Leaders Eat Last: What 27 Years in an F-16 Squadron Actually Taught Him

Twenty-seven years in the Air Force, and Captain Makatura says it like he’s the one who got something out of the deal. By the end of our hour and a quarter together, I understood why.

Who Mak is, and why he wrote the book

Michael Makatura flew F-16s out of Hahn Air Base in Cold War Germany, deployed with the 10th Tactical Fighter Squadron, and eventually found himself in Desert Storm. He’s spent the years since turning that service into a book — and he told me flat out why he wrote it: to honor the men and women he served with. Not himself. Them. That distinction runs through everything he told me.

The Hog Log

One detail from the episode has stuck with me since we stopped recording. On the duty desk of the 10th — the operational hub of the squadron, where pilots checked in before every mission — sat a plain military-issue green notebook. They called it the Hog Log. Nothing official about it. Anybody in the squadron, any rank, could write anything in it, as long as they signed their name. It was where guys who’d just come back from flying something intense, or something terrifying, or something that made no sense to talk about anywhere else, put it down on paper. Mak called it an outlet. Listening to him describe it, it sounded like something closer to a squadron’s collective diary — proof that the people who fly fighter jets for a living are still just people who need somewhere to put what they’re carrying.

You don’t give yourself a call sign

If you want to understand squadron culture, Mak says, start here: nobody picks their own call sign. A young lieutenant shows up at the 10th fresh off F-16 qualification, confident, having beaten out serious competition to get there — and he’s usually still going by whatever tough-guy name he earned in pilot training. Thor. Maverick. Viper. Ace.

That doesn’t survive first contact with the squadron.

Mak walked me through the ritual: a veteran pilot introduces himself to the new guy — “Hey, I’m Nundog” — asks his call sign, hears “Thor,” and deadpans, “I think we’re going to call you Dog S**t.” Then the rest of the squadron descends. It sounds like hazing, and in a sense it is, but Mak was clear about the actual purpose underneath the joke: you’re not in pilot training anymore, you’re flying next to people whose lives depend on you staying humble, and a squadron has exactly one reliable way to strip an overconfident 24-year-old down to size before it matters in the air.

It’s also just funny. Mak still remembers the names three decades later.

“Leaders eat last”

There’s an old saying Mak brought up almost in passing, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since: leaders eat last. He wasn’t talking about a chow line. He meant it as the whole job description — you subordinate your comfort, your ego, everything, to the mission and to the people under you. “You’ve got to die to self,” he told me. Break the selfish instinct everybody starts with. It’s about as clean a definition of leadership as I’ve heard on this show.

Desert Storm, 6.8 Gs, and going dark

The back half of our conversation moves into Desert Storm, which Mak experienced secondhand at first — he wasn’t deployed for it himself, so part of his book leans on a friend’s war journal to tell that part of the story honestly. But he does have his own hair-raising moment in an F-16, and he told it to me in real time, second by second: inverted, pulling Gs to the left, tensing every muscle to keep blood in his brain, watching the G-meter climb — 4.5, 6.8 — and then nothing. He blacked out mid-maneuver. He still doesn’t know if he pulled 9 Gs that day. His backseat friend Frenchy says he did. Mak believes him, because the next thing he remembers is coming to and hearing Frenchy laughing over the intercom.

The part that got me

Late in the episode, almost as an aside, Mak told me about his friend JD — a squadron mate, gone too young, too suddenly. Mak was the one who eulogized him at the funeral. And when the moment called for it, he reached back for one of their old squadron bits — a running joke between the two of them — and used it one more time, at the end, so JD would know he was loved.

That’s the whole episode in miniature, honestly. Underneath the F-16s and the call signs and the war stories is a group of people who took care of each other, needled each other, buried each other, and — twenty-seven years on — still write books to make sure the rest of us don’t forget any of it.

Listen to the full conversation with Michael Makatura on The Sunday Draft, out now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or watch it on YouTube.

If you know someone who served, or someone who’d get something out of hearing what squadron life actually felt like, send them this one.

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