The Legend of Hoser - Fighter Pilot's Fighter Pilot

after graduating from the naval academy with the class of 1964 and pinning on his navy pilot wings of gold joe hoser cetrapa flew 162 combat missions during the vietnam conflict while flying his f8 crusader cetrapa was famous for the personal arsenal that he brought along in the event that he was shot down he carried two mark 33 hand grenades a colt python 357 revolver with 60 rounds of ammunition a smith and weston nine millimeter with non-nato hollow-point ammunition and three spare magazines a custom randall survival knife and an additional throwing knife so trapper earned the callsign hoser after repeatedly missing the air-to-air banner during an aerial gunnery exercise during his fourth run at the banner he was increasingly frustrated and he hosed off his remaining bullets and still missed when they got to the debrief he was awarded the call sign hoser after transitioning to the f-14 community he was flying a test event what was supposed to be a 2v2 engagement between two f-14 tomcats and two u.s air force f-15 eagles one of the tomcats went down in the chocks with a maintenance issue so hoser and his rio launched solo but when they started the first engagement hosers rio pretended to be the wing pilot over the common frequency which caused both of the eagle pilots to think they were going against two tomcats instead of one the confusion allowed hoser to ultimately get a guns kill on each of the f-15s and the resultant hud footage almost caused the japanese to buy tomcats instead of the eagles they'd already ordered my first hoser experience is when i arrived at the f-14 training squadron at nes oceana in late 1983 and sat through the orientation brief also known as the patent speech so for details on that and other hoser stories let's talk to retired navy commander and fellow tomcat rio jack jaws marshall who went through vf 101 as a newly winged ensign just ahead of me tell us what you remember about that legendary welcome aboard brief that he used to give because he wasn't the ceo but it was so good that no he would give the brief he said he was a lieutenant commander so here's this guy at the end of his career don't know who he is smoking up there in the front and all of a sudden it just starts intimidating us all standing you know in front of the american flag and behind this lectern telling all of us uh noodle neck rios and limp-wristed pilots if they wanted to survive and not get killed and not have their wives marry somebody else in the ready room they better pay attention it was just epic it was like you know a seven-minute speech and then he would just you know exit and it was like what just happened who was this guy i don't even know i've been here for like three days so one of the hoser stories was related to you by a british and raf exchange officer is a i guess leggy was a tornado guy or was it was he a phantom guy i think he was phantoms and he was flying with hoser and he he told you an interesting story about that flight with smoke smoke in the cockpit air source off you know we we have to do these bold face so right it was i think you know throttle idle air source off something like that or just air source off ram air increase do you have a cooling air light at the same time and he's like i'm just smoking mate or whatever [Laughter] so it's like okay you know we're just wound tight remember we were ensigns back then well nobody smoked in the airplane by the time we started flying the tomcat you know except a guy like poser right mask is dangling he's up there you know smoking a cigarette and leggy's like special ash trays i had to pivot you know it was fit in the fod pocket and it would pivot open you know put it in and put it out close it back and put it in and they just didn't care it's like it just shut up yeah it was nice it was fun i mean but you grew up fast right well this sort of set the tone for us as tomcat guys and so it was forged very quickly that you are second to no one you live in nobody's shadow we're gonna kick ass in the airplane and we're gonna kick ass at the o club and welcome aboard gents this is going to be the time of your life and hoser was the standard bearer for that kind of and it wasn't what he said so much is just the way he lived his life with this you know i don't give a and if you don't like it that's on you so that worked until it didn't work and then it worked again for him so let's talk about the layman piece and and how he was brought back into the navy after leaving it as a lieutenant commander people may not know but if you don't select for o5 commander then you have to get out at 20 years in the navy that's just the way it is it's law i think you can actually go to 20 years and three months but hoser had so much personality and i think at the time some of the leadership in naval aviation knew that they needed people like hoser to instill sort of that camaraderie that uh we're gonna win at all costs it's it's a hundred percent you know we're we're in as fighter guys we lost a little bit when we lost hoser so he was brought back in with john lehman who was secretary of the navy and he brought him in back in on a presidential a presidential appointment to commander which then allowed him to serve another eight years seven or eight years as a commander and he went back to have you know some great some great uh tours at vf101 and i think he went to strike you and served a little bit of time at top gun after that too so um just fantastic so that's how he was brought back in and they brought it back into vf101 and so when i came back to be an instructor then i'm back there with hozer again as an instructor and being able to see it from his you know from a different viewpoint from the instructor viewpoint and got to watch some more of the patent speeches the guide you know the instructor in the back of the ready room that got to say hello so it was really fun you mentioned he's at 101 but he also as you said was a strike you now while he was at strike u he had an accident so let's talk about that a little bit i mean the guy was in the firearms all right so bought my first gun from him because he was selling guns out of the ready room at the same time he had a van and he had a sidewinder on the side of his van pointed forward okay i forgot all about it and i was just like so he of course he knows all the the ortiz right and he ends up with the 20 millimeter gatling gun which i forget how many barrels are on it ten eight formed it into a big rifle you know a lot of us would go out and have cocktails or play golf on the weekend i think hoser really enjoyed going out blowing things up and so he had this long 20 millimeter which he fabricated somehow i never saw it but somehow it had a malfunction and it blew his thumb off he talked in an orthopedic surgeon into cutting off his big toe and fastening it to his where his thumb was because he needed it it was his right hand so you can you need you need the opposing digit of the human hand in order to fly airplanes because you have to be able to select trim and other other things that are on the control stick of an airplane there's lots of little buttons and switches for a pilot on the control stick so he went from hoser to toeser and i hadn't seen him in a long time i'm doing airwing workups right so i'm out and failing i run into him we're talking and of course what's one of the things he does he immediately puts his hand in my face and says some people say it smells like my feet and i'm like oh you haven't changed it's just great to see you so that is hoser who else would get their toe cut off to put on their hand a lot of people just sulk for the rest of their life yeah no you can't you can't make this up right and that's the same place that's the last time i saw him too was it fallon during airwing workups and same same deal he's like you know check this out you know it looked like a big toe stuck on his head right but he had now he did have an opposing grip and he was not med down for life it worked it kept him in the airplane the legend is true in his case i mean he's the one that taught me ward how to put my keys and an extra cupboard extra set of keys and an extra cover on my desk and leave them there so that no matter what you did if you were screwing around at the oak club or you're off base at lynn haven mall buying some stereo somebody thought you were there because your keys and your cover are on your desk i learned that from hoser and i used it my entire career i used it as an o5 i would do that i would check in in my desk drawer i kept some keys and a hat and maybe a spare wallet just have it on there on my desk of course he's here hoser got out of the navy uh and and then he worked for the fire service he was flying yeah on these firefighting airplanes so he put in probably another almost 20 years fighting fires for the state of california and probably a public-private partnership flying these s2s that were converted or retrofitted with um high performance engines and bladders and everything else to go fight fires and he did that for you know another 18 years and just flew every day he was on tv after having getting doused he was behind he was trailing another aircraft that had put out that you know that orange liquid uh fire suppressant and he actually made it onto the local news which was just beautiful now i was dropping on that drop coverage level six that's almost a maximum load just as he made a drop on the raging hubifier joe setrava's s2 bomber was hit by a wave of fire retardant from the plane in front lifted by a blast of heat i'm climbing out and i realized when i looked out straight ahead that i couldn't see anything because it was totally covered with almost completely blind he immediately went to instrument flying 10 degrees nose up wings level check the vertical speed to make sure i'm climbing he called on his wingman to help guide him then put water from this bottle on his flying glove now my helmet's still plugged into the back so i can talk to my wingmen and reach over the top against the wind and do the through the window yeah a little that big his inspiration the same as when he'd come under fire in combat over north vietnam what would john wayne do my buddies and a voice came from from heaven it was john himself and he told me 10 degrees nose up wings vsi altimeter landing was a little challenging it's a four inch circle right here and then as i was coming back i just i couldn't sit back here like this i had to get up here like this he says it was as exhilarating as being in combat this is the next best thing to it there's nobody shooting at you but it's just as uh challenging so how did he feel about getting back to flying in the smoke till i croak at the grass valley air attack base dave marquis news 10. jaws thanks for coming aboard and remembering one of our great fighter mentors it's absolutely imperative that we had those warfighters to teach us how to rise above and actually do the things that need to be done when it's 24 hours a day you know months at a time you need the hoses commander joe jose trapa passed away on march 17 2019 he was 78 years old all right that's going to do it for this episode if you're a first time viewer please ring the bell and become a subscriber so you don't miss anything give me the likes and comment check the links below for merch including where to get the punks trilogy my first three novels about an f-14 squadron now available as a kindle so check out amazon.com for details on that if you'd like to help support the channel please consider using the super thanks the heart icon below or become a patron at patreon.com wardcarroll and in the meantime i look forward to talking to you again soon [Music] foreign

Channel: Ward Carroll

Views: 110,813

Keywords: Ward Carroll, DCS, Top Gun, F-14 Tomcat, air to air combat, F-8 Crusader, Vietnam War, aircraft carriers, Joe Hoser Satrapa, John Lehman, F-15 Eagle, U.S. Navy, fighter pilots, U.S. Air Force

Id: UFJx8Z1eyzM

Length: 12min 24sec (744 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 08 2022