DonHollway.com: SHOWTIME FOR A TOP GUN

	Showtime for a Top Gun
	by Don Hollway
	Originally published as “Showdown Between Two Top Guns” in AVIATION, March 1994

Randy Cunningham, the Navy’s first Vietnam ace, bagged three MiGs in six minutes.

The U.S.S. Constellation hadn’t launched an air strike this large in four years, since 1968. On the aircraft carrier’s crowded flight deck McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom fighters, Grumman A-6 Intruder and Vought A-7 Corsair II bombers waited, wings folded, as they received ordnance; in her operations room their pilots assembled for the final briefing.

But the “Connie’s” highest-scoring fighter pilot was not among them. Lt. Randy “Duke” Cunningham was out on the catwalk beside the flight deck, from which, in the days when the carrier was launching strikes south of the Demilitarized Zone, it had sometimes been possible to see the Vietnamese coast. This was a clear May morning, with only a little cloud cover turned red and gold by the rising sun, but the ship had moved north to Yankee Station, over the horizon from the DMZ. The morning’s mission, targeting a petroleum-storage facility near Haiphong, promised heavy enemy air activity. But Cunningham had been left off the flight roster—an insult for even a novice Phantom driver. And Cunningham, with two kills to his credit, was the Navy’s top fighter jock.

Officially there simply weren’t enough F-4s to go around; in fact, for the afternoon mission, one flight of Phantoms assigned to antiaircraft-suppression—flak-busting—would have to fill their ranks with a slower Corsair. But that wasn’t all that was bothering Cunningham. He’d recently received his wife’s “Dear John” letter; his obsession with air combat was putting an end to his marriage. And it wasn’t helping his Navy career either. “He was a hell of a pilot,” his commanding officer had noted, “but...flying was just one little mark on his fitness report.... If it didn’t concern flying, Randy wasn’t interested.”

After this cruise, Cunningham knew, he’d probably be relegated to some backwater assignment and obscurity. This mission might be his last shot; at the rate the North Vietnamese Air Force was losing planes and airfields it would soon be finished.

When Cunningham had come to Vietnam his squadron, VF-96 (the “Fighting Falcons”), had been tasked mainly with bombing in Laos and South Vietnam; for political reasons air strikes north of the DMZ were forbidden. Cunningham had done his best to prepare for air-to-air combat. He read incessantly, trained unendingly. He could quote the exploits of past fighter aces verbatim. He wore a non-regulation, custom-tailored black flight suit, hung with guns and knives, in case he was shot down. He optimistically set his weapons selector to air-to-air missiles after every bomb drop. But in nine months the Falcons were shot at just 12 times.

Meanwhile the “gomers,” as the Navy aviators derisively called their North Vietnamese counterparts, were accumulating their own crop of aces. Foremost among them was the infamous, shadowy Col. Nguyen Toon, alias “Colonel Tomb.” Some sources said Toon was trained in Red China, some in North Korea; some said he never existed at all, that he was an amalgamation of multiple lesser aces, created for propaganda purposes. But American signals-intelligence officers listening in to North Vietnamese radio traffic swore Toon had an identifiable radio signature: during the stalk he communicated only via stealthy clicks, talking only after the combat was done. He was eventually credited with 13 kills.

By 1972 enemy fighters interfering with Boeing B-52 bombers over nearby Laos invited retaliatory “protective reaction” strikes. On January 18, while the Fighting Falcons (going by the radio call sign “Showtime”) pounded an air base north of the DMZ, Cunningham sighted what looked like a pair of scoop-mouthed Corsairs about four miles away, clearly visible by the white glow of their afterburners.

But A-7s weren’t equipped with afterburners. Accelerating in behind the bogies, Cunningham recognized them as Russian-built Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21s, codenamed “Fishbed” and known to the Navy pilots as “blue bandits.” “Showtime, bandits, blue bandits north of the field!”

In the MiG leader’s six o’clock position—directly behind him—Cunningham was perfectly positioned to fire a radar-guided Sparrow missile. His back-seat Radar Intercept Officer, Lt. (jg) Willie “Irish” Driscoll, called, “Duke, he’s locked on the radar, in range! Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!”

But Cunningham mistrusted the F-4’s unreliable Sparrow missiles. He switched his weapons-selector to heat-seeking AIM-9 Sidewinder, heard the headphone tone indicating the missile had acquired the target, and shouted the missile-fired warning call like a war cry: “Fox Two!”

The Fishbed pulled a maximum-G starboard turn, masking its tailpipe and breaking the Sidewinder’s lock. Rolling his Phantom in behind, Cunningham followed around the outside of the turn, just 200 feet up. Driscoll confirmed the MiG’s wingman had fled. “Get ’em, Duke!”

The MiG pilot, head swiveling to keep the Phantom in sight, reversed his turn, trying to throw off the Phantom as he had the Sidewinder. Cunningham was way ahead of him. “Stand by. Stand by, Stand by. Fox Two.” He launched his second AIM-9 just as the 21 started across his nose; missile intercepted MiG 3,500 feet out in front of the Phantom. The Fishbed’s tail came off. The shattered wreckage tumbled to the ground and exploded into a huge fireball. One.

“You got him, Duke!” crowed Cunningham’s wingman, Lt. Brian Grant. “Where’s the other one?”

The second MiG was headed for China at full speed. Too low on fuel to give chase, Cunningham switched back to the long-range Sparrow. The missile launcher’s ejector cartridge promptly shorted out; it never left the rail. By the time the Americans got back over the Constellation their fuel state was so low they were denied permission for a victory roll. Instead Cunningham pulled a six-G break turn, just like the ones done by victors at Top Gun, and landed to the accolades of the assembled crew.

By March the U.S. was washing its hands of Vietnam. The Connie was slated to sail home; like many of her pilots, Cunningham flew ahead on a space-available Air Force flight. Two tours of combat had done his marriage little good, but he believed he was home to stay.

Then the North Vietnamese launched their spring offensive. President Nixon retaliated with “Linebacker I,” intense bombing north of the DMZ. Cunningham returned to the Connie in time for a strike on a truck park about 25 miles west of Hanoi. He was at about 10,000 feet, with Grant flying his wing, when a MiG-17 “Fresco” leaped from the cloud cover with both afterburner and cannons blazing.

“Brian, MiG at your seven o’clock!” warned Cunningham. Grant immediately powered away, but the 17 was packing a nasty surprise—AA-2 Atoll air-to-air missiles, which U.S. intelligence had believed the Fresco incapable of carrying. “Atoll! Break port!”

Grant snapped into a six-G left turn, breaking the missile lock, but the Fresco cut across the inside of the turn, pulling within gun range again. Just as Cunningham was dropping down behind it for a Sidewinder shot Driscoll called out two more 17s, rocketing past just 200 feet overhead.

“Don’t worry,” Cunningham told him. “They’re out of the fight.” By the time they got turned around the two Phantoms would be miles away. Too far for a Sidewinder shot at the first Fresco, Cunningham fired anyway in hopes of scaring it off. Sure enough, the MiG reversed hard, right in front of him, just as the Fishbed had done.

“Duke,” shouted Driscoll, “MiGs at five and seven shooting!”

The two passing Frescos had banked around onto Cunningham’s tail after all. Refusing to be distracted by their tracer fire, he squeezed off his Sidewinder. The missile ran straight out into the MiG ahead, which slammed into a mountainside. Two.

But the Frescos behind had Cunningham sandwiched. A turn to either side would put him in front of one; to climb would invite an Atoll up the tailpipe. Instead he snap-rolled the Phantom over into a vertical dive. The strain of the pullout popped rivets out of the plane and broke a flap hinge, but Cunningham came out safely down in the haze, where he could light his burners without attracting Atolls. The MiGs soon lost their enthusiasm and broke off the fight.

Back over the Connie Cunningham was again denied permission for a victory roll. He was content knowing his two victories made him the Navy’s top MiG killer.

Still the North Vietnamese refused to negotiate. President Nixon ordered the mining of Haiphong harbor and the bombing of logistical targets in the Hanoi/Haiphong areas beginning May 9. The next day 35 aircraft left the Constellation for the Haiphong oil yards.

But they went without Randy Cunningham. And when, at mid-morning, they returned to the Constellation one of the F-4s did a victory roll—one MiG splashed.

Below decks Duke Cunningham and Irish Driscoll suited up to fly the afternoon strike.

Cunningham had known of one F-4 still available—“Showtime 100,” the personal mount of the CAG (Commander Air Group, the carrier pilots’ C.O.). It was being cleaned up for a change-of-command ceremony the next day; Cunningham argued that the flak-suppression Phantoms would be compromised by the slow A-7 filling out their flight that afternoon, and got permission to take its place in the CAG’s F-4.

Target: the rail center at Hai Duong, between Hanoi and Haiphong and the airfields at Kien An and Gia Lam. Intelligence warned the NVAF was routing every MiG they had into the Hanoi/Haiphong area; enemy airfields and SAM sites were on full alert. (That morning, while the Navy was hitting Haiphong, the Air Force had staged an attack on Hanoi’s Paul Doumer Bridge, downing three MiGs in the process.) If anyone doubted it they could go out on the flight deck and have a look at the North American RA-5C Vigilante just back from a post-strike reconnaissance run. There were nearly half a dozen places where you could stand beneath the plane and see daylight from above, coming down through holes clear through the aircraft.

By 1 PM the force was “feet dry,”15,000 feet above the mouth of the Red River. The flak-suppressors split off to shield the rest from attack. Cunningham and Grant were supposed to take out enemy “triple-A,” antiaircraft artillery; each Phantom packed an external fuel tank and two Sparrows on her belly, with four Sidewinders and two racks of six 500-lb. “Rockeye” cluster bombs apiece under her wings. But a haze below 10,000 feet obscured the guns’ flashes, so they orbited over the target while the bombers hit it and then, dodging SAMs, dumped their Rockeyes on warehouses next door.

It was just as the two F-4s came out of their bomb runs that Driscoll, looking back over his shoulder to observe the impacts, noticed “black dots on the horizon...really coming up fast.”

MiGs, as many as 20 of them. The radio was a jumble of confused calls: “Bandits! Bandits!” and, “MiG-17! MiG-17!...He’s on my tail!” Grant, coming up about 1,000 feet behind Cunningham and Driscoll, called, “Duke, you have MiG-17s at your seven o’clock, shooting!”

For once Cunningham had been caught off guard. He turned hard to port—normally a mistake against the 17, but these were coming so fast that they couldn’t match the turn. The leader overshot. He was inside the AIM-9 minimum range when Cunningham fired, but in the time it took the missile to accelerate the Fresco opened the distance and the Sidewinder tracked right up the its tailpipe. The 17 came apart in a fireball. Three.

Going to afterburner, Cunningham and Grant zoom-climbed to 15,000 feet for a look around. As Cunningham later recalled, “The scene below was straight out of The Dawn Patrol.” While a Fresco plunged earthward in a flaming death dive, eight more were circling with a trio of F-4s, everyone trying to watch his tail, cover his friends’ and get a shot at the enemy’s.

Still packing plenty of fuel, Cunningham and Grant winged over to rejoin the fight, nearly colliding with another Phantom as it broke from the circle—Showtime 112, piloted by Commander Dwight Timm, VF-96’s second in command, who had no less than three MiGs after him. And he only saw two of them. The nearest, a 17, was right in his blind spot, below and to the outside of the Phantom’s port turn.

Cunningham had a Sidewinder tone, but on whom? Of three hot jet pipes ahead two belonged to Timm’s Phantom. “Reverse starboard!” he called.

But Timm, still unaware of the MiG under his tail, only knew that a starboard turn would allow the two he had in view to close. He held his course, and the Fresco slowly hauled its nose up toward him.

“Duke, we have four MiG-17s at our seven o’clock,” reported Driscoll. “Look at two o’clock high!”

Cunningham looked up to see the glint of sunlight off canopies—two more MiGs rolling in to the attack. “There can’t be any more 17s in the world!” he thought—rightly, it turned out. These last were newer MiG-19s (17s with twin engines), a type which downed two U.S. aircraft on that day alone.

With six MiGs now trying to achieve firing solutions on him, Cunningham had to forget Timm for the moment. He turned into the 19s’ attack; they slashed harmlessly past. Now at 550 knots, Cunningham could simply outrun the Frescos behind him. Unless he turned back toward Timm, who was still tracking around to port. In a few more seconds the 17 would have him dead in its sights.

Telling Driscoll to keep an eye out astern, Cunningham rolled back to port. He had an intermittent Sidewinder tone—on the MiG? The X.O.? He still couldn’t be sure....

Driscoll, head craned to the rear, shouted that the nearest 17 was pulling enough lead for a shot. With tracer flying past Cunningham straightened out, blasting beyond the MiG’s reach. But now there were four 21s closing from nine o’clock high.

For the last time Cunningham turned toward Timm. “Showtime, reverse starboard! Reverse starboard, goddamnit!”

Finally Timm, having outdistanced the two MiGs he could see, broke hard to the right. The pursuing Fresco, doing 400 knots, couldn’t roll fast enough to follow and Cunningham hit the trigger. “Fox Two!”

The Fresco exploded on impact; Cunningham narrowly avoided hitting its pilot as he ejected. Four!

But the ones behind him had cut the turn and were closing in again. And the four Fishbeds, having given up on Timm, were now bearing down on Cunningham as well.

“Break! Break!” yelled Driscoll. “Give me all you’ve got!”

Cunningham, with the Frescos right behind him, turned into the 21s; for an instant eight or nine aircraft occupied the same air space and then suddenly, as air battles do, the sky cleared. Showtime 100 was alone. Timm, far below, was streaking for the coast; somewhere in the tangle Cunningham had gotten separated from Grant. “Everywhere I looked there were MiGs and no F-4s.... It was time to get out.”

Coast-bound at 10,000 feet, Cunningham and Driscoll had little time to reflect on their triumph. (For disregarding his own safety in saving his superior Cunningham won the Navy Cross, was nominated for the Medal of Honor, and got “a big kiss” from Mrs. Timm.) Driscoll, his head swiveling to clear their tail, wasn’t watching his radar scope, but about 30 miles from the coast Cunningham spotted one more MiG, a 17 coming up from twelve o’clock low—a head-on intercept, just as Cunningham had practiced at the Navy’s Fighter Weapons School, the famous “Top Gun.”

In such a situation the textbook calls for the attacking fighter—in this case the MiG, as all Cunningham wanted to do was get home—to veer off, gaining room to come around on the target’s tail after the flyby. The defender must cut the pass as close as possible, to deny the foe turning room, and then blast away before he can catch up.

Cunningham held his nose on the Fresco, expecting it to turn aside. But the enemy pilot had never been to Top Gun. He came dead on, guns aflame.

Stunned, Cunningham hastily hauled the Phantom up into a climb, figuring the 17 to just keep going. Instead he looked back to see “the MiG, canopy to canopy with me, barely 300 feet away!”

The MiG pilot had pulled up with him. “I could see a gomer leather helmet, gomer goggles, gomer scarf, and the intent gomer expression,” recalled Cunningham. “There was no fear in this guy’s eyes.”

The two planes rocketed 8,000 feet straight up. As the MiG began to falter Cunningham lit his burner and pulled ahead; if he could top out above the Fresco he’d get him on the way back down. But as they came over the top the MiG pilot, even on the verge of stalling, nosed toward the Phantom and fired—and not the usual wild spray of bullets either, but a brief, professional burst at the exact moment the Phantom hung overhead.

“It was like, who is this guy?” remembered Driscoll. When the Phantom reversed back downward the enemy pilot let it fall past and dropped in behind “just like he was tied to us on a string.”

“That S.O.B. is really lucky,” Cunningham told him. “All right, we’ll get this guy now.” Abruptly pulling out of the dive, he rolled over and watched for the MiG to appear beneath him. Which it did—pulling nose-up to fire again. “Oh, no!” he thought. “Maybe this guy isn’t just lucky after all!”

From information later gleaned by U.S. intelligence it was determined that “this Nguyen,” as Cunningham generically described him, “was more than your average Nguyen.” In fact, if there ever was such a man, it was probably Nguyen Toon—Colonel Tomb himself—come to claim Showtime 100 as his 14th kill.

Cunningham dove past the MiG and pulled out again; the two planes stair-stepped downward in a maneuver called the “vertical rolling scissors,” each pilot pulling out the instant he dropped below the other, rolling over to attack again as the other passed below in turn. This was the MiG’s kind of game, at which it could only get better as altitude and airspeed ran out. Toon was in gun range all the time. Cunningham couldn’t get enough separation for a Sidewinder shot. “It was time,” he realized, “to bug out.”

The next time the 17 pulled up, he lit his burners and ran for it. By the time the MiG leveled out the Phantom was doing 600 knots, a mile and a half away.

But Cunningham wasn’t through yet. He hauled the F-4 around for another go—and Toon matched him again! The two planes repeated the first engagement: the vertical reverse, the rolling scissors, the disengagement. Still Duke couldn’t get a shot at the MiG. “Everything my airplane did, he reacted to instinctively. He was flying damn good airplane!”

This time when they came out, Driscoll called, “Hey, Duke, how ya doin’ up there? This guy really knows what he’s doing. Maybe we ought to call it a day.”

But Cunningham couldn’t imagine returning to the Connie, having to tell the Falcons, No, he scared the hell out of me, so I let him go.

“Hang on, Willie,” he said. “We’re gonna get this guy!”

Toon, as revealed by intercepted radio communications, felt the same. His Fresco was low on fuel, and his ground controller had ordered him to disengage. Toon ignored him, and when Cunningham came around he found the MiG ready for him.

For the last time the two planes came together. “The only way one guy was going to get away,” said Driscoll, “was to shoot the other guy down.”

Toon had every reason to believe the American would still try to beat him in the vertical. Cunningham saw him pitch his nose up first; this time the Fresco, with that extra bit of momentum, would top out so close to the Phantom that even the lowliest MiG jockey couldn’t miss.

“I wanted [my] nose to [his] tail,” said Cunningham, “and there’s only one way I could really get it, crossing that fast.” As the two planes zoomed up into the climb, he pulled his throttles back to idle, dropped his flaps, and popped his air brakes. “I would have put out my arms if I could have.”

It went against all the rules. It sacrificed the F-4’s greatest strength—speed in the climb. But as Toon pulled vertical and looked out the top of his canopy the Phantom was nowhere in sight. He’d overshot up in front of it.

But he wasn’t dead yet. Still too close to fear a Sidewinder, he rolled slightly left to keep the Phantom in sight. The F-4, 60 degrees nose-up and down to 150 knots, was near stalling, practically dead in the air.

“He could take it away from me,” Cunningham knew. He closed his brakes and flaps; pushing the throttle forward, he lit the burners. “Don’t flame out on me now, you J79s.”

The J79s stayed lit. The Phantom surged upward like a shark off the bottom. Cunningham kicked the rudder over, steering toward the MiG’s blind belly side.

Toon, now near the top of his reverse, saw the Phantom cross his six o’clock position and, trying to keep it in view, attempted to roll right. The MiG floundered on the verge of stalling...and then it fell away, out of control.

Cunningham saw the Fresco’s nose fall through. Near stalling itself, Showtime 100 nosed over to follow, Cunningham seeking a Sidewinder tone. Frantically seeking airflow over his wings, Toon lit his burner and dove for the ground, hoping its heat would distract the inevitable AIM-9. He was passing through 3,000 feet when, with no guarantee of a strike, Cunningham triggered the shot.

The missile roared off the rail, tracking straight and true. It seemed to hit the MiG; there was a flash, but the Fresco did not alter course and Cunningham, thinking he’d missed, prepared to fire another. His last.

Suddenly flame and black smoke streamed from the Fresco. As Cunningham and Driscoll watched, it continued its dive, straight into the ground. Toon rode it down without ejecting. Cunningham winched his Phantom’s nose up just in time to avoid following him in.

“All right, splash one bandit,” confirmed Driscoll. “Duke, you got another one.”

Three kills in less than six minutes! Cunningham and Driscoll had just become the first American aces over Vietnam. And more than that: They were the first to make all their kills with missiles, the first two-seater aces (Driscoll also received full ace status) and the first F-4 aces.

But they were a long way from safety. Climbing to evade small-caliber triple-A and accelerating to outrun MiGs still infesting the area, they were up to 16,000 feet when somebody shouted on the radio, “SAM, SAM, SAM.”

Showtime 100’s radar-warning receiver had detected no SAM guidance scans, but Cunningham looked out to starboard and saw something like a white telephone pole climbing on a pillar of flame—an SA-2 “Guideline” surface-to-air missile, coming right for them.

There was no time to evade. The Guideline’s proximity fuse exploded its 280-lb. warhead less than 400 feet away.

There was a sound like hail rattling a tin roof—shrapnel riddling the Phantom’s skin. The blast tossed the big jet onto its left wing. Cunningham brought it out level and checked his systems. Everything seemed functional. The SAM had exploded beyond its lethal radius; Cunningham and Driscoll had lived through closer misses. Showtime 100 continued on up to 27,000 feet.

There the Phantom suddenly nosed drunkenly to port. Cunningham saw he had zero pressure in his main hydraulic system. The backup system was going fast. When that went his controls would be gone. On top of that, the rear of the plane now caught fire. And they were still 15 miles from the coast.

The book left no doubt about procedure: Eject. But Cunningham was thinking about the infamous Communist prison for downed American fliers: “The one thing I didn’t want to do was spend the rest of the war as a guest in the Hanoi Hilton, not after bagging five MiGs.”

Wrestling with the controls, he held the wallowing fighter in the air. Soon they were down to 17,000 feet, with the fire now consuming the entire rear of the plane. Things started to explode, and just as they crossed the coast the backup system bled dry. Showtime 100 went into its final spin. Cunningham shouted to Driscoll, “Eject! Eject! Eject!” and fired his seat.

On May 10, 1972 Navy pilots scored eight MiGs downed, six of them falling to VF-96. A total of 11 enemy aircraft went down for a loss of two U.S. planes in air-to-air combat.

As for Randy Cunningham, he did live through it. He and Driscoll came down in the mouth of the Red River. Enemy patrol boats emerged to pick them up, but there were still Falcons overhead to drive them back; the only pickup was made by Marine helicopters.

On his return to the U.S. Randy Cunningham became an instructor at Top Gun and eventually commanded the enemy-simulating Aggressor Squadron. In January 1987 he retired from the Navy. These days he serves in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But he never did get to do that victory roll.

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