390: Top Gun with Captain Michael Makatura

Dan LeFebvre
00:02
Hello, and welcome to Based on a True Story, the podcast that compares your favorite Hollywood movies with history. Today, we’re heading back to the year 1986 for an action movie that many people consider the gold standard for aviation films, Top Gun. Now, even though Top Gun wasn’t trying to be entirely based on a true story, it actually was inspired by the true story of pilots as told by a journalist named Ihudio Nye in an article called Top Guns, and that was published in the May 1983 issue of California Magazine.

00:36
That article was adapted into a screenplay by Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr., produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and transformed into the 1986 movie that we know today by director Tony Scott. I’m sure you’ve seen it at least once, if not numerous times, but let’s kick off our episode today by refreshing our memory on the story with a quick synopsis. The movie opens aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise in the Indian Ocean with Lieutenant Pete Maverick Mitchell, played by Tom Cruise.

01:06
Maverick is a talented but reckless U.S. Navy fighter pilot flying the F-14 Tomcat with his radar intercept officer and best friend Lieutenant Nick Goose Bradshaw. He’s played by Anthony Edwards.

01:19
After Maverick breaks orders to help another shaken pilot safely land, he and Goose are unexpectedly sent to the Navy’s elite Top Gun Fighter Weapons School at Naval Air Station Miramar in San Diego. At Top Gun, Maverick quickly clashes with another top pilot, Tom Iceman Kaczynski. He’s played by Val Kilmer, whose cool, by-the-book style is the opposite of Maverick’s instinct-driven flying.

01:47
Maverick also meets Charlie Blackwood, a civilian instructor played by Kelly McGillis, setting up a romance that complicates things when she critiques his flying in front of the class, even as she’s clearly impressed by his skills. Maverick’s daring maneuvers win him admirers, but his attitude creates friction with the other pilots, even with Goose, who worries that one risk too many could have serious consequences. That fear becomes reality during a training mission when Maverick presses too close in a mock dogfight, flies through Iceman’s jet wash, and his F-14 goes into a deadly flat spin. Maverick and Goose eject, but Goose is killed when he hits the canopy, leaving Maverick devastated and consumed with guilt even after an inquiry clears him of blame. Shaken, Maverick nearly quits flying altogether until his commanding officer, Mike Viper Metcalf, reveals more about Maverick’s father and encourages him to face his fear instead of running from it. In the movie’s finale, Maverick is called into a real combat situation over the ocean where he hesitates at first but then pulls himself together using everything he learned at Top Gun to help save Iceman’s jet in a tense dogfight.

02:58
After the mission, Maverick and Iceman finally earn each other’s respect and Maverick chooses to return to Top Gun as an instructor, hinting that he’s going to pass on what he’s learned to the next generation of pilots. Joining us to separate fact from fiction in the movie is Captain Michael Mack Mekatura, whose service flying F-16s as executive officer of the 10th Tactical Fighter Squadron in West Germany coincides with the timeline of the movie during the final years of the Cold War. Mack, later deployed during Operation Desert Storm, and has recently released a memoir telling the true story of it all called The Fightin’ 10th, Cold War to Desert Storm.

03:34
You can grab your own copy with the link in the show notes right now. And while you do that, let’s set up our game for today’s episode. Now, if you’re new to the show, since Based on a True Story is all about separating fact from fiction into movies, you’ll get to practice your skills at separating fact from fiction in this podcast episode with the game of Two Trues and a Lie.

03:52
So I’m about to give you three statements. Can you tell which one of those is a lie? Are you ready?

03:58
Okay, here they are. Number one, the competitions between pilots in the movie is pretty accurate to real pilots. Number two, buzzing the tower, one of Maverick’s signature stunts, absolutely happens in real life.

04:14
Number three, Top Gun’s inverted canopy-to-canopy scene actually did happen with an F-14 and MiG-28. Got them? Okay, now as you’re listening to our story today, see if you can figure out which one of those is a lie.

04:28
And if you’re watching the video version, you can see I’m holding up an envelope. This has the answer inside, and we’ll open it up at the end of the episode to see if you got it right. And now, it’s time to connect with Captain Michael Mack McAtura about the historical accuracy of Top Gun.

04:46
Top Gun Before we dig into some of the plot points throughout the movie, I always like to start with a ballpark idea of a movie’s portrayal of the history. And I’m particularly interested in this case because obviously Top Gun isn’t really trying to be based on a true story, but it is still covering some very real topics that we’ll talk about today. But if you were to take a step back and look at Top Gun from an overall perspective to give it a letter grade for its historical accuracy, what would it get?

Captain Michael Makatura
05:18
You’d get an A.

Dan LeFebvre
05:19
An A. Okay.

Captain Michael Makatura
05:20
Yeah, it would.

Dan LeFebvre
05:21
Wow, that’s really good. I mean, especially for a movie like this, it’s not really trying to tell an accurate story necessarily, but it is using a lot from history. So it sounds like they’ve done a lot of their research on making sure that at least the parts they’re trying to be accurate are accurate.

Captain Michael Makatura
05:38
Yeah, I think that they really did. You know, it’s an iconic movie. And for those folks that are in the fighter community, it’s embraced as a really good depiction of their lives. You know, there’s a couple of nits to pick, and I’m sure we’ll get to those here today. But, you know, when you look at the overall, yeah, it’s very accurate and really a good representation of what it’s like to be in a fighter squadron.

Dan LeFebvre
06:05
That’s really good. Well, let’s start at the top with the concept of Top Gun itself. The movie says that it’s how the Navy’s best pilots are trained. Does the U.S. Navy actually have a Top Gun training program?

Captain Michael Makatura
06:17
They do, and it’s located there in Miramar. I should probably let you know and let your listeners know. So the Top Gun the movie is about the Navy.

06:28
It’s the setting is in the Navy and they’re flying F-14s. My experience is in the Air Force with F-16s. And there are some, you know, the big difference between the 14 and the 16. The 14 has two people in the cockpit and two engines. The 16 has one person in the cockpit and a single engine.

06:46
So I want your listeners to know that, that I’m speaking from kind of a tangential place. But I think my experiences lend themselves well to having an accurate depiction of Top Gun.

Dan LeFebvre
07:01
For sure. So does the Air Force then have, I’m assuming at Top Gun, it’s not Air Force and Navy. It’s probably just Navy there. So the Air Force have their own program?

Captain Michael Makatura
07:11
They do. The Air Force refers to theirs as Fighter Weapons School. And it’s located at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, near Las Vegas.

Dan LeFebvre
07:20
Okay, okay. Not a movie about that one quite yet.

Captain Michael Makatura
07:25
Close.

Dan LeFebvre
07:26
Close. Well, at the start of the movie, we see Maverick in his F-14. He’s fighting against the MiG-28.

07:31
And the movie doesn’t really say what country the MiG-28 is from, but there’s a red star in the plane. It kind of makes me think it’s probably from the Soviet Union, especially since the movie came out in the 1980s during the Cold War. Maverick’s dogfight here seems to be kind of a unique encounter, though, because later Charlie tells Maverick that the whole reason that she wanted him at Top Gun was because of this fight that we see at the beginning of the movie against the MiG-28.

07:54
So I kind of have a two-part question here. Is the MiG-28 a real plane, and how unique would it be for a U.S. pilot in the 1980s to face off against them?

Captain Michael Makatura
08:04
Yeah, so the MiG-28 is not a real plane. The one that you’re seeing in the movie is really a MiG-29, Fulcrum. And in the late 80s, the MiG-29 Fulcrum and the Su-27 Flanker were the premier Soviet aircraft.

08:21
The Su-27 Flanker is most like an F-15, and then the MiG-29, I’m sorry, yeah, and the MiG-29 Fulcrum is most like an F-14. And so, but the aircraft, what they depict as a MiG-28 looks very, very real compared to a MiG-29, the real thing. And then how, you know, how realistic was it to come into contact with Soviet aircraft?

08:50
Well, it was pretty realistic. You know, the Soviet aircraft were propagated across the Warsaw Pact and Eastern Bloc countries, as well as other kind of communist regimes throughout the world. And so you would encounter MiG-29s in the real world.

09:12
And then, yeah. And so how often did you actually dogfight against them? Officially, not very often.

09:23
you know it’s a it’s a you have to be very careful when you are encountering especially at that time soviet forces because one wrong move or one oops or one accident could precipitate you know a really dire consequence and so for the most part that didn’t happen now you know in carrier operations in the Pacific near Vladivostok, I am quite sure, 100% sure that the U.S. Navy and the Soviet Air Force had an opportunity to, I’m trying to think of the line that Maverick used, further international relations or something like that. I think that’s it.

10:10
So, yeah. So seeing a MiG-29 in the wild certainly happened. And, you know, whether we flew inverted canopy to canopy with any of them, I’m not sure about.

Dan LeFebvre
10:22
Well, you know, the movie has to make it look good on screen, of course. Sure. And that was pretty cool.

10:28
Yeah. Well, that makes me wonder that, I mean, because we don’t really see a lot of this in the movie, which makes sense, you know, focusing more on the action side. But I could see how in the real world there would be, I would imagine, a lot of training about what to do in those scenarios.

10:43
Because you are representing your country, essentially, and you could kickstart a whole war. Wars have been started because of things like that. And so I would imagine that that’s a big part of that training at Top Gun or, you know, the weapons school for the Air Force or wherever.

Captain Michael Makatura
10:58
Yeah, it absolutely is. So let me address that in two ways. So one, just encountering Soviet forces. So when I was at Han, we had an opportunity to go over and visit the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, an army outfit that was stationed in the Fulda Gap.

11:18
So they came over to Han with a couple of Black Hawk helicopters and flew us over to the Fulda Gap. The Fulda Gap is a wide valley in Central Europe where it was projected if the Soviet Union attacked Western Europe, they would pour through the Fulda Gap. And so the 11th ACR was over there as a kind of a first noticed early warning that something like that was happening.

11:42
As a result, the 11th ACR was positioned on the west bank of the Elba River, and the East German and Soviet troops were on the east bank. And you could literally, where we sat down, we looked up and there was a Soviet guard tower with guys with machine guns standing up there. Rather poignantly, there were two civilians standing on a bridge on the other side of the river.

12:06
So as we stood about 100 yards from them, we thought, this is surreal because we are free and there are human beings 100 yards in that direction who are not. Anyway, back to your point, the 11th ACR would fly what was called Exciter missions. And so that’s when they would take their helicopters and fly them at high speed at the East German border.

12:30
And they were trying to excite the Soviet and the East German forces to see what they would do. and often the Russians would take off a helicopter and fly it toward the border and then they would stop at the border and stare at each other nose to nose and so there was you know a lot of training a lot of um yeah there was a lot of training a lot of discretion that went into if we find ourselves nose to nose with the Soviets what exactly should we do um the other thing that I will tell you and this is more from just kind of flying against dissimilar aircraft. So there is a fighter discipline called D-A-C-T, dissimilar air combat training. And that’s when, and we did a lot of that, right? And so in the case of the Fightin’ 10th and Han, you know, we would take off out of Germany and our F-16s, and we would encounter friendly, so US F-15s, we would encounter German and British aircraft of a dissimilar nature, so not F-16s. And it was really important to train and learn how to fight against those aircraft, because in fact, you could see something similar to them in a real world scenario. So there is a lot of DACT training, and there’s a lot of training on what to do if you come nose to nose with a Soviet bear.

Dan LeFebvre
14:00
As you were talking about your nose to nose in the movie, you know, it’s a canopy to canopy and fighter jets, but it sounds very like a similar type of situation with nose to nose with helicopters in real world that, I mean, yeah, wow, that is that is very true.

Captain Michael Makatura
14:15
Now. So one of the little nits to pick about the movie is the the inverted canopy to canopy thing is not going to happen because if you just think of the geometry of the airplane, there are vertical stabilizers or tails that would probably get in the way. However, what I can tell you is I’ve actually flown wingtip to wingtip with another F-16.

14:38
So we were on a training mission over Germany, and number one in our four-shift was a guy named K.C. Scow. And K.C. was a former Thunderbird.

14:50
And so when we were done with the training mission and we were flying back to Han, I was in the back seat of Ed Julio Hull’s jet. And so Julio and I were flying straight and level, and KC came up on our left wing. And so the wingtips were probably three feet away.

15:08
Now, of course, he’s a former Thunderbird and pretty proficient at that kind of flying, right? But it’s unbelievable to be flying in a supersonic jet, and you look over, and there’s KC over there. And I’ll never forget this because he kind of looked over at me with this shit-eating grin and went like this.

15:25
And I’m like, holy crap. And then if that wasn’t good enough, he went from our left wing tip. He did a big barrel roll and came back up on our right wing tip.

15:35
So flying three feet from another high-performance jet is realistic because I’ve done it.

Dan LeFebvre
15:44
I’m terrified going down the highway in my car like you get too close to another car, right? I can’t even imagine being in these jets like that. So close.

15:53
Wow. Wow. It was pretty neat.

15:57
If we go back to the movie, it does suggest that there’s some competition between the pilots, like we see between Iceman and Maverick. But, of course, when things matter, they do have each other’s back. But how well does the movie capture the essence of this competition between pilots?

16:14
Absolutely spot on.

Captain Michael Makatura
16:16
And part of understanding that, you know, a lot of it comes across as bravado. And it is some of that too. But I’ll tell you what really is underlying there.

16:29
Just to get into pilot training is a very competitive realm. And then when you’re in pilot training, you got to make it through pilot training and then qualify for a fighter. And then when you qualify for a fighter to be assigned to an operational fighter squadron, you’re talking about less than 1% of people who want to do that can actually make it.

16:55
And so by the time you’re in the seat of one of those cockpits, one, you are very talented. You are very good. You have been through a lot of sifting out and vetting, and you earned it, right?

17:15
And by the way, you know that you’re very good. And part of being very good is you’re very competitive. And so, you know, the people, a lot of the people that sit in those seats are former college, B1 college athletes, right?

17:31
Because a lot of those traits, hand-eye coordination and competitiveness and the ability to sacrifice your personal comfort to reach your goals, those things are parallel, right? In athletes and in fighter pilots. So, yeah.

17:47
So, there’s a lot of very, very talented and highly competitive people. And there absolutely is a very competitive nature that goes through peacetime training. A lot of that competitiveness also involves beer and bets.

18:05
So that is absolutely an accurate depiction. And then, of course, when you’re looking at Maverick and Iceman, it’s a friendly but rivaled competition. So there’s a whole lot of biting sarcasm that goes back and forth, and that exists too.

Dan LeFebvre
18:26
I would imagine there would also be underlying, and you kind of get that when it actually matters and they have each other’s bash, you kind of get that even though there is this competition and there’s this rivalry and egos in the movie and such, there is still a mutual respect for each other’s talent to be able to get there, to be in that 1%.

Captain Michael Makatura
18:46
No question about it. That’s a great, insightful comment. You’re exactly right.

Dan LeFebvre
18:51
Well, we are at the point in the movie where there’s a major emotional turn with Goose’s death. And in the movie, it happens when Maverick tries to convince Iceman to move away. He does. Maverick’s plane takes his place.

19:05
But there’s jet wash that causes Maverick’s plane to fall into a flat spin that ultimately forces Maverick and Goose to eject. When they do, Goose picks the cockpit and breaks his neck. Can you explain what happened here? What is jet wash and would that cause the tragedy that took Goose’s life in the movie?

Captain Michael Makatura
19:22
So, yes, it would. So, and I actually have a real world parallel story to relate to you. So jet wash, you know, it’s a it’s a supersonic jet. It’s a very powerful engine. It’s putting out thrusties out the back.

19:41
And, you know, if another jet flies through that, you’re interrupting the airflow and could very well put the jet into some sort of spin or yaw or something like that. So absolutely does and does happen. I will tell you that that very scenario happened at Han Air Base.

20:05
So we had a guy named Sonny, and he was flying with Rod, and they were in an air combat maneuver, and Sonny lost sight of Rod, and it basically flew into him. So the two planes kind of hit wingtips, and it put Sonny’s plane into a yaw, so that’s when the plane starts to do this. Sonny ejected, and when the canopy came up, because it was in a yaw, the physical forces that were involved there, one of the hinges on the canopy got stuck.

20:40
So this canopy did not fly off the jet. It kind of did one of those. Oh, no. And Sonny ejected up into the canopy and subsequently was killed.

20:49
So exactly the same thing that happened to Goose.

Dan LeFebvre
20:53
Wow. Wow. That’s one of those things that, I mean, you would hope that the movie is making that up, but wow.

Captain Michael Makatura
21:03
For your audience, it’s an inherently dangerous business. In the case of the F-16, a single pilot and a single engine, right? So there’s nobody to turn to if something goes wrong. It’s all you.

21:17
And if that engine goes out, you’re a really heavy lawn dart. And so, you know, in the case of the movie, you know, it’s just an inherently dangerous business of flying high performance fighter aircraft.

Dan LeFebvre
21:30
Well, I mean, my next question would make sense then, I think, but I’ll ask it anyway, that after Goose’s death, Maverick kind of freezes when it matters most. And he wants to quit flying altogether. And on one hand, the movie makes it makes perfect sense from the human side.

21:47
When your partner dies a tragic death, you’d want to disconnect. But on the other hand, there’s the military side of things where death is unfortunately part of the job. And based on your experience, how realistic would you say that Maverick’s reaction to Goose’s death is?

Captain Michael Makatura
22:02
I think that it is realistic, although I had a very different experience. But certainly that happens, right? There were five mishaps in the first 18 months that I was at Han.

22:15
And I will tell you what I experienced because it was kind of shocking. So again, the context is I had just graduated from college. I was a 23-year-old second lieutenant who finds himself in an F-16 squadron in Germany.

22:30
You know, holy cow. And in the first mishap that happened while I was there, I kind of expected to react like Maverick does in the movie. I expected that everybody would be rocked and they weren’t. And so what happened, what did happen though, is there was a 24 hour period of solemn respect.

22:59
People were quiet. There wasn’t the joking around or the jovialness that we normally had. We paid our respects and then we went back to work.

23:09
And, you know, I’m watching these guys and I’m like, wow, like, how does that happen? Right. And, and I ended up talking to one of the guys in the squadron, uh, call sign weird. And I asked him about that. And he said, look, we all recognize the risks and, you know, we all signed up for this. And so, um, we got jobs to do. And by the way, if we’re distracted tomorrow, it could be us tomorrow.

23:36
And so what I saw across five mishaps was this solemn recognition that a buddy was gone and the respect. We paid him that respect, but part of paying him that respect was getting back to work the next day and making sure that that didn’t happen again.

Dan LeFebvre
23:55
That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I mean, like you’re saying, it is very dangerous, and you have to be on the top of your game every moment, so you can’t let that affect you. Wow. Wow.

24:09
Well, I mentioned her briefly before, but in the movie, Charlie Blackwood is Maverick’s love interest. She’s also his civilian instructor. They acknowledge that their relationship is going to be complicated in the movie, but then it’s clear that there is this romantic tension between the two.

24:25
What would really happen in this sort of a scenario between a civilian instructor and their military student?

Captain Michael Makatura
24:32
That. That was realistic. Really?

24:35
Sure. Absolutely. I mean, you know, you’re talking about, in fighter pilot jargon, it’s R-B-A-A-Bravo, which stands for red-blooded All-American Boy.

24:45
So you’re talking about red-blooded All-American boys that are very confident and lots of testosterone flowing through the veins. And beautiful women seem to be all around. And absolutely, absolutely realistic scenario.

Dan LeFebvre
25:01
Okay, okay. I mean, hey, that makes sense. Especially if you’re talking about being in that confidence, that confident element of just to get there.

25:12
Yeah, okay. That makes sense. Well, at the climax of the movie, it shifts from the Top Gun training program to a real-world rescue mission in the Indian Ocean.

25:23
And I’d love to ask you about this because maybe it’s just me, but as I was watching this part of the movie to prep for our chat today, I couldn’t help but think, are there not Navy pilots already ready to go for this important mission? But then on the other hand, I could see how Top Gun pilots have to move on to the real world at some point. So can you help us understand what the reality is for pilots moving on from training to real world missions?

Captain Michael Makatura
25:46
Yeah, you bet. I mean, you know, first of all, the Top Gun, the reason that Top Gun and Fighter Weapons School and the part of the Air Force, the reason those exist is to create weapons system experts that will take that expertise back into the operational squadrons. And so the folks that graduate from Top Gun and Fighter Weapons School are then placed into the squadrons all around the world so that they can teach younger pilots how to employ the weapons system and how to employ it against enemy tactics.

26:21
Right. And so very, very, I mean, that’s the whole purpose of those programs is to put those people on operational units. If the question is around, you know, kind of is it odd for the guys to go from the weapons school right out to an operational mission?

26:41
Yes, but no. And so there’s a lot of things that go into which units get assigned to do a specific mission. You know, I was listening the other day to some Navy SEALs on a podcast talking about, you know, the Bin Laden raid and the Dr. Phillips mission. And, you know, was it DevGrew or was it SEAL teams or was it this or was it that? Right.

27:07
And, you know, you hear the same thing through their conversations that there’s a lot that goes into those decisions. You know, when the 10th got deployed to go to the Gulf for Desert Storm, you know, there were two squadrons from Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina and the 10th from Hahn Air Base in Germany. and they met over there and they formed the 363rd Tactical Fighter Wing Provisional in Aldafra, UAE.

27:39
Well, how’d that happen? Like, why would you take two squadrons from Shaw and one squadron from Han, right? And the reason that that happened was that they flew with the same engines, which means they could deploy there and all of the maintenance troops and all the logistical supply lines could be, everybody knew what was going on because we all had the same Block 25 engines. And so, yeah, so there’s all kinds of reasons. I’ll give you another reason, and this one makes no sense at all, but welcome to the military. So, you know, one of the reasons that you have 32 pilots in a fighter squadron is to build unit cohesiveness, Right. And and you fly in in kind of flights. And then and so, you know, what your flight lead is going to do and he knows what you’re going to do.

28:28
So that that cohesiveness and familiarity is really important when you’re flying three feet from each other. Right. Well, shortly before the 10th deployed to UAE, the Air Force Military Personnel Center came out with a policy that said anybody who’s got a rotation date within six months can’t go.

28:49
And so they instantly plucked about 13 people out of the 10th and they grabbed 13 people from the 496th and the 313th and put them in the 10th. Well, so much for unit cohesiveness, right? So we knew those guys, but we hadn’t really flown with them a lot.

29:06
And so, again, you know, they deploy the 10th because of familiarity with the engines, but then they remove part of the familiarity with each other. You know, welcome to the military.

Dan LeFebvre
29:18
So with, I wouldn’t have even thought about with the engines, but that makes sense from the supply line point of view. So as a pilot, then are you kind of tied to like an F-16 or in Maverick’s case, you know, the F-14? Are you always going to be flying the same plane or do you have to learn other ones so that maybe they’ll take the pilots here? But for logistical reasons, it’s going to be a different plane that you’re having to fly.

Captain Michael Makatura
29:42
Yeah, I don’t see that happening very often. So, you know, the plane that you’re assigned to right now, you’re current in, you’re qualified to fly. They’re not going to take an F-15 or an F-16 pilot and put them in an F-15 operationally.

29:56
Now, over time that happens, right? So the F-16 back in my day was still a relatively new aircraft. And many of the guys that were flying it had transitioned from F-4s or A-10s. So there is a good bit of kind of cross-training to other aircraft during the course of your career.

30:15
but you know in the case of Top Gun nobody is going to take an F-18 pilot and put him in an

Dan LeFebvre
30:21
F-14 and let him go fly a real mission that wouldn’t happen well maybe we’ll have to have you come back and talk about the sequel Top Gun Maverick because I’m pretty sure that the kind

Captain Michael Makatura
30:30
of thing happens there it did as a matter of fact that’s exactly what happened yeah well as the

Dan LeFebvre
30:36
original Top Gun as that movie comes to an end even though Iceman and Maverick used to be rivals they find a mutual respect when Iceman is overwhelmed by enemy fighters and Maverick comes in to help fight them off were there any experiences where you saw these rivals turned into friends like we see happening in the movie all the time all the time I mean the

Captain Michael Makatura
30:56
rivalries were friendly and they were the natural byproduct of very talented high-performing overachieving people in competition with each other, whether that’s for Top Gun or the girl. So yeah, absolutely, those things happen. But the reality is, we are all serving the United States of America. And we are all called to service in defense of our nation. And we all have the same flag patch on our shoulder. And so, you know, those rivalries turn into kind of petty, petty things compared to the bonds that are formed when you are sharing sacrifice and you’re sharing

Dan LeFebvre
31:40
an ordeal. Which makes a lot of sense. I mean, as you’re talking to about, you know, being young guys that you’re going to have, especially if you have that background of being, you know, knowing that you’re the best, you’re going to have some of that butting head, but there’s also the professionalism that comes in when, when it matters. So that makes a lot of sense.

31:59
Absolutely. Throughout the movie, we tend to forgive Maverick as the main character. He’s bending the rules because he’s the hero of the story, and things tend to go his way most of the time.

32:11
Again, he’s the hero of the story, but we bring it back to reality. If a pilot were to act the way that he did in the movie, would they be given the same chances that Maverick was in the movie?

Captain Michael Makatura
32:21
Yes, and it is kind of situational, so sometimes yes, sometimes no, but yes. And the depiction of Maverick is 100% spot on. So there’s a lot of bending the rules.

32:42
There’s a lot, you know, one of the sayings we had is the minimum, if the minimum weren’t the minimum, it wouldn’t be the minimum. And so, you know, let’s say there was a rule of engagement today that you can’t fly below a thousand feet. Was somebody flying at 999 and a half feet?

32:58
Absolutely. No question about it. And so, yeah, there’s an awful lot of bending the rules and flying at the edge of the envelope.

33:12
And there are times when the rules are broken. And there are times when disciplinary action has to be taken. But yes, what you saw in the movie is absolutely realistic.

33:27
The behaviors and the reactions to those behaviors.

Dan LeFebvre
33:31
Which, as you’re saying that, makes a lot of sense tied to what you were talking about before, especially with the helicopters right next to each other or those excitement flights and that sort of thing, where if you’re not 100% sure how the other person’s going through, I’ll liken it to driving a car because that’s what I’m familiar with. driving a car, you’re not 100% sure what the other person is going to do. And there are laws for driving and there are the rules of the road and that element. But sometimes you got to do what you got to do to make it to survive when somebody else comes swerving into your lane or something like that, right?

Captain Michael Makatura
34:06
Yeah, that’s true. And there’s also a pretty healthy element of kind of good-natured disobedience. So there’s oftentimes when, you know, like do real fighter jets buzz the tower?

34:26
They absolutely do. Yes. When that happens, are you in front of the deputy commander of operations standing at attention while he chews your ass?

34:38
Yes, you are. Are you flying next week? Probably. Right. And so those things are absolutely very realistic. And they normally result in a really interesting call sign that’s given to you around a keg of beer.

Dan LeFebvre
34:57
Right as the guy gets a fresh cup of coffee, of course, it absolutely happens. Well, thank you so much for coming on to help us learn more about the true story behind Top Gun. And I want to shift gears away from the movie into the real world, because even though Maverick is a fictional character, there are real world heroes who have served our country.

35:14
You are one of them. So let me take this chance to say thank you for your service. You’re very fine. Thank you.

35:20
Encourage everyone to pick up a copy of your book called The Fighting Tenth, Cold War to Desert Storm. And rather than my talking about the book, can you give my audience an overview of what your book is about?

Captain Michael Makatura
35:31
Yeah, I’d love to. And let me just set the record straight on something. So during, if you’ve seen Band of Brothers, another great military movie, Major Dick Winters is being interviewed.

35:44
And he relates a story where his grandson says, Grandpa, were you a hero? And Dick Winters’ response was, no, but I served in a company of them. I’m the same way, Dan. I’m not a hero.

35:59
But I served with an awful lot of ordinary Americans who did extraordinary things when duty called. And I’m very honored to have done that. So on to the book.

36:12
And maybe if you don’t mind, I’ll kind of tell you how I decided to write the book. We still get together every two or three years for reunions. And we were getting together for a reunion in 2024.

36:24
And we were preparing for the reunion. And in the course of that preparation, I was just doing a bunch of research on the things that we were involved in back from 1985 to 1991. And it frankly took my breath away then because what I was seeing was Chernobyl and the Lockerbie bombing and the raid on Libya and Reagan, Gorbachev, Thatcher and Glasnost and Perestroika and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany.

36:55
And then, of course, you know, Desert Storm. And it took my breath away. I didn’t realize that we had been, and I don’t mean we were there, we were involved in a lot of those things.

37:08
And I said, you know, I don’t think we realized it fully when you’re immersed in it. But now, with the benefit of hindsight, you look at those things and you’re like, holy cow, we were really a part of some big geopolitical historical events. And I said, I got to tell this story, right?

37:25
I got to let people know about this. And so that’s what the book sets out to do. The book is in two parts.

37:33
So the first part of the book could probably be subtitled Life in an American Fighter Squadron. And so it relates what it’s like to be part of an F-16 squadron in Central Europe. And that means it relates a lot of the flying operations and the stuff that we were involved in operationally, but it also relates a whole lot of the fun that we had when we weren’t flying.

37:59
And it gives folks a really good understanding of what it’s like to be inside of one of those Top Gun squadrons. The second part of the book then pivots to Desert Storm. And so the second part of the book, 90% of that, well, the second part is the war journal of Colonel Ed Julio Hull, who was the commander of the 10th Tactical Fighter Squadron during Desert Storm.

38:26
And so Julio was kind enough to let me use his war journal to depict almost a day-by-day, mission-by-mission chronology of what happened as the 10th deployed to war. There’s another important part in there, and that was towards the end of the war, Colonel Billy Andrews, he was a captain at the time, he ended up retiring as a colonel, BA was shot down. And so I asked his family for permission to use his war journal to tell the story of him being shot down and captured and becoming a prisoner of war and ultimately being released back to us.

39:04
So the back half of the book is mostly Julio and B.A. telling the first-person accounts of what happened during Desert Storm. My only involvement is kind of tying the dots together to make it a cogent story. That’s pretty much what the book is about.

Dan LeFebvre
39:21
Wow. Wow. I’m curious. I mean, there’s the, the enemy that you can be, you can train about, you know, the enemy that you can see. But when you mentioned Chernobyl, that part is like, you can’t see the radiation and you don’t even, you know, knowing the story of Chernobyl, I’ve researched it for, you know, covering the Chernobyl miniseries. Like a lot of, a lot of allies didn’t even know that it happened.

39:51
for a long time because so you was trying to cover it up so looking back on that was there like i guess how did you how did you how did you uh navigate all of that in in the moment like did you when you find out about it and was that something that was i imagine it had been terrifying once you found out the full scope of what had happened well so i can only tell you secondhand

Captain Michael Makatura
40:14
because i got to to haunt in 88 and chernobyl was 86 um but what i can tell you you know it happened near Kiev, which is about 300 miles east of Han. And so when it happened, the people, both the military folks and the civilian folks in central Europe, they had dosimeters with them in their houses monitoring the radiation levels. When I got out over there in 88, that was kind of behind us, but even to this day, I can’t give blood because of the potential exposure to the residual fallout from the event. So it was certainly, you know, I have talked to buddies of mine who were there when it happened. Yeah, it was a serious thing, you know, and everybody was worried about, especially their kids and future kids and, you know, what that was going to do and what kind of effect that was going to have on them. So yeah, you’re right. It’s an insidious enemy when you can’t see it. Well, thank you again so much for your time. Dan, thank you. I really appreciate it.

41:17
As you can tell, I’m pretty energized about telling the story. You know, the 10th was a small part of a much larger U.S. military presence that won the Cold War, right?

41:30
And so what does that really mean in today’s terms? You know, there’s 250 million Europeans that are free today because 45 years of American servicemen stood in the gap for them. And I’m proud that I got a chance to be one of them.

Dan LeFebvre
41:46
Once again, the title is The Fightin’ Tent, Cold War to Desert Storm, and you can get your own copy using the link in the show notes. Thanks again so much for your time.

Captain Michael Makatura
41:55
Thanks again, Dan.

Dan LeFebvre
42:05
This episode of Based on a True Story was produced by me, Dan LeFevre. Hop into the show notes to pick up your own copy of Mac’s memoir called The Fightin’ Tent, Cold War to Desert Storm. to learn more about what it was really like for U.S. military pilots during the Cold War.

42:20
As always, you can also find a link to that at the show’s home on the web for this episode over at basedonatruestorypodcast.com slash 390. While you get your copy of Mac’s memoir, let’s find out the answer to our two truths and a lie game from the beginning of the episode. And as a quick refresher, here are the two truths and one lie again.

42:39
Number one, the competitions between pilots in the movie is pretty accurate to real pilots. Number two, buzzing the tower, one of Maverick’s signature stunts, absolutely happens in real life. Number three, top guns inverted canopy to canopy scene actually did happen with an F-14 and MiG-28.

43:00
Did you figure out which one is a lie? Got the answer in the envelope, so let’s open that up. And the lie is…

43:10
Number three. Did you get it right? As Mac pointed out, the practical aspects of having the canopies of planes so close doesn’t really work when you factor in that they have tails that would hit the other plane.

43:22
But he did point out that close encounters did happen, like the story that he told of the helicopters going nose to nose. As always, thank you for your continued support listening to and sharing this episode of Based on a True Story. If you know someone who loves Top Gun, share this episode with them and let me know what you think.

43:39
If you are watching the video version of this, stick around for the credits. If you can find out my cat’s name and email it to me, I’ll send you a sticker. Thanks again for watching, and I hope to hear from you soon.