Combat Story (Ep 15): Dan "Two Dogs" Hampton - F-16 Fighter Pilot | DFC x 4 | Author

and they wanted me to go down through the clouds and do a recce run of these tanks and i'm thinking this is exactly the sort of thing i teach people never to do and so i am just screaming i am right below the mock you know maybe 550 miles an hour over this lake and i hit the road picture a black background and then all of a sudden multi-colored explosions everywhere okay it was every piece of aaa and every shoulder launch sam and everything else what i had found was one of the divisions of the republican guard they opened up with everything that they could and i thought i'm a dead man welcome to combat story i'm ryan fugit and i serve war zone tours as an army attack helicopter pilot and cia officer over a 15-year career i'm fascinated by the experiences of the elite in combat on this show i interview some of the best to understand what combat felt like on their front lines this is combat story today we hear the combat story of lieutenant colonel retired dan two dogs hampton a career f-16 fighter pilot who flew 151 combat missions from the first gulf war to kosovo to operation iraqi freedom over a 20-year career he's a fighter pilot to the corps who earned four dfcs and eight air medals with valor he's a graduate of the u s air force fighter weapon school in navy's top gun dan's experience hunting sands and flying 500 knots below 300 feet give a surreal perspective of life inside the cockpit as do his lighthearted post flight activities that we've come to know and love from the fighter community since retiring from service dan has written several bestsellers including viper pilot lords of the sky and the mercenary his most recent book operation vengeance came out in late 2020 i hope you enjoy his combat stories as much as i did hey dan thanks for taking the time to share your story today really appreciate it my pleasure ryan so i just finished up viper pilot great book and as i mentioned as we were communicating uh to schedule this i don't think anybody could have ever pegged you as anything but a fighter pilot i'm curious if we go back to you as a little kid what what was the spark for you for aviation was it ingrained in you from an early age did you see something in flight where did that come from uh girls girls uh no um you know my my father and grandfather were both marine pilots uh but to my dad's credit he was in no way like the great santini you know he never pressured us in any way shape or form and i i actually didn't have much interest in the military until i was about halfway through college i wanted to be an architect and in fact that's what i i studied i've been flying though you know privately since i was 15. so i'd always been into aviation but i i didn't really wasn't really interested in the military and then you remember the 80s i mean that was kind of the heyday of the military the cold war was wrapping up and of course she had all the cool movies and i remember thinking one day in the summer when i was halfway through college you know i've been flying a jet fighters a lot cooler than sitting here at a desk drawing houses and country clubs uh and so you know i you know like you like you did i went through the whole commissioning and down the down the path and all the merry hoops you have to jump through to be a military pilot was when you talked to your dad or your grandfather i'm not sure if he was still alive when you joined up but what were their thoughts as you said hey i'm actually gonna go this direction oh my my grandfather had already died my dad was was very proud he thought i was a [ __ ] for going into the air force instead of the marines uh no not really he and in fact he told me he said look if all you want to do is fly airplanes then go into the air force because he during vietnam he it still incenses into this day they were going to pull qualified carrier fighter pilots off of aircraft carriers marines and make infantry officers out of them because all the lieutenants were getting killed and it really really chapped him that the marines thought he was more valuable as an infantry officer than he was as a carrier qualified attack pilot and i think that stuck with him so he said join join the air force if all you want to do is fly damn yeah that's ridiculous wow so when and i know and we'll get to this some of the action you saw on first gulf war um was there a time as you were going through flight school that he was talking to you about his combat experiences from the air well you know he didn't really do that until after i'd finished i think he was waiting to see if i'd make it uh and you know like you i'm sure it never crossed my mind to fail um i think if you go into aviation especially military aviation with the mindset that hey i could get killed doing this or i'm going to fail you are going to fail or you're going to get killed doing it it never it never crossed my mind uh after i got out and went over to europe and then of course in the after the first gulf war we talked a little bit more but you know yourself you know hollywood aside you don't really talk about combat experiences with people that haven't actually been there or done that in some form or another because nobody gets it right yeah there's no common frame of reference for they always say what was it like well what am i going to say to you you know that you would understand i don't mean that in a demeaning way but i mean how would you put it in terms that people could understand my dad did so it was easy for us yeah my uh my dad flew huey's in vietnam so we kind of had something similar and you know i knew about it i had seen the medals um you know he had a dfc uh a silver star in the dfc um and so we talked about it a little bit but then kind of when i when i came back from afghanistan the the conversations were just different at that point right right and that and that's why because you know until you've been there and seen the elephant you know uh it how are you gonna speak to somebody else about it except in general terms right hey so i'm glad you brought up the elephant because i had not heard of that term until reading your book so i don't i i'm really curious if is it an air force term it might be military-wide but like where did that come from and what does it mean when you say it i think it's a i think it's a fixed-wing term i i know hilo guys have their own language uh you've got words you use that you know i hear it i'm like what what does that mean uh i think i think it's a fixed-wing thing and it goes back to actually i think i put this in the book uh hannibal crossing the alps bringing war elephants you know into the italian uh peninsula nobody'd ever seen him before so seeing an elephant became synonymous with with seeing combat and and in our case you know that's just or some people say seeing the dragon you know it's just something big and scary that you've you're not going to be able to describe until you've seen it face to face so yeah for sure so if we jump into flight school for you dan um one of the things that caught my eye that i also can't understand from the rotary wing side so you kind of describe how the class ranking comes out top three guys get these jets there's kind of like a below the line for non-non-jet aircraft basically non-fighters but there are a couple folks who are above the line who aren't going to a unit right away and they make them instructor pilots so to me like from the rotary wing side the last human you want teaching you to fly is somebody who just came out of flight school right like you learned so much in your units how how is it that they go to train new students is it just it's just a different uh flight environment maybe yeah and and and i i think they still do it this way i can't speak for how they do it now but in those days yeah there was a class ranking and the line was called the far line fighter attack reconnaissance and everybody above that line and this is a you know an aggregate of all your flying your academics everything everybody above that line could go to fighter attack reconnaissance aircraft everybody below the line goes to tanker transports or bombers um and the problem is for the guys above the line there's never enough fighters for the five or six guys in every class that are above the line so 10 typically went to they get their first choice if the guy who graduates first wants to go to a bomber then he'll go to a bomber most everybody i knew the guys that graduated one two and three wanted to go to fighters so they would take the the two to three fighters that came down per class and then everybody after them but above that line would go off and be we call them face first assignment ips and yeah most of them they're not the guys you know you typically want although the air force did it for a reason they did it because there's never enough operational pilots to come back and and fill all the pilot training instructor requirements there's just not they'd have to strip the operational units for that and operational units take priority so it's it's not a bad system and those guys were always fairly closely supervised and they would come back to the base that they went through pilot training from so they would go off to randolph to learn how to be a screaming instructor pilot and then they'd come back to vance or del rio or wherever because that's the environment that they're familiar with right and of course they'd come back to one of the two planes they flew in pilot training so it's it's not quite as tenuous as it sounds but uh you know i think they do the best with what they can yeah and then so coming out of flight school if if you can take me to your first combat experience which you really do it's described so well in the book in the first gulf war but kind of like where were you what age were you what was going through your mind and if you could just take us through like that first trigger pull that first uh flight in combat sure i was probably let's see by that time i was 25. um and and i i'm not sure about the army system but our our pilot training takes a year and then if you go to fighters you have a bunch of other schools survival schools and other flight schools you have to go to before you finally get to the fighter school that they're going to teach you how to fly an f-16 all of that takes about another year and then when you get to an operational unit it takes probably three to four months to become mission qualified so you're looking at two and a half years after you start really before you are a combat-ready line fighter pilot and you're a wingman you're at the bottom of the totem pole but you know you're there and so i was fortunate i had about a year and a half no two years in europe which was a great place to be a bachelor fighter pilot in in 1990 um before this war kicked off and we were all supposed to you know we were training to fight against the soviet union that's that's what we set all of our nuke alerts on and everything else and i've never i mean i knew where iraq was but i could have cared less you know nobody nobody had even thought about it when that happened in 1990 uh when you know when you invaded kuwait uh so we left right after christmas of 1990 and we went down to we went to turkey which was good we didn't go down south into saudi arabia we got to go to turkey which was nice because they had a an officer's club and you could drink in turkey and you know it it wasn't the desert which was which was a really good thing and um you know we we kind of landed you know we we had a few days to get our act together before the war started and i just remember without sounding too callous i remember being tremendously excited i was too young and inexperienced you know to be too worried about it i thought i was invincible like you do like most young pilots do um you know i i was i was excited i don't recall being being nervous now the first time i saw a surface air missile come up off the ground i remember looking at the plume of dust on the ground and thinking somebody just crashed down there and then all of a sudden my warning equipment went bananas and then i could see the smoke trail and then i could see the second third and fourth smoke trails and i went oh yeah this is what they were talking about in in training holy cow and and and i wasn't really scared i just reacted you know kind of like kind of like you did i'm sure it wasn't until afterwards you know when you come down and you debrief and you're alone with yourself that you think holy cow i was 200 miles deep in enemy territory and four missiles just came at me what happened right and actually dan if i can interrupt for a sec um this is something i didn't know that i probably should have but f-16s i just assumed it i'm going to sound naive here that it was like another air-to-air fighter and you really describe this like sam hunting profile of the f-16 um could you just speak to that briefly like that mission set because that was it makes sense why we do it it was news to me as i read the book yeah i mean the great thing about the f-16 is it does both you know it's air-to-air it's air-to-ground um the f-15s the gray eagles they just do air-to-air the a-10s they just do air-to-ground and that's that's okay but it's nice to have a multi-role multi-mission fighter and and while weaseling or suppression of enemy air defenses was a subset of what we did and in those days and as still true today you go to a wing that has that mission delineated and you have to be specifically trained to go out and pick a fight with surface-terror missiles and then kill them before they kill you it's actually quite a lot of fun but it's it takes a little bit of of training beyond the normal air-to-ground stuff that every f-16 pilot knows and so that was our job in iraq was was to go in with the f4 g's the old you know remnants of vietnam and they would find the surface-to-air missiles in the radars with their guy in the back and their cosmic equipment and then we would either shoot anti-radiation missiles at them which i think are a waste of time or we would drop bombs or shoot mavericks or something else it got a lot more interesting than the second goal for but i'm sure you'll get to that yeah all right so i basically that the f4 is almost spotting for you and then you're coming in to take the shot effectively yeah more or less we flew in and they were called mixed pairs so there was an f4 an f-16 f4 and f-16 we usually go out in uh flights of four that way the two could split up if they needed to and the f-16 was around to protect the f4 from an air threat if there was one and to do the air-to-ground stuff uh if if they needed to that particular f4 didn't even carry a gun it could it could launch anti-radiation missiles and a couple other things but they didn't like to do it because there weren't that many of them left and they didn't want to risk it and they were they were on their way out anyway you know the f4 had come out during vietnam and it was kind of old and tired and it really couldn't react defensively against the newer surface-to-air missiles like the sa-8 and the sa-6 so so then jumping back into that fight that first combat engagement you had i mean you kind of described you have f-15s up overhead fighting migs you're you're scouting for uh sam sites i mean how talk me through like what's going through your mind when you first get eyes on a target pulling that trigger what did that feel like well it was uh it was it was a beautiful clear morning i could see for probably 200 miles as we came over the mountains you know in between turkey and northern iraq and it was just it was just gorgeous and i remember i was i was thinking this the whole way because you know you step out when it's dark it's you know we hadn't been there that long it was confusing it was all new all the local procedures to get aircraft up off the ground and where they need to go we had to go to the tanker of course all that administrative stuff that most people don't know anything about you know they we took it for granted that we would be able to do it and we did i was just hoping the whole time not to screw up you know i'm sure you you get that uh you know i was a i was a flight lead but i wasn't leading a flight that morning because i was still very young and they had a lot more experienced guys and i was just hoping not to screw up you know you got to get all the radios keyed on the secure mode right you've got to you know get on the tanker and get off the tanker without causing delays you gotta always be in your correct position there's a lot you can screw up as you know and i was just hoping not to screw up and then when we came across the line i mean the radios just exploded there were probably i don't know 60 70 airplanes on that one frequency common frequency and we're always real good about you know radio discipline and we have other radios that we can use to talk to each other but the main frequency just exploded because nobody with the exception of maybe one of the colonels had any combat time he was a lieutenant during vietnam so you have a whole bunch of guys that have been very very well trained but they've actually never been shot at they've never fired a shot in anger and you know that changes you when you do it or when it happens to you so that's what i was that's what i was saying and i kept checking everything my target my weapons my target my weapons i just didn't want to screw anything up and what was when when you took your first shot like what altitude are you at what's what's your relationship to the target as as that's happening well that's interesting and it's it's something that's real world that we don't you know you think about afterwards and you think why why didn't that occur to me they had the iraqis had guys sitting up on top of those twelve thousand foot mountains with uh shoulder launch missiles and you know we cruised over those mountains at twenty thousand feet thinking now we're at twenty thousand feet we're we're safe well actually we were only ten thousand feet above the guys with the missiles and they started to shoot at us which was interesting because the first warning we had was then the missiles coming up through the formations because they were uh infrared missiles not radar missiles and so we didn't have any warning of them like holy cow what was that that was a missile you know it takes you a minute if you've never seen it to process it right and and our target that first day if i remember right was the mosul mosul oil fields way up in northern iraq and we were supposed to take out the sams that were protecting the airfield and the oil field for the f-16s behind us who were just carrying bombs to come in and destroy them so that's what we did geez all right man and then it was fun when uh when you came out of that you kind of described in the book uh going back to the o club and letting loose a little bit and i think to me i was like god how great is that you get to fly a jet and then that night you get to have a beer because that was not the case in afghanistan for us oh i know and it wasn't the case for the guys down south we didn't realize how lucky we were um you know in the you know it was a lot like i imagined vietnam to have been you know those guys would go north they'd come back they could all drink and party at night and they did and and that's what that's what we got to do i think i put the amusing incident in the book about that colonel that i met which is i wish i could find that guy today because that he just you know later in the second gulf war when i was a colonel i know how i would have reacted to somebody like me acting like that and i i kept thinking gosh i'm glad he didn't just shoot me in the head dan can you just give like a little context on that because it's a great story i mean you've just come out of what you've been waiting your whole life to do as a pilot you know like that day you see the elephant you're at the o club you're drinking and then and at the end of this i want to know what was scary or like that first day of combat or this colonel talking to you oh the kernel was scarier um but but yeah it was uh we were all at the bar drinking and you know it's amazing at least on an air force base a fighter base how quickly all the non-combat guys disappear whenever there's any kind of shooting going on uh and any you know the air force is different from the army in that respect because in the air force it's it's generally the officers that go out and get shot at and get killed right because they're the ones that are flying and and and the support guys which god love them you got to have them but they outnumber us you know 95 to 1. there's a lot more than than they are of us but they all disappeared except for this one guy who showed up in the oak club that night and i don't know what i don't know what he was thinking i don't know why he thought that'd be a good idea to come away from his computer and go see what the animals are doing in the oakland but he did i think he was a major and he and he had on uh i don't know if he had on blues or he just had on bdus you know but he wasn't wearing a flight suit and in our world if you're not wearing a flight suit well who cares and he walked in and we were all wearing our our vests uh we had to take all the other stuff off that we flying but we were all wearing our vests with our pistols in it because you know it's first day of combat nobody knows what's going to happen next and and nobody knows when we might get scrambled to go again and we didn't really have an armory set up so we're wearing the weapons this guy took offense to that and that's when he you know he he told us in a very whiny imperious voice to you know you've got to get rid of those weapons you can't wear a weapon in a no club and i think he got a resounding round of fuck-offs and and everything and one of our majors told him if he didn't leave you know they were going to cut off his testicles and shove him down his throat and that's when he went and got this colonel and that's when the colonel came back in and you know i'm sure he looked around and said i really don't want to do this you know to himself but he kind of had to since his major got him into it and that's that's when he you know when he when he gave me the the lecture about you know listen you little [ __ ] i had 200 and something missions over north vietnam you know snot nosed puppy like you didn't impress me at all now you know give me the freaking gun and i i said sir i'm not going to do that it's my weapon i i can't give it up and do his credit you know i remember him looking away taking a deep breath thinking i'd really like to just cut this punk's head off but he didn't and he looked back at me he goes all right well then just take it and get the hell out of here and don't come back with a weapon on so anyway it was a good story he had to be there but uh oh god but that had to have been worse than than the combat that day i'm assuming yeah it was it was you know i i kept thinking the day is over you know the day is over all day long i kept thinking well that was it when i came back across the line i kept thinking i'm safe and then i think i put it in the book about the the eagles coming down after some turkish f-104s that decided it would be a good chance it would be good practice to run intercepts on our strike package like what kind of idiot are you and then the the nato patriot battery that was set to automatic and it sensed our jamming pods and shot at us you know and then the airfield the base defense patriots did the same thing they shot at us and i kept thinking every time well that was it couldn't get any worse so there i am in the o club thinking well that's it it couldn't get any worse and i come face to face very irate kernel oh god all right well if we jump forward then to uh post 911 um i know i think i read you got four dfcs total in your time in in uniform um could you take me through one of the hairier moments in your post 911 fight you can choose it you know i know in the book the one where you're in the sandstorm brown out sounds pretty crazy but if there's another one that comes to mind take it anyway but like you're a little bit older at that time um what was your how had you changed um and what was that fight like you mean one of the dfc stores yeah or or one of the the more dangerous ones that you found yourself in but i assume that it would align with your dfcs yeah the the one about the stands the uh the brown out and running out of fuel and you know i gathered up i think 12 or 11 other f-16s and we landed like one minute before the only remaining air base in southwest asia closed down for sand and that was at the end of a 10-hour 10 and a half hour combat mission you know i that's that's in the book and and that to be honest when i talk about it now i keep thinking how did i live through that um one of the other ones was uh was one day it we we were going out as six ships then and the f4s were all gone by 2003 we're all f16 block 50s which is a version of the f-16 made to detect and and kill sams we had some cool pods and some other things and and so we'd go up as sometimes as six ships and then we would split up and we would go hunting mobile sams and we'd go you know somebody said hey there's a there's a radar here that you need to kill or sometimes it was just normal strike stuff you know a bridge or a line of tanks or whatever and in this particular day um we'd already split up and i just had one wingman with me and the giant voice you know enters my helmet from space or wherever and it's the commanding general for you know flight ops in southwest asia and they have some some emergency tasking and it turns out that they'd picked up from space or guys on the ground or something uh what they said was a line of tanks moving south out of baghdad it's highway one you know that goes from baghdad to kuwait and it was a solid overcast i mean below about 5000 feet it was just solid it was one of those days where it's nice and flat above you know but the tops of the clouds you know are for as far as you can see there's just no holes and they wanted me to go down through the clouds and do a recce run of these tanks and i'm thinking this is exactly the sort of thing i teach people never to do you know you never go down through the clouds or a hole in the clouds if there are bad guys down there but they were adamant they said we we've got to know because it may be a counter-offensive which it turned out to be but they didn't know that so i i came in i looked at the map and i and i came in there's a big lake west of baghdad and i figured well there won't be any sams over the lake i went 30 or 40 miles out and i let down on [Music] radar altimeter and infrared and all the other crap we had so that i could i could come into baghdad from the west over the lake because i thought i'd be safe there and i was it was a good idea and i think i broke out at maybe 800 feet and i i dropped down to maybe 300 feet as the weather you know starts slamming down and i could pick them up on my air-to-ground radar i could see the vehicles on the road and it wasn't a line of tanks it was like a whole gaggle of tanks and so i am just screaming i am right below the mock you know maybe 550 miles an hour over this lake and i hit the road and it it you would get this because you know you would understand but i mean picture a black background and then all of a sudden multi-colored explosions everywhere okay it was every piece of aaa and every shoulder launch sam and everything else what i had found was one of the divisions of the republican guard i don't remember which one it was maybe the medina division but they it wasn't a line of tanks it was a whole division moving out and when they heard me or saw me or picked me up coming screaming in off the lake at 200 feet they opened up with everything that they could and i thought i'm a dead man i am a dead man fortunately my pod reacted automatically and i put out every you know i had 120 chaff and flare bundles i had cluster bombs under my wings and i i just i remember i remember thinking [ __ ] i actually said [ __ ] and i nosed over and and flicked over we had real good system systems in the f-16 i flicked over to air-to-ground like that and i just put the piper that we used to you know to drop things on right on the road in the middle of all those vehicles and i i hit the button and the cbus came off and i just screamed over the road and as i come screaming over the road they detonated behind me and the whole sky behind me lit up i thought my i thought they hit me with something you know and they're still shooting as i did this and it was you know the whole thing lasted less than 30 seconds but it scared the hell out of me you know i remember rocketing past and i'm down to maybe a hundred feet now because of the weather i just zoomed up through the clouds once i was well past the road and i remember breaking through sunlight right it's all dark and hellish below and then all of a sudden sunlight and blue sky and and i realized how hard i was breathing and you know like you i don't get too excited when i fly because you get paid to be calm but that particular 30 seconds was really really bad and it turns out and this is purely by accident i wish i could take credit for it but my cluster bombs hit the lead vehicles and slowed the column down long enough for our guys on the ground to do whatever it is they were going to do they wanted to give me credit for tactical situational awareness and i said i just really just hit the button because i wanted to go faster and i needed to get rid of the bombs and they were pissing me off because they were shooting at me um but anyway you know it worked out well and i remember when i zoomed up and got a hold of them and told them they asked me to go back and i said it's not safe you know down there i told you what it is it's it's it's a division a full division an armored division and that's really all i can tell you and me going back isn't gonna isn't gonna do anything else besides they're all pissed off and waiting for me now so [ __ ] uh yeah that was that was a bad that was a bad 30 seconds so so dan you were a flight of six but you went down on your own i wasn't gonna drag a wingman down there um there was no need to do surveillance and reconnaissance you know we called it road recce road reconnaissance um i thought it was bad enough that they were sending me down i wasn't going to risk him he was orbiting up above he had me locked up the whole time on his zero radar so if anything had happened to me he would have he would have sung out and let anybody know but you know there was no reason and it's a good decision because if he'd been he couldn't have flown with me because of the weather and you don't fly close in combat anyway because that's just stupid the only way to do it would be to have him in trail of me and and they would have really let him they would have lit him up yeah absolutely that's how a lot of guys in vietnam got whacked because they were still flying like they did in korea in world war ii and and it's usually the the guys on down the line that got hit not the not the leader and i wasn't going to do this to this kid damn so um i'm sure you've had many near-death experiences it sounds like that's one of them but that day when you landed you kind of alluded to this with the gulf war experience where you're just in the moment you realize things are crazy but then i think you hop out of the aircraft and and things are calmed down for a minute and you realize just how insane it was um what did that feel like coming out of that day were you like i can't even believe i'm here still yeah it was later and see the good thing about that war was we were in the south this time we were in saudi arabia country i hope to never see again um and and it's a good hour flight hour and 15 minute flight from where we were to the border and you have to air refuel coming out because of the distance and because we always used up all of our fuel so there's some time to calm down and defrag yourself you know and and so i had an hour and 15 minutes and air refueling and a long slow ride home to kind of you know get over it but still until you get out of the airplane you know and you shut down you walk away you're not really done right in any kind of military aircraft and we went through the debriefing and all that and there was no booze to take solace in and i i came back to my my palatial quarters uh and i remember laying down on on the on the on the rack the metal rack that we slept on and staring up at the springs you know it was a bunk bunk bed staring up at the springs and thinking what the f what the hell just happened you know and i i didn't really have time until then to relive it in my head and and as you've done yourself at some situation like that you're just reacting you know some situations you can plan for you've got you know you can look at something happening and go hey tactically we're going to do this and this and this this was one of those situations where you just react you know unfortunately your training and the airplane take over and and you you walk away from it yeah um you just mentioned the debrief that you did and um we would do debriefs but they were not hour-long debriefs the way you describe them it was that pretty common like couple hour pre-flight discussion mission brief and then post flight for two hours plus no not in combat um for a couple reasons first of all nobody's getting graded on it except whether you live or die unlike peacetime stuff second we tended to fly with we call them formed four ships so you would generally get the same wingman in flight lead and as a as a flight lead mission commander type i would lead the same four guys or the same three other guys sometimes same seven other guys you know we'd fly in groups of four and so after after a day or two of that they know what to expect from you you know what to expect and then you don't have to go through all the administrative crap this time besides a lot of the peacetime briefing is eaten up by mandatory briefing items you know that you have to do yeah and in combat you know it's really hey you know this is when we step out this is when we start here's the lineup card with the frequencies and you spend all of your time talking about the tactics you know and all of my time meaning you know we would typically spend maybe 30 minutes you know talking about all right these are the weapons we have today this is how we're going to employ it or we might just say hey we're going to do it just like we did yesterday only from this direction and if you're with the same guys you can get away with that the debriefings generally consisted of anything really big or stupid that anybody did which almost never happened uh because like you were all professionals and nobody really did anything dumb unless they were they were they were guests you know they were colonels down from headquarters trying to get a combat sortie or something there were a few of those um but we would concentrate on all right you know we hit six out of eight today what happened to the other two so that when we went out the next day we'd get eight out of eight you know it was all confined to real world tactical stuff yeah um can we talk about your call sign so i think it was two dogs if you're able to share because a couple of the other guys i've talked to had pretty uh tame call signs uh so i don't know where on the spectrum yours falls but uh just curious where it came from well i'm proud that it didn't come from doing anything stupid in the airplane um i was lucky you know in 20 years i can't recall ever do anything stupid in an airplane now on the ground in the bar is a different thing but at least in flight i i you know everybody screws up once in a while and of course i screwed up but i never did anything noteworthy enough to get a call sign out of it you know like scratch you know guys that would drag the tail along the runway or you know there was there was there was always a boomer somebody that goes supersonic inadvertently and blows all the windows out of downtown atlanta you know i didn't do anything like that um two dogs i'll give you the tame version because my mother might see this i get uh i i have i have some indian blood in me and when i am out in the sun i turn this kind of dark brown reddish color i look like an indian that in my big nose uh so in germany when i was a lieutenant we used to go to spain this was before the first war we'd go to spain twice a year for 30 days such a good time to get all of our bombing requirements because you couldn't do it in germany because the weather sucked and we did a lot of pool time and i got really dark and really brown and and so the tame version of the call sign is they named me two dogs after the indian joke you know two dogs screwing in the night how did i get named father you know how did the indian boy get his name so um that's the tame version of it and then in the air force in fighter squadrons if you have the same call sign over three tours in different commands or if you use it in combat it's yours forever you you can't be renamed otherwise every time you go to a base if you you know you can be renamed and fortunately that was my first tour i did the gulf war i'd flown with it in combat so i was always two dogs you know thereafter nice um was there anything you carried while you flew that was like a good luck charm talisman something like that that you had to have with you my wife's panties stop for real absolutely absolutely that's the best one i've ever heard there are red panties and i i i had them up in my uh up in my we had an arm pocket on her flight suit and i i'd stick them up there oh man they were they were very small because she's very petite so it's it was a good thing yeah a pair of red panties awesome all right i can't top that i'm just in the interest of time just two more two more questions dan i'll let you get back to life here um there was a quote from the book that i thought was really great i just i want to read it and and get your thoughts on it um i've definitely felt this but haven't been able to put it into words this way but you describe how you've got 30 other men who survive the same screening years of training constant attrition they're generally priceless to be around personal likes and dislikes aside you know that you can count on them with your life they die for you there's no real equivalent to that um man that rings so true for me as a veteran like when did you realize that and and what does that mean to you you know i realized that subjectively in training you know to some degree but the first time i went across the line like we talked about earlier i was flying as a wingman that day i was like i said i was only a lieutenant and the f4 guy with me was maybe i guess he's maybe eight ten years older than i am but he was one of those guys that and you get to that point when you fly right when you you you haven't seen everything but you know that anything that happens you can deal with it yeah it's a great feeling to have as a pilot when you go hey i'm so i'm experienced enough that i'm not cocky about it but i know that if anything happens i can deal with it he was one of those guys his call sign was orca because he looked like a big whale and but he was completely unflappable you know he was a big big ugly great strong sturdy kind of a guy and and i got temporarily turned around after my first uh evasion from an essay to and i lost sight of him i couldn't find him i'm in enemy territory and i don't want to talk on the radio because you know i don't want to add to the confusion and i remember that sinking feeling you get for a few seconds when you realize holy crap i'm all alone out here and all of a sudden i heard his voice and he said you know look at your left seven o'clock for a mile a little bit high and i hadn't even told him i was lost you know or not lost but disoriented he could tell you know and when we came back we went to the club we drank and i remember sitting there arm-in-arm with these guys we weren't talking about it but we knew hey if anything had ever gone wrong these are guys that would that would do anything they could for you you know um you know as well as i do and this is something i don't think most people get in that situation in a fight you're not fighting for your country or the government or anything else you're fighting for the guys you know on both sides of you it may come down to all the rest of that crap later but not crap but stuff later but at the in the moment when it's your butt out there and people are trying to kill you you're fighting for the guys that are there with you and nobody else yeah for sure um i think i know the answer to this but i try to ask everybody this one question when uh when you look back on that time all the the near-death experiences and the craziness would you do it again absolutely i would and and you know it isn't just because you know i got into it way back in the back of your head you want to do it because it's patriotic because you want to serve your country but you're also doing it because it's a tremendous challenge and you figure at age 25 or whatever if i can master this then i can i can master anything and one of the biggest things that i'm happy for now at this point in life and i'm sure you are too is that i haven't had anything to prove to anybody but me for 30 years you know and that's something people that have never done it don't really understand that's why you see guys go off and have midlife crises and do stupid stuff but i i never will not like that and probably you won't either because we've got nothing to prove you never have to look at yourself in the mirror and think you know would i measure up because you know that you already have and then selfish question last one i've got three boys the oldest is 13. he loves flying he wanted me to ask you if you weren't flying an f-16 what would you fly well i flew the f-20 i was in the f-22 program for a while too um you mean any airplane or modern airplanes any oh if i had mine just like just somebody who just loves flying if you could do any what would it be oh you mean right now just have an airplane to fly oh uh you know if the f-16 would still be close if i could afford these 70 000 an hour um but i i've always loved the corsair uh the you know the world war ii chance vaught corsair and if if i could have an airplane i think it would be the the corsair just because it looks you know manly with those 50 caliber machine guns i think it'd be a blast to fly that's awesome all right well dan i won't take up any more of your time i really appreciate it these are some great stories especially the good luck charm that you carry with you yeah well it obviously worked right hey you're here to talk about it so i think i have a picture of it somewhere i was refueling and and actually the boomer asked me he said you know so what do you do for good luck and i remember as soon as i disconnected i hung out there for a second i pulled my wife's panties out of the out of my pocket and held him up he took a picture and sent it to me i really wish i could find that picture because it's a great picture that's a classic that's awesome what are you working on now because you got several novels red viper pilot what's coming next for you well vengeance came out in oct in august and it's about the yamamoto mission you know the fighter pilots that shot down yamamoto and i'm working on one right now with a new publisher uh st martin's press and it should come out late next year maybe about this time next year and it's about a marine officer who escaped from corrigador by swimming across manila bay and then tried to get to australia on a boat got captured and spent the rest of the war in a pow camp uh great story i've got his i've got his manuscript his daughter's been real helpful so it's it's really amazing stuff every day i look forward to doing it because i find myself enthralled so it should be a good book that's great i'm so glad to hear it and i'll make sure that people can can find you uh where you're at on social media and uh and your books so yeah you know tell them if they if they do that i will always respond it may take me a few minutes or a few days but i'll always respond and and if they like any of the books please do reviews uh they're very very helpful and they'll keep me writing if they don't like the books don't say anything don't say anything say anything you got it thanks dan have a good one you bet ryan thank you

Channel: Combat Story

Views: 5,329

Rating: 4.9211822 out of 5

Keywords: air force, pilot, MiG, F-15, Strike Eagle, DFC, ROTC, military, veteran, Desert Storm, Gulf War, Kosovo, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Aerial Combat, SAM, Surface to Air, Surface to Air Missile, SA-8, SA-6, SA-2, Hunter Killer, Dan Hampton, Two Dogs, Colonel, LTC, F-16, F-4, Viper, Viper Pilot, Mercenary, Dartmouth, Oxford, OIF, Officers Club, Air Medal, Valor, Top Gun

Id: 7hPLlIWe8K8

Length: 44min 56sec (2696 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 07 2021