The purview of TOPGUN is essentially threefold: (1) they develop advanced tactics and recommendations for employment of strike fighter aircraft and their associated weapons systems in the fleet; (2) they teach a nearly ten-week course four times a year to train select strike fighter aircrew in the employment of tactics, and those who finish the course become strike fighter tactics instructors (SFTIs) for the rest of the fleet; and (3) each TOPGUN instructor is also a subject matter expert (SME) on a particular topic—anything from aircraft and weapons systems to hardware to employment of these elements to various aspects of whatever threat is currently under examination—and acts as the Navy’s definitive voice on that topic.
A whole culture is associated with TOPGUN, with its own rules and traditions. The most serious of these concern the Patch. The Patch is the TOPGUN logo, but it’s not just a logo. Besides being the visible declaration of association with TOPGUN, it carries the historical weight of the whole reason TOPGUN came into existence, which was due to the great number of pilots killed or captured in the early years of the Vietnam conflict. The Navy’s air-to-air performance and combat kill ratio was troublingly poor, so it commissioned the now declassified Air-to-Air Missile System Capability Review, more commonly known as the Ault Report (for Captain Frank Ault, who conducted the review). The upshot was an evident need for consolidating and standardizing fighter expertise into some kind of advanced fighter weapons school. Hence, TOPGUN. It took me a year and a half to get all the backstory, but in this light, the organization’s fanatical insistence on the importance of the Patch, the injunction against ever doing anything to dishonor, discredit, disrespect, or in any way call into question the reputation of the Patch, makes a little more sense. I originally thought it was an elitism thing, but above everything else, beyond all the hype and perception, it’s a memorial and a commitment: “Never Again.”
The Patch, simply as logo, is a white MiG-21 Fishbed in flight against a dark blue background. An orange gun reticle converges on the middle of its fuselage and a red ring surrounds the whole image, on which is written “United States Navy Fighter Weapons School.” For as much as the name TOPGUN is invoked in the daily life of the organization, it appears nowhere on its most important image. The image itself has a hardworking life. Instructors wear it on the right shoulder of the flight suit and it appears as “fin flash” on the vertical stabilizer of every F/A-18 Hornet and F-16 Fighting Falcon NSAWC owns, but it also shows up embroidered, printed, etched, enameled, carved, painted, and otherwise emblazoned on a variety of items available for exclusive purchase: bumper stickers, T-shirts, sweaters, jackets, ball caps, baby blankets, onesies, earrings, pendants, key chains, shot glasses, beer pitchers, beer glasses, wineglasses, scotch glasses, Christmas ornaments, and anything else the instructors, or more often their wives, can think of. Over the course of our time in Fallon, I came to understand that there was a direct relationship between how ferociously hard instructors—and by default, their families—worked and how strong the urge became to accumulate items emblazoned with the Patch. Our own Patch collection is ridiculously large. Survival among this high-performance set seemed to come with a fanaticism for endurance and self-identification I’d previously seen only among marathoners.
The Patch also graces one side of a “challenge coin,” which is about the size of a fifty-cent piece and bears the instructor’s call sign and “TOPGUN Instructor” on the other. Challenge coins are not unique to TOPGUN—most other fleet squadrons produce them with their individual logos as well—nor is the tradition of taking it out at the bar and either slapping it down or tapping it against the table until everyone else presents their challenge coins as well, the idea being to stick the tab with the guy who showed up without his coin. But the adherence to this tradition, and the habit of former instructors and even retired ones to continue to carry their TOPGUN coin at all times, just in case, is unique.
The other major way to make a positive visual ID of a TOPGUN instructor, especially at a distance, is to check out what color T-shirt is visible at the unzipped throat of his flight suit. Light blue pegs an instructor. Just as the Patch never says “TOPGUN,” the powder blue never appears on the Patch. Similarly contrary is the issue of footwear. The aviation community has sought to differentiate itself from the rest of the Navy by wearing brown combat boots with flight suits rather than black ones, necessitating the shorthand phrases “brown shoe community” and “black shoe community.” Yet another trademark differentiation among TOPGUN instructors is the insistence on black flight boots. Various stories exist to explain this choice, but there seems to be no official agreement on this score.
Finally, TOPGUN instructors even have a special word they use to identify each other: “Bro,” as in “He’s a good dude; he’s a former Bro.” It is used without a hint of irony.