I am doing something I rarely, if ever, have done: I am going to rerun a previous column verbatim. Hans Trupp, of St. Simons, died last week. I wrote the following about him two years ago and ask your forbearance in allowing me to present it to you again. Hans Trupp was and always will be an American hero—a true patriot. RIP, my friend.
I may be one of the few people on the planet who has not seen “Top Gun: Maverick.” As of this writing, the film, starring Tom Cruise and a sequel to the 1986 hit, “Top Gun,” has grossed over $1 billion at the box office and shows no signs of landing anytime soon.
Someone who has seen the movie is a former Top Gun, Hans Trupp, a long-time friend and real estate executive on St. Simons Island. I called him and asked what it felt like to sit watching Maverick Mitchell (Cruise) and his team in action in a theater.
“I can’t believe I did that,” he laughs after watching all the action on the screen. But he did. Trupp generally gives the movie good marks for its depiction of carrier life but sees many things that would not have happened in the real world of Navy aviation. “Aboard a carrier, it is all about discipline,” he says. After all, planes are launched every 30 seconds and recovered every 45 seconds.
Trupp concedes that the egos in the movie are real. “We were a very competitive bunch and thought we were all hotshots,” he chuckles. “But we did have fun.”
As a pilot of an F4B Phantom, Trupp flew over 200 combat missions over North Vietnam from two different aircraft carriers: the USS Ranger and the USS Constellation. For his service, he was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross, 12 Air medals, two Navy commendation medals, and two Navy achievement medals with Combat V and the South Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. He earned them all.
Trupp got his Distinguished Flying Cross for shooting down an enemy plane in Haiphong Harbor attacking a PT boat trying to smuggle spies into North Vietnam – and he did it at night.
On another occasion, he was flying wing for another F4B when an enemy surface-to-air missile hit the other fighter jet just 100 yards from Trupp, who watched it go down and never saw the parachute.
“It was obvious they didn’t make it,” he says.
Trupp was also flying over North Vietnam when John McCain was shot down. “I heard his Mayday call,” he said.
“But at the time, I didn’t know it was McCain.” It caused quite a stir since McCain was the son and grandson of Navy admirals.
Trupp says that avoiding surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) was an occupational hazard.
“When they locked on you, you quickly went into a ‘Split-S’ maneuver. You invert the aircraft and pull the nose down,” he explains. “And then pull up headed in the opposite direction at a lower altitude.” The missiles couldn’t handle those twists and turns.
Having survived the war and the real estate business, Trupp was to discover that much of it had been in vain. Twenty years later, he discovered that John L. Piotrowski, a retired four-star general in the United States Air Force, had published a book, “Basic Airman to General: The Secret War & Other Conflicts.”
In the book, Piotrowski cites a television interview in which former Secretary of State Dean Rusk confessed the U.S. government was tipping off the North Vietnamese about its intended bombing targets a day in advance.
“We didn’t want to harm the North Vietnamese people, so we passed the targets to the Swiss embassy in Washington with instructions to pass them to the (North Vietnamese) government through their embassy in Hanoi,” Rusk said.
Rusk said the U.S. wanted to show North Vietnam that we “could strike targets at will, but we didn’t want to kill innocent people.”
After a month-long search, an incredulous Trupp tracked down the retired general and discovered it was true. He and his fellow fighter pilots were risking their lives fighting an enemy who had been forewarned and prepared and were shooting down American aircraft, capturing and torturing survivors.
Trupp says it was an unforgivable betrayal by the very country they were serving. That is putting it mildly.
Today, Trupp worries about our country's future. He believes we are weaker militarily and that China, more than Russia, represents our biggest threat. Of even more concern is a generation that seems less patriotic and less appreciative of the freedoms they have been given and the sacrifices made for them.
This isn’t what he and his fellow aviators fought for. But I am proud they did. We all should be. Theirs was not a Top Gun movie. It was the real thing.
You can reach Dick Yarbrough atdick@dickyarbrough com; at P.O. Box 725373, Atlanta, Georgia 31139.