July 1990
John had finally achieved his dream of being “something more,” something only a select few had ever accomplished, only to discover along his pipeline journey that qualifying as a Combat Controller was only half the measurement of success in his new world. The other, greater, metric could be realized only in actual combat. He couldn’t have known it, but in late July 1990, his first opportunity was only weeks away.
One of John’s other local buddies was Joe Puricelli, an Army 82nd Airborne paratrooper he’d met at Airborne School. On 2 August, a Thursday, Joe invited John to travel back to his hometown of Windber, Pennsylvania, to hang out for the weekend. John thought, Sure, why not?
The same day, half a world away, another man executed some travel plans. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait at midnight on 2 August, bombing the capital and the tiny emirate’s paper military, seizing key facilities using helicopter-borne commandos. Within twelve hours it was all but over; Kuwait’s military was either wiped out or had fled, along with the royal family.
The news made a global splash as the US mulled what to do about this realignment of 65 percent of the world’s oil sourcing, yet it was barely a blip on John Chapman’s radar. John and Joe stopped at a gas station as they rolled into the rural borough and ran into Valerie Novak, one of Joe’s best friends from high school, who was completing her last year of nursing school. Valerie had long brown, wavy hair, blue eyes that shone with a mischievous twinkle, and a raucous laugh. Her tiny five-foot-four-inch frame belied her vivacious personality, which she enthusiastically demonstrated when she gave Joe a big hug and said, “Hey! You’re home! Let’s go out tonight!” Joe smiled and said, “Well, I have a friend here with me,” and introduced her to John. Valerie responded with a hearty, “Cool!” and they were off, spending the night hanging out at one of Windber’s bars. During the evening, and long into the night, as Valerie remembers, “We went dancing and drinking…We drank lots of tequila.” For John, the weekend passed way too quickly, and immediately after he returned to Pope AFB, John and Val started calling each other and writing letters and cards. As often as he could, he drove the eight-hour stretch to Windber so he could spend time with Valerie. Almost as often, she would come off a twelve-hour shift, jump in her car, and drive the eight hours to see him at the condo he’d purchased in Fayetteville. Somehow, they made the long-distance relationship work, and by fall the two were inseparable.
While John was falling for the petite brunette, the US and Kuwait had called an emergency UN Security Council meeting, which dutifully passed Resolution 660 condemning the invasion and demanding Iraq’s immediate withdrawal. For the next few months, Iraqi overtures and negotiations were met with repeated rejections by President Bush and a militant British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.
In November, while the Iraqi situation deteriorated, John and Val joined his father for Thanksgiving in northern Michigan. During a horseback ride, John was thrown and landed hard and in an awkward position, but he got up, “rubbed some dirt on it,” and continued riding.
In the wee hours of the morning, John woke Valerie, telling her he was in incredible pain. Valerie remembers, “I checked him, and his stomach was enlarged. I immediately knew we needed to get him to the hospital.” When the ER doctor examined John, he shook his head and said, “You’re one lucky dude. If you had waited any longer, you’d be dead.” John had ruptured his spleen. Though surgery wasn’t necessary, he was ordered sidelined for six months.
Relegated to nonphysical duties, such as working drop-zone and assault-zone training across Fort Bragg, he watched as the rest of his squadron trained up for war and deployed. Christmas was depressing for the new and untried Combat Controller. His only solace was the time spent with Valerie, who’d traveled down so they could spend Christmas together. By January, his squadron, the 21st STS, was a skeleton crew of nondeployable and stay-behind airmen.
* * *
For CCT, the war proved to be a watershed moment. Across Iraq and Saudi Arabia, Controllers from different squadrons established and ran airports and airfields, conducted beacon bombing (using beacons to determine known points for accuracy) missions with US and coalition aircraft, and liberated allied embassies with British Special Air Service (SAS) and Special Boat Service (SBS) troops. Hunting Scud missile launchers in the western deserts of Iraq with Delta Force to keep Israel on the sidelines and hold George Bush’s coalition together was the 24’s sole purpose. Overall, their efforts dropped Scud launches into Israel to virtually nil. One CCT, Bruce Barry, supported by a Delta troop, managed to destroy an estimated twenty-seven missile launchers alone. When the war ended, General Norman Schwarzkopf, the US commander, flew to Delta and the 24’s operations base in Arar, Saudi Arabia, near the Iraqi border, to congratulate them.
“So this is the guy who kept Israel out of the war,” said the hero of America’s Desert Storm campaign as he regarded Bruce Barry, the other, unknown, hero of the coalition when they were introduced. It was a proud moment in the 24’s continued transformation into the most distinctive and versatile unit in special operations.
* * *
In North Carolina in the spring of 1991, as the troops were coming home from Desert Storm, John Chapman watched as his brother Combat Controllers returned to a hero’s welcome, offered by a nation taking pride in a victory that scrubbed away the stains of the national protest and social divisions that marked the Vietnam conflict. He’d missed the entire war due to his injury and subsequent sidelining, and now, it seemed, there’d be no opportunity for another in a stable new world order led by the sole remaining superpower, America.
With his work life stable, if a bit unexciting, John picked a June weekend nearly a year after his chance meeting with Valerie to drive to Windber and propose. She knew what John’s job entailed, and she knew she would have to move from her hometown to destinations unknown. His one solace at missing the entire war with his brothers was the other piece he’d been missing in his life; and here she was, in the form of a vivacious swirl of energy who’d agreed to be his wife.
In November of 1992, they packed their belongings and shipped out to Japan for John’s next assignment with the 320th Special Tactics Squadron. Overseas military assignments tend to bring service members and their families closer to their fellow Americans, and John and Valerie were no exception. While she worked at the hospital, John and the other Controllers trained: more dive operations; HALO parachuting; small-boat, drop-zone, and assault-zone operations. Conducting NEOs, or noncombatant evacuation operations, was a prime focus of the unit. Because of the 320th’s central location in the Pacific theater, theirs was the go-to unit when disaster struck. Evacuating embassies, airlifting out American citizens or disaster victims…These were important missions to rehearse, and the unit had a proud humanitarian legacy that seemed, in a peaceful world, like it might be John’s best chance at using the skills he’d been developing for years.
* * *
While John toiled in the Pacific, the 24 added to its legacy and mystique on the remote coast of Africa in another country most Americans had never heard of: Somalia. In an operation that came to be known as Black Hawk Down, one Combat Controller, Jeff Bray, kept the besieged force of Delta operators, Rangers, and fellow CCT and PJs alive during the fiercest portion of the historic eighteen-hour gun battle, using his unequalled airstrike expertise. The operation and, more specifically, the firefight that took place on 3 October 1993, shaped special operations and US foreign policy for the next eight years, until an Arab scion would declare war on Western civilization, and America in particular, and change the course of international history.
* * *
John learned of the Somalia operation in the same fashion as the rest of the world, through media reporting and grisly images from the streets of Mogadishu. But within the Combat Control community, word slowly spread of the heroics of the CCT involved. By then, John was well into the second year of a three-year tour in the Far East, gaining valuable experience and enjoying training missions in exotic countries like Thailand and Korea. But they were just that, training missions. As 1995 approached, he realized he wasn’t satisfied, not completely. Something was missing, exacerbated by his having missed the First Gulf War.
There was only one place to gain combat experience, or at least execute highly dynamic operations with national implications. If he was to attain the experiences he desired and validate the years of training under his belt, he needed to go to this place. But to do so, he would need to be more physically fit, more proficient in his skills, and more mentally committed than he had ever been in his life, because the destination he had in mind took only the absolute best of an already elite group of men. That place was the 24th Special Tactics Squadron.
* * *
Assessment and selection for the 24 is singular, yet simultaneously similar to the process at the other most elite military units in the world, SEAL Team Six and Delta Force.3 Within Combat Control it is unique because, among all the operational Special Tactics squadrons, it is the only one that requires the individual to voluntarily submit a package and request assignment.
From Scud hunting in Iraq to man hunting in Mogadishu and every significant American counterterrorist operation from Desert One forward, the 24 has played a key role. No other “black” SOF unit (defined as a unit operating with restricted congressional oversight) has been involved in as many nationally prioritized and high-risk special operations. The 24 doubled in size from the time of Grenada to the First Gulf War, and then doubled again, occupying increasingly greater space within the JSOC compound at Fort Bragg.
In the spring of 1995, John Chapman looked to add his name to the best of the best in the world. It would be daunting. He was applying to one of the most demanding units in the history of America’s armed forces. Of the men in Combat Control who applied, only half would succeed in the two-week selection and six-month Green Team training process. John knew little about the unit, mostly snippets from the few former members who circulated among the other Special Tactics squadrons (24 members rarely reentered the “white” SOF system). Yet if that’s where the truly best of CCT went to demonstrate their excellence, then he’d go there too. And there was another calculus for the now ten-year veteran: He wanted the chance to prove himself in combat or combat-like operations and, at age thirty, he was rapidly approaching “old guy” status. Once in the unit, he could conceivably stay for the rest of his career—but getting in was the trick.
As with everything else John did since Val came into his life, his approach to this new opportunity incorporated her.
“I want to do this, but if you say no, I won’t,” he’d told her in early 1995. Two decades later, Valerie remains convinced that had she said no, the matter would have been dropped without resentment. “But I didn’t want to look back at age eighty and realize I’d kept him from something he wanted so badly.” And he did want it badly. He knew that wanting it was part of what it took to make it, just like the pipeline, only this time he was being measured against the other best of the best, with a metric only the 24 selection committee knew.
John attended selection in the summer of 1995 and successfully assessed for assignment. Much of what is known regarding Delta and SEAL Team Six selection is based on previously released books by former unit members. The 24 selection process, while similar in many ways to its Army and Navy counterparts, remains a closely guarded trial of the human spirit. He came home and announced the great news to Val, who was thrilled to return to North Carolina, where they still had friends at the 21st STS and would be closer to family. Then she added news of her own…They would be bringing home a small piece of Japan when they returned. She was pregnant.
By October, the expectant couple was back in Fayetteville, happy for the overseas experience so many service members enjoy, and even happier to be home again. They bought a house and settled in for what they believed would be the rest of John’s career. Valerie even returned to her previous job as an in-home nursing care provider as she awaited the birth of their first child.
Two new adventures lay ahead for them: their first child and John’s assignment as he waited for Green Team to begin. For John, the first six months would be a return to the grind of passing another pipeline, only this one had higher stakes and risks but also offered compensation by virtue of the unequalled caliber of the men he was training with on Green Team.
Green Team was set to start in late January, and the couple spent the holidays reconnecting with old friends and making new acquaintances. For John, one particular CCT stood out: Pat Elko. Thin and athletic, the six-foot-two-inch first-term enlistee had little by way of experience but put in a strong showing at selection and was accepted into the unit. John took an immediate older-brother liking to Pat.
The early morning hours of 18 January 1996 were frigid in North Carolina, in a bone-chilling way that only the humid weather of the South can produce. John and Val were snuggled tightly in bed when John’s newly issued beeper went off on the nightstand at 0516 with coded instructions to report to the unit immediately. When the newest members of the 24 arrived, they learned Green Team started NOW.
What followed was every kid’s dream of what the military is supposed to be but in reality was reserved for a very select few who rose to the top of their professions in special operations. They seized airfields with Rangers in Louisiana and Georgia. They trained day and night on cross-country motorcycles, with NVGs and full combat loads. They had their first orientations to Delta and SEAL Team Six, the latter involving exposure and operations on the Navy’s HSAC (high-speed assault craft), the offshore racing boats the SEALs used for attacking targets in the ocean and for launching operations on land. These kidney-damaging/brain-pounding boats were a source of either excitement or misery, depending on how well one handled the seasickness and physiological impact of boat operations. For Chapman, a water natural, the boats were exhilarating.
Advanced shooting instruction was provided by the Green Team instructors (seasoned CCT and PJs from the 24, including Jeff Bray, one of the unit’s heroes from Somalia), augmented by contract civilians at the legendary Thunder Ranch and Y.O. Ranch in Texas (where John’s team managed to drink the facility out of beer in the first two days of training). When they weren’t on the road, the team spent time utilizing others’ facilities, such as Delta’s obstacle courses, located conveniently down the road from the 24.
As their training progressed, the men began the process of gelling as a team, meeting each other’s wives, kids, girlfriends, or dogs, as the case may be, sharing beers and meals, and of course coming to rely on one another completely. Early on, Pat was adopted by John and Val. Pat, now an FBI agent in Dallas, recalls, “I can only guess the number of nights I spent there. John and Val were kind of like my parents away from parents, except we drank a lot of Miller Lite.”
The team’s next stop was HALO and HAHO (high-altitude/low-opening and /high-opening) training. Parachuting is a critical skill, and much time was spent in the air at a classified facility in the western US, as well as on the drop zones of Fort Bragg, and included day and night jumps from as high as 25,000 feet. The parachute training culminated in what one of John’s Green Team instructors refers to as “a full-benefit, night, oxygen, ruck, and weapons HAHO jump.” The men, looking to push the boundaries, “plotted the GPS and drop calculations to the maximum” over the desert, covering twelve miles under canopy to land within seventy-five yards of one another, taking their place as members of the military’s best combat parachutists.
Amid the demands and the steep learning curve of an intense training regimen, on 13 May 1996, John and Valerie welcomed their first child, Madison Elizabeth Chapman. Valerie recalls the moment the three became a family. “The first time he held Madison, the spark in his eye was like nothing I’d seen before. It was like a kid in a candy store, he was so excited.” While sharing the moment with his wife and receiving hearty congratulations from his new teammates, there was little time to revel in or reflect upon the profound change Madison’s arrival would produce on the Combat Controller. Training and missions went on despite the other facets of life, and nothing could replace the absoluteness of contingency preparation and execution at the 24, so after a week off, John returned to training and his team.
In Fort Walton Beach, Florida, the team practiced scuba and low-signature rebreather diving insertions through the ocean surf, navigating with compass boards in the dark and honing skills necessary to work alongside their SEAL counterparts. There, they also practiced air-dropping rescue RAMZ (rigging alternate method Zodiac) boats into the ocean. These approximately three-foot cubed packages contained a rolled-up raiding-craft boat and motor, including fuel, and rucksacks with weapons, all in a single container. In the water, the boat would be inflated with compressed gas, getting the team underway toward a target or water crash site in less than five minutes.
For the CCT, no training was more important than close air support. They traveled to Fort Campbell to work with the 160th’s helicopter gunships, F-16s and F-15s in Gila Bend in Arizona, and A-10s at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. Finally, on 29 July 1996, the men stood together and were welcomed into the most prestigious Air Force special operations unit as full-fledged brothers. Together, John and Pat went to Red Team (one of three colors, the others being Blue and Silver) to begin their new lives. In addition to their own specific training requirements—airstrikes, surveys of critical facilities and airfields—Red Team alternated training with Delta and SEAL Team Six.
Madison grew, and the family shared time when John was home. They settled into a rhythm revolving around his demanding job and travel schedule between exercises and training with the Army and Navy. By summer of 1997, Valerie was pregnant again. Nearly two years to the day after Madison was born, her younger sister arrived. Brianna Lynn Chapman was born 5 May 1998, completing the small family.
By the time Brianna turned one, John had turned another corner. The girls had come to be his life, and the allure of Delta Force and SEAL Team Six waned in the face of his new and true purpose. Recalls Val, “When he was home, he was home.” He preferred bathing the girls and brushing their blond hair to beers and wrenching in the garage. “He could have killed five thousand people at work, and when he walked in the door, you’d never have known,” reflects Valerie on how complete John’s transformation was after the girls’ arrival.
However, as he was psychologically moving in the opposite direction, John’s first opportunity to execute a real mission appeared on the horizon of another frigid East Coast winter day in 1998 while working with SEAL Team Six. The Navy unit was deploying a force to the NATO-led stabilization force in Bosnia to hunt Yugoslavian war criminals, the latest incarnation of Delta’s man hunting in Somalia five years earlier. Delta was also in the region, but this time the SEALs were getting their own shot at leading and executing a similar operation. John’s SEAL element target was Goran Jelisić, a Bosnian Serb wanted for genocide and crimes against humanity. John’s job was handling tactical communications for his entire team as it pursued its man on cobblestone streets in the small villages surrounding Tuzla, where Goran was believed to be housed. The SEALs and the Combat Controller arrived in the conflict-ravaged region in January, and while much of the detail of their operations remains classified, they captured the fugitive who’d vowed never to be taken alive and delivered him to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. There, at his trial, he was acquitted of genocide charges but not of crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to forty years in prison and remanded to the Italians to serve out his term. There were other hunts and captures, and by April, John and the SEALs redeployed. In keeping with the sensitive nature of the operations, John never told Val where he’d been or what he’d done.
When John returned home to his family, he’d arrived at a decision. The window for getting on operations and gaining combat experience was closing. It was time to spend more time at home with his girls. He didn’t want to hold out for another opportunity to get into combat; the only missions on the horizon appeared to be more of the same and, while exciting at times, they were more of a letdown than a validation. He left Red Team behind and joined the 24’s survey team. Survey, as it was simply known, focused on comprehensive surveys of locations the 24’s “customers” (Delta and other units or organizations) valued around the world. In Survey, John built on the basic airfield and drop-zone survey skills common to all Combat Controllers, adding AutoCAD computer drafting to his expertise. John found he liked the work as much as he appreciated the more predictable schedule for his blossoming family. Though not high-octane like being on Red Team, the survey team had its share of intense situations, placing men, often working alone, in precarious situations around the globe.
Meanwhile, Madison was growing fast, Brianna hot on her heels, as the family entered the new millennium. John, now well settled into the drafting and computer skills of his survey job, came home in the evenings to little ones awaiting his nightly entry. Inside, and much to Val’s dismay, he often grabbed the girls up, bundled inside a blanket, and would toss them into the air, brushing the ceiling, to catch them again, then toss them, tiny arms flailing, onto the couch.
* * *
By September of 2001, the couple had devised a plan. While John’s new computer and survey skills sharpened, his core counterterrorist skills and proficiency dulled as he made peace with the fact that there’d be no war to validate his military career. He contemplated the future after Combat Control.
John and Val had agreed he was only going to do twenty years, then use his drafting and survey skills to increase his salary in preparation for the girls’ later schooling. They were already attending a costly private academy, supported by the income from Val’s in-home nursing career, and the proud parents intended to continue providing the best academic preparation. Secretly, though, John harbored a dream of opening his own custom auto shop where he could create and wrench vehicles like the Cobra kit car he was building in his spare time. On the night of 10 September, he stood in his garage with a beer, looking at the project and wondering when he might finally get the time to finish the vehicle, still barely a frame, with an engine, drivetrain, and various parts scattered across his workbench and garage. The world was peaceful, his relationship with Val was strong, his girls were growing, and he accepted a future that didn’t involve proving himself in combat as he’d once hoped. As things stood, John was just fine with that.