Man, where do I begin with this song and these boys? I guess I could start when my neighbor and I went to see Top Gun in the theaters, I was around nine years old and my neighbor who was an FBI agent told me that if I wanted to be a pilot in the Navy I needed to study as they didn't let morons fly their jets. At the time I said to him in my mind "Dude I am going to play pro hockey, I don't care about that crap". And I would go onto to try to fulfill that dream.
For some reason along the line I thought about joining the Navy and flying. I did that, went to flight school in Pensacola where so many amazing men had treaded. I met a great bunch of boys, hell, some of the best men I have ever met in my life. We would study hard, fly our asses off and drink to get rid of the stress every night at the Florabama right on that line and stumble back to my house on the beach for the early morning brief, which I would stumble through and fake my way through flights I was barely prepared for everyday.
After flight school I received orders to San Diego. I went out there before my peers, went to SERE school only to make it out in time for my best friend's arrival to town. He drove straight from Pensacola to the bar in San Dog where we met and started skulling Sapphire and Tonics. Standing around the bar these two chicks came up and started talking to us, we told them what we did for a living and they asked us to sing "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" to them. For some reason we did and casted aside whatever apprehensions we had to eventually spend a blissful weekend at the Hotel Del Coronado drinking and rolling around in the sand.
The funny thing is in our world everyone wrote off "Top Gun" as the cheesiest of cheez, while outside of the fact that it was in no way true to form, I love that movie. I love when he goes to see Charlie at her small cottage in Mission Beach, the ending of which the picture above takes place at Kansas City BBQ which has now burned down. I remember going there one day, and having to go there with my leather jacket on and aviator glasses, how my life had turned into a fantastic movie and how I reveled in it while the sun was streaking in through cloudy windows.
And it was amazing, flying jets in San Diego, running wild, playing golf weekly, surfing the La Jolla reefs in my spare time between studying and flying.
I think and hope that atmosphere still exists. I hope there are still mechanized cowboys running low levels through the desert, getting wasted at the I Bar with sunglasses on. I hope there are still guys running around like Socks and Toby that are keeping the tradition alive. I hope there are guys shooting the TACAN to 27 in the May Grey to the numbers and following it up at the bar before they serenade some lass at a Gas Lamp bar in the sweet SoCal air. And that when they come home they throw on this song because it is one of the most beautiful and inspiring songs in existence.
Man they were some good days, roaming around in a flight suit, flying and having a grand old time while B+9 and Letteri told salty old sea stories at at the debriefing table. We were kings of the world living our lives in a romantic haze a few hundred feet off of the Pacific. I wish those boys were around me at this time, I wish Doo Doo and I could head downtown and drink till black out until we had to find Cooper wandering through the streets of downtown San Diego. I wish we had Patches to make fun of and watch him drive down into oncoming traffic on the five while we were laughing and pissing ourselves. How Slackey would come out and we'd get a steak at G5 under the portrait of Duke Cunningham and Wille "Irish" Driscol, the last aces from Vietnam.
The Navy has tried to take to romance out of being a carrier aviator, they moved TOPGUN up to Nevada, gave up the base in Miramar and shut down fixed wing aviation out of North Island. Those motherfuckers will never know what they gave away and how amazing it made us feel to be a part of a fraternity of which so many wanted to be a part of, now it is just a bunch of XBox douche bags who fly by the numbers and go home to study NATOPS.
But they were heady days back then and we ran it full out without consequences, for me I did the nightly portion of my life while listening to this song with a gin and tonic in hand, eating mystic rolls at Bistro D'Asia until I staggered home to a home on the beach with the Pacific wafting in through open windows next to a raven Southern California Native. It was everything we ever thought it would be and more and whenever we get on the horn and bullshit, those days always come up as I assume they always will until we are sitting around in diapers with our teeth flapping in the breeze needing the same DLC we utilized on the ball, but our attitudes will never change and we will always be running the ragged edge of control until they sprinkle our ashes over that Point Loma hill under seven Marines taking aim towards the sky.
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