Livin’ the Dream: Story of a Tailhook Pilot

PURPOSE

“In December of 1992 the USS Ranger sailed off the coast of Somalia in support of Operation Restore Hope. I flew the very first mission of the airwing down the coastline to perform electronic surveillance on any threatening radar signatures, while at the same time our sister squadron had an F-14 equipped with a TARPS pod take aerial photography of critical regions. (The dramatic movie Blackhawk Down featured the long joint military operation which ensued). When we returned to the ship, the first duty after getting debriefed on our carrier landing was to hit the dirty shirt mess where we could grab a bite to eat. The small television in the top corner of this cafeteria always played CNN news, and I’ll never forget how they were already reporting our surprising overflight of Somalia within an hour of the actual event! So what does this personal account have to do with anything decades later? Well, many of the details reported by the CNN news crew were entirely wrong!” – Interview with “Pete” Jalajas, 2021

Now, it wasn’t for Pete Jalajas to know if the Department of Defense had purposely misled the public on the story or whether the news reporters just made their best educated guess knowing the basic U.S. military assets in the theater of operation. That doesn’t matter. The point is that propaganda, intelligence operations, bad sources of information, biased or agenda-driven journalism, malicious calumny and more, can easily mislead the public in today’s techno-frenzy world. Mainstream and social media certainly creates our reality, as distorted as it might be at times. So, to be kind to an honorable career of service in the Navy, Peter’s friends have documented this short snapshot of a retired old man (using primary source documents), hoping that it might inspire others to live a meaningful life in pursuit of excellence, in pursuit of the Truth: Livin’ the Dream!