Chain of Command

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I didn't intend to kill the first one. Not really.

It was fifteen years ago, almost to the day. The Soviet MiG had a hard-on for me and my ass was nailed into the cockpit of an F-14A Tomcat by a four-point ejection harness. The conclusion was intuitively obvious. One of us was going to make an uncontrolled descent to the ground and impact at an angle completely outside of our aircraft's performance envelope.

The second that I heard the ESM warble telling me the MiG had me illuminated, I knew it wasn't going to be me.

U.S. Navy fighter-pilot training is as realistic as it can get. By the time I met my first real live MiG, I had two peacetime cruises under my belt, as well as Top Gun training. But ten weeks playing laser tag with adversary aircraft isn't the real thing. It isn't until you get cockpit-to-cockpit with someone who wants to kill you that you know what you're made of. Then the training kicks in, the reflexes they build into you. In my case, I killed the MiG before I ever really thought about it.

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