This is a sweeping view of Target B-17, which is used by the TOPGUN fighter pilot school at Naval Air Station Fallon in Nevada’s Forty Mile Desert. Click the icon in the lower righthand corner of the player to expand the video.
Top Gun: Maverick, the greatest fighter pilots in the world, and a remote mine near Fallon: This is the story of Helen Hall, my favorite legend.
“Maverick to Range Control, entering Point Alpha. Confirm green range.”
During one of the most pivotal scenes in the blockbuster movie Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise’s Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, an instructor at the legendary U.S. Navy TOPGUN fighter pilot program, commandeers an F/A-18 Hornet fighter jet and flies low across the Nevada desert.
His mission is borne of desperation. Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazansky, played by an ailing Val Kilmer, has just died. The influential officer served as the reckless Maverick’s guardian angel, bailing him out of one fiasco after another so the aging captain could keep his wings. Following the funeral, Jon Hamm’s Vice Admiral Beau “Cyclone” Simpson, air boss of TOPGUN, grounds him permanently.
With his flying privileges gone and his young students staring down a seemingly impossible mission, Cruise’s character does what he does best: Maverick goes full rebel.
“Uh, Maverick, Range Control,” an incredulous off-screen air traffic controller responds. “Green range is confirmed, but I don’t see an event scheduled for you, sir.”
“Well, I’m going anyway.”
A little over two sand-scorching, airframe-bending minutes later, Maverick’s brazen gamble pays off: He proves to Vice Admiral Simpson that the mission can be flown successfully his way and earns back his instructor position.
The scene cuts. Cruise, actually in the backseat of the fighter jet, and his pilot, a Navy aviator, begin their return course to Naval Air Station (NAS) Fallon in Nevada’s Forty Mile Desert. A short distance to the east at Target B-17 in the Fairview Valley, the boom from the jet’s supersonic engines echoes off land handed down to me by a real-life rebel.
Her name was Helen Hall, my grandmother.
“Fightertown U.S.A.”
Made famous by the original Top Gun movie in 1986, the Navy’s Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor Course (TOPGUN) was founded in 1969 to stem aircraft and personnel losses in Vietnam. NAS Miramar, located to the north of San Diego, CA, housed the TOPGUN program until 1996, when it was relocated to the remote desert city of Fallon, NV.
Prior to becoming the new “Fightertown U.S.A.,” the seat of Churchill County was perhaps best known as a stop along U.S. Route 50, dubbed “The Loneliest Road in America” for its hundreds of miles of near-total desolation. Today, just like before the arrival of TOPGUN, local farmers carve out a living growing crops like alfalfa, and ranchers herd cattle. The difference now is the world’s best military pilots crisscross the sky, staying sharp for combat.
The aviators who train at NAS Fallon’s Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center are all business. Pilot call signs are formal, a far cry from Hollywood-derived monikers like “Payback” and “Fanboy” that were featured in Top Gun: Maverick. It’s also against the rules to quote famous lines from the original Top Gun; doing so costs the offender a cash fine.
The cold professionalism of the culture is for good reason – the men and women in TOPGUN deal directly in death. If they don’t perform well enough in the box in real-world situations, there’s no movie script to save them.
TOPGUN aviators aren’t the only elite military operatives who train at NAS Fallon; the Navy SEALs, the most renowned Special Forces unit on the planet, conduct certification courses at the station’s desert ranges. Between the two groups, it’s no stretch to say the most skilled warriors in air, on land, and at sea can be found in Churchill County.
Brave and bold, the Navy’s best of the best have long done their part in keeping America great. They share similar qualities with several extraordinary women in my family.
Setting the Standard
While I never flew fighter jets or fought alongside special operations personnel, your humble blogger did a four-year tour with the U.S. Air Force from 2010-14. I was an enlisted airman assigned to the 1st Airborne Command Control Squadron as an aircraft maintainer. When it was all said and done, I flew over 250 hours on the E4-B airframe as part of the squadron’s flying crew chief program.
America’s servicemen and servicewomen are among our country’s most celebrated and for good reason. We are, after all, the most powerful nation in human history largely because of our military might. In a global era of rising authoritarianism, the men and women wearing the uniform are as important today as they ever have been.
But what of the origin of America’s strength: Does it derive from organizations like the military or are they byproducts of the exemplary traits of the citizenry, many of whom, to borrow a line from late Florida rocker Tom Petty, are running down a dream within our grand experiment of personal liberty? Looking back over my life, I firmly believe it’s the latter.
In my case, it was a special group of female family members that influenced my life’s direction, one that led to the Air Force and beyond. Their accomplishments are my own legends, and they are testament to democracy’s promise.
Two of my aunts were state championship-winning basketball coaches. They are also members of the LGBTQI+ community, an incredibly difficult reality to endure in my former Deep South hometown in Alabama. One of my cousins, also a lesbian, went on to play point guard on the University of Alabama women’s basketball team. Rising above a system that’s all-to-often hampered by misogyny and discrimination, she is now a C-Suite executive at one of the largest banks in the country. Another of my relatives, one of my great aunts, was the first female mayor of my old hometown.
I have a tremendous appreciation for the example each of these women gave me. Courageous like the men and women in our nation’s military, their actions helped me set my own standard of excellence as a youngster, eventually carrying me through my Air Force enlistment.
Along with the women mentioned above, my paternal grandmother also impacted my life in a profound way. I never met her, but the stories I was told growing up described a woman who possessed the archetypical American spirit – the soul of an adventurer and the heart of a maverick.
Returning to NAS Fallon, this is the legacy of Helen Hall.
Talk to Me, Grandma
The American postwar period was dominated by structure. After the human dominion had been ravaged by two global conflicts and a crippling economic depression, the U.S. placed outsized significance on stability. Traditional family values were viewed as the bedrock for a better future, and society expected women to stay within specific supporting roles, namely childrearing and tending house.
My Grandma never signed up for any of that.
Much like Cruise’s Maverick in Top Gun, she was headstrong and played by her own rules: To say she had a healthy internal locus of control would be the understatement of her era. Drawn to remote locations, she raised her children as a single mother in desolate spots out west, including the Texas Panhandle and Central Utah.
She was also a landowner, buying property like the mine that currently resides within NAS Fallon’s Target B-17 in the Fairview Valley. She never developed the land, but that’s not the point. Where it’s located and the fact that she owned it at all reveals the true value of her legacy, one that’s interconnected with some of the most celebrated chapters in American lore.
The Forty Mile Desert was the most harrowing section of the California Emigrant Trail during the mid-1800s. Crossing in the searing heat, hundreds of souls perished along with their livestock in the parched landscape as they desperately tried to make the Sierra Nevada Mountains before autumn snowstorms made them impassable.
“From one extremity of this desert to the other, the road was white with the bones of oxen and horses,” late American author Mark Twain, who crossed the desert via stagecoach in 1861, wrote in Roughing It. “It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that we could have walked the forty miles and set our feet on a bone at every step!”
The survivors helped settle the state of California, which is now the largest sub-national economy in the world. How many folks back east told the pioneers they were crazy for trying, it was too far, not worth the risk? Like Cruise’s Captain Pete Mitchell said in the crucial scene from Maverick or my Grandma when she set her own heading westbound, their response was surely a simple one.
“Well, I’m going anyway.”
It’s the same paraphrasing that was likely used by the brave and bold men and women comprising the Navy’s TOPGUN program and SEALs when they first decided to test their own personal limits. The message is only three words and a contraction, but it comes with an underlying warning: Doubt me at your own risk, and, in the meantime, get the hell out of my way.
My Grandma’s property on NAS Fallon is a summation of that sentiment, the most emblematic representation of the unconquerable American spirit. Her legacy is right where it belongs – part of a continuing lineage of some of the most independent individuals in our nation’s history. That is the kind of memory you should want to leave behind.
When I venture into remote locations across America and abroad, I can feel her presence within me. We are, after all, a culmination of the thousands of generations that preceded us.
Talk to me, Grandma.
Related Content
– Click to view my high-resolution photo collection from Nevada’s Forty Mile Desert.
– Click to read my short story “Standing on Sacred Ground” about my visit to Nevada’s Valley of Fire on the National Day of Mourning.
– Click to browse my high-definition video collections from America and abroad.