We have all seen the Top Gun movies. The words Maverick, Iceman, Goose have all entered the popular lexicon. Tom Cruise’s fame still pivots on the success of the Top Gun franchise. T-shirts emblazoned with the quote ‘talk to me Goose’ still sell today.

Val Kilmer still gets requests (despite his throat cancer) to repeat his character’s famous catchphrase ‘you can be my wingman anytime.’ But how many of us know that the first Top Guns, Air Force pilots awarded the honour of outstanding air combat skills, were actually African American?

The story in Top Gun is fictional, but the Tuskegee airmen were definitely real. The first African American fighter pilots, trained decades before the heavily fictionalised version of Navy air pilots portrayed in Top Gun, the members of the 332nd Fighter Group pilots won the first ever Fighter Gunnery Meet in 1949. They were the first Top Guns, and their accomplishment was ignored for the next 55 years.

The gunnery meet was held in May 1949 at the Las Vegas Air Force base, and saw squadrons from around the nation gather for the fighter competition. Retired Lt. Col. James Harvey III, one of the first African American pilots, commented years later that everyone, especially the all white officers, were stunned. The Tuskegee airmen, African Americans, won the competition.

Along with Harvey, Captain Alva Temple, 1st Lt. Harry Stewart and alternate 1st Lt. Halbert Alexander, collectively won the first propeller-driven aircraft fighter gunnery meet. Harvey recalled that there was dead silence at the time of their win. Not only was there no applause, but long-festering resentment at the success of the black American pilot team. The top gun trophy mysteriously disappeared, lost in the sands of time for decades.

This was the time of legalised segregation, and the Tuskegee pilots were put in their place. Lt. Col. Harvey, when training at the military base in Tuskegee, Alabama, was told by a local sheriff ‘if I see you again, I’ll blow your brains out.’ Approximately 1000 African American air men served in the US Air Force between 1941 and 1946. The immediate needs of the war outweighed the requirements of military segregation.

Harvey fought missions in the Korean War. Shunned after returning from service, he and his fellow Tuskegee airmen were acknowledged with a plaque commemorating them at the Las Vegas Air Force base in 2022, 73 years after their Top Gun victory.

To be sure, this is not an advertisement for air force recruitment. The role of the US Air Force is to expand the military and economic power of the financial oligarchy that runs the United States. Movies such as the Top Gun franchise serve not only as recruiting tools, but also to obfuscate the suffering, blood and guts spilled, and lethal casualties of aerial warfare.

Savagery from the skies can become normalised if we keep telling ourselves that the personnel who drop the bombs are heroes to be admired. Indeed, in this age of drone strikes – a policy escalated and routinised under the first African American president Obama – the casualties of aerial warfare can seem even further distant and out of sight to Anglophone audiences.

Another African American first – an accomplishment for which the originator has been marginalised – was the use of radar to calculate the speed of the Moon. The astrophysicist responsible was Walter McAfee (1914 – 1995). An African American whose knowledge of mathematics was impressive, he joined Project Diana in the 1940s.

McAfee joined the United States Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories in 1942. The US military wanted a more effective way to spy on its enemies; would radio signals break through the ionosphere? Bouncing radar echoing signals off the Moon – which had been tried before and failed – was a practice requirement of the Diana Project.

Enter Walter McAfee – and he calculated how to bounce radar signals off the Moon. In January 1946, he and his colleagues successfully detected the returning radar echo signals from the Moon. This achievement not only provided the military with an edge in radar technology, it also opened the way for radar astronomy, a civilian and scientific offshoot from the original military purpose of McAfee’s work. If it were not for him, travel to the Moon would have remained a practical impossibility.

McAfee was subsequently shunned, and his achievement were forgotten outside of the American military-scientific community. It is important to note that the African American was marginalised; at the same time, NASA, and other American scientific institutions, deliberately and secretly recruited ex-Nazi scientists, providing sanctuary for scientists whose work led to the deaths of millions in Europe.

Decades after McAfee’s accomplishments, he was finally honoured as a pioneering astrophysicist.

Hollywood has a cottage industry of making films about how American military veterans are treated poorly. The old cliche of the allegedly mistreated Vietnam veteran has done the rounds through numerous Hollywood movies. That myth has gained wide currency, drumming up public sympathy for the soldiers participating in imperialist wars overseas.

Let us see if Hollywood will make movies about the mistreatment and shunning of African American veterans, and personnel who served in various capacities. After serving their nation (in both world wars), African American veterans returned to a country that rejected and marginalised them.

These are historical matters, to be sure, and we have come a long way since then. The way we teach history impacts the way we see ourselves, and influences our contemporary choices. A general public that views the American military as heroes will resist attempts to hold US soldiers to account for their crimes. Let’s honour the African Americans who served, but let us also avoid masking imperialism with the fig leaf of inclusivity.