On the wall of the ready room for the VFA-25, a strike fighter squadron known in the Navy as the “Fist of the Fleet,” there hangs a poster of Maverick, Tom Cruise's character in Top Gun.

The poster was one of the first things I noticed when I walked in, a seemingly too-obvious riff. I asked the squadron's executive officer, Winston “Stoner” Scott, if the pilots considered Maverick some sort of patron saint. He laughed. Actually, he explained, it was somewhat of an embarrassment for some of the pilots to have the Top Gun poster hanging in their ready room. It invoked ridicule from other squadrons onboard. He acknowledged that most of the pilots on board knew the film well before joining the Navy. Perhaps a few had even been inspired by it. The movie was ultimately a Hollywood fiction, Scott explained, and it didn’t represent the real life pilots experience at sea. But they all had a soft spot for it. Perhaps they were even taken by the romanticism of a clean-cut pilot and his noble American mission. The VFA-25 pilots had even fixed up the poster, pasting their squadron’s insignia on Maverick’s flight suit, like he was a squadron mate.



The USS Harry S. Truman and all of its sailors are at war. Currently, they are fighting ISIS on the behest of our country. It was easy for me to forget this while getting lost in the guts of the ship, with thousands of young military personnel scurrying around me on mundane missions far from daylight. For the few breathtaking minutes that I spent on the flight deck, I was seduced by the sheer power of American naval aviation. It lives up to the melodramatic '80s soundtrack. I could imagine that I was fulfilling my dream, as I stood next to a jet fighter being launched off the carrier's deck. But all it took was a moment of reflection and a glimpse of the bombs and missiles, and the faces of the pilots, to recognize that real human lives are at stake when the carrier is at war. And to reconcile how all that I saw here, these mundane and dramatic scenes at sea, my fond childhood memories of the movie Top Gun -- they all exist solely because of war.