training. You're a B-52 guy and then you see Q in the F-9?

Yeah. What was that like? I mean, they're worried that you can't even get aboard, right? Yeah. Yeah. What was that like? I guess my FCLP was okay. And when I first time out, FCLP, I think, this is ball on me.

I can do this and so forth. And the guy comes back and he says, well, you were this and you were this and you were. I thought, that's amazing. How do you know that? And so forth. That's LSOs. They grade you accurately and their club, Dave knows this. I was in LSO.

Oh, okay. It's hard to get into their club. And you can't really dispute what they tell you. And after every SC landing, he's in your ready room saying, well, you started out high and so forth and so forth. So you guys have now both thrown it. I was wondering if I missed something, but the term get aboard.

What does this mean? Expand on it. There are guys, I guess, who just say, you're crazy? I'm not going to do that. I thought I didn't realize. You had to do that. I guess that's what happens.

Or they're just what used to be called, the guy's a plumber and he can't do it. So get aboard means you actually qualify in the aircraft? Yeah, get aboard is just a language for can you land on the ship. Right. Got it. Okay, that's what I was missing. That's what I was missing. Yeah.

It's hard. It's the phrase of, hey, is this guy going to be able to get aboard? Meaning can he land his plane on the boat? Yeah. What happens, I think, every now and then is you got guys to go through the whole pipeline. Carrey calls is the last thing you do in training traditionally, and you can be great at all these things. But if you can't get aboard, you're no good to the Navy.

That's right. Because we land on boats. Oh, yeah, we're saying you to P3s or... Yeah, in fighters, exactly. So is that what happens? You get sent to P3s? You get... I mean, now you get sent to, you know, P3s, you go to helicopters.

If you can't get a board in a jet, they're going to send you to some other non-tactical platform. That's true. I've been talking about this lately. It seems like there's certain skill sets of people. Some people just can't get through like, for instance, when I was going through seal training, I would say about one out of every hundred guys, they're just not going to be able to shoot a pistol well. And they might actually not make it through the training because they can't shoot a pistol.

They might be an athlete. They might be great at everything. They might be smart. They can't shoot a pistol. Close quarters combat. There's a bunch of strict little things. that you have to follow. And some people, I think that number is about four out of every hundred.

This is in basic seal training or seal qualification training that they're just not going to get it. They're just, there's not bad people. They do a lot of other things well, but they just can't do that thing. And it sounds like occasionally someone that can fly a plane, someone that can land it on the airfield, someone that can do the turns they need to do in the sky, someone that understands the dynamics of it, but they can't get aboard, they can't land on that aircraft carrier. Right. And then it doesn't matter.

Yeah. No, it does matter because you were a top gun guy, but I was an instructor at Meridian at the end of my career. And I don't remember exactly how or what, but the guy said to me, in the friendliest collegial way, if your students can't cut it, it's not their fault, it's your fault. because if this guy is not the sort of guy we want for tailhook we'll find a place for him and he'll be valuable to the Navy

and the Air Force is the other way around it always felt to me like they were trying to get rid of you they were always rotten to you except for one guy who wound up being a I think I put this in my list of stuff he wound up being a four-star general in NATO and Europe but he

maybe it was personal self-esteem or self-confidence or something like that. He was very quiet and struck in T-38's in Air Force, and Air Force advanced, very laid back. He'd say, Tom, come left a little bit more. Or Tom, let me show you. And he did. And that was in his last, and he wouldn't talk to me for 10 minutes and stuff like that. But not because he didn't want to, just let you go until you made him. No, no, no, let me show you something.

And stuff like that. But at any rate, they always acted like they wanted to get ready or worse in the Navy. If the kid doesn't make it, he's been qualified by us in 16 different ways. If he quits or wants to quit, it's your fault, not his. And so we'll find a place for him and heloes. And you have two guys there and stuff like that. So where the heck, where are we? So then you do get your orders.

You get your F4 orders. And I guess I kicked this whole tangent off just by the F4 at the time was just like the ultimate beast. The monster, yeah. That's what I always called it. And then I went to Mirror. And I remembered this like it was yesterday. Check in, do all that. I'm going to find a place in the B.O.Q.

Forget it. No chance. Tom, so I had to go find a place to live off base and whatnot. But at any rate, VF121 was the F4 rag at that time and was the eastward end of the runway there. And I had a couple of steps going through a narrow gate that was always open. And an F4, you're looking at the tail up the pipes of this thing. And I thought, oh, my God, I forgot how I think. This is a monster.

And they had Marines working on them because they were going to Denang or Chulai to get shot full of holes and eventually abandoned over there. And they took the radars out and put lead noses in them at that place and basically went over the whole thing. And they had Marines' mecks working on them there. But I thought, oh, my God, look at that thing. And so that's the thing. And then I walked at the end of the hangar, and two F4 is taking the runway. And VF121 at that time was at that end of the east end of the runway, and 99% of the time in Miramar, you took off to the west. And two F4s rolled out on the runway.

It was night and early morning, low coastal clouds and fog, just like here. This is at Miramar. and they ran up and then they rolled and they firewalled and they went to burn her and then they disappeared into the mist. I thought, oh my God, I am in over my head. But you learn to do it and get good at it. I get pretty good at it. Although, you know, there's the thing about LSOs since you're here.

So the LSO is the greater basically. That's a landing signal officer. You grade every landing. That's right. Okay. And you have to call meatball and state for every landing, VFR or IFR or anything else. And he's the guy when you look up and they say one peak is worth 10,000 scans, scanning your panel. Instrument flying is something that's hard to understand if you haven't done it.

You cannot make a mistake or you're going to be killed. and wrecked the airplane. No mistakes allowed in genuine IFR and especially carrier IFR. But he's the guy who says to you, you say, 2,400 Clara, and he says to you,

that means I don't see the meatball, and really you can't see the deck either. And he says to you, you're looking great, babe, keep it coming. And you just have to trust what he's saying. Right. Because you can't see visually because of fog or whatever?

Well, one second later, or maybe a half second later, you see the deck, and then you're aboard. He'll say that to you at a half mile. The radar controller says half mile, call a ball or execute a wave off. And you take a second peak and nothing there. You see a white glow from the deck. But if you're on center line and on glide slope, you're going to be okay. And he's tracking that via radar? Or he's, yeah.

Because he can't see you either, right? Yeah, what they, the ship does. It's different now, I think, but it's essentially sort of the same. You have, the F4 had a radar reflector on the nose gear, and the ship's track while scan radar would lock onto that receiver. Otherwise, it might lock onto the wing tip. And that will keep you on, you, if you, flying accurately, the way you're supposed to, everything will be, when you break out, you'll be on center, line on glide slope with the Senator Meepole. And basically don't, don't, with a fuel, in black oil ship, Constellation was a black

America before it, they were both black oil ships. They have a stack gas problem, but actually with a nuclear-powered carrier, you have the burble that comes around, the wind coming around the island. I'm told you can feel that too, but with a with a fire-powered carrier. fossil powered ship, you had a lot of burble. So you're hitting turbulence basically because you're coming to land. Yeah, a tenth of a mile from touchdown. Yeah.

One time I had my mask loose and you could smell it. My mask wasn't tied. What was you? Do you remember your first carrier landing? Yeah. How to go? I thought that was pretty great. That's all I remember.

I remember being on the catapult, though, on, it was Randolph. with hydraulic cats. It was one of the only ships left with hydraulic cats. They'd all been converted to steam. When they put the angled deck on them, these old Essex and Yorktown class ships, they put steam catapults in them, but they put some of them, they put hydraulic cats,

and Randolph was still, it was a wonderful, clean, well-run ship. I thought, what a little. I know the captain was very friendly to me because I was an oddball. and was a coming across Air Force officer he had been told. Come on up on the bridge. It was very nice.

At any rate, sitting there, getting ready to get on the hydraulic cats on Randolph, I remember thinking to myself, I don't have to be doing this. I remember thinking, if I say I don't want to do this, they'll stop right now. I must be crazy. I did it, boom. Was that your first cat launch? Yeah. And they told you over and over again, these are hydraulic cats.

Bob said, you're a pal and instructor. He said, now, make sure you're all the way back, make sure you got your elbow locked, because it's a hell of a bang. And you get, on your first 15, 20 feet, you get 80% of it. your acceleration right up front and then you sort of just trundled down the rest of the way. So I was ready, boy, all the way back in the seat, head back and elbow locked. I didn't think about my knees. When that thing went off, my knees were up here somewhere.

But the F-9, I think the F-A-18 is the same way. You can take the shot hands off and then grab the stick as soon as you're out over the water. And so I still had my hand on the pole, but I had to get my knees back down on the puddles. Is the hydraulic harder to launch than the steam? Because the steam is more gradual buildup or something? Yeah, the steam is smoother and it's a continuous flow. And I guess the new electric cats are that way as well. It's supposed to be even better, I guess.

I don't know how there would be, but I guess there would be. Now, this is the time like Dan Peterson, you guys are working. Like almost getting in this air-to-air combat where you're training at a level that really you hadn't trained before at. Or the pilots hadn't been training this way where we're going hard against each other all the time. Yes and no. In that that was the beginning of the – I said in my talking to Dave via email, I said my only claim to fame here being unusual, if you will, is the fact that I was there when what people, became Top Gun started.

I was there. Sam Leeds, who's in Dan Peterson's book, came into various ready rooms. And VF-121 had about three or four of them. I can't even remember because they took the whole hanger. And he came in there and said, we're going to do the, a lot of F-4s.

And some F-8s, too, were getting shot down by MIG-17s, mostly. But R-A-5Cs are getting shot down by MIG-21s, because they, MiG-21, the R-5C would be cruising at, say, 600 knots taking pictures or going to his next spot to take pictures, and the MiG-21 would come downhill from 30,000, at 1.2, 1.4, or something like that, and launch a Soviet, what was the B model they had stolen from us, a sidewinder, and shoot down the RA5C.

That was the big deal. Don't let your A5C. If you're the escort, I was lots of times. If you're the escort to the RA5C, don't let him get, you have to keep looking back and up there and be prepared to turn into him for a head-on with a sparrow. But at any rate, what was the question? I'm just trying to gather that eventually what I want to know

is how well prepared you were when you went on deployment. From a pilot. So like, I was in the SEAL teams. We would shoot so many rounds through our guns. We would do so many immediate action drills. We would do so many drills and so much training that by the time we went overseas, I felt really good. Yeah. I felt really good.

And I'm trying to figure out where you guys would feel the first time you get on your first combat mission. Well, there's nothing quite like getting shot at the first time. You do remember that. Yeah. But I remember the time, they had some sort of an exercise where we flew down the coast and back up again and maybe went up as high as Hanoi and or the seaport, the high faun, at the mouth of the river up there and back and got aboard and came aboard. Big exercise. I remember looking out over northern part of South Vietnam and over into Laos and all that red. I thought, holy smoke.

That's for real. It's only every one and every six, but you're not quite ready for that. And the first time you actually see it going by, it makes you an older man immediately, I think. So, wherever are we? So you're training to get ready to get over there. Are you dogfighting? Are you? Oh, yeah.

Oh, yes. Yeah, one-on-ones. That's what you did in your training. You left Miramar and went out over the water, and the standard deal was your, you're, flight leader, you're the wingman, he kisses you off. You both turn 30 degrees away and you proceed until one guy turns in. You can turn in immediately or you can wait. If you're the younger guy, you wait until the older guy finally turns in because he can't

see you anymore. You can barely see him and you know his eyeballs and not as good as yours, but you turn in and make a head on it. And then you can see his wings flash and he sees your wings flash. you make a head-on pass. But that's not the way it is in combat. When you get into a combat situation, well, statistically,

it doesn't matter whether it's World War I Korea or the Vietnam War, the guys who got shot down, the guys who didn't see it coming. It's like 99% of them. One guy got shot down, let's say. He said, yeah, he got it on me, and he pulled inside and he unloaded,

and he got me. But that's the exception. And moreover, 95% of the airplane shot down, I popped a pee there in Vietnam, were with AAA, not with Sam's. Everybody, you know, Sam's this and Sam's that. But no, when you're vulnerable and relatively close to the ground, that's when they got you,

especially when you could see it going by. You were in the envelope, if you will. And that's just like a matter of two. chance in a way. That's right. Well, better tactics. There are better tactics and poor tactics. I think I wrote in, has that my monograph there, a guy said to me way back, you know, in Kingsville I teach you to let it roll off on a wing, let the nose fall, acquire the target, adjust a little bit, and now you're watching the altimeter and so forth. I said, this is Poloni.

I want to hit the target. I want to put them right in the hole there. Pull down. Up, invert, pull down. Some ROs think you're crazy the first time they're in the back when you do this. Pull down. As steep as possible.

Well, more than 30 degrees? You bet you. How about 60 or 70 degrees? The steeper you are, the safer you are, the faster you are, the better you are. And then I think I wrote in here. Is there any compromise when you go to come out of that dive and turn the airplane back up towards the sky?

Not really because they've been through all that at Pax River. Say the flight test in the book, the manual that you have, either the Natops manual, the flight manual for pilots, or the tactics manual has all these tables in there. And you can say, if I get out, Let's say I have 80 degrees angle of bank A dive

And I get out at 6,000 feet I'll still be well clear I'll have 1,500 feet To clear if I pull 6.5 Gs to get out If I pull 7 I'm even better off But you lose power when you do that I'm sorry you lose airspeed when you do that So you pull the Gs you're safe

A lot of guys would not do that But did you train this way before going to Vietnam? Did you know that the high angle attack was better? No. Or you figured out when you got there? No, I figured it out in Arizona. Okay. Going over there to those targets that I have.

I guess in the East Coast they have them all over the place too, in rural places. It's a huge plowed area and plowed in a circle and you've got, they have two towers. wooden towers on 12 o'clock and 9 o'clock, 3 o'clock, and they talk to each other, and they tell you where you hit was on the, and a white thing in the center, and they tell you, you bomb. But a guy told me, if you want to be safe, be steeper, be faster.

I said, that's for me. And then I saw this picture, sort of famous, and you've probably seen it, of an airplane diving on a Japanese aircraft carrier at midway, and the guy is 89 degrees. The fact is for me, that's why I'm going to do it. So roll inverted, pull them your nose down. Then you get your dive right there,

because your nose wants to come up, the faster you go. In an airplane, whether it's a Piper Cub or an F4 or F818, your nose wants to rise as you build air. Airspeed, it's just aerodynamics. So get the nose down there right now, and then you can do whatever you want. Therefore, you could pull power to idle at 500, and it would hold five. I don't know what they'd do in the 18s, but in anyway, pull the power to idle at 500, almost no matter what you dive angle was.

What does that mean pull power to idle at 500? What does that mean? Just pull the throttles all the way back to idle, and it would hold 500 knots. Got it. So you wouldn't increase it. your speed to some. Right. I don't know why it's just, they discovered it, no doubt, after they were actually flying the airplane. But if you go 550, it'll hold that. So a lot of guys say, 500's

fast enough for me. I just got to pull out of this. I said, baloney, look on the charts. You can get out easy. They wouldn't do it. But I said, steeper is better. So it's the guy in the back says, you know, we were 560 knots tonight. Yeah, fine. It's like that. but I never got any holes. I got scared a couple of times. Well, yeah, got warned. I had a load go off right there that gave me, you know, did your picture taken with an old,

saw flashbulming and spots, and it gave me spots in front of my eyes. That was that close, but no holes. So I never did. And there were guys who came back with a hole about as big as a 45 caliber of bullet in the bottom of the airplane, but not me. We had leadership in the squadron I was in that I kept going back to reading your book about how this guy operable gardener the way he operated.

He was a former underwater demolition team guy. Right. And so how did he operate? He was very laid back, very quiet about him. everything. And we get after him about sharks, for instance. And he said, no, he says, sharks don't bother you. But barracudas sometimes do. They're curious. And they'll come right up to you and wonder what the heck you're doing and what you are. At any rate, that sort of thing. And he was the guy who would do the classic Navy routine, if you will. Tom, can you help me with this? As opposed to, Tom,

get that done. Rather, can you help me with this? It's funny in leadership terms, if you say to a guy, can you help me with this? He may not really want to do it, but the way you phrase it makes you want to help him. If he says, do that or else, and you don't want to do it, pisses you are. It's your style. But it's effective in leadership terms, very effective, to use the old Navy way of doing things like that. I don't know how the Marine Corps operates, but I had a pal who got killed in Vietnam who told me, I will be a Marine General. He got killed, being aggressive, I think, based upon what I heard about what happened with him. but at any rate.

I just wondered how the Marine Corps operates when the guy doesn't want to really do that, but he would if you had just asked him as opposed to saying to it or else. Well, having worked with all kinds of leaders in the Army, Navy, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, the good leaders in all those organizations are the type that say, hey, I need some help with us. Hey, what do you think? How do you think we should back? I think that's good stuff. And across the board, and then you take this into the civilian sector as well, the ones that bark orders and yell at people and say, you need to do this right now because I'm ordering you to do it.

They're not ever considered to be good leaders. But that's by and large the Air Force style. No exaggeration. Maybe my experience in the Air Force wasn't broad enough. But by and large, that's what they do there. What, bark orders? Yeah. Yeah.

And I think the, maybe the order. Having read his autobiography, you know, he didn't write it himself really, really, but Faradus Lameh, talking about the way he operated in England in World War II. Do it or else. Yeah. Well, wait a minute. Yeah, well, there's a whole thing to talk about there. You know, this idea of the authoritarian people, certain people have an authoritarian mindset. They're attracted to the authoritarian mindset. And when they look at the military, when they're 10 years old or 17 years old or 20 years old, they look at the military and they're very excited about it because they think, oh, there's a place where if I have rank, people have to respect me.

They have to listen to me. And so the military actually attracts these type of people. And most of the time, they kind of become not the best leaders. And they usually don't make it very far because they piss people off. and whatever. Occasionally, you'll have someone that gets put in the right circumstances and despite the fact that they're a tyrannical leader,

they're still able to advance. And, you know, Curtis Lameh is probably a good example of that. You know, here he was in charge of bombing Europe and he puts together a plan. It's like, hey, this is what we're doing. And it was an extreme situation and it ended up working. And then he gets, you know, his...

They made him a hero. Yeah, exactly. In his autobiography, he says that I had no choice but to begin to ascertain that we had to do it that way or else we wouldn't do it at all. Yeah, yeah. So it can happen, but even, I mean, like I said, I've worked with Air Force, I've worked with Navy,

I've worked with the Marine Corps, obviously I've worked with the Navy, and the good leaders, and all of them are not tyrannical at all. Now, are there situations that you can get into, or it's like, hey, we got to, this is what we're doing. Occasionally that happens. Yeah. But it doesn't really happen a lot.

And, yeah. Now, I'm also thinking with your old job in the Air Force where you're, you know, you've got, there's no room for any error because you're dealing with nuclear weapons. That probably, that probably emphasized that type of leadership more than, because the other thing about authoritarian mindset is they don't do well in combat situations oftentimes because they have a very structured mind. They have a very predetermined way of thinking. So they get thrown something that they didn't expect, and they just fall apart. Yeah. You know, the person that's great in garrison, that's great at keeping everyone, great at doing inspections, great at keeping everyone in the proper uniform, they get into combat where all of a sudden the enemy gets a vote. There's things happen they didn't expect, and people are getting shot.

And a lot of times those people don't do well in combat scenarios. Well, there's something about that this occurs to me right now, is that on consolation. for that 10-month, nine-month, cruise, I never heard of that happening. And you had two squadrons of A-7s, two squadrons of F-4s, one squadron of A-6s, a detachment of RA5Cs, and Combat Heelho squadron from Japan, a squadron, whatever they were. I think there were two armored heavy-duty helicopters and the guys who stood by the machine guns. I never heard of anything like that. Anything like what?

Anybody, uh, screwing up or refusing or being unable to or anything like that. And they were using real bullets and stuff there every night. Yeah. Well, it's an interesting thing too about the Navy in general is that the Navy in its nature, when, you know, from its,

from the past, you know, if you were my, if you were a commander in my fleet and I was going to send you and your ship somewhere, I wasn't going to be able to talk to you again. That's right. Yeah.

Except with flags. Yeah. And only until you go over the run. Right. And then it was like up to you. Yeah. And so we had to, we had to exercise a decentralized command more than anybody else. Right.

And that really, when you really pull the thread on the SEAL teams, that becomes very clear that that's one of the reasons why the SEAL teams has a reputation for being very adaptable and figuring things out. Right. Because we wouldn't get support all the time. And we had to, you know, just being in the Navy. You had to figure things out. The other thing is, in the Navy, historically, if you're on a ship, you can't surrender. You can't surrender. You have to just fight until your ship goes down.

There's no quitting because you'll die. So you end up with that attitude embedded as well in the mindset. And I think, you know, there's a lot of that with pilots as well. is, hey, look, I'm going to do what makes sense for me in my aircraft to make sure that I stay alive. And you have to make those decisions for yourself. And so it's on you. Well, when I was in Thailand, to my shock, flying with facts, Air Force Fax, I never told them I was previous Air Force. I thought that's too controversial.

I'm not going to get into that. I just let it go. and they see these guys, Air Force guys, doing 30-degree dives. And I thought, that's crazy. It has to be at least 45, at least, 60. And, of course, what I did was as steep as you could get. The hell of it. I'm not going to get shot down here and so forth.

But 30-degree dives, and I think they all did that. And they had the same charts that Navy had. And the Air Force is known for charts, Maybe there's were even better or more complete or larger than what we had. But you couldn't hit the ground. Yeah, I mean, a 60-degree dive in the middle of the night. Are you nuts? You can't hit the ground.

What happens if they got a tower up there? Well, you're still going to be a thousand feet clear of that. So if you use a 6,000-foot release and a 550-degree dive, 550-not dive in 500. they're not releasing 60 or 80 degree dive, you're not going to hit the ground. Don't worry about it. You won't do it. It can't.

You won't. And what are you pulling 7 Gs at the bottom of that? 6.5 is what we usually did, I think. If you look down while you're doing it, the needles just doing that just above 6. You would look down from time to time at that. If you're pulling out, you're nothing else to look at anyway. Yeah, and I think that's a number you're saying,

as I listen to you talk about it, it is a little surprising that you wouldn't do a steeper dive, especially in that airplane, because you're also more accurate. You know where that bomb's going to go. And to be quite honest, like six and a half Gs is not that hard

if you get used to it, and if it keeps you from... It becomes ordinary. Yeah, it's not that big of a deal. Any pilot could get used to that. I think the biggest problem is people don't like doing that stuff at night. Yeah.

And that to me is, it's interesting that more people didn't have the same logic that you had, which is steeper is better. and I'll just do the math, I got an altitude to recover from. And if I pull back on the stick, I can survive six and FGs, no factor. Right. I'll pull out.

I'll be fine. Yeah, because the engineering knowledge is right there on the paper. You could see it. A 30-degree dive seems, I didn't even know that was even something that you were doing. That's a shallow, especially in a place like that where ground fire, not the, not the Sam's, although I know Sam's Rora's consideration, but AAA, like a 30-degree airplanes, a, giant airplane. There's just a lot of airplane to see at 30 degrees where at 60 degrees or 70 degrees, there's a very little amount of airplane to see. And I would think that's the math

game you would be playing as a smaller platform, the better. I got one better than that. I was with this OV10 guy, I'm riding in the back with the binoculars. And these two F4 showed up and they made about three runs from the same direction, 30 degree dyes, one after the other. That's crazy. Are you nuts? You always come in from over there. And on then that you made one dive from over there, over here for your second, we used to drop pairs. And we have six, 500-pound bombs and make three runs with pairs. But never from the same direction, never. And when the lead goes in over here, turn it all around the circle and come in from the other side,

because that means he's got to turn the gun all the way around over there because he was shooting at him. The thing is, that's another thing about the first guy in, in the movies. John Wayne is the first guy in. It's not a big deal. They're still getting a gun turned around, and he's off the target by then. It's the second guy. Dash 2, dash 3, dash 4 are the ones that take it, huh? That's right.

So you feel like you were pretty good prepared for that deployment. You were out bombing. You were doing these steep things, getting ready to deploy. Yeah, I was getting better at that. and I didn't get good at it until we were over there. And, you know, they don't emphasize, they don't talk about the fact that there's a lot of flack and you will see it going by. They don't tell you that.

Because maybe they're afraid of somebody saying, not for me, I've got a bad cold. And I think I've got a permanent cold. And maybe I'd do a lot better in Iceland. and then doing this. So I don't know. But the other thing about that being prepared was the Advent. I said to David, my real claim to fame here, because I'm pretty ordinary, actually, was the fact that I was there when Sam Leeds walked around VF-121 and said,

we're going to start this thing. And maybe you might want to be part of it because we don't want to have any more. or F4 shot down by MIG 17s, not so much 21s, but MIG 17s. What did they call it? Was it called the Advanced Gunnery School? Do you remember what it was called? No, they called it Navy Advanced Fighter Weapons School. Okay.

Or it could, I think initially they said it might be called something like that. It was all very loose. And I think they had okay for somebody on the Admiral's staff in North Island, but it was very loose. And they said, if you volunteer, you'll fly extra time. And maybe you don't want to do it because it's going to be at 6 o'clock in the morning. And if you don't fly, you have to be here at 6 o'clock at 4.30 in the morning to man up and run the airplanes out and make sure everything on the airplane systems, engines, and whatnot works. And the radar works because you're going to have an experienced good guy in your back seat just.

for this morning exercise so that when we put two-four airplanes out on the parking ramp, they all work and all the radars work. So be ready for that. You will be here at 4.35 o'clock in the morning, and you won't fly. Ooh, a lot of guys say, forget that. So did you do it? I did it, yeah. And it was, it was, and you will fly ACM, air combat maneuvering.

with our instructors and so forth. One of my claims to fame is flying with Sam Leeds and an A4. They had, at that point, they had several generations of A4s, and they had two-seat A-4s, and I think a couple of single-seats. They had a much bigger engine in them. And they had, for the instrument rag at Miramar, they had coupled with the big engines in them. And that's when they flew at imitating the MiG 17.

Don't get close to this guy. He'll eat you alive, which is true. And that's Duke Cunningham should have been shot down. He should have been shot down a couple of times. He was very lucky, just lucky. But at any rate, doing the wrong thing with Sam Leeds is my bragging point. One of the few ones. He came in on me trying to suck me into a.

what's called a scissors. It's two airplanes who do this, one trying to be slower than the other guy. And I rolled over the top on him and went to Burner. And I was standing there upside down above him in Burner. And he said, still in my mind's eyes, I see him looking up at me. And he said to me, I can't believe you're doing this,

which is the wrong thing to do. That would be a last, last resort with the MIG-17, because if you screw it up, he's going to kill you. You're a phantom and he was in an A4? Yeah. But I was standing upside down on my tail in Max Burner to do that. And Sam was the maximum nice guy. Dan Peterson is a little bit removed, a little bit standoffish sort of guy.

Not a bad guy or anything like that, but a little bit standoff. But Sam Leeds is, how the hell are you, sort of guy? At any rate, he said to me, I can't believe you're doing that. Aviation and sticking rudder stuff. Okay, so now you're deploying to Vietnam. Do you just load on the aircraft carrier? You're on the USS constellation? No, you go on a mini-cruise for Monday through Friday,

what was supposed to be or it was, for a month, for four weeks. And, well, before you, they let you near the ship, you have to pure care quall. That's all you do. And we went to the East Coast to do that, the bunch I was with. And it was wintertime. Poopy suits back in those days, rubber immersion suits. Did you ever wear one?

Absolutely, yeah. Good times. What is this in case you're ejected in the water? The water's below a certain temperature. You die super fast. you got to wear those emergent suit in case you ejecting to the ocean. So it's just a big rubber suit that sucks. I'm not going to complain about in front of a seal, but it's not cool.

No, it's the water and air temperature, less than a certain number. And they're not supposed to leak, but everybody, the parachute rigors and people like that and say, don't worry, they all leave. And the other thing is getting into this thing. The zipper goes from here to down here somewhere. So how do you get your head through there? Basically, shoulders up, get somebody to help you,

and pull it up over your head, and then he lets go, and it takes your ears off, so to speak, and pulling down because it makes a tight seal around your neck. And above your neck, I guess you have no protection from the seawater either, but I don't know. And then around the wrist, so your hands are going to get ice cold. The problem is you, in that, maybe you know this, in cold water like that, North Atlantic and whatnot,

you stop breathing. You can't breathe. You're fully conscious, but your whole diaphragm cools down, and it won't work for you. So you're going to drown because you're, now your swimming ability is falling, and your diaphragm just will not make,

get oxygen for you. You're done. But at any of my first traps in the F4 wearing a boopy suit off Norfolk in March or February, I can't remember. Not that it matters.

And then then you board the carrier and you guys sail over on the carrier? Yeah, once you get, they give you, well they did, I don't know how they do it now, but at the F4, they gave you about four day traps, one, your initial, in my case, I flew aboard, if you flyboard, you walk off, but your initial day trap, and then next day, maybe two, maybe one, and so we're getting

you used to the whole idea. And after you have about four, five, or six, I can't remember what it was. Then you get your first night, which is thrilling. And Nick Farr, Nick Farr, so. What's Nick Far? German. What does it mean? Not so. Oh, okay.

He was just being facetious when he's a German, isn't he? Berk-er-any. Anyway, I got my first night, they shot me off the bow of America, CV-A-66, and I thought, holy smoke, it's being shot into a cave. And I can't fly this crazy thing. Calm down, Tom. So, all right, and you go up and around and get on the downwind. Don't look at the ship, they told you.

Do not look over at the ship. It will give you a case of vertigo or spatial disorientation. Do not look at the ship. What, just look at your instruments? Yeah. And it was an overcast night and whatnot. So a high overcast. I could see the ship in the corner of my eye over here,

driving on the downwind, and driving on the down. I see it over and took a look. That's what they told you don't look at the ship. Don't look at the ship. I did. I can tell you. I don't understand. Why does it freak you out to look at the ship?

I have no idea, but it does. Is that the same thing they told you, Dave? Yeah. So it's just a spatial thing. You look out, there's no, like, when he's talking about, there's no horizon. You have no sense of where flat or level or the sky and the water meet. And so if you look over, which we all do, because you'll find the down one. If you look to your left, the ship is there.

You cannot not look. And all of them. And the lights. disorient you as to when you see lights, lights should either be up up or down so it creates disorientation which you can recover from by looking at your instruments but the

don't look at the ship everybody's told the same thing there's no line between the blackness that is the water the blackness that is behind the ship and the blackness that is over the ship. The ship is just sort of floating in black space somewhere somehow or other. I'm getting dizzy just thinking

about it. Do you ever get used to landing on the carrier? Well, that's the second part of this thing. So I got aboard and went below. And there's a lieutenant commander, nice guy from Miramar, who was there getting re-upped to go to sea. And I went to the wardroom on Constellation.

The main wardroom was the second deck. So I went down there. I got my coffee and I got my donut or whatever it was. And he said, pretty dark out there. And I said, I had no idea. I thought I would know, but he said, well, you'll get used to it in the daytime. It gets to be fun in the daytime, which is true. But nobody ever likes it at night, which is true.

Dave confirmed? One hundred percent. Daytime can be fun, nighttime, not so much. That's right. That's 100% true. Full moon is pretty easy? No, it's worse, because you get shadows and you'd make a turn, and the moon is there, and it puts a light across your cockpit,

and it travels across, and it gives you a mild case of spatial disorientation. You don't want that. Black is better, and then you're just on those gauges, and that's an end of it until the guy says, three-quarters of a mile, call a ball. And assuming you're on center line on Clyde's Globe at that point, that basically you just got to wait it out. But that's how I got in trouble, which is in those notes.

Are you looking at my notes? Different, different notes, but it comes from the same thing. Yeah. What got you in trouble? I'm interested just. Lower your nose in close. Come down one wire. Not good.

Well, what happened? Well, you bolter. What's that mean? I'm sorry, no wire. You don't get a wire, and the lights come on and you're off the angle. Oh, okay. You're too high. You're too hot.

You miss. It can have. happen. You can be innocent and the wires are staggered. They're not the same space so that if you have a hook skip, you can even hook skip two wires. It has happened. And off the

angle you go and rats. What'd you call it? What's the verb for it? Bolter. Bolter. B-O-L-T-E-R. That means that you miss the wire. Yeah. And the L-S-O, he's very helpful. You know what he says? Boulder, Boulder. Boulter. Yeah, thanks a lot. And so as soon as you As soon as you miss, you have to floor.

You have to full power. When you touch down, you go to full power. Oh, that's regardless. Okay. Yeah, basic engine. And from time to time, on the F-Word, anyway, the engines would be slightly misrigged, and one of them would go to Min-Burner.

And the ship would go ape shit and telling you, oh, no, you've got to do yelling at you. Come out of burner and things like that. That didn't mean anything. So you have the bolt-or, bolter, then what happens? Because you said it got you into trouble? Yeah. I guess the ship is on the same, their radar facility, the CCI, is on the same frequency.

And they hear the LSO, say, bolt a boulder, and they'll say 212, continue straight ahead to 500 feet, turn left heading, thus and so, which would be across wind. And then you do that, and climate maintain, 1,200 feet or 1,000 feet or whatever it is, and turn left to less and so. And then you're on the downwind. and then you have more planes coming in, coming down from the holding chute, if you will, and they'll squeeze you in in the middle there. Or they'll take you way down until one guy is early and one guy is a little.

You push over from those altitude at an exact you're supposed to to the second timing from the stack. And some guys are a little bit early, the guys are a little bit late. So it can squeeze you in. And it squeeze you in there. And then you get aboard the second time, we hope. But at any rate, how do you bolter if you hook skip or you're high and lay along?

So I got in trouble because I boltered and I'm not going to do this two nights in a row. And it's almost unconscious, lower nose and close. What, that's a move that you make to try and make sure you're not high. comes down like a safe. And they also call it taxi one wire in that you land before, where you hook does well before the one wire and you taxi into the one wire. And thank heavens we're aboard. That's enough for this for tonight and so forth.

So out of the next, say, 10 nights I got, well, at the end, let's say I got six come down in close. So Rule Gardner came to me and he said, Tom, in the passageway too, that's another thing, laid back in the pastaway. Tom, I don't want you to fly tomorrow and you're not on the schedule because I don't like this

and I don't want to make Pamela a widow. Oh, we had been married about 14 months at that point. So he said, I want you to think about it. This is not a punishment, but I want you to think about lower nose and clothes. And so if I fly that me, he bought a touchdown, that was an end of it. But that's the way he was. Leadership again, very laid back, I don't want you to fly rather than almost indicating.

If you wanted to fly badly enough, go to the schedules office and tell him to put yourself back on the schedule. But no, you didn't do any of that. So you bolter, bolter one time? No, like four out of six the week before, and that's why he did that. God, it comes down. So once it got in your head. And it's almost unconscious. I think Dave can vouch to that.

You do it without really thinking about it. Yeah. You don't say, I'm going to, as soon as I get past the ramp, I'm going to lower the nose. It's a bad habit that you don't know why you do it. And you do. So after you sit down for 24 hours and think, that is dangerous, that is stupid. And you've seen pictures, flight deck pictures of lower. I'm not going to do that anymore.

Is it a case of overcompensation, Dave, like subconscious overcompensation that you put, you get over the ramp and just crank it down a little bit because you want to be early because you don't want to be long? I think that feeling, the first time you bolter at night is a really awful feeling because all you want to do is land. Like you just you would trade anything you have just to be on that flight deck and so you do all this work Thomas talking about the timing down to the second there's a lot of work to get you to three quarters of mile It's a lot of work from the stack down to the end of the runway or end of the ship and Typically when you bolt or it's because in the last probably three seconds of a however long Or less than that or two seconds you make one little air in the last two seconds and it pushes you past the wires by five feet

And then you're back in the air again and you you don't want to want to be there. And so I think in your mind you say when I get in close, the term is called in close to at the ramp. It's the last three or four seconds of flying. I am not going to add power. He mentioned something earlier about something called the burble, which is a real thing. And the wind that goes over the flight deck, especially in a conventional carrier that has to make its own wind, meaning it has to run the engines to get speed. You have 30 knots of wind over the flight deck. That burble, the way the wind goes over the flight deck, and right at the end of the runway, it curves down towards the water

will literally pull your airplane down just a couple of feet. But if you add the burble for three or four feet, it's going to pull you down. And that destroys part of your lift as well. Absolutely. And then that psychological piece of, I am not going to go high,

that six or seven foot difference will put your plane in the back of the ship and literally blow it up. That's the videos he's talking about. And I think the combination of those two creates a really, really dangerous combination of the psychology you talked about

and the actual aerodynamics of it. And I would say just a high majority, if not, almost all of the mishaps around the ship aren't really because of mechanical or engine problems. It's because of that scenario. And the LSOs probably went to the CO and said, hey, you've got to talk to this guy because he's going to kill himself.

And that's when the skipper, you know, and I'm obviously putting words his mouth based on the common experience. I didn't talk about it specifically, but it sounds like I'm hitting close to the market that feeling. Yeah. Yeah. That's what happens.

It's all very laid back. too as a matter of fact the LSOs he earlier that night said to you Tom this is your third bolt out of the lower nose in clothes in a row this is not good you got to work on this and then four hours later he came to me in the passageway and said we're not going to do this you get to change Dave how often how many times do you bolt or bolter I probably so on my first cruise, I had no bolters on my second cruise, I had one boulder. Oh, boy. In training, when you're talking about CQ, night CQ, I bet I had at least one, if not two

bolters at night. What's night CQ? No, I'm sorry, night carrier qualifications. Got it. The night. Before you deploy. So the night CQ, I had probably a relatively small handful. Once you're on, you know, like on cruise and underway, it's not, it doesn't happen all

that often. But the thing that's crazy is probably some of the worst flying you'll ever do is off the coast of California because it's overcast at 800 feet all the time, even though it's beautiful Southern California weather. So it's pitch black underneath that overcast, even if there is a full moon because there's a big cloud layer there. And the Pacific Ocean likes to move around, the ship moves around, and it sucks. It's awful.

He flew a much harder plane to get aboard the ship than I ever did. So what he did is harder. You're talking about you might have had four of these in your car. career, you had four of them in six flights. That's enough to freak someone out for sure. Yeah. I don't know. The F4 was an ancient airplane in a manner of speaking, and the FAA 18 is a different

breed of cat completely. And I was told the F8 is actually fun airplane, easy airplane to fly, and then you have to work to get really good at it, but that's something else. The F4, the first time I flew the F4 with my instructor in the back cockpit, We went back, take off and go out over the Pacific, off Miramar, and headed north, and he said, you can level off here at 15,000, or more or less, it didn't matter. And I tried to level off, and I thought, I can't even fly this thing straight and leveled. But the F4 was designed to be an unstable platform, and then they put three axial axis stabilizing devices.

in there. And the early models had a single switch, and then they put three separate switches for pitch roll them and yaw. And a lot of guys, at the end, I'd turn a roll off. Most guys did total roll. But at any it was an unstable airplane. So if you touch

the stick a little bit, it'll do that. You touch the stick. It turns off the stabilizing system. When you touch the stick, there are microswitches in the base of the physical hand grip. And as soon as you touch it a little bit, it turns off the roll stab.

You pull back just a little bit. It turns off just a little bit. Actually, before you fly the airplane, they'd want you to get familiar with the cockpit and so forth. They say to you, realize that this system is there, and if it's quiet, you can hear the micro-switches click, and you can. But you just got to touch them, click-it, click-it, very faint. but they're in there and it turns off the roll stab. So here you are your first time out with this thing, and you touch it a little bit, and it turns off the microstab,

the stabilization in pitch, and it does one of these, because you go the other way and it keeps it off and so forth, then you push it a little bit this way, and it turns that off too, and then you go back and so forth. There, it only turns it off for half a second or something like that, but if you hit it again, it turns about it. Correct the other side, Yeah, right, and so forth and so forth and so forth.

But the F-A-18 is a modern airplane. The F-4 was just an airplane that Mr. McDonald said, I want a monster, and I wanted to do this, that, and the other thing. And if you have a problem with it won't do that, add a system to do that. And they did, and they kept on doing that. And that's what you got. You got a hell of an airplane.

But my favorite quote about the F-4 was a Marine in one of the books. I, as you might suspect, I have airplane books and whatnot. And he said, I flew the F-4 for three years, and it never killed me. So now you get to Vietnam. What's your mission? What are you guys doing? Hotea Mintrail, Hucci-Mintrail, Hocin-Trail, Latin barcap. It was a bombing pause in the north.

And the only things were going up there were RA5Cs to look at whatever changes they made, probably in the, mostly in the airfields and also looking for SAM sites. So you being a first cruise guy, you were not going to fly that escort until you did it. I think that's a Navy tradition. You can't do it until you do it. So for the first three or four months of that cruise, I didn't fly any Rakey fighter escort up there. And then basically what happens is, and everybody I think is familiar with this, Fred's sick. Tom, can you do this?

Yeah, I can do that. So then you're the escort for the fighter for the RA5C, and then you're on the regular. schedule for that after that. But that was the best flying ever did in my life at keeping with him. So what would one of those mission profiles look like? Well, launch and point towards North Vietnam, the coast. And they were always looking around. So half the time they would see you on radar.

And you have receivers in the other than the FAA 18. probably has better ones, far better ones than we had. And you see him, too, too, do, too, looking at you as the sweep goes by, and de-pressurize a cockpit and give yourself a little spacing on the RA5C. And he has promised that he will not go closer than 1,000 feet to the undercast. He will be above 4,000 feet of the, I'm sorry, the overcast. He won't be that close to the undercast. He will be four or five thousand feet above the undercast.

He won't go faster. He won't use burner and about four other things. And then when you get into it, he does everything that he says he wouldn't do because he's shedding in his pants too. Because they're looking at you. Once you're in there, they're looking at you with about three different. You can hear the different tones, different kinds of radars. So what are they doing?

What's the RA5C doing? Taking pictures. And you're just protecting it? Right, because the MiG21s shot down a lot of RA5Cs. And what they would do was they figured maybe they're going to do it today. And they put one or two MiG21s at very high altitude, above 35,000 because they get more speed out of it. So the MiG21 would go 1.8 downhill, easy.

So they would wait until the RA5C turned away from where their loiter is up here. And he's down at 2,000 feet taking pictures and then come downhill behind him. So your job was to stay away from him and always be looking back there. This side too, because you never know, but always back here. And so to stay away from him. And what people in the in the YouTubes and

things like that called Fetch weave, Commander Fetch invented that in 1914 or something like that. And it's absolutely. Air Force, they always write with each other. It's just useless and a waste of fuel.

We always stay one mile, minimum, mile and a quarter is a little better so you can come back and so forth. So watch out for a Meg 21. I wanted to be head-on with Meg 21 because with the F-4 system, well, before that, off the coast of California,

nobody ever told me you could do this, but I wondered against F-8s. I put the PIPPER, 35-mill pepper, down the intake of an F-8, and guess what happened? The sidewinder growl, which means it sees heat. just looking down the intake so I want to do that with a make 21 but I never get the chance and I said to Jimmy I said when my best friend I said so that you can claim we got him with a with a sparrow we won't know which because as soon as that

side wind your leaves I'm gonna flip to because you got the pepper on it I'm gonna flip to radar and pull the trigger a second time so So I said, when that big guy sees maybe the sidewinder wound guide, maybe it'll miss him by 30 feet, and the kill radius is only 25 and stuff like that. But when he sees that spiral coming at him, that monster sparrow, he's going to shit in his pants. So anyway, how to get into this? Well, I was just asking what that mission profile was like. Yeah, so at any rate, you follow him around, basically, at high speed.

and he always said he wasn't going to use burner, and he had the same engines that you have, and the J-79 would put out ordinarily put out a smoke trail. We got a mod in the F4, late in the cruise, that would stop that, and a fuel additive, and they had to put piping in to do that. But at any rate, you look over at him, and he's not smoking. That means he's a min-burner to get rid of the smoke.

As soon as you did that, the smoke went away. And you look down, and the max low altitude speed on the F4 indicated airspeed was, I think, like 740. And you look at the indicated airspeed, and he's not in burner. We're doing 790 indicated relatively close to the ground. We're smoking along here. And then you come back, and they know what you've been doing, although it's kind of. combat situation, nobody ever complains, but I have a picture of an F4 coming aboard with dense, big dents in all three tanks because you've been up there, if not at the mock,

really close to it, the dynamic pressure dents the fronts of the tanks, and maybe they don't do that anymore, maybe put some sort of a reinforcement on the front end of the tanks, but those tanks were not reinforced in the noses, and they were all dented. from doing stuff like that. This story is so cool for me because that's like just classic naval aviation. What I always loved about flying with the Navy and the Marine Corps was

he's talking about that for that missile he was talking about in training. Like the book says you can only shoot the missile from the back of an airplane. That's the rule and that's how it works and they tell you. And the coolest thing about flying with guys in the Navy, they're like, I don't care what the book says. I'm going to go try this. That's right. That's right. This missile, which is on paper and designed to only shoot the back.

of a jet because the engines in the back, that's all the heat is. These guys figured out I could shoot this thing, we'd call it Ford Corner in the nose. And the best part about that is if you launched this at a MiG, I guarantee you he would do exactly what described because nobody else would do that. Because the book says you can't do it. So I just like, I like listening to your stories of, I don't care what the book says. I'm going to try this and see if it works. And that F8, that big giant intake probably replicated a Mig 21's big nose with that big giant engine right in the front of the airplane.

That's pretty cool thinking. I like that. And he had a 37-millimeter gun, too, in both those airplanes. And you better not shaking your pants too soon because he's going to be firing that thing on a head-on, no matter which one it is, at you. And you've got a piece of bulletproof glass in the front of you, and the older airplanes, I think of four you did. So it shouldn't hit you in the face, I guess.

But he's liable to ruin your radar, which could be a problem. if he gets close to you with that head on. But as soon as you pull that trigger, he never saw anything like that in his life. And he's been told that the F4 has to get behind you, so don't worry about it. And that's what I always said, Jimmy, you're going to be able to him. We get that mig with a sparrow. Because that's the radar operator's missile, it's a sparrow. And so what was it that made those recon missions so fun for you, just that you're up there, hauling ass around?

Well, this goes back to something I put in that deal. I heard Chappie James say it the first time, and I think it's common, but don't get in the airplane, strap it on to you. Chappie James was quite a guy, and I talked to him once, once. But you know who he was. No. He was a black guy who was number two to Robin Oles. in Thailand. And Robin Old's got all the publicity and all this.

And Chavez-James was the quiet guy who kept his place and so forth. But they made him a four-star general. He was, the night I talked to him, he was a speaker at a dinner. And he had the place in the palm of his hand. And then you figure he's probably winding up about now. And he said, you've been such a great audience. I'm going to sing a song for you. And I thought, oh, the poor man, he's going to ruin everything.

He had it made here, and now he's going to make a fool of himself. He sang Old Man River like Metropolitan Opera. It was really, really something. So, and then he talked with the troops after everything was done. He was, strap it on, don't. So that was, first time I felt that way, truly felt that way, fly like the airplanes. attached to you the other way around because when he you want to stay a mile or mile a quarter of beam.

What happens if he turns into you? Well you go high and you come up here this way and watch him going around the bend and then you can go to the, because you're coming downhill, you're going to gain energy so you can go to the outside if you figure his next turn will be into you again. Well then you can go up without adding power because you're going to you. as you go no that's wrong

but if he turns into you you can go high Would you fly with the same guy all the time In the back seat? No the plane that you were covering for No you didn't even know his name No kidding

Yeah And they were all Because they are They lost a lot of young guys Flying the RA5C Early in its career They switched to Mostly

Senior guys with a lot of hours and a lot of traps, they would lose them at the ramp. So those guys were, maybe they were all commanders, which is too old to be just an airplane driver on a carrier. But because of the difficulty getting the monster and that monster aboard, heavy, their launch weight was a little over 80,000 on that thing. and the standard launch weight

that has come to pass more or less is around 60,000. 20,000 pounds heavier off the, all we're getting aboard. So they had senior guys doing that. I think there was one guy who was a lieutenant commander. But anyway, flying with him,

flying, I discovered I could fly like a bird because at that point in your training or in your experience level, you start to get that good at it. And I thought, holy smoke, I'm doing this way. Even though at that point I had 1,000 hours of total flying, maybe more than that, flying experience. But it was something of a revelation to be able to fly where you wanted to go

and not be limited by what the machine would do. Especially with the F4 when you have all that power. And especially when you're about halfway through your fuel load, you have a lot more power because your weight is gone. How long did the fuel last? How long did you have? Well, the cycle on Constellation in Combat Zone was two and a half. They called it a two-hour cycle,

but you wound up flying two-and-a-half. hours because they would launch everybody and then they would recover you. So I think they launched it every two hours. I think that's how it worked. You know, I never thought of it quite this way. But at any rate, my traps on combat zone were always about 2.6. Mm-hmm. Did you guys get gas? Only from time to time. Okay, that's a long time. Yeah, and the F-4 fuel gobbler and you were always, always slow sweating fuel always sweating fuel the cycle time they measure the cycle time what you're talking about on an aircraft carrier in the cycle time is launch to launch so if it's two

hours that means a launch happens and two hours later the launch happens what's bad about that is if you're on a two-hour cycle when you launch you'll be the first one to go in your phantom and then two hours later the next launch goes you have to wait for all those airplanes to get launched before you recover. So that two hours is two hours from takeoff to take off. You have to wait for everybody else on the next launch to take off before you can land. So that two becomes two and a half. And 30 minutes, an extra 30 minutes is a lot of time to manage your gas. You burn 100 pounds a minute. Yeah, that's a lot. A hundred pounds a minute? Yeah. That's 6,000 pounds an hour. Yeah. How about hitting the Ho Chi Minh Trail doing those bombing runs? Well, you always had a, well,

What you do is, no, your flight later, I was always a wing one. Your flight later would call, I think it was a piston engine Lockheed Constellation that was out over the water south. And he would ask you what you are and what your ordinance was. And he'd come back and say, your fact is going to be camera 2-2. And he is currently at the less and so of the less-and-so tech end. and he will meet you at the thus and so and thus and so of that tack-in, which would be somewhere in northern Laos,

and he'll be there in 12 minutes, his own route right now. So you would go there and, excuse me, and you'd go there and we'll wait a couple of minutes because if you called him up early, he'd say, I'm going as fast as I can. And so, anyway, then he'd call you up and say, I'm in your area now. Here's what we're going to do.

And he had what they called logs. They were pieces of wood that were four inches square and about two feet long. It had holes drilled longitudinally in there. And they had Willie Pete inside. And he had a way, and maybe they had a fuse or something. I don't remember that liked that. And he would fly over the spot where, more or less, where he wanted you to go. And he would drop it out, a trap door that he had in the bottom of the airplane.

Is this true? Yeah. It's crazy. And then he would go drop a second one. And he said, do you have my two markers? And you'd say, yeah, okay. And he said, now they are northeast and southwest. So remember, they're northeast.

They're northeast and southwest. And what you want is on a triangle pointed to the north, but to the northeast. And sort of. And there's a crossroads there. Can you see the crossroads? And sometimes you could on a moon at night. He said, okay, now not the crosswalk goes, but this is really what they're doing. And he said, I drop another one, but we don't want to alert them because the trucks are all parked right now.

But there's a grove of heavy trees. Can you see those? No, you can't. I would always turn my lights out after get off the ship and get, how would you put it comfortable for a couple of minutes? I'd turn everything off because I had a good, best R.O. in the back. And, of course, you can hear something's amiss in the airplane. What's that ticking? What's that thumping?

Whatever. The engines don't sound right. You can hear all that, even with your helmet on. So I figured, and warning light panels for galore. So I figured turn it out. The human eye takes, you probably know this, it takes about 30 minutes. Yeah, half an hour. The same length of time takes the sun to set.

So after half an hour, you can see everything on the ground. And the facts talking about that grove of trees. Yeah, I can see what you're talking about. I can see where those roads are. I only started doing that after about two or three months. because initially you don't know what you're doing. Turn the lights out and turn the panel lights all the way down. The warning panels, they, or any warning lights, low fuel or anything like that,

that doesn't turn down, as you might figure. So I figure, and with a good guy in the back, he'll let me know. So at any rate, and then you're almost like almost daylight when you, your eyes get truly acclimated. You see everything on the ground. Even if it's just the least little, no moon, but just stars, you can see stuff on the ground. So at any rate, that's what.

Were you always running nighttime missions? 99, 95, 99%. What would cause a daytime mission? New on Yankee Station. The first day, maybe day, two days. Days, but then after that all nights. And you'd be on Yankee Station for, 31, 32 days.

Well, what's the Yankee Station? What is that? That was the northern Gulf of Tonkin. Northern Gulf. And initially they had a second carrier. They called Dixie Station off of South Vietnam, but then they stopped that. And they would have two carriers

up north, excuse me, on Yankee Station. But anyway, you turn lights out and you could see everything at night, and the guy says, can you see the dark, the trees? and the skipper wouldn't be able to see him because he's got older eyeballs in me and he didn't turn his lights out or turn him out completely.

That's what I would do. He had a good RO too and he stole my good RO. When his RO got taken by the admiral to be part of his staff, then he took my RO and then I had a teenager who didn't know what he was doing. He was right out of the Naval Academy. Anyway, so he gave you those coordinates and he said, can you see the trees that is just the south of where that intersection is? Yeah, anywhere in those trees because it's full of trucks there and so forth. Sometimes you'd get there and they would have, you'd see headlights, but rarely, rarely.

And as soon as they really hear you, they'd run back to the truck and turn the lights off or turn the engines off, I guess. at any rate and then you'd do that but see that thing there that you read early on that was that was you know all when Lyndon Johnson

had his bombing pause in North Vietnam the North Vietnamese took all the guns that used to be in North Vietnam put them over in Laos to guard the Hucherman Trail over there so

where was I the guns and so forth. Well, how often were you running into, like, you know, you mentioned the anti-aircraft, the flack that you're flying by, the surfaced air missiles, how often did you run into that? Was that every mission?

Every time, every time. But they were cool about that, you see. You'd get there. Who was cool about that? The gunners on the ground. The enemy gunners? Yeah. In what way?

Well, they'd know you were there because they could hear you. And in your orbiting, what I would do immediately, as soon as we get there, I'd separate an altitude. I'd go a thousand higher on whoever was, usually rural gardener, but I'd go a thousand higher, and I'd cut across and turn. Every naval aviator is a left-hand turn expert. They're all turning left. In fact, one time I met a guy in Philadelphia who had the same dog as I did, and I started talking with him. And then I saw him the second and the third time. He said, what did you do before you did the ad business?

He said, I was a naval aviator. I said, son of a gun, so was I. How about that? So at any rate, in that office, it was street level. I had an old IBM computer, and I had the Microsoft flight simulator early on a version of that on that computer. I said, you come inside and look at this thing. Anyway, took it off, made it take off, and I turned right. And he said, what the hell kind of a naval aviator are you?

In Sims. I can't remember. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Sims. Nice guy. Nice guy. At any rate, I would orbit to the right. And I knew that he was going to roll in from 1-8.

I would roll in anywhere at the top of the quadrant. of the So what made what the gunners do cool? You said the gunners are cool. Well, you make yourself present because you're making all that noise right over here, over the crossroads,

and they know, the gunners all know as the trucks are over there, and they know that, and they know that you know that. Because they can hear the fact flying around too. So they would wait until you roll in until you commit. The problem is they had to get a handle on you when you start down,

They also know, I presume that they knew, because you're gonna pull powered idle and your engines get very quiet as soon as you do that. So if they didn't have a bead on you at that point, I'm convinced too that they used a simple auditory way to track you. I think my idea is that if you took a bunch of paper towel tubes and put tape around them,

and put a micro, microphone behind them, and then you put that on the mount of a gun. We had a gun that the barrel got overheated and it warped, so we got this gun mount over here. We don't use it. Put that auditory searchfinder thing on the gun. Because as soon as I turn it over there, and I can, I got headphones on, and I can hear it. There he is. Oh, and I lost them.

No, I got them back again. But the point here is that the azmuth and elevation on that auditory device, if you have a simple system, you can all the five guys have them 57 millimeter or even 85 millimeter pieces around here. They can know where you are because they can read what he is tracking you in an auditory fashion. So they wouldn't open up sometimes until you release, pull, and add power. And as soon as you did that, yeah, that's a shit going by from the back. And most of it right there. Because they had time to know where you were, and they could hear you in orbit, and now this guy was over here, and suddenly he got silent.

that means he's in the dive. So that means he's going to be over here. The truck turned their guns around. Moreover, the guy with the auditory, half a dozen paper towel tubes taped together, he can hear you, even if you've got your engines at idle, I think. That's my private theory.

I don't know if that's true or not. But anyway, that's when they would open up on you. And yes, every night, no question, every night. Anytime you were there, they would, they would, blast away. Did you guys lose any aircraft while you were on deployment? Not my squadron, no. The ship lost, I don't know, four or five, maybe more.

A-7s, no A-6s. A-6 guys, I think, were pretty cagey. A-7 drivers, they all tended to be, seemed to me, younger guys. In the wardroom sitting there with a guy said, Man, I had a hell of a time tonight. I was mixing it up with these guys. They had a 57 millimeter in a cave on the side of a hill. I don't know how they got it up there.

But I made it. I came back around and gave him another load of 20 millimeter. Really? I said, you know, he's sitting that far across the wardroom table. I said, do you realize what the aim point is? Oh, it's the airplane. I said, no, no, no. The aim point's right between your eyes.

You're nuts. Put a 500-pound bomb into that hole. If you're any good as a bomber, you can do it. that, put a bell in him into his cave. That's the end of that gun. No, it's more fun. I went around a third time and he's going to shoot you down. You're going to feel really stupid. You throw away your weapons, what you do when you get shot down. You have a responsibility to, in your book you talk about things that are worth it and things are not worth it. And I'll tell anybody who's willing to, including my old skipper or somebody like that, I said,

I have a favorite switch position down by your left knee in the F4. It's an all. It does all the bombs. Oh, okay. Not the missiles, the missiles stay, but the bombs, you have singles, pairs, doubles, cluster. All. And then all. Flip all.

This is bad here tonight. I don't want to be here. I'll be back tomorrow, but for tonight, oh, see if you can eat this load. There's only six of them for heaven six. What, six, 500 pounders? Yeah, that was our standard bomb load, six 500 pounds. As the deployment went on and you're going out facing this every night,

night after night, is it every night? You're flying every night? Yeah, and when you were in the Gulf, you flew every night. How is this wearing on you mentally? Not bad. I think at that age, you're in your late 20. I was in my late 20s. No, not a big deal. Except that air conditioning on some ships was not very good, and Constellation was one of them, a flight tag. Or the O3 level. To a Navy guy, man, that air conditioning pisses us off all the time on a ship. Well, how about you just had good ventilation, you know? You have 85 degree air outside. Put 85 degree air in there. this room.

You know, and my state room was in the 03 level, the 04 levels of flight down. So there are places in a ship where the air conditioning really did work beautifully. But we got visited by ABC or CBS News or something like that. And they were on Hancock, which was in the Gulf at the same time, at that time. And one of these guys said to me, boy, we could see this. ship on the horizon. You say, this ship is nice, Hancock. But next week, we're going down to get aboard the big guy. Air conditioning doesn't work here, and the food's not real good. Better on the Hancock than every way. I said, well, fortunes of war, I guess.

Yeah, I had a guy on the podcast named Dean Ladd, who's a Marine in World War II, and he went into a bunch of different islands, but he was talking, he's going into Tarawa. and I'm like, were you nervous going in? He said, no, it's the other guys that are going to get wounded and killed. That's right. He ended up getting gut shot in Tarawa, and it was lucky a couple of his Marines disobeyed the order just to keep going, and they grabbed them and threw him back on a ship.

So I think that's the common mental state of the young man in combat is, I really feel sorry for the other guys they're going to have trouble out here and get wounded and killed. My favorite professor in college, the University of Chicago Ph.D. it's a big deal. An econ was a tailgunner in B-17 is in World War II. And I used to play chess with him, and I said to him, what was it like? You said, you always figured the other guy's going to get it.

That's the same thing I've just said. That's a pretty impressive statement for a tail gunner, B-17 in World War II. He was a teenager. And he said, you know, always, fortunes of war, you figured the other guy's going to. Or you can always jump out. You know. That would be the worst of it that you had to bail out. Any other highlights from that deployment?

Well, I... Skepper said to me, we want to send somebody over to Thailand. And since you have Air Force experience, would you like to do it? Well, yeah, why not? And this is to be a forward air control or something? No, just to make some judgments and come back and relate what? But how they do things over there and how the facts work and stuff like that. So I said, okay.

And so they took me over in a cod, and we did not get shot at broad daylight. Codd went out in daylight, and we didn't get shot at crossing or anything out into Ubonn is where I went. Where Robin Olz was when he made his five kills and stuff like that. And initially, hard to get to first base there. I said, it was like in the movies. The cod pulled out onto the grass and the crewman opened the back door and I hopped out. I had shut down the starboard engine and door slammed. Starboard engine started up.

Taxied away. I was standing there with my suitcase on the grass. And this is just like a goofy movie. movie from France and World War II or something. Anyway, so I've got a guy. A trooper walking down the tarmac somewhere and I said, where's base operations? Down the street, but you don't want to go there. Why? Because, ah, we're not allowed to be here. We're guests. Oh, where do I go? Building 386, it's on the second street over and it has 386 on the outside and I'm making this part of There's about in the essence of it.

That's the operations you want. So I didn't have a place to sleep right there in my little suitcase. So I went there and it got a Marine, no, Air Force Trooper, big guy, big guy with a sidearm at a little lectern inside the door. Basically he says, who the hell are you? I'm in a Navy uniform and whatnot. And he said, not without whatever he needed. So that night I went to the club, and I meet a guy, an Air Force major.

And they said, we can take care of you. We'll get past that. Don't worry about it. And he took care of everything and stuff like that. But their Air Force operations were officially just a guest, and they were just unofficially. The tarmac loaded with F-4s and C-130. So I got to fly with a guy who flew the OV-10, which is a heck of a fun airplane to fly.

Man, oh, man. Swap ends in a second with that thing. I mean, this way, that sort of thing. Tons of power, two turboprop engines, and designed for the Marines so you could put one in a couple of guys in the back, and they open the hatch in the back, and the Marines can parachute out into middle of nowhere, and stuff like that.

And a good panel in the buyer made an instrument approach with that guy. And he said, that's really something off that terrible panel back there. And said, yeah, well, you make about 100 passes at the ship at night. And it's not a big deal anymore. I flew with him maybe twice. And I flew with the C-130 gun ship, a C-130 forward air controller, only at night for him, though, because he's a big target, I guess. But we had flown off of that guy, but we didn't know what kind of airplane he had.

And let's see, the OV10 and two times with the C-130. There's only there a week. And then back out to the ship. C-130, no, C-47 had about 8. or 10 Marine troopers who were there on R&R at Yubon, Thailand. They had been downtown and they all looked at a big night last night. I don't know where they wound up gone, but they dropped me off at Huy. It was right after the battle of Huyi that destroyed everything.

And right next to the runway, a matte runway. And when we landed on that mat runway, they're shooting at us, because it's goes rattle, rattle, rattle, and I thought, I'm gone. But that song was just a plank runway. And then the Army was there. And I thought, boy, sandbags and logs and mud and, oh, thank heaven. I have no part of the Army. And anyway, they sent the cod in there, and the cod picked me up and took me out to the ship.

So that was the end of that. But that was quite an experience. Those C-130 guys, they had C-1-30 guys. They've sacked their parachutes back over here and they have a pile back there. Really? What do you do if you get hit? Because in my mind, you get hit. You might take the whole wing off or the end of it and then it starts to tumble

and you're not going to have time to put on a parachute. But they did. I think they lost more C-130s than they ever admitted to over there. Because the one I was on, the gunship, he's at 3,000 feet, and the 37-millimeter gets to 30,000 feet. And the burst went off in front of the nose, and I hit the deck behind the, they have a flight deck on that airplane. I was on the floor as we flew through the smoke.

And they said, what was that? I said, for heaven's sake, it went off right. Yeah, but it falls away. Don't worry about it. All right. but we threw through the smoke. I saw the smoke go over the windshield. And I got the fly the scene went 30 a little bit.

Just steer it around. Not a big deal. But anyway, that's what I did in Thailand. And then I came back to ship and the guy said, what about this and what about that? And that's when I saw those F-4s making multiple passes from the same direction. At 30 degrees.

At 30 degrees dive. And not just the same direction, but both airplanes from the same direction. Maybe you're losing airplanes, and I think I know why. No talking them out of it. I think if you are encouraged to think that 60-degree anglo-dive is dangerous,

you'll believe it. But it's not. It's safer. It's a better way to go. And when I saw that picture, I don't know if I said this now, there was a famous picture, taken during the Battle of Midway. And that guy is virtually 89 degrees,

all above a Japanese carrier. So that's the way to do it, I thought. Besides, you've got to get the barrel all the way up there. Maybe he can't do that. So you get done with that deployment. Head back to the States. Now it's what, 1970? Yeah.

And you're coming back to America now. Now you've got the protests and all this stuff going on. Are you seeing that? Are you aware of that? How's that impacted you? Very much so. And I think you'd just get used to it. The thing that you wouldn't get used to if you were a newly married guy,

and that was me and a lot of other guys, too, that they would call up your house and tell you your little wife that you had been killed that night. This is stateside. before you went to sea. Very evil. That's evil. And then, of course, we had,

there were a couple of bad actions. There was a Navy cod, I think an old one, with a bunch of guys on board that crashed on St. Clemente before we sailed. And that was very bad. And it made my wife very squirrelly, my young wife.

There's a funny thing. This is a funny one here. I went to the East Coast. And I flew out to the East Coast, so then I have to ride back. So we're on a DC-4, C-40, 51, or God knows what, a four-engine, unpressurized Navy transport. And we get to Houston, and the guy says, we'll be here overnight because we, the Watson saw,

and the third engine or something that's not right. And so be prepared. We'll have it. It'll be ready by morning. So at any rate, we were supposed to be back at Miramar by 6 p.m. more or less. I sent her, called her or something from the East Coast, from Norfolk. So she calls the duty officer and the white hat sailor who's on duty too. He answers the phone.

And she says, this is Mrs. Coppell? My husband going to be there tonight with his ETA. And he says, oh, no, the airplane went. down in Houston. Jeez. Now wait, it gets better than that. She figured she was a widow. What to do about this?

The next morning, coming up the side of the building, are two guys with gold braid on their sleeves. She said, well, this is it. Steal myself. They're going to tell me what happened. I walk in the door. Anyway, funny story. And she still likes to tell it to her friends from time to time.

Oh, man. So there is this 1970. You come home. There's obviously a lot of division in America. Right. And what do you end up doing when you get back? Well, the re-asked Tom if he wants to stay or go. And I said, my father-in-law offered me a job, so I'm going to go.

And I had too many dead friends by that point too. And I said, I think I'll just get out. And I said, well, we want to send you to be an ACM instructor at Kingsville. And I said, I don't want to go back to Texas. I don't like that place. He said, well, we could send you to Meridian, but it's only basic instruction. I said, that's for me. Because a pal had told me that he got plowed back at Meridian.

And it's a really nice place, nice people there. So I said, let me go to Meridian. And so they put me in Meridian, and I was an instructor there for my last something, like, 14 months. And I had good students and mediocre students and so forth. I wonder what happened to the best of them. I've never been. I typed his name into Google. No.

In front. Who knows? I had Marines, bloody old Marines as one guy. I was his instructor. and then his pal, I flew with him a couple of times. They were recon Marines, which is this Navy Seal-level stuff. And I foolishly said to one of them at one point, this is really foolish, this is naive.

I said, you get heloed into northern Laos, and you get dropped off in the jungle, and you know you're going to be there for at least a week, plenty of ammunition. Really, what do you do? He said, well, we hunt for the North Vietnamese. They train up there, and they're in the jungle, and they're easy to find because they smoke so much gonga

that you can smell them if they're upwind from you. Oh, really? So what do you do then? He said, well, you move around, so you are, in fact, downwind, and then you get close enough to them, and you set up, and with your weapons and whatnot, and you wait till dawn, so they start walking around. Yeah? Then what do you do? Oh, well, we'll kill them all. Oh, excuse me. I was a little naive there.

But these are, anyway, and the guy who was my student, I wonder what a nice guy, both of them nice guys. He would say to me, Tom, we were first name at base, and even ring captain at that point. Tom, Tom, Tom, how do you do, how do you do a barrel roll attack? See that kind over there? Make a barrel-roll attack on that guy. Rich, I'm not supposed to do that. You know that. Come on. Make a big rolling thing on the student flying.

Students never look around. He's flying over there. They're a big mock. Wow, let me try it. Go away over here. He tried that, that's angry. Or the other thing with him, you fly in the back cockpit, all fighter planes or Navy trainers have rear-view mirrors.

If you need rear-view mirrors in a fighter plane, you're wasting your time. You are long gone. When I came back, or let's say, from halfway through the cruise, you become a nutcase in the cockpit. At least I did. I want to know everything that's on the horizon 360. That's the only way to genuinely be certain you're,

going to survive this thing and stuff like that. So you become a minor nutcase looking around and looking around and so forth. Intuition you're a young guy who I'd say, how the hell you fly the airplane if you're spending that much time? Well, you do. You get skilled at it. It's just time that you get better and better at doing it. But I would have them turn their mirrors so I could see this much of their face.

everything else is oxygen mask, helmet and oxygen mask. But I want to see this part of there. I want to see where they're looking. I don't want you to see you Mr. Wilson looking at the panel. I want you looking outside. Mr. Wilson, you're down in the panel again. I want your outside the cockpit here. Well, Mr. Coppell, I have trouble flying level.

I said, I'd rather see you bumping around in a little off altitude than getting shot down later because it's that important and so forth. So with Rich Freeman, I would like all of them. So I'd see him trying to fly level and make Mr. Rich, I want you to make a 30-degree angle and roll out of 2-7. Okay. And he's doing a little bit of this. And he starts to get red in here. So a Marine getting angry and not good thing. He said, Rich, don't get upset.

Remember I told you, you want to hold the stick with two fingers. and trim off the pressure. Move it and then trim off the pressure. Two fingers, that's all you need. I really do it that way. Okay, we're trying to get. Come back, three, six, okay, he comes back, and he's getting redder.

I said, Rich, do you feel that in the airframe? Yeah, what is it? I said, that's me back here. Bounding on the bowl. He's got it in the vice grip with white knuckles. and his elbow in here trying to fly this thing. Rich, it doesn't work that way. But anyway.

You got to relax, I guess. I don't know. I think when you come back and they're shooting at you and you get bored at night in bad weather, you're soaking wet and you're tired. Do you burn more calories? I think so. There was a study done before the Vietnam War.

with A4s, and I bet you David knows about this, they asked these A4 guys to, oh, no, it was during, at the beginning of the Vietnam War, that's how it would work. They put, they had a recorder that put a pen mark on a, on a disc of paper, and then they wired these guys with sweat and lung function and heart function and so forth. And they found out that just what they figured. You go in and feet dry and everything comes up. And you get in the target area, comes up even higher. Get off the target area.

It comes down a little bit. Get feet wet. It comes way down. And it was way up here in the target area. And then you talk to the ship. And it goes up here. That much higher. higher than the target area.

Right. Because at the ship, everything is right here. Whereas in the target area, it's fortunes of war. It's good tactics, but to a certain extent, it's out of your hands. So you do your best. But if you're going to smack the ramp or do something bad like that, it's right there in your hands. And that was A4s. So, yeah, you will burn more calories in your tired guy.

And then you stand around the right room and smoke cigarettes. When did you quit smoking? I'm right after that. I quit smoking. And how was your transition into the civilian life? Difficult. Because you are used to a guy who says that. He does that.

And civilian world's not that way. Guy says, can you loan me 50 bucks until next Wednesday? In the Navy, he comes looking for you. In civilian world, you've got to go looking for him. Hey, Eddie, give me my 50 bucks. Oh, I'll give you half of it. It's all I have, I say.

Okay. He was a little bit rocky. And I went in business for myself because my wife thought that might be a good idea. for us and the antique Persian rug business of all things so I wound up making friends with a lot of Persian guys most of them Jews a couple of them I still know to this day call them up saying how the heck are you a couple of Muslim guys all nice people you had to be because you were sort of all in that like being in

the Navy we're all in this mess together so you I figured in that business I had it because you have retail customers talk to you and say, I've been looking for a less and so type. Do you know what that is? Oh, yes. I need it 18 feet, but no longer than 19, and I need it thus and so wide. I don't want anywhere, but I want more of this color and so. Can you do that?

As soon as I leave, you get on the phone, you call Mohammed and you call. Hakeem, and you call that guy, I'm saying, I have what you want, and he will give it to you on your signature if your credit is good. I figured, I called a guy one time, and he said, I don't have it, but I know who does have it. He's an old Armenian guy, and he's really crotchety, and he shouldn't be in business anymore, but he's got some nice choice stuff. This is in New York, 28th Street, 31st Street, in that neighborhood, fifth half. And I said, I need this and that and this and that and this and that. Yes, yes. I said, my credit, I said, you don't know me, but I have, I should call those and so and call him and you could call him.

I don't have to do that. Really, why? I know who you are. I could have it on my signature. I drove away one time with 80,000 in wholesale value. you in the back of my truck and I figured that was a mistake, no signature. They know who I am. But nice people, a lot of nice people, not like what you read in the paper. Did you miss the Navy? Oh yeah. Yeah. A lot of pals and stuff like that. But you have to get away from that.

You can't live in the past. You know, you've got to keep going. So we had a lot of, a lot of, I keep saying this, but I had a lot of fun doing that too. And down to my wife, I bought a piece for several thousand, and I came back, maybe two days later. And I said, where's the lesson sale? She said, I sold it. She said, I hope you got more than $5,600 for it. She said, I got $75. Is that what one of those rugs cost?

How much one of those rugs cost? It depends on what it is. It depends on its age. It depends on its condition. You have to deal with somebody that you know is utterly trustworthy because Henry Kissinger got fleeced on a trip to Tehran, and he knew it after it was all over. What happened to him?

I don't know exactly what the thing was, but he admitted to the fact that, All he did was take that load of stuff that I bought and send it to a dealer somewhere to get rid of it. Because it was junk and he paid a bunch of money for it? And it was very embarrassing, yeah. And then you ended up in the bakery business, right? Bread making business? Is that where you're at now?

Yeah. Well, this is Jocko saying when you're in the middle of the woods, start walking. And the guy says, which direction? And Jocco says it doesn't matter. Yeah, start walking. But I knew how to do that. So Pamela said, why don't you make some bread? Pamela's brother is in, believe it or not, in the exotic mushroom business.

And they have an outdoor farmer's market. These are common in Pennsylvania on Sunday afternoons. And give them to Joe and see if he can sell them. He sold them all. I'm doing it by hand. So same thing again next week and so forth. And he comes back and says, Fred says, you ought to. take a table here, your stuff is good enough. I said, holy smoke, but I can't only do so much

by hand. So I had a guy that I did business, rug business, antique, if you find anything like that, Tom, call me. Oh, you do, and so forth. So I was coming, I used to had to buy all the time, whatever you could. So I used to go to a lot of outdoor country auctions, more, more country than anything else. And they had rugs from the 30s and it drive to Altoona, as I did in this case, with my truck, Chevy van, no windows. And I buy the rugs for $1,500 because there's certain human psychology, certain price levels in which a retail customer knowing that you could pay more, but I won't do that because I don't want surprises and stuff like that. So you know you're going to get them for $1,500 if you drive, because you talk to the auctioneer and he tells you more or less

what it is and he thinks he knows and stuff like. So he drive to Altona and you look at it and say, yeah, I can get $6,000 for this. I won't pay more than, have to pay more than $1,500, and you do that. So I came back from Altona that day to this guy's place and he's in a secondhand equipment business, secondhand commercial equipment. ovens and mixers and things like that. They go on forever. And he said, you bake bread once in a while.

And I didn't buy anything that day, and I had money in my pocket, cash in my pocket. He said, I got a couple of nice ovens over here. I said, I'm not interested. He said, look at them. They're diner size. They're not the full size.

You've got to find exactly the right guy. Probably a diner, already has. I'll show him to you for $900. He said, I can slide him right onto your truck. And he didn't know I had money in my pocket either. Yeah, he did. Maybe. And finally I said, okay. So then I had to install them myself on a, we live in an old Pennsylvania Dutch. I call them a Pennsylvania German soft brick drafty. And they have matching porches on both sides. And this porch is enclosed, so I put them on

that porch and had heavy. They weigh, I don't know, a thousand apiece, I guess. Jacks and everything, and blocks and getting it up and sliding it over. I installed both of them, but I didn't do very much until my sister-in-law actually said, you need to put bread with Joe

at the Skippak farmer's market on Sunday. So then one thing led to another, led to another. And then, I I went to this nice guy at Kimberton Whole Foods, who was at the time he had one store and he was on the floor himself. And I said, do you think you can sell these? He said, probably not because LaBus just bailed out of here.

But you can put it on their shelves if you want. Came back next day. It was six of them. Sold. I said, can I put more? Of course. So one thing led to another. He has about maybe he has eight stores now.

And I'm in four. So you're making bread every day? I work, no. I work Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and I deliver on Wednesday what I made on Tuesday, Tuesday night, and sliced Wednesday morning to deliver that. Then I work Thursday and deliver that on Friday. And then I'm off Saturday, Sunday, Monday. But I got another racket going on. What's the other racket?

When I ran for Congress, I don't know if you know I did this. I did know that, yeah. It was in your notes. Yeah. I was supposed to lose, and it was in a gentleman's agreement. You want a guy who can lose gracefully, and I said, that's exactly right. And I said, okay. But I thought to myself, this guy, this congressman, he drinks a lot, and he may get hit by a truck

or have the classic too much alcohol heart attack or something like that. This is the only chance I'll ever get. So I did, I think I put it in there. I did ring 10,000 doorbells. I really did. It gets to be fun after a while. You meet new people. And moreover, they ask you questions privately that you hadn't quite fought through.

And after you fumble around with that, you say, I won't fumble around with that a second time. And it turns out the next two days later, a guy asks you the same question. I'm ready. You're ready for it. So after that, and he spent 10 times what I spent. A U.S. Congressman, I was told, will do anything to stay in office, anything. So at any rate, he spent 10 times where I had to spend.

I had $35,000 to spend. He spent $3.50. But anyway, and he wouldn't debate me either. He finally went to this silly thing on, he was in D.C. Because he couldn't quite return, which is baloney. He was from the county north of where we live. But at any rate, it wasn't going to say that... Well, you had to do with your racket that you're running, your other racket.

Yeah, well, I was a stockbroker at that point. Because when I had my subdural hematoma, they cut a hole in your head, take a piece out of your head, because it slept and falling about that. what I call it in there, you're John Glenn. John Glenn fully recovered and so have I. But a lot of people don't. I think, too, it's a matter of wanting to and deciding to recover. Because with my case, my right side, it was on my left side, and it's true.

Your left side didn't work right or work a little bit, but not real well. And I couldn't walk right and stuff like that. Anyway, so at any rate, how'd you get the registrar? I am the Pennsylvania registrar for births and deaths in OLLI Township, 06 township, and for several surrounding townships. If you die, you need a will. And to have a will, you need an executor who distributes, but you have to prove, have somebody prove, this guy is dead, not just gone to South America.

and so forth. So you make certified copies of his death certificate issued by, generally by the hospital or the coroner, and that way your executor or the man or woman's executive can probate the will and so forth and all that. So at any rate, a year after, maybe 10 months after I lost the election, I get to talk to a guy named Bob Asher, who was a little bit of a character and well-known in Pennsylvania politics because he took the heat and went to jail for something he didn't do, but probably to protect a Pennsylvania senator or maybe one of the governors, I don't know. But he took the heat and everybody agrees that Bob never did anything.

But he owns a candy company called Asher Candies. It's well-known chocolates in eastern Pennsylvania. And there he was at this affair. So I went up to him and I said, Bob, you owe me one. He said, get out of here. I said, you know who I am? Oh, yeah, I know who I know who you are. I said, I rang 10,000 doorbells.

Yeah, I heard about that. I said he had to spend $350,000 to beat me. Yeah. Bob, we both know what that means. He would have spent $35,000 against the guy in Fayette County. He would have spent $58,000. at the guy in Pittsburgh. He would have spent

102,000 in the guy in the Harrisburg race. He spent it all to beat me. Yeah, so what? Bob, you owe me one. A week later, the local guy that I knew very well was a whole political office

called me up and he said, how'd you like to be a register of will? What in the hell is that? So I said, yeah, that's right. How much does it pay? Well, you won't make much. You can make $35,000 doing it. You can.

At any rate, they're trying to get rid of the Pennsylvania Registrar. Now I'm just sticking on because I figured I'd right down to the last day. So at any rate, that's how that happened. So I was a stockbroker, and if you start late in life to be a stockbroker, you don't have much of an account and stuff. And I got to be a certain age, and I said to my wife, this is not cutting. I got to do something else. And right after that, my sister-in-law came to me.

She was a German national. You wouldn't know it. She has zero accent. She said, you sell bread that's good enough to sell in Germany. You need to do this. I'm still doing it by hand. And one thing led to another there. So that's what I do now.

I'll tell you what. keeps you in shape. You're not going to get fat doing this unless you want to. I suppose you've got to make sure you don't get too much of your own product, though. That's true. Just like the drug dealers. No, no, no. I say to people, people in stores say, oh, I don't eat much bread.

I said, it's not the bread. It's what you put on it. Too much mayonnaise or too much strawberry jam is what you do with it, not the stuff. Well, what's the name? So where can people get your bread? You got a shipment of it. Oh, I know what I'm not going to be going to the grocery market very often in Pennsylvania. The only baker.

The only baker. O-L-E-Y, yeah. That's an Indian name for the valley in which we live. The Indian name for it was Olinca. And that got shortened by the locals at that time, way back. Benjamin Franklin did not like to come up to that county. He said there were too damn many Germans up there. I don't like to go up there.

He was a good horseman. in his middle age. We all see Ben Franklin as a big fat old guy. Oh, yeah. Fat old man, but he was an expert, expert horseman, and people did not like to travel with him. I read an account of him going to York, PA, which is west of Harrisburg.

They didn't like that with him because he would take off overland to basically explore the landscape and whatnot. And they were all afraid he was going to either fall off or get killed by the locals, the Indians. So then we're going to have to go look for him and find him. Some of the folks out there don't like us very much and so forth. So people did not like to go traveling with him, but he was an expert in overland to a horseman.

But we all see him as the fat old guy. Yeah, that's the image he got stuck with at some point. Right. I know you wrap up your bio that you sent to Dave and it says, 22 still having fun. Heck yeah. That's pretty awesome. I don't know.

Did we miss anything? Get us up to date? There's one thing I thought about on going by. Now it escapes me. Married to the same woman. This is during the political campaign. They would ask you. I said, still married to the same woman.

Since age 27. Wow. So I got married a little bit late. And it was your daughter. that brought you here and linked us up. I think she linked us up on social media. Yeah, there was an elder daughter, Genevieve. She wanted to come with me, but she is in a job that she doesn't like, and she's intensely searching. So the other daughter said, I'll take him out, and she had not actually said. She said, if you go, I'll buy my own ticket. Okay. So then I said to you,

I will not travel alone. I will travel with my wife. Oh, okay. So then Pamela said, I don't want to go. We have an ancient puppet dog here, and she's going to die. I said, well, we ought to euthanize her. I can't do that. That's the pragmatic solution, apparently.

So younger daughter said, I'll go with him. So she is here today in San Diego. An elder daughter is angry, but I said, Jenny, what you're doing is more important. She's working at it. She got into the medical world, most specifically into transplants, and she said, if Jocko says anything to you, ask him if he is a organ donor. Because he should be, everybody should be. I am.

Yeah. So I'll tell her that. But at any rate, she's going to know. Apparently everyone's going to know now. I said, but the thing about Jenny, the thing that people want is something you can do that most people can't. You can keep six balls in the air at the same time, so to speak. That's why these guys in the transplant business love you so much because they could say, oh, I don't know about that.

Ask Jenny. And she had the answer. Or this computer thing is screwed up and it's off the thing and it won't work and say, call Jenny. She can do that and she does. There you go. So, and the younger daughter, they have their, she and her husband have their own

business, so it's not easily done for them. Although they're very serious and they do well. So that's the whole thing there. It was something else. Dave, what do you got? Oh, man, I got a lot.

But I know we're kind of around it. I've been taking a lot of notes. I just I'm remarking at how many similarities there are and I just started writing things down I was stationed at Meridian I was stationed at Kingsville I was in LSO

I have about 40 traps in the Connie early in my career How about that? I did the spin rides in the T2 and I knew were a spin instructor I know that well It's fun it's a great I said I said it's great carnival ride

But so many guys would not do it I used to say the student didn't know who I was. I'll be doing your spin hop today. You're terrified. Well, no, Mr. Coppell, but I thought that... I said, wait a minute, wait a minute. How many guys have you been punched out on spin hops?

Oh, I don't know. No one. It's a carnival ride and so forth. And Fred didn't want to... I don't like it to do it. I'll do them. I'll do them for you. So I would do a lot of the spin hop. opposite I'm running. There's a carnival ride. Not much instruction goes on that day, except for the rote.

All right, Mr. Smith, we establish the direction of rotation, and we will positively neutralize the controls, and then apply full opposite rudder, and when the rotation stops, we will put stick full forward, and so forth. Yeah, that's all you do. And then, okay, fine, we got that. Now we'll going to climb back up. You have to do it again? Yeah, I'm going to do it again too. I remember it well. Some of the best rides ever. Yeah. My time with the Air Force, and then you kind of conclude with a couple of things that I just couldn't help make the connection to living on the O3 level in the state room underneath the catapults. And then, God forbid, I am on a podcast where I don't have to say something nice about Navy SEALs, but you worked for a

a frog man and got to see what real good leadership looked like. But you know what? Let's talk about leadership just a second. He was not well thought of, mostly by the younger guys who are ROs in the Fleet Squad and I was in. He never does anything. And well, he'd talk and and say not nice things about him. I don't think any of the

front seat guys said that. What a surprise. But the backseat guys, they're all young and Lieutenant Junior grades, all of them solid. Most of them retired as commanders. I don't know what the heck they got them to do to stay in the Navy that long. But at any rate, they didn't like him because they couldn't understand what he was doing.

I think the front seat guys all really understood what was going on there. Well, I think there's a real strong connection between pilots and seals. I got to learn that firsthand working with Jocko. But you did it at a time where you didn't. have the machines that we had. I mean, you flew an airplane that, I guarantee you, was infinitely harder than it was for me. But it occurred to me that the legacy that I got to live under, the 35 years of history, was written about people like you. And when I got in the Navy and the Marine Corps, how we flew fighters and the way we taught people to fly fighters was already

embedded. And that all started with your generation. So, you know, that's what I was thinking about in that Dan Patterson and the book that wasn't called Top Gun until maybe I don't know

three, four or five years later somebody said top but the F4 didn't have a gun and I don't and all your

newspaper guys he said I had to have a gun and then finally did the F4E and had a gun in and finally no

the missile was a better weapon every time every time he had to be within 3,000 feet to do anything

with a 20 millimeter gun. I shot the gun at Kingsville. We all did. I was bad at it, too. I don't know. They put your colored paint on your and then they examined the banner.

There's no greens on here. What happened to you, Tom? embarrassing, you know? I'm an older guy. I'm supposed to have holes in there. But at any rate, I don't, I utterly disagree with that business about if any sort of a fire plane, you have to have a gun.

Ball linole. Now, early on, Sparrows didn't work because White Hat sailors would drop them and chucked them up into the bottom of the airplane, and they didn't test them to make sure this is working and things like that. And the aviators didn't turn a panel on and to see if the missiles, they call it tuning, that the missiles would tune and things like that. And then if one didn't tune, you flip past that to go to the. the number two and so forth and fire that one, forget about the first.

But then you could do one more thing that came out during top gun that nobody, during advanced fighter weapons move. If you went to Borsight, tell the guy in back cockpit, go to Borsight, the antenna goes where the Piper is through the 35-mail gun site is looking. They're both looking at the same place. And that's what I was going to do with the 21. Go Borside, pull the trigger. And you'd get a sparrow, which is a monster missile.

Why, it weighs 500 pounds. Sparrow. The ones we had, anyway, the e-models weighed 500 pounds. But anyway, it wasn't called fighter weapons school back then. Oh, yeah. So the thing you read in Dan Pedersen's book, Who Remains a Nice Guy? But I would say this to him in a collegial.

way. Most of the airplanes shot down in World War I in World War II, in Korean War, in the Vietnam War, never saw the guy that shot them down. They never saw the missile that shot them down. I know, I knew, guys who came out, feet wet, out of North Vietnam, and saw the missile go by. The B-model missiles, the missile the Russians had, they stole it from us and shipped it through Berlin on commercial freight. And it didn't guide that well. At least the Russian version of it didn't. It had a big seeker head on it and it didn't narrow its sight.

But I talked with guys who said, I saw the missile go by and I had no idea. Holy smoke. Most guys who got shot down, and I heard this early in the cruise, Not until I was out there and you get fully realized that they're used rail bullets here and stuff. Most 95% of the airplanes that get shot down get shot down and they never saw whatever did it to them. They never saw it. One time, we were in Laos somewhere. It doesn't matter where.

Waiting for the fact. And he's at 14, now and I'm at 15. He's in a port orbit, and I'm in a starboard orbit. We're just waiting quietly. And here comes an F4. You can tell because it has, at the wing roots, and the leading edge of the two flashing white lights. That's an F4.

And he comes flying by, and he gets about where we are. That's where there are guns on the ground, because that's where there are a truck park, and that's where the fact is going to meet us. And those gunners can hear us up overhead. But here comes this guy over the horizon. An F4. At this guy, probably 57 at least, maybe 85mm,

and he's still got his lights on Bright and Flash. And he disappeared over the horizon, bright and flash. Did you go get close to him? Well, not that close because they were shooting at him, but I went close enough. I could see. That is an Air Force F4. It's not some Navy guy who's lost or something.

It's Air Force F4, and he never knew it. Oblivious to everything with his lights on, bright, and flash. True story. So my point here is that Top Gun is, or what they call now Top Gun, is very interesting if you go one-on-one. You both start from here, you turn, and start with a head-on pass and so forth. One guy is better than the other, and he gets behind the other. But that's not what happens.

What happens is the guy that you were picking your nose for some reason or other, and the MiG-21 showed up or a MiG-26, or God knows what it is, and he shot you down from three miles of stern because you were picking your nose. You've got to be a wild man in that cockpit if you don't want to get shot down. You've got to know everything that's going on, 360 degrees all the time. So you turn into a crazy man and you fly with a new RO. He said, you're really nuts. Yeah, I'm still here too.

So at any rate, I beg your pardon I interrupted you. Not at all. That's probably a great place to wrap it up right there. That's a great attitude to have. Thank you so much for coming out here. It was fun. We really appreciate it. Thanks for sharing your experiences, lessons learned.

And of course, most important, thank you for your service. Oh, baloney. Thank you for your service in the Air Force and your service in the Navy. And most of all, thank you for your service to our great nation. Amen. Thank you, sir. And with that, Tom Copel has left the building. Pretty awesome to hear from a dude that, as you were telling me,

before we hit record, Dave. In the middle of Vietnam War, just volunteers to go and fly, you know, F4 Phantoms. That's the pipeline, too. So pretty amazing to hear these guys. I thought it was actually pretty interesting about the nuclear war stuff too. Yeah.

You know, like, what are you thinking? What you, you know, I was in the SEAL teams and I was like, hey, we might do a mission. In the 90s, like, hey, we might do a mission. Michael, you know, kill a terrorist. This dude's like, hey, we might go and end humanity. Yeah. You know, that's a...

I remember when I first started flying airplanes, what you really want to do is you actually want to... You want to do something. You want to drop a bomb. You want to get in a fight. That's what you want to do. And there's a double edge to that because, you know, like, well, I mean, we don't want to go to war.

It's not a good thing. But if you do, you want to get the call, the only thing you're ever going to do when you're, you know, strategic air command with nuclear weapons in a B-52. You get that call, like, that's a different psychology about what your job is, you know, and I could see someone like him getting pretty restless doing stripler all day, knowing it's kind of unlikely. And even if it did work out, like, what are you actually doing there?

That's not a scenario you want to be in no matter what. Yeah, crazy. But anyways, thanks for listening. If you want to support the podcast, you want to support yourself, Get yourself some jaco fuel Joccofuel.com You can get these drinks We're drinking right here

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Now, look, I'm not trying to get kicked off. I don't think I'm going to get kicked off. We're not getting crazy over here, but there are certain things I've said that have been demonetized. So who knows when they're going to say, yeah, you can't say that anymore. So we have our own platform, jocco underground.com. Check that out.

YouTube channel. Jocko podcast is the YouTube channel. Origin USA also has a YouTube channel. We got psychological warfare. We got flipside canvas, Dakota Meyer. Got a bunch of books. Only Cry for the Living by Holly McKay. Final Spin.

The audio book of Final Spin, Dave and I did like a Q&A from Final Spin. So after the book, you can do the Q&A. You can listen to that Q&A. Pretty cool. The background of where it came from. I can tell you where it's going. that thing's making moves. I'll leave it at that for now

because it's hard to get these things done. But anyways, written a bunch of books, Warrior Kid books. I have a gym, Victory MMA and Fitness, and just about every day a parent will come up to me and say, thank you for those books. That got my kid to focus in school,

got my kid here to start training Jit-to, got my kid to stop eating junk. So, check out those books for your kids. Way of the Warrior Kid series. Mikey and the Dragons. Hackworth, about face,

extreme ownership, dichotomy of leadership, all these books. You know I've written them. Get them if you want them. Ashland Front. What's Eshleon Front? Dave Burke. Eshlon Front is our leadership consultancy

where we, you, me, Laf, and the whole team get to actually in person live, talk about every single leadership principle you've been talking about on this podcast and in the book.

We get to do it with companies and people all the time. It's awesome. And what about the Academy? Oh, the Academy. The Extreme Ownership Academy. It turns out that meeting people live and in person isn't always the most convenient way to do it and bringing people off the line or bringing people into a conference room

or a classroom every single day is not a great way to train. We want to keep people working. But the Academy takes basically everything we teach, puts it online so you can get to it whenever and however you want to. And it's an awesome additional resource. It's basically be able to hit that leadership gym. every day whenever it's convenient for you. So we got the academy.

Yeah, just like Jiu-Jitsu, there's moves you've got to learn. There's moves you've got to learn about leadership. And just like Jiu-Jitsu, you can't just look at a move and hear it one time and be like, oh, I'll throw this umapata on somebody now. This is not going to work. You got to fully understand it. You got to see it from different angles. You got to try it yourself.

And that's what the academy is, extreme ownership.com. If you want to get in on that. And if you want to help service members active and You want to help their families. You want to help Gold Star families? Check out Mark Lee's mom. Mama Leach. She got a charity organization.

Does incredible stuff. Does incredible stuff. Takes service members. This is one of the things that she does. She takes service members who have significant health issues and she gets some treatment. It's a multifaceted treatment. One of the big treatments is hyperbaric chambers. You're going in, right in the I-O-2.

She sets this up. for like 30 or 45 days, all expenses paid. So, and we've seen the results of this is just outstanding. So if you want to donate or you want to support that, go to America's mighty warriors.org. And also don't forget about Micah Fink, who's taken vets up into the wilderness to heal through adversity, which is pretty awesome. Heroes and Horses.org. and if you want to follow us on Twitter, on Graham, on the Facebook,

Dave is at David R. Burke. I'm at Jocko Willink. Watch out for the algorithm. Thanks once again to Tom Copel for making the trip out, for sharing those experiences. And lessons learned from your life, pretty neat to hear this stuff, first person. Thanks for your service.

Thanks for coming out. And thanks to all our military person. Now with a special recognition today, to those of you that help us own the skies, the pilots, the navigators, the air crews, the maintenance and mechanics on the ground and the thousands of support people that make our domination of the air possible. Thank you for what you all do. And thanks as well to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol secret service, all first responders. Thanks for what you do here on the home front to keep us safe. And I want to close this out with another quote, a quote from Captain David McCamble, United States Navy.

34 air victories in World War II, the most of any U.S. Navy pilot ever. And he said this, quote, aggressiveness was a fundamental to success in air-to-air combat and if you ever caught a fighter pilot in a defensive mood you had him licked before you started shooting end quote so there you go that just doesn't apply to air-to-air combat it applies to everything that's how you win so get out there be aggressive make things happen and of course, keep getting after it.

And until next time, this is Dave and Jocko. Out.