Mid-April 1980
As had become his norm, Coach was back east at the Pentagon and White House doing what Lampe calls “big-guy stuff and planning.” He’d participated in only two training and scenario-development events. Also, he’d been gone for much of March to execute a clandestine insertion to survey a landing site in the remote Iranian desert. Accompanied only by his one-legged CIA pilot, Coach had spent the early morning hours of April Fools’ Day walking and then burying covert, remotely controlled lights at a place called Dasht-e-Kavir for use as a staging point by Delta on its way farther into Iran. The site was designated Desert One.
In April of 1980, as John Chapman was nearing adulthood, and as the American hostage situation in Iran dragged on, Mike Lampe and Brand X were developing a potential infiltration method along with thirty members of Delta Force’s B Squadron at Yuma Proving Ground, practicing desert overland driving movement using motorcycles and Mules, the four-wheeled Vietnam-era cargo-hauling buggies. They’d spent the entire night struggling with the vehicles in the sand and had discovered that the equipment of the day was not effective at moving men and materiel across adverse terrain, when they were recalled and flown back to North Carolina.
No one in Yuma knew what the recall meant exactly, but it was the first time they’d ever been pulled from training. They hustled back to base to find a lone C-141 waiting to take them home. When they arrived in Charleston they found Coach waiting for them. “It’s a ‘go.’ Gear up, pack up, and get everything loaded on the C-141 we got outside.”
With no time for additional consideration, Lampe and the other eight Combat Controllers who comprised Brand X loaded their lights, beacons, weapons, radios, and the motorcycle Delta had provided for use at Desert One, and left American soil without fanfare.
The first test of Brand X and Delta Force turned the nascent special operations force (SOF) on its head. In the remote darkness, problem after problem plagued the Americans. When the first plane landed, a busload of Iranians emerged unexpectedly from the night, leaving the Rangers no choice but to guard them. Then, the eight Marine RH-53 helicopters (not suited to the desert conditions) to be used in flying the assault force into Tehran suffered mechanical failure after failure during their insertion from their launch platform, the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz.
Lampe and the CCT were establishing the lakebed runways when the next crisis literally exploded. An illicit-fuel smuggler traveling the dirt road came upon the Rangers assigned to keep the airfield’s perimeter secured. When the smuggler wouldn’t stop, they fired a LAW anti-tank rocket and the truck’s fuel load exploded, lighting up the night with a hundred-foot fireball.
Slowly Marine helicopters began to straggle in. “We’re waiting on helicopters, when finally number six limps in and lands. On landing, the bird is inoperative; it’s lost hydraulics. And we get word that it’s the last bird. So we’re on the deck, we still have the fuel smuggler’s tanker burning on the horizon and fifty confused Iranians at gunpoint, the conditions are complete brownout, and we only have five helicopters. Everyone knows our absolute minimum is six.” Lampe paused a moment as he reflected on the significance. “Finally the decision comes. Pack it up. We’re going home.”
In order to evacuate the site, one of the MC-130s needed fuel from a tanker EC-130, forcing two helicopters to reposition. Lampe recalls what happened next: “I’m a hundred yards away when a helo picks up and the sandstorm returns, so I turn my face away from the sandblasting. Out of the corner of my eye I see it lose altitude and begin to drift. And then there was an explosion. There’s still dust everywhere but I can see a huge fireball [as the helo hit the EC-130 refueler next to it]. The flight crew was cooked, done. It was already buttoned up with its fuel hoses, as well as Delta shooters. I recall people pouring out the right paratroop door.”
In the midst of the catastrophe, Lampe and the others, along with Delta Force and aircrew members from the C-130s, managed to recover the victims and load everyone on the remaining MC-130s. As they flew to safety, Mike couldn’t help but wonder, “Did we leave anyone behind? We left an aircrew behind for sure, our fellow warriors.” It was an unfortunate end to America’s first true counterterrorist mission, paid with the lives of eight Marines and airmen. For the men of Brand X, who’d overcome the challenges and successfully accomplished their airfield mission, it was a triumph over neglect by the Air Force, but a bittersweet milestone. Yet they were confident the unit’s combat-demonstrated capabilities would allow it to continue to develop concurrently alongside their Delta counterparts.
* * *
Tom Allen was a soft-spoken and unassuming police officer in Windsor Locks when he volunteered to coach the Windsor Locks High School boys’ diving team, starting with John’s older brother Kevin in 1977. John was in the eighth grade and watched as Kevin learned how to nail dive after dive on the one-meter springboard. Kevin was very aggressive and that caught John’s attention. He decided he wanted to join the high school kids in their diving practices and asked Coach Allen, who approached John’s father to see what he thought. “He’s the best athlete in the whole crew,” replied the father in reference to his third child, so Tom allowed John to practice too. Consequently, when John joined the team in his freshman year, he had an edge over divers from competing schools, even varsity-level athletes.
In John’s first year he became fast friends with sophomore teammate Michael DuPont. Over the next two years, John and Michael pushed each other to reach for bigger and better dives as they traded placing first and second during meets. As with all great coaches, Tom realized his two best divers required little guidance, because their competitiveness and camaraderie pushed them harder than he ever could. What Michael remembers most about his friend was “his competitive drive and the inspiration he gave me while we were diving together. My favorite part about our friendship was during my senior year when we kept trading places on setting new diving records. He broke the record first, then I would beat his record, and back and forth. I believe he still holds the record for high score.”
John’s four years of high school diving were spent getting progressively better. In his freshman year he placed fifth in the State Championships, and the next year, third. By his junior and senior years, he reached number one, making him the top-ranked diver in Connecticut and the first number-one state diver in Windsor Locks High School history.
John graduated in June of 1983 and immediately enrolled at the University of Connecticut—UConn—his life seemingly planned out. He selected engineering as a major and joined the UConn Men’s Diving Team, already ranked number one in their division for the one-meter board and number three on the three-meter board. He thought he would compete throughout college, complete his degree, find the right woman, followed by the right job, and his life would fall into place.
* * *
On 20 October 1983, as John was immersed in his first engineering classes and in UConn’s pool, Coach Carney was enjoying a beer and Thursday night football on television at his home in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Florida State was mopping the floor with Louisville when the phone rang; it was the operations floor of the Joint Special Operations Command at nearby Fort Bragg. Major General Dick Scholtes, the JSOC commander, needed Carney to come in. Leaving Louisville, who were already going down in flames at 51 to 7, he arrived at JSOC’s tightly secured compound at 2200 hours to find the general and his staff poring over maps and satellite imagery of an insignificant island called Grenada.
* * *
Three years earlier, in the summer of 1980, in the immediate aftermath of Desert One, the Coach had testified before the Holloway Commission, and the outcome was the formation of the new Joint Special Operations Command, incorporating the already validated but wounded Delta Force. The command began to take shape as SEAL Team Six (the newest SEAL team, created specifically for JSOC) materialized, Task Force 160 (the Army’s premier helicopter unit) joined, and Coach’s Brand X became Detachment 1 MACOS—short for Military Airlift Command Operations Staff, an innocuous name for the new and now most classified organization in the Air Force. “Det 1” was to be the Air Force’s contribution to the new command. No one involved could have imagined that it would transform into the most dynamic and diverse special operations unit in the Air Force.
At the time, the boys in Det 1 were living like vagabonds out of the hangar in Charleston Air Force Base, South Carolina. “I’ve got good news and bad news,” the Coach announced one day shortly after they’d returned to the air base from planning a second Iranian hostage crisis rescue attempt that fall. “The good news is we’re gonna form our own standalone unit.”
“What’s the bad news?” queried Mike Lampe.
“It’s going to be at Fort Bragg so we can be next to Delta. We’re moving to Fayettenam,” he said, invoking the alternative and derisive soldiers’ name for the nearby town of Fayetteville, North Carolina.
When the team moved to Pope Air Force Base on Fort Bragg in 1981, the men lived out of a derelict mobile trailer until things improved. “We got a second mobile home,” said Lampe flatly of their “improved” digs. By October of 1983, when Coach was called to JSOC, Det 1 had grown to twenty-four men and they were better trained (though lacking in facilities), having built on three years of exercises with the Rangers and Delta.
On 13 October 1983, as Coach’s Combat Controllers were hitting their stride in the States, the latest in a series of coups had replaced the Grenadian Marxist leader, Maurice Bishop, after he’d made overtures to the US and was placed under house arrest. On the seventeenth, Bishop was freed by supporters but assassinated three days later, and the tiny nation descended into twenty-four-hour shoot-on-sight martial law. In addition to a heavy Cuban presence and the extension of Soviet influence into America’s sphere, there were concerns in Washington about several hundred American medical students and tourists under potential threat on the island. The US plan was for the Rangers and CCT to seize Grenada’s Point Salines International Airport as an airhead in order to introduce the 82nd Airborne and other follow-on forces. Delta would rescue the medical students from their True Blue medical campus near Point Salines, while CCT established the airhead and then ran the international airport within thirty minutes of jumping onto the airfield, a metric that would become an advertised standard that remains to this day.
On the evening of 24 October, the mission was green-lighted. The Controllers had been working nonstop for days in the muggy Georgia climate alongside the men of the 1st Ranger Battalion, with very little rest. After they’d loaded the aircraft, despite the unknowns facing them, they gratefully took the opportunity to catch some desperately needed sleep.
In flight, the Rangers and Controllers began to don their parachutes for the five-hundred-foot paradrop when they were a few hours out. “Some guys put on reserves, others didn’t.” The drop was three hundred feet below the standard eight-hundred-foot combat altitude so as to fly under the antiaircraft guns positioned on hills ringing Point Salines. Because the guns could not depress their barrels below level, it was believed the invasion aircraft should be safe from the point-blank fire.
The entire force was invading with the dawn because the Marines had no nighttime capability and were seizing the island’s other initial strategic object, Pearls Airport, at H-hour, as the start of the invasion was unimaginatively named. Failing to recognize (or possibly ignoring) the still painful lessons of Desert One, the Joint Staff pushed opportunities for each service to participate at the expense of operational applicability.
“I can see the coast and it looks low. Seems a lot lower than five hundred fucking feet, when we suddenly pop up. I remember seeing tracers from the triple A, but they’re going over us. And then fuck, I don’t have a reserve chute,” recalls Lampe.
He said a little prayer for the rigger who packed his parachute and jumped out the left troop door. He exited the plane in the morning light, feeling completely naked as he waited for bullets to slam into his body and was yanked horizontally by the parachute’s deployment as he dropped out the door.
On the airfield, with moments to spare, the CCT as air traffic control (ATC) cleared the first aircraft for landing and they were in business, as plane after plane was landed and guided to its designated parking spot. “The planes are dumping their cargo by doing combat offloads before making rapid departures. They’d drop the ramp, hit the throttle, and pallets of gear or gun jeeps would roll out the back.” Combat Control ran the airfield for the duration of combat operations until civil control of the field could be returned to airport authorities, US forces had stabilized the island, containing Cuban forces, and the rescue of 233 American students at True Blue medical school was complete.
The CCT were spread among the Delta Force troops to take down other designated targets, their key job controlling airstrikes, particularly by the AC-130 gunships. Despite setbacks and interservice politics, the operation was a success for CCT as they ran the biggest contingency airport in US history and performed flawlessly with their Delta teammates. Grenada represented the maturation of Det 1 into the shape it would maintain for the next decade as it continued to grow alongside Delta and SEAL Team Six.
* * *
John Chapman watched the news of the invasion with the rest of America, mildly interested in the fact that it took place, but it didn’t resonate with the freshman. He was too busy failing his classes. By the time the invasion was over and the semester ended, his grades were so poor he was ineligible to compete as a diver. He was certainly a smart young man, but as his sister Lori recalls John’s own words, “Studying wasn’t his ‘thing’; doing was his thing.”
Like most young men disinterested in college, John returned home and, as he mulled over the Air Force, took a job as a mechanic and tow truck driver. Then, in the third week of August 1985, John enlisted in the Air Force. He promised his mother he’d try something “safe,” selecting information systems specialist as a job. To Lori, he was more to the point: “I need to do something more than stay in Windsor Locks my whole life. I want to see the world; I can’t stay here.”
While at Lackland AFB, Texas, John attended a CCT recruiting briefing given to all male basic trainees. Even though he was contracted with the Air Force to attend information systems technician training, Combat Control is authorized to recruit from among all eligible candidates, and if interested, any qualified trainee can relinquish their Air Force Specialty Code and try out. If they meet the standards of a Flying Class II physical examination and pass the CCT physical ability and stamina test (PAST), they’re in.1 Watching the video of Controllers jumping from planes, riding motorcycles, scuba diving, calling airstrikes, and conducting assault-zone landings hit John right where he desired most: challenge and excitement.
His promise to his mother remained steadfast, however, and he left the alternate Combat Control future unexplored. After completing basic and technical training at Keesler Air Force Base, Mississippi, John arrived for his first duty assignment at Lowry Air Force Base in Aurora, Colorado, in February 1986. He made the most of his new life and career, enjoying the Air Force, but soon the urge to do something “more” returned. Unfortunately, he was obligated to his job for a minimum of three years—chained to a keyboard and monitor. By late 1988 he’d decided that he was going to try and cross-train into CCT.
He’d loosely followed Combat Control, reading about what little was known from Grenada as well as Desert One and the wars in Laos and Vietnam, vowing to learn everything possible and preparing for the PAST test relentlessly. Feeling that he’d kept his promise to his mom by trying something safer first, when three years had passed he submitted his cross-training paperwork. All he wanted was a shot—just one—to prove he could do something so difficult it would elevate him to the top 1 percent of military men.
His approval arrived in the spring of 1989 and John returned to Lackland Air Force Base that summer to attend the Combat Control Indoctrination Course—known informally as indoc—the toughest school in the pipeline and where the vast majority of volunteers wash out. He knew that 90 percent of the candidates who tried out for CCT failed to make it through training. He didn’t know what exactly a 10 percent success rate translated into for those who couldn’t or didn’t have the heart to make it, but clearly there were many hazards and unknowns ahead. Yet it was merely the first of ten Army, Navy, and Air Force courses he needed to navigate to become a qualified Combat Controller. It would be a long year and a half.
* * *
Mike Lampe and Det 1 had changed much in the years between the Grenada invasion and the time of John Chapman’s cross-training approval. By 1989, Lampe had been promoted to chief master sergeant and was the unit’s senior enlisted manager (the most senior enlisted position in an Air Force squadron). The Coach had been promoted and had moved on, and the unit continued to go through a series of name changes to mask its identity and purpose.2 He and the new commander, Major Craig Brotchie, had also implemented a formal selection process that mirrored Delta Force’s famous assessment, which culminates in “the long walk,” but with one distinct difference: Delta Force was open to any member of the Army regardless of background, whereas the (now) 1724th Special Tactics Squadron—referred to obliquely as “the Hill” for its location on the JSOC compound above Pope Air Force Base—only considered volunteers who were current combat-deployable Combat Controllers with two years of operational experience and a recommendation from the individual’s commander.
As Chapman arrived at “indoc” in the summer of 1989, another crisis developed. Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian dictator, had ignored the country’s presidential election results, choosing to remain in power while also managing his lucrative cocaine shipping empire. By 15 December, Noriega, possibly under the influence of his own product, declared a state of war existed between his country and the US. The next day, Panamanian Defense Forces killed a US Marine and then accosted a Navy lieutenant and his wife, physically abusing the couple. On 17 December, President George H. W. Bush obliged the dictator’s call for war by green-lighting “Operation Just Cause,” the invasion of Panama.
Mike Lampe was home on 16 December when his beeper went off. His boys, seeing the news on television, attempted to keep their father from leaving, but he promised he’d be back in time to drive the family on its planned Christmas vacation to New Hampshire.
At the unit, he learned the operation they’d rehearsed seven times had the green light. Again, JSOC would be leading America’s latest major overseas intervention (the nation had eschewed a declaration of war, something it hadn’t done since World War II, preferring to conduct “named operations”)—this one, the largest airborne invasion since the Second World War—and as was becoming tradition, CCT would enter the theater ahead of their JSOC counterparts.
On 20 December, just after midnight, the invasion arrived in thirty C-130s over Rio Hato and Omar Torrijos (Tocumen) airports. The CCT “bike chasers,” the nickname given to the men who followed motorcycles dropped for use in clearing the runways of obstacles, were the first parachutists to jump from the lead aircraft, seizing the international airports, literally making them “First There,” CCT’s motto. Before any of the forces jumped, however, three CCT quietly infiltrated the Omar Torrijos airfield to establish and assess the airport and then to control the air invasion.
It was the largest employment of Combat Controllers in history at the time, and the CCT manpower requirements were so extreme that the 1724th was forced to augment its missions with men from the 1723rd Special Tactics Squadron at Hurlburt Field, Florida.
As advertised, within thirty minutes of jumping into the darkness, the Controllers were running both airfields, and the number of aircraft under their control for landing, moving to take down multiple targets throughout the country, and close airstrikes was staggering—171 different special operations airplanes and a near-equal number of helicopters were moving in the nighttime airspace over the tiny Central American country. Almost all of them were under the direction or guidance of CCT. The twenty-by-twenty-mile airspace was roughly equivalent to the area inside the Washington, DC, beltway. Despite no radar usage or prepublished air plans, every single flight maintained safe separation. Not only were there no air-to-air mishaps, there wasn’t a single ground incident or a near miss. The only aircraft lost during the invasion either crashed or were shot down.
As for Mike Lampe, he’d managed to join a Ranger platoon as they raided Noriega’s beachfront hideaway near Rio Hato the day after the invasion began. During the search for potential intelligence as to Noriega’s whereabouts, the Rangers rifled through the dictator’s office. They’d missed him by a mere fifteen minutes but didn’t come away empty-handed. In Noriega’s desk were hundreds of 14-karat gold paper clips. A Ranger gave one to Lampe who, upon returning home long after Christmas was over, gave it to his wife as a Christmas present. Her gift to him was a beautifully wrapped shoebox stuffed with civilian “Help Wanted” employment advertisements.