11 September 2001
The 23rd STS4 sits on the far side of Hurlburt Field’s runway, across from Headquarters Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC). The base, itself home of the majority of AFSOC’s forces, is actually an auxiliary field of the giant Eglin Air Force Base and test range, thereby reducing Hurlburt’s status from “base” to “field.” Older maps identify it as Auxiliary Field #9 and show only a smattering of buildings, not the sprawling amoeba of compounds it is today. At the time of the founding of the original Air Commandos for use in Laos and Vietnam, it was the perfect location, tucked anonymously away in the swamps of the Florida Panhandle, hidden from prying eyes. The famous 1970 Son Tay POW rescue attempt was planned and rehearsed there for that very reason.
On the morning of 11 September 2001, the 23rd was planning to hold a squadron-wide “monster mash” physical endurance training event consisting of a series of unusual physical challenges in which teams competed against one another. Pedaling his bike from home to the monster mash that clear summer morning was Calvin Markham, a sixteen-year master sergeant and CCT. Despite putting himself at an energy deficit disadvantage (monster mashes could go on as long as half a day, leaving participants depleted for several days, depending on which group of Combat Controllers planned them), he regularly rode in to work, regardless of the day’s schedule.
A giant of a man with round features and a burly but friendly personality to match, Calvin kept a closely cropped haircut to deemphasize a high hairline. Parking his bike near the entrance to the unit’s team rooms, he walked in to jarring images blaring from the television in the corner. The first twin tower of the World Trade Center in New York City was heavily damaged, smoke billowing out in waves from the initial plane strike. By the time the second plane struck, the men of the 23rd were already packing: precision microwave airfield landing systems, combat search and rescue gear, radios, laser markers, and weapons. They knew what was coming.
Three weeks later, Calvin and a fellow CCT, along with a Special Tactics officer, were running an airfield called Karshi-Khanabad—known to all as K2—in Uzbekistan, where the US would begin staging in preparation for its first operations in Afghanistan. The three men were literally “First There” in establishing and operating the airbase for the US.
By the first week of October, the 5th Special Forces Group had planned to insert two Operational Detachment Alphas (ODAs or A-teams) as the first teams to link up with the allies’ newest partners, the loosely organized and fractious Northern Alliance (in actuality several groups of differing tribes and leaders, some of whom would rather fight each other for local dominance than the Taliban). The two ODAs, each made up of between ten and twelve Green Berets with different specialties—such as weapons, communications, or medicine—were numbered 595 and 555, the latter known by the moniker “Triple Nickel.” The first would strike out for Mazar-e Sharif, the other for Bagram Airfield, the abandoned Soviet airbase just north of the capital, Kabul, in the hope that it could be secured and readied for when US operations moved within Afghanistan’s borders.
Each ODA was commanded by an Army captain and seconded by a chief warrant officer. Their missions were to establish contact with the Northern Alliance, determine the battlefield dynamics, and crucially, employ airpower to destroy the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in northern Afghanistan. The two ODAs were responsible for separate locations and took radically different approaches in their planning and execution, which would have significant consequences in the coming weeks. Both ODAs were offered CCT to coordinate and apply airpower. ODA 595 rebuffed the offer. In the words of Combat Controller Bart Decker, “They didn’t want anything to do with CCT.” ODA 595’s decision to exclude CCT would provide the definitive case study showcasing the difference between forces that had a Controller and those that did not.5
ODA 555, familiar with the expertise of Combat Control, recognized not only the value of a Controller but its necessity if they were to be successful in their third mission tasking. Green Berets are experts in aligning with, training, and fighting alongside indigenous forces, with a proud legacy founded in Southeast Asia. And while authorized to call in airstrikes, as indeed any soldier or sailor on the battlefield can, they were by no means experts, or even proficient.
ODA 555 was provided a list of available CCT and discussed the names internally. One name stood out—Calvin Markham. Calvin and one of the sergeants, Greg McCormick, had gone through the Special Forces combat diver course together as swim buddies and had remained in contact over the years. McCormick identified the Controller as “the guy,” and the matter was settled. By the end of the first week of October, Calvin had moved into isolation with the team and began his own planning. ODA 555 was commanded by a captain, although the one actually in charge was the chief warrant officer, the most senior and experienced man on the team, David Diaz. Calvin had great respect for Diaz, stating, “He’d been in Afghanistan in the eighties, and he knew how the people thought. He was a great leader and was respected by all the guys.”
Calvin’s air plan, however, was hardly solid, which was a source of concern for the Controller. In the early days of the war, there were no Air Force air operations strike-planning cells. Instead, a few Controllers from the 23rd, the first Special Tactics squadron to arrive in-country, along with a handful of pilots and air planners, built the strike plan from scratch. Bart Decker and the others did their best to coordinate for the unknowns. Decker described it as merely “CAS [close air support] on call. There were no procedures. No one knew what was going to happen.”
On 19 October, Calvin and ODA 555 were about to find out. After two attempts at clearing the 20,000-foot peaks of the Hindu Kush range in the midst of severe weather, the joint team finally skimmed the snow-covered terrain and passed into Afghanistan. His immediate boss, Special Tactics Officer Kurt Buller, had walked Calvin to the helicopter, telling him, “You’re the first,” adding, “I don’t know if I envy you or I’m sending you to your death. This could very well be a suicide mission.” Buller stayed on the helicopter as it taxied, to ensure there were no problems with the helo’s movement, climbing off just before takeoff. The two men shook hands as Buller wished him happy hunting.
Because of the altitude, the men were piled into two separate special operations MH-47s that had been stripped of all armor and flew with the minimum fuel required to insert the team across the border. At their designated HLZs, both helos were offloaded without incident or enemy contact, then they left the men behind to pursue their perilous missions.
Calvin’s team was met by a group from the Northern Alliance shortly thereafter and began the critical task of establishing mutual trust over tea and raisins offered by the Afghans. The entire group of several dozen mounted a convoy of old trucks and SUVs and headed into the Panjshir Valley. Even though the Taliban often attacked local villages, Calvin and the team made no enemy contact for the first two days. Instead, they focused their efforts on winning over the Northern Alliance leader, General Mohammad Qasim Fahim, a man whose distrust of the Americans and their reasons for being in his country ran deep. But there was one foolproof way they could demonstrate their commitment and value: airpower. Calvin recalls, “They were pretty skeptical of us. They’d been promised air before.” The Afghan leaders had yet to see any of this mysteriously magical war-changing promise.
Calvin’s chance to represent the entire might and commitment of the US came on 21 October, a bright and cold morning, when Chief Diaz sent a reconnaissance (recce) team to find the Northern Alliance front line. It was believed to be near the airfield at Bagram and under the command of an Afghan leader named Babajon, whose girth led to the natural Americanization of “General Papa John.” The men clambered aboard a few trucks and drove south.
As the small recce team moved onto the north end of Bagram Airfield, the front turned out to be the airfield itself. They dismounted the vehicles and proceeded on foot. The Northern Alliance owned the former Soviet airbase only from midfield north; the Taliban held everything to the south. This World War I–style stalemate had existed for years despite fierce attempts by each party to dislodge the other. If Calvin could deliver airstrikes on the entrenched Taliban positions, he could single-handedly change the course of the stalemate, perhaps the war. As they moved cautiously across the flat terrain, dotted with leafless trees preparing for the coming winter, Diaz told Calvin, “Get where you can establish a good OP [observation post]. Hide in plain sight.”
They crept close to the Taliban, and Calvin’s observation post materialized before his eyes, the air traffic control tower. Who would expect the Americans to climb into the most obvious building on the airfield? Perfect! The men cautiously approached the structure and then cleared its rooms to ensure no Al Qaeda forces were waiting inside. By then it was late morning, the warmth of the sun a welcome respite from the cold. As Calvin and the team surveyed the airfield through binoculars and a spotting scope, he set about preparing the tools of the Combat Control trade. First were the SOFLAM laser target designator and rangefinder. Then he erected his SATCOM antenna and checked his communications link with the nascent Joint Special Operations Air Component. The JSOAC would be his source for air when he needed it. After he’d checked in, the Controller next began identifying targets he might be able to strike. With enemy lines blurred and only a few hundred meters from his location, the potential for fratricide was significant. The one thing he couldn’t do: kill men from his own side. And apart from the few Green Berets with him (and their CIA interpreter, the only member of 555 who could communicate with the locals), he didn’t know any of the friendlies or how to tell them apart from the Taliban. Everyone looked the same through binoculars or the spotting scope.
A short time later, the JSOAC called Calvin. “You’ve been approved for aircraft. Your first flight will arrive on station at noon.” He checked his watch—less than an hour. Shit! Calvin hadn’t even requested air yet, and now two F/A-18s launched from the USS Theodore Roosevelt were already inbound. Sprinting the seven hundred miles from the aircraft carrier’s location in the North Arabian Sea, they were flown by two pilots anxious to get close-range kills directed by someone on the ground.
Calvin set one Green Beret on the SOFLAM to designate targets, while another manned his SATCOM radio. Calvin got on his primary strike radio. He carried two and, as usual, his CCT ruck weighed more than anyone else’s on the mission. He was ready. The tension in the air traffic control tower was building, everyone sensed something big was about to happen…except Papa John. Recalls Calvin, “He was pretty skeptical. Thought we were just there for show. Then the first aircraft arrived.”
Diaz had the target in the crosshairs of their spotting scope and asked Calvin, “Is that the target?”
Taking the handset from his ear and looking through the scope, he confirmed, “That’s it.” Then he cleared the aircraft “hot.” “Thirty seconds,” he told everyone in the tower.
The heavyset general bent forward and looked through the offered scope, but not before giving everyone in the room a final doubtful look. Seconds after he put his eye to the scope, the bunker Calvin had ID’d for his first target disappeared in a direct hit from two 500-pound bombs. The tower shook and General Papa John stood upright to look out the windows, which had long since been shot out of the tower cab, as if the spotting scope was playing tricks on him. Before him, the former Taliban headquarters bunker was a blackened smoking heap of earth and rubble, the smoke of the bombs still rising in the air.
Calvin had no time to enjoy the view. His next planes, F-14s also from the Roosevelt, were already checking in. Behind them, the first Air Force hunters, F-15 Strike Eagles and F-16 Falcons, were chomping at the bit, no doubt wishing their Navy brothers would clear out of the airspace.
The men in the tower watched the battle tone change across the airfield. Taliban positions were frantic. The CIA interpreter, now on the Taliban’s frequency, passed himself off as one of their own, asking about damage. The response was immediate and alarmed: Their frontline leader had been killed. In the very first airstrike in the struggle for the Afghan capital, Calvin Markham, with the help of his team, had just killed the most important man in the battle. Papa John was elated at the prospect of so many dead Taliban and the ease with which it had happened.
Calvin “cleared hot” each plane in order, striking Taliban positions to within three hundred meters of their location, causing the men in the tower to take cover behind the flimsy walls of Soviet-quality construction as shrapnel and shock waves rocked the top floor. Not a single friendly fighter was injured during Calvin’s first strikes of the war.
In a handful of strikes, these few Americans, led by the skill of one unique individual, broke a three-year Taliban stranglehold on the airfield. Papa John and the other leaders of the Northern Alliance were no longer skeptics. Calvin recalls, “The CIA guys couldn’t get the CAS on target. When I got bombs on that first day, hitting C2 [command and control] and rocket sites, our credibility was immediate.” And Calvin and the Triple Nickel were just warming up.
Their next mission was an eighteen-by-thirty-seven-mile target area in the Panjshir Valley, but a handful of fighter aircraft diverted at the last minute were not going to be enough to displace thousands of well-armed and armored Taliban. Calvin needed more air, and lots of it. To strike an entire valley, he needed bombers, but he’d also have to be close enough to differentiate friend from foe and adjust fire. Calvin and the Triple Nickel needed to be among the Northern Alliance fighters.
After pleading with the JSOAC for more air for a week, he finally got his wish. ODA 555 established three observation posts in the valley, and on 28 October, nine days after arriving in Afghanistan, Calvin received multiple B-1s and B-52s, fully laden with hundreds of 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs.6 Throughout the first week of November, “We broke the back of the Taliban,” recalls Calvin. So many bombing runs took place nonstop that he began coordinating them to hit while he slept. He knew the valley better than any training range he’d called air onto back in the States and began to share the “cleared hot” burden with his teammates, who by then were becoming proficient in the art themselves.
By this time, the men of 555 and the Northern Alliance shared a strong bond, sleeping in the same locations, sharing both the MRE rations of the Americans and the local Afghan food, including slaughtered goats and sheep. Calvin would call in resupply drops, normally delivered by C-130s, to keep the team in ammunition, food, and other necessities, the most critical being batteries for his radios and targeting equipment. Unfortunately, it didn’t always work out well for Calvin and 555. “This dumbshit colonel in Germany who was in charge of rigging our resupply didn’t want to use her precious (and expensive) chutes.” Instead she sent disposable high-speed versions, which blew up on opening at the high altitudes. “They burned in, sometimes costing us our entire resupply.” The men in America’s first major conflict since the Gulf War, it seemed, were not immune to the vagaries of the military’s logisticians and bean counters.
With no showers for more than two weeks, they’d begun to take on a most Northern Alliance ambience as well, but that didn’t make them Afghans. The white Americans, using Northern Alliance vehicles to move about the country, were now being targeted by a reeling Taliban. To combat the possibility of assassination or ambush, Diaz began masking their intentions by coordinating vehicles for a certain destination and then changing it through their interpreter once they were rolling. But it would be only a matter of time before the Taliban countered the tactic and struck the men at one of their various camps.
The potential problem was solved by the Northern Alliance leaders, who were gaining confidence with each successful airstrike and were pushing to take Kabul. On 11 November, 555 was told the Afghan force was moving on the capital. The Triple Nickel wasn’t prepared for, nor tasked with, such an audacious mission, but in the end there could be only one course of action. If the Afghans moved, they would too. “Higher [HQ] was so worried about us going into Kabul, but we really didn’t have a choice. We were in [Northern Alliance] trucks, so where they went, we went,” recalls Markham.
They weren’t, in fact, the first Americans to approach Kabul. The CIA’s Jawbreaker team, its first on the ground, was already on the edge of the capital and also armed with a 24 CCT. But the Triple Nickel was the first to bring airpower. Calvin realized his requirements were going to be immense, and his faith in a sluggish JSOAC request system, never strong, was diminishing. “It was a bit comical; someone thousands of miles away with no idea of the situation [on the ground] was deciding how much air I needed or would get.” As with the Northern Alliance’s push, he had little choice but to request “everything they had, especially bombers,” in the hope the JSOAC would grasp the gravity of a full-on assault on the Taliban and give him what he needed.
An all-out battle was at hand, two sides facing off with all available men and weapons. “It was like Braveheart, with both sides lined up” as the battle formed, recalls Calvin. The two armies, no more than five hundred meters apart, prepped weapons, passed orders or encouragement for their men, and waited. Going into deliberate battle for the first time, 555 discarded their CIA-provided Afghan clothing and donned uniforms. They would not go into battle as anything but Americans. Calvin and a couple of 555 soldiers occupied a two-story building, repeating their Bagram strategy, and readied the Controller’s equipment. Nearby, in another building, Diaz established a sniper’s hide to provide protection for his men and the Combat Controller, enabling them to focus on turning the battle.
The Taliban, with no idea the ODA was there, were completely oblivious to the amount of destructive power inbound against them. At 0800 the morning after 555’s arrival in Kabul, the Taliban opened fire on the Northern Alliance. In the hope of routing them, the Taliban fired everything they had prepped. “The exchange of fire was stunning. I’d never seen fire anything like it in my life,” remembers the Combat Controller. The exchange went on for hours. Meanwhile, Calvin and his teammates were already calling in strikes as fast as they could. The aircraft arrived in droves, forcing the Controller to start stacking them in air traffic holding patterns at different altitudes, just as Bruce Barry had done a decade earlier in the remote desert of Iraq. Only this time, there was an entire battlefield surrounding the CCT, and the fates of thousands of men—friend and enemy alike—were in his hands.
At an insane pace, he scribbled call signs, payloads, and play times (the time a particular aircraft was available to remain on station). Bombers, fighters, Navy, Air Force, coalition—they kept coming as word of the significance of the battle spread. This forced the Combat Controller to employ innovative sequencing and use of aircraft. “I was putting B-52s in timed strike patterns. When they rolled in, my fighters were out and they could drop their bombs from thirty thousand feet. Once those bombs hit, my fighters were rolling in and putting bombs right on. It was like the B-52 was marking the target for them,” he recalled in an interview.
After two hours of the most intense airstrikes of Calvin’s life, the battle was still not turning in the Northern Alliance’s favor. The Taliban, with superior numbers of men and equipment, now rolled on the friendlies with Soviet tanks and heavy antiaircraft weapons, aimed like rifles at allied positions, including the fire control building occupied by the Controller and his team. To protect the most valuable man on the battlefield, Northern Alliance troops were instructed to defend the American position. The battle was raging with hand-to-hand fighting at the base of the building, and Diaz’s overwatch was insufficient to hold the enemy at bay.
“By the time of the [airfield] battle, whenever we were under threat, their mission was to keep us alive at all costs,” Calvin recalls of their Afghan security force. While he continued focusing all his attention on receiving targets from his Green Beret spotters and laying down bomb strikes, below him, Northern Alliance soldiers were laying down their lives to protect his. Eighteen years after the battle, these nameless men remain close to his heart, their sacrifice not forgotten by the man whose job it was to liberate their comrades. “There’s no greater respect in the world than someone who’s willing to lay down their life for you in combat.” Of the men who died for him he states simply, “They weren’t the best equipped or trained. But they were men. I’ll never forget them or the honorable way they died.”
Despite the Afghan protection that allowed him to continue bringing airpower to bear, the tide was turning against the Northern Alliance. Thousands were already dead on both sides, but the Taliban’s superior numbers were proving decisive. The Northern Alliance, including 555, for whom there would be no retreat without their selfless Afghan brothers-in-arms, was in danger of being overrun. Calvin could still see two thousand Taliban troops, supported by armored personnel carriers in addition to the tanks, staged for a final and massive push. Behind them, a second wave waited. He needed to take a game-changing gamble.
Overhead, he had another B-52 poised to strike, but this one was different. It was loaded with twenty-seven 2,000-pound bombs, which he intended to place within five hundred meters of his own position—from 30,000 feet. Unfortunately, none of the bombs were precision guided, but were merely “dumb” bombs, subject to winds and atmospheric disruptions through six miles of airspace without correction. Such a mission at home on the training ranges of Nellis AFB, Nevada, required a five-mile safety standoff distance.
With such a massive single delivery, if he was off with any of his multiple calculations (the coordinates, his position, the friendly locations—all derived from an inadequate and antiquated Soviet map), not only would the Northern Alliance lose the battle for Kabul but he and the rest of his team would be vaporized by his own hand.
The Combat Controller looked to his teammates. They looked back, poised behind their weapons and the targeting equipment, as a battle for survival was being waged one floor below them and across the fields to their front. Men were fighting and dying. The Americans stared for what felt like an hour but in reality was merely seconds, while everyone weighed the consequences. He asked his team, “Are you guys good with this? Are we going to do this?” To a man, all agreed.
He rechecked that his SST-181 radar beacon (the only device he had to mark their position for the bomber) was working, checked the strike coordinates a final time, and called in the airstrike.
After inputting the data at 30,000 feet, his aircraft traveling at nearly 500 mph toward the men’s fate below, the pilot asked the Controller to confirm he wanted the strike placed immediately adjacent to their own position.
“I told him that if we didn’t, we were going to be dead anyway.”
Despite the desperation on the ground, the Controller waved the pilot off his first pass and sent the bomber around again, using the time to reconfirm every decimal.
When the plane reported inbound the second time, Calvin, gazing out upon the surreal scene before him, almost Hollywood in its drama, took another breath, keyed his black plastic handset, and stated clearly and calmly, “Cleared hot.”
Seconds later came the pilot’s reply: “Bombs away.”
Bombs released at 30,000 feet take roughly one minute to fall to earth. Outside the strike building, thousands of warriors, committed to their opposing causes, continued to fight, oblivious to the gravity-delivered destruction headed their way. Through the Alliance lines, 555 sent the word, “Get down!”
Committed to a destiny of his own devising, Calvin looked up at the clear blue sky, so deceptively serene, and at the B-52 high overhead as it left four contrails from its eight turbofan jet engines, and thought of his family back home. He took a deep breath and hugged himself to the floor.
The strike was perfect: 54,000 pounds of explosive death detonated parallel to the remnants of the friendly line directly in front of them. Black smoke blossoms of dirt and fire, stretched out over a mile-long line, exploded into the air. Then the sound hit, concussion after concussion rocking everyone on the battlefield, stealing the breath from their lungs. Calvin’s building buckled but stood. In slow motion, heavy pieces of armored carriers and tanks tumbled through the air, their landings silent as they were drowned out by the deafening roar of 2,000-pound bombs releasing their energy at an atomic 25,000 feet per second in every direction.
In the immediate silence that followed, itself strangely deafening, the line of huge craters, bordered by pieces of men and rifles and the hulks of armored equipment, revealed themselves to the stunned Taliban and Northern Alliance witnesses. Beyond the destruction, the Taliban’s second wave could be seen racing south in retreat.
The road to central Kabul was suddenly open, and within an hour of his battle-ending airstrike, Calvin and 555 were again in the back of Northern Alliance vehicles, riding into the city in a scene reminiscent of a liberated French town from the Second World War. Pockets of resistance remained, but the capital fell, and Calvin Markham arrived in the city at 0800 on 13 November. It was his twenty-sixth day of combat. What Pentagon planners believed would take more than six months was accomplished in less than a month by the commitment of a sometimes-fractious Northern Alliance and one Special Forces ODA with a lone Combat Controller. During the handful of days immediately following the insertion of ODA 555 and the other A-teams with CCT, the Northern Alliance’s control of the country went from less than 15 percent to 50 percent.
In his Silver Star citation, Calvin Markham, the first Combat Controller to direct airstrikes in America’s response to 9/11, is credited with directing dozens of airstrikes “involving over 175 sorties of both strategic [heavy bombers] and attack aircraft resulting in the elimination of approximately 450 enemy vehicles and over 3,500 enemy troops. [This] led to the eventual surrender of hundreds of Al Qaeda and Taliban ground forces” during his first mission, lasting forty-two dangerous and often desperate days. They would not be his last days of danger.
After the big battle, among the rubble of the formerly besieged Afghan capital, two friends met, CCT from different squadrons. They were dirty and disheveled, both having gone nearly a month without bathing. Their clothes were stiff with crusted sweat and dried mud, and their beards and hair were grungy as they hugged each other in brotherly fashion. Calvin was wrapping up his first mission. The other, a man named Joe O’Keefe, was a 24 operator and member of its Advance Force Operations team. Joe was the CIA’s Jawbreaker Combat Controller. Like Calvin, he’d snuck into the country weeks before, but with a four-man Agency team.
Calvin, having just delivered victory in the first major battle of the war but with severe frustrations over the way commanders and planners in the rear delivered everything from batteries to bombs, shared his experiences. “We brainstormed. How can we do this better?” says the burly CCT. As much as they were fighting the enemy, they were also fighting an Air Force bureaucracy, coordinating its air support through a rigid process stretching back to the 1970s of Laos and Vietnam. “There was no procedure for what we were doing. We were writing the books,” he recalls.
* * *
Stateside, John Chapman wasn’t writing the book on new airstrike procedures. He was trapped in the survey shop writing survey assessments and generating products for others to use in contingencies or war. And as in the Gulf War, he found himself sidelined. Only this time it was by choice; he’d chosen to move to surveys, and now the newest war, striking the United States from a clear blue sky two months before, had the entire focus of the US military, except himself it seemed.
* * *
In Bagram, Joe O’Keefe and Calvin Markham went their separate ways, knowing they were at the beginning of a long war with a bureaucracy both antiquated and constipated and an enemy well established and fanatical. Calvin headed to a well-deserved R & R. Joe was about to embark on another Combat Control first, this one in a place neither friend knew existed—a mountain cave complex a hundred miles east of Kabul on the Pakistan border. A place called Tora Bora.