Ask Maverick which he loves more, the jacket or the motorcycle.
He’ll say the jacket. If he’s being honest.
I’m being honest: It’s the coolest thing I own.
It’s iconic.
And I look fantastic wearing it.
And I earned it, dammit!
You got this slip of paper – a chit, in Navy-speak. You took it to gear issue to get your leather jacket after the final exam in ground school.
If you passed.
The Navy wouldn’t give you that gorgeous G-1, the same one my grandfather had been issued in 1943, until you’d successfully completed Aviation Preflight Indoctrination, or API.
All of API, including water survival, land survival, the obstacle course, the fitness test, the mile swim in a flight suit, the academic stuff, and the physical.
Shit! the physical. A full day’s ass-prodding at the Naval Aerospace Medical Institute. If there was anything wrong with you, the docs would find it. I mean, anything. Some dude . . . every nineteenth beat of his heart was off by two zepto-seconds. He was disqualified. Just like that.
Pack up your shit, son, and head to Newport. You ain’t flying. You’re driving ships for a living.
It was the NAMI-Whammy. No leather flight jacket for him.
I didn’t get whammied, thank God.
A few years later, I’m in the Persian Gulf. It’s ninety degrees at midnight. You step outside the skin of the ship, and you’re immediately soaked. You can’t not sweat.
Doesn’t mean I’m not wearing my leather jacket, though. Everything’s over-air conditioned on a ship, what with all the weapons and sensors. It was blazing outside, freezing inside. So I wore my jacket. Everyone did.
But I hadn’t worn it flying. There was no practical reason to do so. I wasn’t making bombing runs over 1940s Germany. But it bothered me that my flight jacket hadn’t left the ground. A flight jacket should fly, dammit!
So, I wait for the next time I’m scheduled for the dawn patrol. It’s the coolest part of the day, right before sunrise. And if you climb high enough and crank the air conditioning, it gets a little chilly in the cockpit.
I put on my jacket and my flight gear over top of it. While I’m strapping in, the copilot’s looking at me like I’m an idiot. Screw him. Has his jacket been flying? Yeah, didn’t think so.
So we go tooling around the Gulf for three hours, and there isn’t much going on. And at first, I’m comfortable in my jacket. But then the sun rises, and things start to warm up. And warm up. And warm up.
And pretty soon, no amount of air conditioning keeps me from sweating.
We land, and I climb out of the aircraft. The back of my flight suit is completely soaked through, and I feel like I’m wearing a wet diaper. One of the ground crew asks me if I pissed myself.
Jackass.
The fur collar is soaked, but my jacket is otherwise fine. It seems happy to have gone flying.
The G-1 was designed to serve a purpose, not just to be an ornament. To take the jacket flying is to pay it its proper respect.
Can’t say the same of the office Halloween party.
Twenty years later, I’m a corporate guy. The email said to dress up.
Dress up for a party with Tom and Brenda from accounting? And no booze?
I’d rather stick a sharp pencil in my eye. But the boss expects everyone to dress up.
I give it zero effort and recycle the same Top Gun costume I’d been wearing to such events for a decade. Out of the closet comes the G-1.
I’m in the elevator on the way to the downstairs conference room for the chili cook-off. Dude dressed as Dracula (I think) turns to me and says, “Awesome! Where’d you get that? eBay?”
Pensacola, I tell him, knowing the reference to the Cradle of Naval Aviation will go right over his head.
And it does.
Makes me think of my grandfather. Did members of The Greatest Generation have to haul their G-1s out of the closet for office Halloween parties?
Doubtful. It would have been disrespectful, both to them and everything a military flight jacket stands for.
Or is supposed to stand for.
I shake it off. I’m just doing what I gotta do.
But I’m not proud of it.
Still, I’ll never stop being proud of having earned my leather flight jacket.
I love you, G-1.
And I’m sorry about the Halloween parties.
But I did take you flying that one time. Remember?
I sure do.
And, for whatever it’s worth, I still look fantastic wearing you.