What follows is a select history of one of the deadliest and least-known forces in the history of human warfare. It begins, as many heroic combat tales do, with a crisis.
It’s also the story of one man, John Chapman, who would earn the nation’s highest honor for bravery when he saved the lives of twenty-three comrades at the willing cost of his own.
Finally, it is the history of John Chapman’s fellow Combat Controllers during Operation Anaconda, America’s first major operation in its ongoing Global War on Terror. How a handful of Combat Controllers managed to stave off disaster and destroy Al Qaeda and Taliban forces by the score using their unique expertise and wits has gone down in history, even as the doomed operation continues to reveal its secrets to this day.
The history of the men of the Combat Control Teams (known universally by the acronym CCT, whether applied collectively or to an individual) laid down in these pages is by no measure comprehensive; rather it is representative, a distillation of commitment, capability, success, and loss. Delta Force officer Tom Greer, who led the hunt for Osama bin Laden, writes in his book Kill Bin Laden that Combat Controllers are “the best-rounded and uniquely trained operators on the planet. The initial training ‘pipeline’ for an Air Force special tactics squadron Combat Controller costs twice as much time and sweat as does the journey to become a Navy SEAL or Delta operator.…And that is just to get to a place where they can do the job for which they are really trained, calling those deadly airstrikes.”
What’s unique about the role of CCT is that wherever the need arises, they are there. In Kill Bin Laden, Greer notes that, “In the relatively finite black SOF world, assaulters and snipers are a dime a dozen. Yes, these men are trained in multiple deadly skill sets and the dark arts of counterterrorism. But…Just because you are the best of the best does not mean you are the best at everything. Any Delta operator can vouch for the capabilities of the Air Force Combat Controllers, and very rarely goes on a ‘hit’ without the men who wear the scarlet berets.” CCT is not permanently assigned to the Special Forces (SF) teams or SEAL platoons they fight alongside but they are attached, to use military parlance (think integrated or embedded), when needed for combat operations. Consequently, in America’s longest-running war, the men of Air Force Combat Control collect, in aggregate, more combat action than their special operations counterparts in the Navy and Army—making some of them the most experienced veterans in all of America’s previous wars. During global humanitarian crises, they are often the first to arrive, unsupported, to deliver salvation where no other first responders can. Their motto: “First There.”
Born of America’s disastrous first attempts to insert airborne forces into battle during World War II, Combat Control predates their better-known SEAL and Special Forces counterparts, with whom they’ve served silently for decades in some of the most dramatic missions in US history. This is the story of one such mission.