How a Navy Tomcat Shot Down an Air Force Phantom During a Training Exercise

Buy PUNK’S WAR, Ward’s debut novel about life in a Tomcat squadron at sea, at Support Ward’s YouTube channel by becoming a Patron at Get official Ward Carroll channel flight gear at In the fall of 1987 a new Tomcat pilot assigned to VF-74 aboard the USS Saratoga shot down a USAF RF-4 while participating in Display Determination, a NATO exercise that was being conducted in the Mediterranean Sea off of the west coast of Italy. The missteps the pilot took along the way remain as implausible and shocking today as they were more than a quarter century ago. And the story’s epilogue is also pretty amazing with how the Tomcat pilot reinvented himself within the Navy only to have his past haunt him 25 years later.