Tom Hopkins grew up in a small Kansas town where everyone knew your name and the Air Force base on the edge of town meant some fathers never came home. His own father, an Air Force bomber pilot who had survived flying unarmed DC-3s over the Himalayan mountains during World War II, died in a B-47 crash at Goose Bay Labrador in 1959. Tom was twelve years old. His older brother gathered the boys in a closet and told them: no crying, no fussing — Mom needs us. It was the first lesson Tom ever learned about what it means to serve.
By 1966, Tom was a college student in Sacramento who had just lost his student deferment. Rather than wait for a draft notice, he drove his cousin to the Navy recruiter, and walked out enlisted himself. Over the next 20 years, he would serve aboard the USS Ticonderoga, the USS Kennedy, and multiple anti-submarine warfare squadrons, flying first as an acoustic operator aboard the propeller-driven S-2 Tracker and later on the computerized S-3 Viking. His job, simply put, was to find submarines in a very big ocean. He used sonobuoys, magnetic anomaly detectors, slide rules, and eventually onboard computers to track Soviet and Chinese targets. In one harrowing mission off Hainan Island, his ECM scope lit up with two simultaneous fire control lock-ons from a Chinese surface ship that nearly mistook his slow, propeller-driven S-2 for a threat worth shooting down.
The stories Tom tells in Episode 42 of Ask a Vet span the full range of what naval aviation looks like from the back seat: the eight carrier approaches in a single night behind an admiral’s son who could barely fly; the engine failure that had him reviewing bailout procedures in his head while the ship’s deck rushed up to meet them; the cold catapult shot that nearly put his S-3 into the Mediterranean; and the night he spent aboard the diesel submarine USS Sabalo, steering it off course while learning first-hand just how loud an S-2 sounds when it passes overhead underwater. He retired after exactly 20 years and two days– the same length of service, he notes quietly, that his father never quite finished.
Tom is now in his eighties, flying with the Civil Air Patrol out of Spanish Fork, Utah, where he serves as a mission observer aboard Cessna 182s intercepted by F-35s during training exercises near Hill Air Force Base. He lost his pilot’s medical due to a heart condition but has not stopped flying. In a final reflection, he says the Navy gave him something his brothers never found in their shorter enlistments: purpose, adventure, and the daily privilege of getting off the ship and going to play.
Catch Tom’s full story — and every episode of Ask A Vet — on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and anywhere else you listen.