The exercise phrase was “red and free”. Every other crew in the Mediterranean that morning understood what it meant: you are cleared to simulate an engagement. Call the shot, do not take it.

On 22 September 1987, off Sardinia, a US Navy F-14A Tomcat of VF-74 heard those words and fired a live AIM-9 Sidewinder into the tail of a US Air Force RF-4C Phantom II. Two American airmen ejected at around 550 knots. One of them never really recovered.

Twenty-five years later, the man who fired the missile was nominated for promotion to rear admiral, and the man he shot down found out about it from a phone call.

A Perfectly Ordinary Morning

The Phantom’s job that day was mundane. Display Determination was a NATO exercise, and Vodka 51 had been sent to find USS Saratoga and read her hull number. That was the mission: get close enough to identify the ship visually, and go home.

Finding a carrier meant flying at a carrier, which meant the carrier’s fighters would come out to meet you. That was the whole game, and both sides had played it for years.

It is worth pausing on what an RF-4C was. It carried no guns and no missiles. The nose that would have held a radar held cameras instead. The crew’s entire defence was speed, and the confident knowledge that nobody in a NATO exercise was going to shoot at them.

Two Words, Two Meanings

The F-14 intercepted. Its radar intercept officer called a simulated shot, which is what the exercise required. Strike control passed a weapons status of red and free.

In exercise phraseology that authorised a simulated engagement. Dorsey appears to have taken it literally. Accounts of the exact words exchanged in the cockpit differ between sources, but they agree on the substance: Dorsey questioned whether he was being told to shoot, his back-seater answered in the affirmative without grasping that the question was about a live missile, and Dorsey fired one.

The Sidewinder took the Phantom’s tail off. Ross and Sprouse ejected into the Mediterranean at high speed and were picked up by a helicopter from the ship they had been sent to photograph.

What the Navy Concluded

The finding was unusually blunt. This was not filed as an accident.

The same review described an “illogical act” that raised “substantial doubt as to his capacity for good, sound judgment”. Dorsey kept his wings but never flew a Navy aircraft again. He left active duty in 1991, took a law degree, and continued to serve as an intelligence officer in the reserves, where he was promoted steadily.

The Two Careers

Mike Ross, the Phantom’s pilot, spent the following decade having his spine repaired. He was medically retired in 1997. He eventually retired as a colonel.

In 2012, Dorsey’s name went forward for promotion to rear admiral. Ross learned of it and did not keep quiet.

Ross also pointed out the obvious institutional failure: somebody had put a name forward for flag rank without anyone checking what was in the file. The Senate Armed Services Committee, once it knew, declined to act on the nomination. Dorsey retired in 2014 without the star.

Why It Still Gets Told

Friendly fire is usually a story about fog: bad information, bad weather, a target that genuinely looked like something else. This one has none of that. The weather was fine, the Phantom was exactly where the exercise said it would be, and everyone involved knew it was an exercise.

What failed was a phrase. Two words that meant one thing to everybody in the Mediterranean and something else to one man in one cockpit, with a live missile on the rail and three seconds to decide.

Sources: Washington Times reporting by Rowan Scarborough, 2012 and 2013; The War Zone; We Are The Mighty; The Aviation Geek Club; Wikipedia (VF-74).