All of these special traditions and visual markers are important because they are signposts that indicate you have gotten off onto a very different road within the Navy. They are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how exactly TOPGUN differs from the rest of the fleet, and the rest is obscured, even from the wives.
There is much to learn for a TOPGUN wife, and it begins by assuming the role of “Murderboard widow.” An instructor will spend most of his first year on staff learning, perfecting his knowledge of the assigned SME topic, and writing the lecture he will give, an hours-long speech given from memory with accompanying slides and critiqued, often brutally and in great detail, by the other instructors at a culminating event called a “Murderboard.” The finest points—word pronunciation, body language, facial tics, how you press the key or hold the remote that changes the slides—come under review in the effort to make you into the perfect vehicle for the delivery of information. Total accuracy, complete clarity, zero distraction. Working on the lecture and preparing for the Murderboard consume a new instructor completely. Much of the lecture is classified information, so a wife can’t even sit and listen to him practice and tell him if he’s doing that head bob thing the senior Bros keep making fun of him for.
Many wives prepare impressive home-cooked spreads for the review committee on the day of their husbands’ Murderboard. This is something of a tradition. From then on, they also provide potluck buffets for the evening “MiG Killer” lectures that take place once every three months as part of each TOPGUN class, where an experienced fighter pilot from some previous conflict comes in to share the story of his air-to-air victory.
As in the rest of the fleet, there is an officers’ spouses’ club, or OSC, for NSAWC, and it is open to all officers’ spouses from N1 to N10, but there is also a TOPGUN spouses’ support group (SSG). If you are a TOPGUN wife, it is possible to belong, and pay dues, to both, though what it is you’re supposed to be doing with each group is at first confusing. To the best of my knowledge, the distinction is that the larger NSAWC OSC is recognized by the base legal office, and thus may hold fund-raisers, while the TOPGUN SSG is very careful to identify itself as a noncompeting “social support organization.”
This is the scaffolding laid out for being a TOPGUN wife—the cyclical cooking duties, the continual production and sale of merchandise, the club within a club—but a lot happens in the liminal space. Keep in mind that Fallon has a population of just over three thousand and few employment opportunities. For me, it was the first time in my life since I was sixteen years old that I was totally and indefinitely unemployed. My job was now my family, and for someone accustomed to the feedback, identity, and remuneration of work outside the home, suddenly taking on the perplexing whims of an infant as your performance reviews and conflating the roles of “boss” and “husband” are easy—and costly—mistakes to make. The balance of power in our marriage had shifted once again. I no longer had the pressure valve of a job and a community outside of my role as a Navy wife, and without Stella and Jake around, no one within the tribe to help explain the rules to me in this new place.
Soon after our arrival in Fallon, I recognized the twin currents of extraordinarily high performance expectations and isolation. It was a feeling I was familiar with, enough to have formed my own sort of “Never Again.” When it came time for me to go off to college, I had walked out of two separate campus tours at private universities known for their academics. They “smelled” like St. Stephen’s, like jittery people winning at life but harboring ferocious private habits to compensate for the stress. Fallon, at first glance, felt suspiciously similar.