The Christian Science Monitor
Blasted high into a cloud of heat and dust by an errant, 2,000-pound
guided missile, the Air Force sergeant thought he'd left Earth behind
for good. Unable to see or hear, he felt himself lofting over a chaotic
Afghan battlefield into a quiet, numbing blackness.
"It was just
a floating feeling of being pulled upward…total sensory
deprivation," said the sergeant, Mike, whose full name was withheld by
the military. Sgt. Mike landed alive—inside an ancient Afghan fort
filled with armed, rioting Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners.
It was late last November, and Sgt. Mike—a member of a highly specialized, little known group of elite U.S. fighters known as combat controllers (CCTs)—and his team were at the prison uprising near Mazar-e Sharif trying to recover the body of slain CIA agent Johnny Michael Spann.
If the war in Afghanistan has showcased a lethal partnership of U.S. Special Operations Forces and precision air power, combat controllers are the critical go-betweens, the most sophisticated human ground-to-air link.
Now on brief rotations back home from Afghanistan, some of the first CCTs on the ground in the Afghan war are telling their stories. They are stories of bravery and ingenuity, of spotting targets from horseback using laptops and laser goggles, of melding 19th-century Afghan warfare with 21st-century U.S. military technology in unprecedented ways.
"Nobody out there knows more about the ground plan and the air plan, so when things go bad we are the ones who try to pull it all together," said Senior Master Sgt. Robert Rankin, commandant of the Combat Control School at Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina. "Our main job is to bring calm to chaos."
"First There"
A tiny force of less than 400 men, CCTs are in such demand that the Air Force has imposed a "stop loss" order, barring any from leaving or retiring.
Experts in setting up remote landing strips and drop zones, guiding warplanes with radios and radar, and calling in strikes for ground troops, their motto is "First There." Indeed, in Afghanistan, CCTs were among the first to arrive behind enemy lines, infiltrating the country with U.S. special operations teams about a month after September 11 to begin spotting targets for the Northern Alliance.
One of those spotters, Sgt. Calvin, landed north of Kabul and within 30 hours called the first air strikes on Taliban positions, according to an Air Force account released last month. Northern Alliance officers were so impressed that during an intense fire fight with Taliban forces, one of them moved to shield Calvin.
"He said if something happened to him…someone else would step in," Calvin said. "But if something happened to me, the planes could not come."
Round-the-clock bombing followed. Calvin and others directed more than 100 sorties by B-52s, F-18s, and other U.S. war planes, shattering Taliban defenses. The battle for the capital that military planners estimated would last six months took 25 days.
