In the process of digging out from my move, I came across this little tidbit from my days back in Nevada. The folks I had working for me loved to “alter” Dilbert cartoons and post them in our coffee break room. Seeing this particular cartoon brought back some forgotten memories.
With justifiable pride, Lex recalls fondly his days as an instructor at Topgun. More properly know as the N7 Directorate of the Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center.(NSAWC).
NSAWC was formed from the merger of Topgun, CAEWWS (Carrier Airborne Early Warning Weapons School) and the Navy’s strike warfare center. None of the organizations involved wanted the merger and it was driven through by the tenacity of RADM Bernie Smith who believed it was the way forward. He served as the first commander of NSAWC.
At the time there was great pressure to get folks involved to be indentified as part of one unit. The guys at Topgun really did not like that and in my first exposure to the power of the Topgun mafia within the Navy, they got a lot of their way. They used to have seperate social events from the rest of the staff, and they wore different patches and T-shirts from the other flyers. The latter item caused a great deal of friction from the other entities involved who had to give up their patches and name tags etc, in favor of the triangular NSAWC patch and standardized nametag. Since that time, cooler heads have prevailed and each of the weapons schools at NSAWC has been allowed to reassert some of its identity. However at the time it was a source real friction for the non-Topgun JO’s. (After all the TOPGUN program was brought down from Mt Zion by Moses was it not? It was on the third and the fourth tablets…e.g. holy writ.)
Idle hands being the devil’s workshop, the following little piece of manga ensued:
There were some others, not so flattering about yours truly, so when I found them last week I put them back in the box. Perhaps over the next few months I’ll publish them. Nothing like JO’s with time on their hands.