John Chapman’s quest for challenge lit upon one of the most selective, and certainly most unique, special operations forces in the world. And like most young men entering an SOF discipline, he was not fully aware of how unique his chosen field was until after he was a full-fledged member. When he cross-trained in 1989 there were fewer than three hundred Combat Controllers in the world. Over the course of America’s longest-running war, CCT has grown to nearly six hundred operators, still only a fraction of sister-service SOFs such as the Green Berets, Rangers, and SEALs, who number in the thousands, yet the ratios are appropriate. Controllers continue to operate as lone warriors among the teams of men they join and protect in war.
For those aspiring to become a Combat Controller, the pipeline has evolved as well, just as twenty-first-century warfare itself has advanced. What was essentially a year plus of hell and trial by fire from day one for John Chapman and the others of his day has morphed into a two-and-a-half-year journey, including an entire year of advanced skills training after graduation from Combat Control School. The sophistication of instruction and the preparation of candidates for the challenges ahead of them are some of the improvements, yet attrition remains 75 percent due to the punishing nature of the training and exacting standards demanded.
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Despite its name and combat focus, there is a second and arguably more valuable role Combat Control fulfills—that of humanitarian. With this secondary mission, CCT is the only deliberately dual-role SOF force. In 1978, three Panama-based CCT were given a no-notice task to hop a plane for Guyana in late November, only to find themselves amid the evil and senseless carnage of the Jonestown massacre. As the only men capable of single-handedly spearheading the body recovery and providing situational awareness to the highest levels of government back in the US, they spent their Thanksgiving among the hundreds of dead in order to return the 918 victims to their loved ones on American soil.
CCT has gone on to reprise this role as the world’s first-of-the-first responders time and again. For Americans, this was most evident during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when CCT from both Air National Guard Special Tactics squadrons led the rescue, staging, and recovery effort for thousands of homeless and desperate Louisianans, turning Interstate 10 into a major heliport and surging small Zodiac boats to isolated victims. CCT then repeated the feat during hurricanes Rita and Ike in 2005 and 2008, respectively.
In the Indian Ocean shortly after Christmas turned to Boxing Day in 2004, the third largest earthquake ever recorded unleashed a tsunami that devastated multiple countries. John Chapman’s former unit, the 320th Special Tactics Squadron, responded to the worst-affected and most remote Indonesian province of Aceh to deliver aid and assist with rescues where the massive quake-generated wave crested a hundred feet and washed away entire villages.
The most significant humanitarian Combat Control operation, however, took place closer to home and earned a distinction no other US military enlisted person has ever received. Tony Travis, a career CCT master sergeant at Hurlburt’s 23rd Special Tactics Squadron, was called into work on the evening of 12 January 2010 after a 7.0 earthquake rocked and devastated the impoverished island nation of Haiti. Two million people were affected in the capital of Port-au-Prince alone.
Packed and ready to go within hours, Tony led the first forces on the ground, arriving at 1536 the next day. Their mission: Secure, open, and control Toussaint Louverture International Airport. Eight Combat Controllers, equipped with only their portable radios and two ATVs, cleared and established control within twenty-eight minutes, meeting the self-imposed CCT standard and launching their first plane with two minutes to spare (Tony started his stopwatch the instant he stepped onto Haitian soil). From their ATVs and a scavenged folding table, the men ran the airport amid international chaos for the next thirteen days (when they were relieved by Air Force air traffic controllers). Armed with a personal letter from President René Garcia Préval granting Tony personal control of all Haitian airspace, CCT landed the more than 250 aircraft converging daily from fifty-plus nations, exceeding the expected capacity of the airfield by 1,400 percent. The expert austere airfield operators managed to shoehorn planes and helicopters onto every inch of the airport with zero incidents. Additionally, when more CCT arrived, they surveyed, established, and controlled thirty remote landing and drop zones for aerial delivery of 150,000 pounds of humanitarian supplies. A man with extensive combat experience, including an unfortunate knife kill (“I fucked up clearing a building and was forced to go to my knife when I couldn’t get to my secondary pistol”), he was profoundly impacted by his experiences in Haiti. “You do a lot of things in combat but never see the results. In Haiti the positive feedback was immediate.” For him, delivering global first responders, sending out the injured, and bringing order to the chaotic airfield was the essence of Combat Control. “It’s what we do. Go in, set up, and control airspace. I don’t believe any other organization in the world can do that without advance notice.” For leading the effort to establish a beachhead amid the anarchy of a global response converging on a single ill-equipped and devastated runway in one of the most impoverished nations in the world, Tony Travis was recognized as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of the year.
Like Tony Travis, John Chapman was already one of the most elite warriors in the world, but chose to take another, ultimate step toward being the best, placing himself in the top 10 percent of all CCT. And as with the select handful of Green Berets and Rangers who try out for Delta Force, or their counterparts in the Navy, drawn from the ranks of the “vanilla” SEAL teams, who volunteer to join Team Six, John successfully ascended to the most elite unit in the Air Force—by some measures, the world—and joined “the 24.”
Throughout its history, CCT has accomplished unique “firsts” in and out of combat, particularly using parachutes, their favored means of insertion. In 1955 and ’56, America was building a presence in Antarctica and used Air Force aircraft to airdrop and land on the continent. During this expansion, the first site to be built up was situated on the precise South Pole. Staging from Christchurch, New Zealand, USAF C-124 Globemasters ferried equipment and supplies to the austere environment. When the uncontrolled cargo parachute drops began failing and missing their target drop zones (DZs), damaging significant portions of critical and specialized equipment, the call went out for someone with expertise in precision airdrops. In stepped Technical Sergeant Richard J. Patton, an airman with merely thirty-one parachute jumps. At exactly 0154 hours, Greenwich Mean Time, Sunday, 25 November 1956, at an altitude of 2,000 feet, he jumped from a C-124 christened the State of New Jersey. One minute later, he drifted to the ice to become the first person to make or even attempt a jump at the South Pole. Within hours, he established and operated a DZ and delivered near 100 percent accuracy. For his actions, Dick Patton earned a Distinguished Flying Cross and presidential citation.
Five years later, another Combat Controller, James A. “Jim” Howell, successfully became the first “human subject” to eject live while testing the upward rotational supersonic “B” ejection seat. From an F-106B slicing through the air at 560 knots and 22,060 feet over Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, he was fired into the atmosphere, giving new meaning to the term “test dummy.” The intrepid Combat Controller stayed with the rocket-powered seat for forty-three seconds until he passed through 14,000 feet, then separated and opened his parachute without incident, successfully capping a nearly five-year test program.
Forty years later and a world away, a much younger Combat Controller set a different kind of record on 14 November 2001. It was a frozen night over Afghanistan, the temperature at altitude was in excess of minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and Staff Sergeant Mike Bain, a member of the 24, conducted the first-ever combat HALO tandem cargo bundle parachute drop. Also executing this historic first were Delta Force sergeants major Kris and Bill (the same two operators who would accompany Jay Hill on Anaconda and witness John Chapman’s one-man stand), each with their own bundles. Mike was pushed off the ramp of an MC-130 Combat Talon at 18,500 feet, strapped on top of a three-foot-diameter, eight-foot-long, 528-pound tube crammed with his Delta team’s rucksacks. Bill carried the team’s food and water, and Kris more equipment. No surprise, their mission was to call airstrikes on a Taliban-controlled pass. It was a daring feat of courage. As audacious as it was, what Mike did after his parachute opened 6,500 feet above the enemy could be drawn from the pages of James Bond. Under canopy on his radio, Mike received his first strike aircraft, a flight of two F-15s, and managed to work up his first three targets by writing with a grease pen on the compass navigation board mounted on his chest. Also talking with his ISR platform, a Navy P-3, he was ready to destroy targets passed to him from the P-3 before he even hit the ground. Mike had the imagination, foresight, and expertise to plan for the possibility, an unprecedented innovation and application of airpower. To many fellow “black” operators, it was the most impressive combat parachute jump in history. To a layman it simply sounds unbelievable.
The men landed in an isolated high-elevation mountain valley, with Mike hitting the intended impact point dead center. Mike and his Delta team then spent the next twenty-four hours climbing across two mountain summits with their hundred-pound rucks. The enemy, knowing the mountainous terrain was inaccessible, assumed their passage was safe from American eyes and bombs. They were wrong. The team, with Mike on the radio (naturally), destroyed ammunition and fuel trucks on the first day of operations. That night, Mike had an AC-130 crater the road to slow traffic so the team could ensure they struck only Taliban forces. For three days, the Delta team and Mike denied all Taliban reinforcements between Kandahar and Kabul along their key supply route.
Sixty-six years into its history, CCT is just beginning to reach full potential. It’s come a long way from Jim Stanford standing on the wing of a puddle jumper in the middle of enemy territory, pumping his own gas, to John Chapman fighting to save the lives of his five remaining SEAL teammates and another eighteen men he’d never met. Yet they share a common brotherhood: an Air Force no one knew or even suspected existed.
John’s life and this book both end on the battlefields of Afghanistan in 2002. In the seventeen years since those events, the three to six hundred Combat Controllers that have comprised the force have earned hundreds of Bronze Stars with Valor, thirty-five of the Air Force’s seventy-five Silver Stars, six of its nine Air Force Crosses, and its only Medal of Honor. From a uniformed force of approximately 500,000, Combat Control comprises 0.1 percent of the Air Force yet accounts for nearly half of its Silver Stars and two-thirds of its highest award, the Air Force Cross. Those heroics are for chronicling in another volume of Combat Control’s history. What is significant at the conclusion of this book is the impact this deadly shadow force has had on the Air Force and the nation. The future promises more of the same.
In discussing that future, Brigadier General Mike Martin, the former commander of the 24th Special Operations Wing, the most decorated wing in the modern Air Force,31 explained why it’s critical for CCT to continue to push into new frontiers:
No one is tasked or organized to exploit and manage space into the battlefield. We are. You’d expect SEALs to own the maritime domain, but they don’t. Same with [Army] Special Forces. I don’t think anyone exploits those multiple domains more so than CCT.
The contested nature of future environments will likely change what we do. Combat Control’s abilities in denied and degraded environments allow us maneuverability unavailable to others. This in turn allows us to inform and shape the air and even space kinetic strike missions that will be required. Going forward, if I can put a [Special Tactics team] in suborbital low earth orbit, I can infiltrate it within forty-five minutes globally. Using Operation Anaconda as an example, the forces supporting CCT in conducting those strikes, the kinetics, hypersonics and the like, must be able to keep up with our “First There” forces. B-52s, a weapon Combat Control used extensively, can’t keep up with that kind of rapidity.
Regardless of future advances, today’s Combat Controllers remain the deadliest individuals to walk a battlefield in the history of warfare, with the power and expertise to orchestrate the destruction of key strategic targets or hundreds of enemy at a time on any battleground onto which they step, as exemplified by Joe O’Keefe’s stunning 688,000 pounds of bomb tonnage at Tora Bora. At the same time and using their unique expertise—blending the world’s mightiest air force with unequalled battlefield acumen and three-dimensional awareness—they are the first to deliver hope and salvation to suffering masses anywhere in the world, at a moment’s notice.
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Regarding the fight for Takur Ghar, it is proportionally the most valorous battle in the history of the United States military. Of the twenty-five men on the mountain at sunrise, thirteen would receive Silver Stars, one a Navy Cross, and two the Air Force Cross. And finally, two ultimately received Medals of Honor. But a battle sometimes referred to as Roberts Ridge (for the SEAL who inadvertently fell from a helicopter) more accurately centered on John Chapman, the man abandoned for dead and who became the fulcrum by which the two opposing forces levered the larger fight.
During his final hour, John was the deadliest man on the mountain summit battlefield on which he found himself—the lone Combat Controller—not because of airpower but by virtue of his spirit in the tradition of the American fighting man: a solitary warrior, one of his nation’s finest, fighting as CCT have always done even when integrated into a team, as a man with the burden of the lives of many others in his hands. After saving the lives of his five SEAL teammates at the cost of two mortal wounds, he held two dozen enemy fighters at bay for more than an hour, until in his final moments, in excruciating pain, his body ravaged by sixteen gunshot and shrapnel wounds and battered from hand-to-hand combat, he chose self-sacrifice over self-preservation and with his last breath delivered eighteen comrades he’d never met into salvation.