He had thirteen American kills, a colonel’s rank, and a name that made young U.S. pilots go quiet: Colonel Toon. He was North Vietnam’s deadliest ace, the ghost every Navy flier feared meeting over Haiphong. There was only one problem with the legend of Colonel Toon. He may never have existed at all.

The story starts with a real dogfight — one of the most famous in the history of naval aviation — and ends with a mystery that historians are still arguing about.

10 May 1972

Lieutenant Randy “Duke” Cunningham was heading home. Flying an F-4J Phantom II from the carrier USS Constellation, callsign “Showtime 100,” with Willie Driscoll in the back seat running the radar, he had just come off a strike near Haiphong. That day he had already downed two MiG-17s. Then a third Fresco came at him nose-on, cannons winking, and refused to die.

What followed was not a modern missile duel but an old-fashioned knife fight. The two aircraft went vertical, then into a rolling scissors, each pilot trying to force the other out in front. The MiG matched Cunningham climb for climb, canopy to canopy, at one point just a hundred yards away. It was everything American aircrews had been told the MiG-17 could not do against a Phantom.

The shot

The fight bled speed until both jets were wallowing near 150 knots — the MiG’s home turf, not the Phantom’s. Cunningham chopped his throttle, popped his speed brakes, and let the MiG overshoot. When it pitched up to run, he fired his third Sidewinder.

For a heartbeat the missile seemed to miss. Then a flash, black smoke, and the MiG-17 fell away and hit the ground at a shallow angle. It was Cunningham and Driscoll’s fifth kill — making them the only U.S. Navy aces of the entire war. Minutes later a surface-to-air missile caught their Phantom near the coast; the two men ejected into the South China Sea and were rescued.

Out to Sea on Rudder and Throttle

The fight over, Showtime 100 turned for the coast. Near Nam Dinh an SA-2 surface-to-air missile exploded close to the Phantom. In Cunningham’s account the hydraulics bled away, a fire started and the jet pitched nose up. With the flight controls failing, he kept it heading for the Gulf of Tonkin by rolling it with rudder and throttle as it climbed and dived. A few miles out to sea it finally departed into a spin. Both men ejected over the water and were picked up by Navy rescue helicopters.

The three MiG-17s that day followed a MiG-21 on 19 January 1972 and another MiG-17 on 8 May. Five victories made Cunningham and Driscoll the first American aces of the Vietnam War, ahead of the US Air Force’s Steve Ritchie, and the only Navy aces of the war. Both received the Navy Cross.

View this post on Instagram

Chasing a ghost

After the war, when researchers went looking for Colonel Toon in North Vietnamese archives, they found nothing. No service record, no photograph, no biography — a strange absence for a national hero with thirteen victories. Most historians now believe Toon was a myth: a name that drifted through American ready rooms and hardened into a legend, perhaps loosely inspired by genuine aces like Nguyen Van Coc.

That does not make the pilot Cunningham fought any less real, or any less good. Whoever sat in that MiG-17 that day flew one of the finest defensive fights of the war.

Why the myth endured

Legends need a villain, and Colonel Toon was a perfect one — faceless, deadly, and finally beaten by American skill and training. His defeat became the story the U.S. Navy wanted to tell about its new Top Gun school: that preparation, not luck, won dogfights. Whether or not Toon was ever a man, he became something more useful — a symbol. And the aircrew who “killed” him flew home into history.

After the War

Both men took their experience to TOPGUN, the Navy Fighter Weapons School at Naval Air Station Miramar. Driscoll, who flew 170 combat missions, became an instructor there and later taught on the F-14 Tomcat with VF-124; he has spoken to every TOPGUN graduating class. Cunningham instructed at TOPGUN, served as executive officer and commanding officer of the adversary squadron VF-126 and retired as a commander in 1987.

His later life was far less heroic. Elected to Congress for San Diego in 1990, he served eight terms before pleading guilty in 2005 to taking bribes from defence contractors. He was sentenced in March 2006 to eight years and four months in prison, and was pardoned by President Trump in 2021. Duke Cunningham died in August 2025 in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the age of 83.

Sources: The Aviation Geek Club; MilitaryHistoryNow; SOFREP; George Hall, “Top Gun”; Wikipedia (“Colonel Tomb”). Cunningham quote via his own account of the engagement.