If you belong to the tiny slice of the population who didn’t witness Tom Cruise’s career-making 1986 role as cocksure fighter pilot Lieutenant Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, grab yourself some light beer and cheese dip and fire up the Netflix. One would be hard-pressed to find another movie more chock-full of technical inaccuracies, reckless conflations of timeline, and puzzling homoerotic undertones, but in capturing the peculiar mix of old school manliness and mirrored-shades glamour in this subculture of the Navy, it’s spot-on.
The way you end a year with no time is to meet it on its own level of absurdity, a Dukes of Hazzard handbrake turn where you switch gears from preparing for a deployment to Afghanistan and instead strap your four-month-old into his car seat and floor it across the Sierras by way of Lake Tahoe, streak out into the parched bottom of the Great Basin to Fallon, Nevada, “the Oasis of the Desert,” to become part of an organization you know only from a movie, and whose name you have to keep following up to civilian friends and family with, “Yeah, it actually exists.” Within the Navy community, I knew TOPGUN had a larger-than-life reputation, and that this was a game-changing move for Ross’s career, but neither of us ever spoke of that. We had more pressing matters to attend to, like taking in a sobering, panoramic view of one of the worst-hit areas of the nation’s housing crisis, and giving ourselves four days to find and put down an offer on the first house we’d ever bought.
I was ecstatic to have Ross home. The impending move, yet another new state where I knew no one, the swan dive into mortgage debt, the ridiculously short timeline in which it was all supposed to happen—none of this mattered, because there he was, my husband, my helper, Sam’s dad, not gone. Lying next to him in bed one night, I told him I felt like I shouldn’t hang around as much with the other wives in the squadron because I had my husband home and they didn’t.
“It feels like hanging out with the Donner party, only I have this giant cake stashed away in my pack and they keep catching me with frosting on my face when we sit down together to talk about how we’re starving.”
Ross took it further. “It’s more like an Airstream trailer you have, with a space heater and a microwave,” he said, spooning me and tucking his hands down around my belly. “‘Hey, Rachel, could you help me fix this wagon wheel?’ ‘Um, yeah . . . it’s just, my popcorn’s almost ready.’”
We laughed like we were giggling in church, all wheezing and shaking, trying not to wake the baby or the dog, or disturb the cat, who had curled himself at our feet, but it was a sharp, painful laughter for me, the more intense for its tinge of guilt. I had him home. It was the best feeling, but I knew it was cold outside and would be for a long time yet.
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TOPGUN is a special subset of pilots and aviation specialists within a special subset of pilots and aviation specialists. The larger entity is called NSAWC (pronounced “en-sock”), which stands for Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center. NSAWC as a whole consists of ten different groups, numbered N1 through N10, all representing various aspects of “excellence in naval aviation training and tactics development.” This means excellence in personnel resources, intelligence, electronic warfare systems, and pretty much everything else even remotely related to carrier-based air warfare in the Navy. TOPGUN used to exist as its own entity, in Miramar, California (which is where Tom Cruise sulked around with his motorcycle in the movie), but a Base Realignment and Closure decision in 1993 moved the organization to Fallon, Nevada, an hour east of Reno and in the middle of the Great Basin and home to the Fallon Range Training Complex, some of the best flying real estate the Navy has, where it came under the NSAWC umbrella as the seventh N.