July 1989
Six months before the Panama invasion, Sergeant John Chapman returned to Lackland Air Force Base, only this time his purpose had crystallized. He was starting a journey of self-discipline and performance like nothing before. High school diving was based on one’s own competitive desire to win. For all who dared, the CCT pipeline was a standard by which they measured themselves, yet it was far beyond anything John had ever experienced. If he could make it through the next year plus, his life would be forever differentiated from the masses, he knew that, but what was it that crushed hardy men and drove scores of them to quit in the first weeks of training? Whatever it was, he thought, as he emerged from the taxi in front of his first home on this new journey, he’d see for himself soon enough.
Operating Location-H—OL-H for short—occupied a pair of Vietnam-era two-story barracks in the “low-rent district” of Lackland AFB. The buildings were tired: Even the bland tan and dark brown trim advertised neglect. Referred to by the young men there to test themselves as “the oh-el” or “indoc,” it stood as the gatekeeper for each man’s ticket to ride the remainder of the pipe. In front of the building was a symbol of a bygone era, an H-model Huey helicopter mounted on a pole, appearing to swoop toward those who walked the sidewalk as if it were setting up a gun run on the unsuspecting. Across the concrete pad in front of the building, John was greeted by a fifty-by-twenty-foot wood-bordered dirt patch, home to a set of dip bars and pull-up bars, and two thirty-foot ropes that hung from a wooden arch. Between the ropes, hanging from the crossbeam at the top, was a shiny brass bell. At the door was a sign: OL-H MACOS, with the motto QUALITY NOT QUANTITY stenciled across the center. On each side were two military flashes, modern versions of European coats of arms. One displayed an angel, wings spread above her head, two arms stretched around a globe as if embracing it, and the motto THAT OTHERS MAY LIVE below the name USAF Pararescue. The second was bordered by a wreath, leaves pointing to the top, the center a globe with latitude and longitude lines. A yellow lightning bolt stretched diagonally from upper right to lower left; below the bolt in the lower-right corner was an eight-pointed compass rose, and opposite was a parachute. Across the bottom was written “U.S.A.F. Combat Control.” Between the tips of the wreath at the top, a motto: FIRST THERE.
More than 120 men were set to start John’s class in a few weeks. OL-H, as the sign in front announced, was for Pararescue (PJ) trainees and potential Combat Controllers alike. The Air Force’s undisputed toughest jobs had much in common, including sharing two-thirds of the pipeline training, so they started together. Most of the initial 120 men trying out were there to become PJs, the better advertised and better known of the two careers. Roughly fifty of the men were there to become CCT.
Arriving around the same time as Chapman, Joe Maynor was the absolute embodiment of a Tennessee country boy. His hometown of Athens was little more than a village sixty miles north of the “big city,” Chattanooga. At basic he’d attended the recruiting brief and thought, Let’s see where this takes us. He survived the PAST test and flight physical examination and, upon graduation from basic, was met by another indoc candidate to be taken to the OL-H. Candidates were not allowed to walk anywhere, they ran…to lunch, to training, to the base exchange, to check-in. And so, along with a few other hardy (or foolhardy) souls, Joe double-timed it to his new destination wondering if perhaps he’d made a mistake, dragging his duffel bag and all his worldly possessions as he ran through the Texas summer heat, dripping sweat before he’d even checked in.
Joe and John were processed along with many other nameless men. Arriving candidates were treated with disdain or indifference, largely because many of them would not survive the waiting period to even start class. The first thing they learned was they were in “casual status,” meaning not formally in training or on orders for an assignment, and were referred to as such. “Hey, casual” was a common summons to those unworthy of a name; instructors didn’t bother learning names until candidates were well into the class. The second thing they learned was that casual status was anything but casual. Each morning was spent in calisthenics sessions, runs, and pool training to prepare them for the upcoming seven-week trial. During this period, the young men faced the reality of their choice—CCT training was not about parachutes, exotic locations, and motorcycles. It was about pain and never being fast enough, strong enough, or aquatic enough. Those who realized their mistake early suffered less. To quit, one merely had to utter the words. Instructors—seasoned PJs and Controllers, specially selected for the assignment—were notorious for spotting weak moments or individuals and singling them out for attention. Sometimes, to cull the herd, they tortured the entire batch of casuals with sessions in the mud pit until someone quit.
By the first day of class in early September, the instructor cadre had whittled the number of candidates down to a manageable seventy, Joe and John among them.
The OL-H course spanned seven weeks of physical conditioning and testing, coupled with basic academics in such subjects as scuba diving physics, which mostly served to occupy the candidates for an hour or two each day and allow for physical recovery. Each week got progressively harder, faster, longer.
Grueling calisthenics sessions ruled each morning, followed by a run, usually between three and six miles, or sprints on the nearby track. But the worst was pool training. Each day after lunch, the men learned firsthand the value of oxygen to the human body. Pool sessions consisted of a series of different events, all designed to strengthen the mind and the body—and to separate the very strongest from all others. There is no more compelling drive in the human body than the need for oxygen; it overcomes all thought, instinctive in an absolute sense. To push oneself past the physiological need to breathe is to master oneself. And the OL-H had devised surefire ways to test the hypothesis.
The first oxygen debt exercises they were exposed to were “underwaters”—swimming the length of the Olympic-size training pool submerged, then touching the far wall and sprinting back across the surface using freestyle stroke. This was repeated eight times, with decreasing intervals to resupply oxygen to the body and never long enough to completely replenish. Breaking the surface even once during any iteration was failure—and immediate removal from the course. Another instructor favorite was drownproofing, where the student’s hands are tied behind his back before he is pushed into the pool. He must use the bottom of the twelve-foot deep end to push off, undulate to the surface, and catch a single breath, repeating for five minutes—more art than science. Struggling to stay afloat without use of the hands and arms is impossible, and those attempting to flounder at the surface are failed in any case.
Then there were the crossovers. The word instills gut fear in everyone who’s ever done them. They start during the third week, after students have been conditioned to oxygen deprivation through various other exercises. Of all the brutal water tortures, crossovers were undeniably the worst and were a requirement to pass for graduation. Each student donned a set of twin eighty-cubic-foot galvanized-steel scuba diving tanks. The tanks had no regulators for breathing; indeed, they weren’t for that purpose at all. Each student would also don mask and fins. Finally, each fastened a sixteen-pound weight belt around his waist.
They would drop into the deep end of the pool along the long side, wedged together with one arm holding them to the security of the wall, lined “nut to butt.” They were then given the preparatory command, “Prepare to cross over.” That was the signal to take one final huge lungful of air. “Cross over!” would come a moment later. All the students would sink straight to the bottom and, upon reaching it, fin as hard as they could to the other side as a similar group from the far side also finned simultaneously. The groups met in the middle, one designated to go “high,” that is crawl over the “low” group, both then continuing on their way to the other wall. Only when they reached the far wall were they allowed to push off the bottom and rise for the precious and distant air that awaited them.
Gasping men, crawling past each other, clawing for air, sputtered to the surface on each side. This would be repeated eight times, with reduced intervals from forty-five to thirty seconds between crossovers. To add to the excitement, instructors were in the pool with them, for safety in the event of a near drowning but also to harass the students, sometimes pulling masks from their faces to induce panic. Other times, they would stand on a particular student’s back, holding on to the tank’s manifold, and “surf” the student for a few feet, creating an incredible amount of extra drag, forcing the student to crawl for his life.
As the next batch of students stood freezing in the cold water at the shallow end, waiting their turn, instructors offered words of “encouragement” to the men gasping for air. “Come on, you know you want to quit.” “It’s all over, and there’s a great Air Force job waiting for you. Just quit.” Occasionally, when they sensed someone was close to the edge, or was particularly whiny, they’d converge as a pack on the frightened student: “Say the words! Say it!”
“I quit.”
At these words, sometimes uttered meekly, other times shouted back in a form of final defiance, the instructor’s face would change. Gone was the fierce anger, the challenge to the individual; in its place, a calm and reasonable human would appear, with a simple instruction: “Move to the shallow end of the pool. Take off your gear and report to admin.”
John, as student leader, watched as other young men, almost all of them younger than he, would skip lunch. Burning through thousands of calories a day, they needed every carb they could get, but “the pool” held them in its liquid grip. Others, trying to take in needed nourishment, would instead vomit from anxiety in the barracks before the pool session. Occasionally, some would get out of the pool to vomit or just vomit over the side.
In the pool, some men pushed themselves past the point of no return, blacking out in the water and having to be pulled to the surface by instructors and resuscitated. When they came around, they would be given a choice: “Get back in the pool or go to the lockers.” After the daily pool sessions, which included underwater knot tying (a series of knots to be completed on one breath) and buddy breathing (students shared a single snorkel, passed back and forth for air, while instructors harassed them to prevent them from breathing and tried to pull them apart, which meant failure if they could), the pool day was concluded with a swim, either freestyle or with fins, of between 1,500 and 4,000 meters.
On land, things were little better. Mud-pit torture sessions, thousands of extra push-ups and pull-ups, or “motivation” runs were common. No-notice room inspections, where instructors would turn out the entire class for any infraction or contraband, always loomed. During all of these, John and the other NCOs were expected not only to perform to standard but to demonstrate leadership and selflessness. Joe recalls the first time he and John bonded. “We got in trouble for nothing”—a typical student observation. One of the fiercest instructors, Sergeant Rodman, called them all onto the front concrete pad and had the men, now down to less than thirty, mount the dip bars. These were four feet off the ground and ran in parallel. Gripping them like gymnasts, the men would support themselves with straight arms and then dip down till their shoulders were level with the bars, before thrusting up again. This constituted one dip.
“Rodman had us do a set of fifty,” he remembers. “But in between each dip we had to hold ourselves up for a minute.” Those who reached muscle failure were relegated to the mud pit, where two other instructors were inflicting even worse torture. “John and I were the only ones to make it all the way to the end.”
The young Tennessean was about to comprehend what they all were doing there. As their reward for completion, both John and Joe were excused from further torture; they could shower, get something to eat, and relax (as much as anyone could at the OL). Joe, realizing reprieve was upon him, started for the barracks door. But John ran, not walked, to the pit. “Where do you think you’re going, Chapman?” shouted Rodman.
“The pit, Sergeant, to join my team.”
“You’re off. Get out of here.”
Chapman didn’t move. One of the guys in the class threw mud at him, hitting him in the head. Rodman, not needing much incentive to encourage teamwork, stated, “Well, you’re muddy now, you might as well join your team.”
Joe had watched the entire exchange and, seeing his desperately needed decompression evaporate, jumped into the pit with his team leader. “John and I bonded over that moment. I’ll never forget it. It was the first time I realized what we were doing was about more than just me. It was the team.”
* * *
Of the 120 men who signed up for OL-H class number 89-005, scheduled to begin on 18 September (the Air Force’s birthday), and the seventy men who survived to start the class, only seven would graduate—five PJs and just two CCT, John Chapman and Joe Maynor. The two men, representing 4 percent of the Combat Control candidates, had their pipeline tickets to ride. The next gut check came immediately: the US Army Special Forces combat diver qualification school in Key West, Florida.
Arguably one of the toughest Army schools, SF CDQ, as it is known, fails between 25 and 35 percent of all who attend. However, for Joe and John, it was the course they’d spent months and months of pain and preparation for. Forty men started the class in mid-November; fewer than thirty graduated. Dive after dive, nighttime, infiltration, LAR-V Draeger rebreathers (a system that uses 100 percent oxygen and recycles breath so as not to leave an air-bubble trail), and of course, PT: long runs and cal sessions. For the Army soldiers, the pool sessions with their crossovers and harassment were the worst. To the OL grads, it was just another week.
After Key West, the relentless pace continued. More water work awaited them at the Air Force water survival school in Homestead, Florida, south of Miami, in the form of a three-day course in how to survive a crash and recovery at sea. In contrast to the first two schools, it was an “easy” and mostly academic course.
As 1990 arrived, the two potential Combat Controllers found themselves at their second Army course, Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia, universally known among CCT as “Air Force appreciation.” For John, jumping was exciting and something he took a liking to. He talked to Joe about taking skydiving lessons while they were still in the pipeline and before they attended HALO school, the military high-altitude/low-opening freefall course.
After making the five jumps required to graduate, they hopped on a plane to the next stop, Air Force aircrew survival school on Fairchild Air Force Base, Washington. The two-week course was designed to expose Air Force members to survival in the woods, covering such things as basic land navigation, hiding and evading, and procuring food. In addition, it provided resistance training for interrogations in the event of capture.
By then the two men were inseparable and well on their way. In February they arrived at Keesler Air Force Base to attend air traffic control (ATC) school, one of the most academically demanding courses in the Air Force. Many who couldn’t hack the pressures were reassigned to other jobs, and potential Combat Controllers were no different. If you couldn’t control air traffic, you couldn’t be CCT.
John had flown home from survival school to retrieve his car, a piss-gold-colored four-door Ford LTD yacht, from his dad. “It had worn vacuum hoses,” recalls Joe. “So the headlights would dim until you hit the gas, then as the pressure built, the headlights would brighten. At stop signs, they’d go dead. It was a real piece of shit.” Still, the car equaled freedom, and they used it to explore the Gulf Coast and release the pressures of ATC training.
There remained one last hurdle to becoming Controllers—Combat Control School at Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina. The base was encompassed by Fort Bragg, home of the 82nd Airborne, Delta Force, and the 24 STS.
Combat Control School incorporated everything the men had learned to that point on their journey, and then built on that foundation to give them the basics of being a Controller. It was the last school before they earned their berets, but by no means was it the final school; they still had to complete HALO and achieve their joint terminal attack controller certifications, among many others. For John and Joe, “We thought we’d made it already and didn’t realize that’s not how the instructors saw us till we started class.”
Morning PT sessions were grueling (again) and were followed by a daily in-ranks inspection to check each student’s ability to pay attention to detail. Infractions for a string on the uniform, a poor shave, or scuffed boots incurred push-up penalties. Then it was on to the classroom to learn radio and navigational equipment capabilities, how to establish assault zones, advanced land navigation, and small-unit tactics (patrolling, ambushes, and assaults), in addition to advanced weapons training, including grenades and demolitions. The academics of the classroom were complemented by field training, the euphemism for being in the woods of Fort Bragg under the watchful eye of the CCT instructors. Unlike at previous schools, mistakes “in the field” were rewarded not just with calisthenics but with CS (chemical smoke), the military term for tear gas. Instructors used it to induce stress, since shooting at students was not something one could do to simulate combat conditions. The sweating men would don their gas masks to protect their eyes and lungs, but there was no escape from the burning, particularly in their crotches and armpits, where the searing doubled when coupled with raw moist skin.
The students frequently parachuted into training to acclimate them to jumping. Joe recalls the nighttime jump the team made into one of Fort Bragg’s drop zones named Normandy. They were to land at Normandy and navigate to their next target, Sicily DZ, to establish a C-130 dirt assault strip, and then control and land an actual plane. In the plane waiting to jump into the dark, John was next in the stick to jump behind Joe and leaned forward to shout in his ear over the roar of the plane’s engines and the wind rushing past the open jump door. “I’m going to piggyback you. I’ll be right on your ass!” Joe, no fan of jumping, merely nodded, Yeah, right.
When Joe cleared the door and the round chute fully inflated above his head, he looked up to see imprints of feet sinking into the billowed fabric and making their way across to the edge of the canopy. The next thing he knew, John’s body dropped into sight next to him. John had jumped so close to his friend their parachutes opened atop one another and John had to walk across Joe’s. When he got to the side, Joe’s canopy had stolen his air, dropping the older student down to his level. “We were level, side by side. And John was giggling with adrenaline.” The boy from Tennessee, however, was far from elated.
As the weeks turned into months, the team prepared for their final field training exercise, FTX, held at nearby Camp Mackall. There the men were tested on their ability to insert into a hostile country, patrol to various targets, conduct assault-zone and other operations, and suffer. Food and water were never withheld, but sleep was a luxury. And of course, to help keep them motivated, there was the dreaded CS gas.
The last event of the FTX was for the men to hump their rucks and weapons the fifteen miles back to the Combat Control School (CCS) building. Like everything else the students did, it was a timed and competitive event. Tired, but driven by the knowledge a mere fifteen miles separated them from their goal, every member of their seven-man CCS class finished. On a sweltering July night in 1990, John and Joe, the only two survivors from OL-H class 89-005, walked across the stage of the Pope NCO club, donned their red berets, and bloused their black leather paratrooper jump boots for the first time.
The Air Force’s newest Combat Controllers, now more brothers than friends, both received orders to the 21st Special Tactics Squadron, a move that took them directly across the street from the Combat Control School. Whatever challenges and adventures were to come, they planned to face them together.