AFA Policy Forum

Colonel Lyle Koenig, Jr., and TSgt Jim Hotaling

Air Force Special Operations Command

Air Force Association National Convention

Washington, D.C.

September 16, 2002

Policy Forum: Special Operations Forces Brief



Colonel Lyle Koenig: I appreciate the chance to be here. As General Peterson said, I work directly for Lieutenant General Paul Hester, who is the Commander of Air Force Special Operations Command and—as everybody in this audience knows— he is a member of the AFA, a strong supporter of the AFA, and I know he was very disappointed he couldn’t be here to address the group today, but he is doing an Air Force board and was unable to attend. So, it is my honor to be here. I just appreciate the opportunity.

What I am going to do today is spend a small amount of time talking, laying the foundation for a war story, a short portion of what Air Force Special Ops is about, and then we are going to get the real warrior up here who has laid on the ridge line and shot back at terrorists. He will give you his story about ground operations in Afghanistan.

This is what everybody recognizes—Air Force Special Operations Command by – six versions of the C-130; the MH-53 Pave Low helicopter. As you all know, we are a small command – 13,000 people total for worldwide Air Force Special Operations. One hundred and twenty one aircraft, only 88 of which are combat coded. In addition to being an Air Force major command, remember we operationally report to the Commander in Chief of the United States Special Operations Command in Tampa to provide specialized support for this nation’s special operations forces as well as a ground force to provide a very special air-to-surface interface that we are going to briefly talk about.

This is the portion that many people aren’t familiar with when we discuss Air Force Special Operations Command – special tactics. Three career fields: combat control, para-rescue and combat weather, all of which are jump-qualified and all of which are integrated with ground Army and Navy special operations teams.

In October of 2001, many of you saw, all across this nation, on the front page of all the major papers, pictures such as these, with captions that said, “soldiers inserted on the ground in Afghanistan.” I don’t need to tell this audience these guys aren’t soldiers; these are airmen. And airmen are on the ground, combat controllers, integrated in every single special operations team that was inserted on the ground in Afghanistan. This is no surprise to us, but a big surprise to those outside of our community.

What I want to do real quick is just explain what it takes to become a combat controller. Start with your Combat Control Orientation at Hurlburt, mainly PT, just to get you in shape for your 18 months to 20 months worth of training that you have to do. Off to Air Traffic Control School, where they learn radar control, air field control, graduating from that course as a certified FAA air traffic controller. No surprise – they go off to jump school at Fort Benning, same school we all know about. No surprise with combat survival training at Fairchild Air Force Base.

Combat Control School at Pope. This is the meat of what the combat controllers learn, communicating, land navigation, LZ survey, DZ survey, LZ control. All of those things, those basic fundamental tenets that the combat controllers need in combat. Back to Hurlburt for 12 months to do advanced skills training, which is where all of the disciplines that the combat controllers have learned are put together in preparation to go out on their first operational assignment. Part of that is military free fall. A minimum of 30 free falls, of which two day and two night jumps on oxygen, full combat gear, ruck sack, combat equipment, LZ and DZ survey equipment—everything necessary—and when these guys jump into combat, they are familiar with [it]. Diver School. No surprise there, by the United States Army to get scuba qualified out to a unit.

The real heroes are not the guys on the staff, as you all know. What a pleasure it is to introduce guys who lay on ridge lines, shoot back, kill terrorists and call in precision fire power. Today, Tech. Sgt. “Hots” Hotaling is one of those guys who we have the opportunity to hear from. As General Peterson said, he has 10 years of active duty service. He is in the reserves. A Washington State trooper as he said. But what stands out to me as I have gotten to know him and as I have read his story and heard his briefing is on the 12th of September, this guy called up and said, “I want in the fight. I want on active duty. I’ve got to get there now.” On the 14th of September, he was activated, starting spinning up the small little refresher things that he needed to do to get over in the theater. He was there for about a month and from the opening day of Operation Anaconda he was there. What really appeals to me is that I really think Sgt Hotaling is the citizen airman. Not citizen soldier. He is a citizen airman and it is an honor to be around this guy. Thank you very much for listening to me. I’ll bring up the real hero. Sgt. Hotaling, over to you.



TSgt. Jim Hotaling: Thank you very much for inviting me. Three things before I start the briefing. First thing is what the colonel didn’t mention is that the motto for AFSOC is that we are the quiet professionals. So it is a little bit of a thing for us to get up here and actually be able to tell our story finally. It is an honor for us to do that.

Secondly, it is also an honor that there are some fellow AFSOC warriors in this room and it is a little humbling that I get to tell my story and it just represents one story of many that we are out there fighting the war and to this day we are still out there doing it. This just represents what special tactics is doing. With that, we are going to go ahead and do it.

It has already been mentioned a hundred times, but I love bringing this thing up that nobody likes to see that in the rear view mirror, including myself. It is true I am a Washington State trooper and the story has already been told. About six months prior to 9/11, they started a reserve program, IMA, for combat controllers and I got the call and said, “sure, why not?” I get to go back, shoot, dive, jump and be with the fellas again. What a great job! I remember telling my wife, there is no way I would ever be activated. It would take something like Desert Storm or something like that for me to get activated. Six months later, she is kicking me out of the house.

Anyways, I was activated and I was assigned to our west coast team which is the 22nd Special Tactics Squadron out at McChord Air Force Base, which was conveniently in my state, which allowed me to stay at home. I was assigned the theater call sign of Jaguar One-Two. I spent a few months training up with them. In late November, we inserted into country.

After insertion into country, we were assigned to our different teams. I was assigned as a Terminal Attack Controller to provider command and control and close air support to a coalition special forces team.

Third point that I wanted to make is this is the unclassified version of this briefing. So you are just going to have to fill in the holes a little bit because there is going to be some things that don’t connect.

I was assigned to a coalition special forces team. And within a week of being in Afghanistan, we were assigned a strategic reconnaissance mission. Strategic reconnaissance, if you are not familiar with it, is basically just sneaking behind enemy lines and taking a look at what they are doing and reporting back intelligence. But it is not actually doing any action on to them.

So, we get in there and we insert on some CH-53s from the Marine Corps and we drive four-wheel, ATV quads about 20 kilometers across country and then we walk the rest of the way. We are there for about two days and we are just watching the bad guys and seeing what they are going, reporting things back and lo and behold a Bedouin walks right up onto our encampment. There is about six of us there and we take care of him and shoo him away, but what does he do? He runs to the local village and he notifies the militia.

Within two days of actually being in the field, and within a week of being in Afghanistan, I am on my first Escape and Evade. I know this war is for real.

This picture is an actual picture of the E&E. If you can see the coalition guys expression of “why are you taking a picture at this time?”—I promised my wife I’d get a lot of good pictures on this war. I actually carried one of those disposable cameras that you buy in grocery stores around my neck at all times. So I just took the opportunity to take a quick little snap shot as we were running back for our four wheelers. But what this picture does demonstrate, it shows you the type of terrain that we were in and also gives you the sense of the type of backpacks that we were wearing. If you can see what he is carrying on his back there, that equals to about 120 pounds worth of gear. That is not fun to carry. Especially when you have to run through that type of terrain.

We were able to get back to our ATVs and we were being chased by four Toyota four-runners that had .50 caliber machine guns mounted on the back of them. The chase was on for a little over 90 minutes. Within that 90 minutes, I was able to get a Navy P-3 Sub Hunter that just happened to be in the area to help me out. He has some eyeballs up there and he was literally able to tell me to turn left, turn right, go down this creek bed, stop here, and it allowed us to break contact with the enemy as we started to gain some distance. It also allowed me to get the close air support role going and we were able to bring two of my friends from the USS Stennis aboard, two F-18s to take care of the problem for us. That was a good first mission.

We ended up surviving that mission, as you can see. And we later did a direct-action mission on that facility with the Marine Corps.

Coming back off of that, I stayed with that same coalition team and the next mission we had was on a terrorist training facility. This is the second largest terrorist training facility in the country, a very hardcore Al Qaeda training camp, and we knew we could not afford at this point to be compromised like we were with the local militia. So what we had to do was some how find a way that there was no way somebody could stumble on us. My coalition mates decided to nickname this one the “walk of death.”

The reason why is the terrain that we had to take. We had to climb a 2,300 foot ridge that was almost straight up. It took us two and a half days to make the climb. We averaged about a hundred yards an hour as we did this, but we knew there was no Bedouin that was going to stumble across us on this one.

To give you another idea, if you can see the size of the packs, if you look on the right corner there, you can see the one guy sitting down and the pack is literally a good foot and a half over his head. Again, this was a nine-day mission. We had to carry in nine days food and water plus all your gear and plus it is freezing cold. There is a lot of stuff you have to carry and again these weights were extreme. It is not like it is the X Games or anything like that where you’ve got safeties and ropes and little helmets and things like this. It is do or die. It is a tough thing to do, but it is things you have to do in war.

Coming back off of that mission, which was a successful strategic reconnaissance and then turned into a direct action, we came back and had a few days off and went back out again on another strategic reconnaissance direct action. Direct action, if you are not familiar, is what you would visualize if you saw a SWAT team here in the states. It is basically kicking down the doors and engaging the enemy one-on-one. This one was on an Al Qaeda command and control facility, and I have up there chasing enemy SOF. The reason that I have that is as we were chasing them across country we were chasing them on six-wheeled range rovers and there were also some additional non-Al Qaeda, non-Taliban members that were security forces for this Al Qaeda C-2 facility so it made it an interesting fight. This gives you an idea of what the terrain looks like towards the Iranian border and it is more of a flat, typical desert-type terrain and that is just us stopping on a break and listening and looking and seeing where the bad guys are.

Another funny story about these six-wheeled range rovers is that they are designed for three people. Of course, I am the fourth guy and I am the American so I am on the tail gate the whole time riding in the back. So, it was pretty uncomfortable.

We ended up catching those guys and they are in Cuba now I believe.

Coming back off of that one—don’t worry, there’s more to come—I actually came off the coalition teams and was asked by my commander there in the field if I could head up a classic special tactics combat control mission, which is to go survey air fields. As the colonel mentioned before, we are certified air traffic controllers. What we also are certified to do is go out and actually survey air fields. We are not talking about the ones that you see at LaGuardia or here at National, but the ones that are made out of just dry lake beds and middle of the road and things like that. We can actually go there and talk to the director of mobility forces and tell him, “you know what, you can land a C-17 here because we’ve kicked the dirt, we’ve touched and we’ve tasted it and we can do it.” That is what we had to do on this one.

This is just an example of what we bring to the fight, where actually you bring engineering total stations out there and you can see the tactical neon yellow that we utilize over there. This is not a good feeling when you unpack this in the middle of indian country and you realize you didn’t paint the total station before you went to war. Lessons learned. That was definitely in the lessons learned.

This is another one. I was actually escorted on this survey mission by the Navy SEALS and they brought their desert patrol vehicles which they made famous over in Desert Storm. The reason that it is all white there—that is actually an ice storm that we got hit with and pretty much shut down the whole operation. But we were able to tactically survey that airfield and today it is being used for operations.

Coming back off of that mission, I was assigned to another coalition team. These guys were from a northern European country and they were pretty interesting. It is funny. When I first got assigned to them, I came up to them and I introduced myself and of course I am the only American and they are like, “Ja, Sgt. Hotaling, we’ve been training for months and months to climb big mountains and we are strong and we hope you are, too.” I am just looking at them like, “I am a donut-eating state trooper.” That is what I’m thinking in the back of my mind. But of course I had to save face since I was the only American with them and I lied and said, “Let’s go get ‘em.” We went on this mission, it was another direct action mission and this was on the Al Qaeda safe house near the Paki border. The reason I had “B-52 Intimidation” on here, I don’t have any slides on this, but after we were done with the direct action mission, we were ready to go home and so as we were up in the mountains, we came down to a valley floor to go to the helicopter landing zone and as we were waiting for the two helicopters to arrive, the local villagers started seeing, “well, there is only 12 guys there, there is like 300 of us in the village, I think we can take ‘em.” So the villagers started to go up on the ridges and they were building bonfires and started to shoot their guns off in the air and the coalition team leader looks at me and says, “Sgt. Hotaling, it is time to go.” I call up for the helicopters and one helicopters calls me and says, “We’re broke and we’re going back to Bagram.” So, just the great news that I wanted to pass along. I tell the team leader that we are on our own and we are going to have to go hide until they can come get us. So at this point the villagers are getting a little crazy and I think they are getting rambunctious, they are ready to go take us on and one thing that I had in my back pocket, though, prior to the mission, I had coordinated for a B-52 to be overhead in case we had any caves in the area because there was reports of caves there and we might do some cave-busting. So I call on the frequency and sure enough he’s still around and the first thing he asks me, he goes, “Hey Jaguar, where do you want me to drop these bombs?” He had flown a long way, probably from the states and he was ready to go. I told him, “well, let’s just slow down and let’s figure this out.” So we talk it through and what is the best way to disperse 300 screaming, crazy Afghanis? How about a low pass with a B-52? That is exactly what we did. No need to drop bombs on the villagers, they were just getting crazy, but it was enough to scare the hide off of them and the problem was solved. Another good thing about that was he actually stayed on site for over three and a half hours and that was a big deal for me because he could hear the tension in my voice. He knew that I was the only American down there with these coalition guys and it was a big deal for him to stay there and cover our six while we made our way up into the woods and found some place to hide. It was a big deal. So it was nice for him to be there and it was much appreciated. After he left, we got a P-3 overhead and basically he watched us all night long until the helos could come and get us. So it was a good effort.

Coming back off of that mission, I am bouncing all over the place. Now I am going with the U.S. Navy SEALS and another coalition force that has their version of the SEALS and this time, another direct action mission with Sensitive Sight Exploitation. Sensitive Sight Exploitation is basically gathering evidence. Once you do direct action, you’ve got all this evidence that you can take back home to use in prosecuting the enemy. That is what the purpose was of this Al Qaeda safe house.

The interesting thing about this direct action mission was it was a nine house complex that wasn’t just little mud huts. You can see the one in the background there. Actually, it was three stories high, had a basement in it, multiple families living in it, kids running around and all the houses were like that, intermixed with bad guys. It was a pretty neat dance that we had to create with the SEALS taking down half the village and the coalition guys taking down the other half and coordinating all that as it went down. It was a very complex mission, but very successful.

The story out of this one, though, is if you look near my elbow, there is an antenna sticking out of my back pack there that looks like a helicopter blade. We had had problems prior to this with my communications. I always had to switch from line of sight communications talking to aircraft to satellite communications to talk to the commanders in the rear and I am always switching antennas and lines and all that stuff and it is always a pain, especially when you are doing direct action missions because things are happening fast and furious. So, we got to talking about how we could solve this and I was talking with my Navy buddies and they said, “you know on ships, they’ve got an antenna there that you can talk to everybody with just this one antenna, line of sight and SATCOM.” So, lo and behold, miraculously, we acquired one of these off of a ship and did some modification to it and it actually worked out very well. This thing was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I called back to the 720th Group there in Florida and I say, we’ve got to buy a hundred of these things, everybody needs them. So they are like, “alright, let’s get them.” So they start doing some testing on them and all that and they didn’t tell me this until I after I got back stateside, but they said “you are not supposed to get within 50 feet of that thing.” But I got word that we are still buying them so, hey, that is good news.

This is just a picture from the roof of one of those complexes looking down at some of the ammunition and weapons that we took. All the guys with the white skull caps there are also visitors to our Cuba facility.

As I came off of that mission, I went again on another, got assigned to a different coalition team, again from northern Europe and what we got word on here, we are just hanging out in camp one day and we get word that there is someone on our Top 10 list. Everybody has heard of the Al Qaeda and the Taliban Top 10 list and now someone’s up there in that list trying to make their way to the Paki border and they are on a cell phone saying, “they’ll never catch me.” Of course, we are intercepting all this stuff so after we do the mad dash for a couple helos, we end up flying in and landing literally right on top of the bad guy and taking him back to where we were from. And again, another Cuban visitor. You clapped too soon when I said about the Cuban visitors. We had plenty of those.

Another honor that I failed to mention about the other European team was for this team here on this mission and the other mission where the helicopters didn’t come and pick us up, it was both their countries’ first combat mission since World War II and it was a very big source of pride for them to actually go into combat and to prove who they were and their manhood and all that stuff and for me to be the only American with them was a great honor and of course it was a great honor to drink with them to celebrate that fact also. But it was a big honor and it was a very powerful thing to be with other special operations forces that were finally proving their worth after so many years.

Back off of that mission, still staying pretty busy, I went back to the SEALS and to the coalition SEAL equivalent and this time a direct action mission and a sensitive sight exploitation of a cave complex right on the Paki border. We knew this one was going to be very sensitive and that it was very, very close to the border. We didn’t necessarily want to just take these caves and bomb them, we wanted to go up there and if we had to set demolition charges or just see what was up there. We knew the altitude was going to be a little extreme—somewhere between ten thousand and eleven thousand feet. What we weren’t expecting was five feet of snow. But that is what we got. We actually had to do some cross country skiing and snow-shoeing to get to the caves. Again, that is justification for our winter warfare trips to Stove, Vermont or something like that, because we need it. It was a very interesting trek up the mountain. Did about a thousand foot vertical ascent with the snow shoes. And also utilized a one-man AKIEL sled to carry our demolition. The demolition was about 80 to 100 pounds worth of demolition. The Navy hates that I bring this point up in public, but I like doing it anyways. All the gear that you see there is Air Force gear. We were able to deploy – my squadron has the extreme cold weather package for its special tactics and we deployed over there with it and we were the only guys in town that basically had all the gear. So, all that gear that you see there is actually Air Force stuff.

Just another picture of the conditions. The ridge line in the background there is the Paki border. That is how close we were. We ended up not dropping bombs and we just blew the caves in place with the demo, that way we didn’t have to tote all that demo down with us as we left.

That was about middle February. After I got off of that mission, we were notified that there was going to be a big operation coming up shortly, codenamed Operation Anaconda, which everybody has heard in the media. I was reassigned back with my original coalition team that I went out on that big “walk of death” with and they wanted me just for the fact that they knew they could climb that terrain and they at least had one trusted American that could climb that terrain and so I was the sucker that got assigned to them.

This picture here is actually a picture from my observation position. If I say, “OP” that is what I mean, my observation position. This position here just gives you an idea of how extreme the terrain was. This picture was taken late in the Anaconda. What I’ll do now is give you a little situational awareness of how Anaconda was going to go down and then I’ll explain to you my 14-day version of how Anaconda went down through my eyes.

This is the Soeycowt Valley. The valley floor was basically 8,500 feet. The top of the mountains reached to about 10,800 feet. The snow line was about 9,000 feet. Temperatures ranged somewhere dropping below zero at night to about 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the daytime.

This was the basic battle plan. We had friendly Afghani forces that were going to push from the west down. We had a conventional Army task force, Task Force Rockason and Task Force Mountain, which were 101st Airborne Division and 10th Mountain Division, conventional forces pushing also down from the north. They were going to put in where you see HLZ 12 there, that was going to be a blocking force and basically this was the old hammer and anvil effect and we were going to squeeze the enemy into the blocking force and take them out. My OP was situated just south of them and what I was to do was what we referred to as catch the squirters, which were the onesey twosey guys that made it past our conventional forces and take them out. That was the plan.

This is a top-down view. That red box indicates that HLZ 12. The blue dot in the lower left hand corner is my OP position where I was going to be inserted. All those yellow dots that you see there are enemy positions. That is not the picture that we had prior to going in there. We didn’t actually know that was the enemy concentration. That enemy, all those positions there are just plotted off of my battle damage assessment at the end of Anaconda. But that just gives you a sense of how much of the enemy was actually in the valley.

On the first of March, I inserted with my coalition team. We inserted onto the ridge line, these ridge lines were so steep that the helicopter couldn’t even actually land. What he had to do was lower his ramp and back his ramp into the ridge line and we literally jumped off the ramp onto the ridge. If you were up in the cockpit of the helicopter, he would still be flying it and you could look down and see about a 2 to 3 thousand foot drop. It was pretty crazy on how he actually had to get us in there. It was one of those things that you would never want to do again, that is for sure.

We insert one day prior to the actual assault that was going to take place.

On dawn of 2 March, the 10th Mountain Division, about a company minus actually, inserts into that HLZ12 and they are pinned down all day. They are getting their butts handed to them because basically as they get onto the LZ, as they land, they are instantly pinned down with mortar fire, heavy machine guns and RPGs. They are in for a pretty tough fight that day. As they fight, I am about six to seven kilometers away from them to the south. All I can do at this point is actually just observe it. I am too far away to call in any close air support and I really can’t do much. So we were just trying to figure out what we can do to help at this time.

Well, this was the motivation that we needed. The coalition task force commander basically called us on SATCOM and said, “guys, it is time to go help the Americans. You are the only other guys in town. See if you can get up there and do anything to bring CAS onto the situation.”

So, we develop a plan that will have that same helicopter driver come back, pick us up—because we figured he was the only guy who could come and pick us up, because we didn’t know how he was going to drop us off and he did it. He would come pick us up and we would fly straight up the valley, land on a high ridge and then I would call in close air and save the world.

That didn’t happen. What actually happened was about midday of that same day an SA-7 was shot up at an F-15 and the helicopter pilot obviously was not going to fly down the valley with a surface-to-air missile threat. So we had to devise a secondary plan.

Our secondary plan was basically just do a quick buttonhook about a kilometer and a half to two kilometers down to a creek bed and we’d have to walk it the rest of the way, which was about five and a half kilometers. It was absolutely the worst thing that we wanted to do because tactically it was everything that you would not want to do.

One, it meant that we would have to walk during the day. Two, we would have to walk very heavy. And three, it was right smack dab in the middle of enemy territory. With all that stacked against us, we said, “let’s go.” That night of 2 March, he picks us up and we insert on the creek bed. It is actually just prior to dawn on 3 March at this point.

My favorite slide: our favorite saying in special tactics: “ounces make pounds.” This was the actual list that I turned into our operations center prior to deployment. Big thing that I like to highlight here is the thing in the blue of total weight – 143 pounds and then moving down, almost 75 percent of that is equipment. When I go and talk to people that deal with technology and things like that and they always ask, “what can we do to help you out?” That is the only slide I need to show them right there. That is completely unacceptable that we have to walk with that much weight with the technology that we have out there today. But, again, the donut-eating state trooper is forced to go this. It is tough, but it is one of those things, it is the strangest thing. I don’t think I can take that same ruck sack today and walk around this hotel with it. It is just one of those things that happens when you are at war and a little switch goes on.

So, we were all heavy, all the coalition mates, all six of them and me, all were within two pounds of each other. It was because I couldn’t carry a tent because I had the radio so the guy next to me carried the tent and the food and things like that. So we were all within two pounds of each other. We were all very heavy.

This kind of gives you an idea of how we walked. We walked along the creek bed. Then at the very last ridge we started our thousand foot vertical ascent up to the highest ridge point of the inner valley. We did that in the daytime. We had to get there to save those Americans that were pinned down. How did we do that? The Army refers to it as a forced march. Why would you do a forced march in enemy territory? We had one thing on our side: we had the Predator and what he was able to do for us that day was incredible. What I did was, I was hooked up to the Predator in my ear and I was walking right next to the team leader and as we tactically moved through that creek bed, the Predator was actually my point man. As we walked, he would say, “ok, the next turn is good. Ok, that bolder is clear. You can keep moving. Those trees, there is nobody underneath them.” We were able to basically walk as fast as humanly possible and still remain tactical because we had someone up above keeping an eye out for us. So it was a great force enabler that day.

This gives you an idea of my commanding view of the valley and my attempt on PowerPoint graphics to show that. Basically I had a great 360-degree view of the valley and I was ready to do anything at this point. It took us about five and a half hours to make that climb through the creek bed and then up that ridge. By that time, the company that was pinned down was actually starting to do their exfil. They were exfiltrating that LZ. At this point, all I was doing was reporting back intelligence and helping out anything I could. I also received word that since the friendly forces were not successful in pushing down as far as they wanted, including the friendly Afghani forces, that we were going to insert additional observation positions that night. Other SOF forces going in all around the valley. That is great. It is the 3rd day without sleep. I am going to bed at this point. I lay down at bed. This is late on the 3rd, lay down in my little sleep sack and I put the microphones to my ear and try to get some shut eye. And I listen to the inserts going on all around the valley.

As one of the inserts goes on, another SOF team inserts basically across from me at about 3 kilometers as the crow flies. As they are inserting, their helicopter takes a hit and one of their soldiers falls out. It is a Navy SEAL by the name of Neal Roberts. He falls out of the helicopter and the helicopters limp away into another helicopter landing zone farther north. Neal Roberts survives the fall and begins to fight for his life. As that happens, the helicopters that limped away reconstitute their forces and go to self-SAR, or self rescue, the fallen SEAL. One of those members on that rescue force was a fellow combat controller and good friend, Master Sgt. John Chapman. As they come back in, they land and they begin to fight their way to their fallen comrade. Some time during that night, John Chapman was killed in action.

As that was going on, the remaining forces that were alive there trying to rescue decided that they were outgunned and they decided to start their own escape and invasion. They decided to leave the firefight. As they leave, we launch a quick reaction force out of Bagram to go get everybody.

That quick reaction force consisted of 10 Rangers and an embedded combat search and rescue force which was an Air Force C-SAR package. That was two pararescuemen, and one combat controller. As that force landed on what is now called Roberts Ridge, they were shot and the helicopter was shot down. It is actually referred to, if you talk to the guys, as a “hard landing.” They were flaring to land when they took several RPG shots and the helicopter fell from the sky at about 15 to 20 feet.

As the 47 crashes, this is basically what I am looking at now, these range lines are off. This is actually about 3 kilometers from Jaguar One-Two's position to the crash site. The SOF force is basically beginning their E&E. As this happens, the quick reaction force takes some casualties basically within the first two minutes. Four members of the quick reaction force are already killed, eight are wounded and they are taking quite a hit.

What can I do? At this point, there is a combat controller on board the crashed aircraft, Staff Sgt. Gabe Brown. He is on the radio and he is starting to make his calls, calling in close air support. He is trying to get air overhead immediately. I am letting him do that through the airwaves and coordinating through him through a line of sight radio. I let him know where I am at because he wasn’t aware of where I was and I am talking to him and we are trying to arrange the close air support. As that is happening, what I can see is the enemy forces in the valley and on the back side of the south side of the mountain moving their ways up toward the crash site to reinforce the bunkers that they have on the high ground. I get with Sgt Brown and we start to coordinate the appropriate air.

What we came up with was a simultaneous CAS operation. Sgt Brown would take everything from his location at the crashed aircraft to 800 meters out and he did that through strafing runs and through 500-pound bombs. He actually was calling in 500-pound bombs at 200 feet from his position. The reason they were able to survive that was terrain and also the snow. It was absorbing a lot of it and their frag patterns and he called in several bombs that day at 200 feet. He also took everything out to about 800 meters because I wasn’t comfortable getting closer than that to the crash site but what I was able to do was to take all the JDAMs, the 2,000-pound JDAMs, and everything else that he wasn’t able to use, and start to prosecute targets on the enemy outside of that 800-meter range. Basically what I started to do was destroy all the reinforcements that were coming up on that mountain side.

Me and Gabe fought that day with close air and actually started to take a pretty good toll on the enemy, to the point where they were not reinforcing at all coming up the mountain, and the surviving Rangers on top actually took the bunker and were successful at the top. As that was going on, throughout the day, we started to start working up the rescue package. What we wanted to bring in to bring these guys off that hill looks something like this – a gun ship out of the north, an AC-130 gunship out of the south. 47s to go in and pick the guys up and then the A-10s finally get in the fight coming in to help us out. This was the package we began to arrange. During the day, one of the pararescuemen out of the two that were treating a wounded Ranger was shot and later that day, Jason Cunningham, a pararescueman, was killed also.

As night falls, we begin to work the rescue. As the package comes in, I take a gunship and begin to work fire missions on to the town of Marzak. I am engaging the enemy there. The other gunship, a U-model, begins suppressive fire just south of the helicopter landing zone. We bring in the helos, they successfully exfil all the wounded and all the KIAs. Everybody comes off that mountain and the A-10s finally get into play with close air.

This is the memorial that was put up for our fallen comrades in Bagram the next day. That day we lost four U.S. Army, two Air Force and one Navy, with eight wounded in action.

But Al Qaeda, they didn’t count on one thing. Now I am ticked off. And they’ve exposed themselves to me. At this point, I know that I’ve lost some special tactics friends, close friends and it is now a personal fight. So what I began to do is coordinate with conventional forces and I found out where all the forward line of troops were, I found out where all the friendlies were and I knew basically everything south and west of that location was now a free-fire area. And that is exactly what I began to do, was to kill everything south and west of that FLOT.

I got into what I called the kill cycle. At night, I would bring gun ships on board and I would work 10 hours at gun ship at night and then as dawn came, the gun ships would go away and I would start with just conventional CAS, any bombers or fighters that were in the area, I just did conventional CAS.

This is my CAS sortie and BDA for Anaconda. Worked over 250 sorties. Was accredited with over 200 enemy killed and untold amounts of their infrastructure.

This is a picture of my mates and me after we came off the hill and were about five minutes away from being picked up out of Anaconda. The commander of the coalition forces said this to us as we got off the helo and it kind of stuck with me that Air Force Special Tactics disproportionately affected the outcome of Operation Anaconda.

The last thing I want to leave everybody with before we do some questions and answers, if we have time, is I carried three things in my pocket at all times over there when I went in the field. One was a picture of my family. One was my escape and evasion blood chit. And the third thing was the whole speech that President Bush gave to the Joint Session of Congress and to the nation 10 days after the events of 9/11. In it, he said, whether we bring our enemies to justice or justice to our enemies, rest assured that justice will be done. And I just hope that special tactics has done its part so far in this war.

Thank you very much. [Applause]



Q: How do you tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys?

TSgt Hotaling: You know, it is amazing. One of my very first questions to an intel guy when I got in country was the same thing. How do we tell the bad guys? And you could just see it in their eyes. And that is the God’s truth. When we would go through on some of these mobile ones, you saw me in these range rovers going through, we’d go through villages and things like that and you could just tell. I don’t know, call it a sixth sense. It is the same thing like being a [state] trooper when they say you kind of know, their hairs stand out on the back of their head, it is the same thing. You know who are truly evil or not.

Q: Did you use the binoculars with the laser range finders?

TSgt Hotaling: Yes and no. For a few missions I did very effectively. We have several different versions and some of our high-end versions are great and some of the low end versions are ok. But I’ll tell you what, I fought Anaconda with a Russian 1:50 map and a grease pencil. Mainly because the laser range finding equipment that I had on my person that day was ineffective. It wouldn’t reach far enough and with the haze and the fog and everything that was going in, I couldn’t get it with the laser range finders. I also use GPS technology though for those JDAMs.

Q: You had three GPSs and two different kinds, can you describe how they were used?

TSgt Hotaling: We have a standard military-issue GPS and that interfaces with a lot of our gear so that is why I have to take that because it is an added piece to binoculars and things like that. But, truth be told, there are some civilian version GPSs that are better and that are quicker on the fly. You’ve got to remember that when you are dealing with all different kinds of aircraft, I was dealing with from all different services and several different countries, each of them take a different type of coordinate, a different type of lat/long or a military grid reference system and these little handhelds that I had personally bought can switch on the fly a lot quicker and they can just go around your neck a little bit better, too. We used quite a bit of different GPSs.

Q: Talk about the training and readiness of coalition forces.

TSgt Hotaling: If I could send one message to everybody it is just that—I wish this was the classified version—because I’ll tell you this, that one, they are very well trained and in some cases I would rather go with them than with the U.S. forces and two, these guys have saved my life on more than one occasion and they are willing to give their lives for us. That is an important thing to know.

Q: What improved equipment would you recommend after this experience?

TSgt Hotaling: Lighter, lighter, lighter. We’re working on that. It is amazing. We haven’t just come home from this and said, “oh woe is us.” We are working day and night, Special Tactics and AFSOC are on the ball on this. We are really aggressively going after the newest stuff out there. We are trying to get ahead of the game on that. It is out there and we just have to capture it all and actually bring it in. We are working on it.

Q: When it became personal, were you calling in close air support by yourself?

TSgt Hotaling: That is a little tactics, techniques and procedures. I did standard coordination. The question was, “how did I coordinate all the air flow?” and to actually show you the little spider chart on how I did it isn’t necessary, but I did it the conventional way of doing it like that and I spent 14 days out there and when you work ten hours a night with my AFSOC brothers, the gun ships, they get to love you when you are working them every night. They would sometimes not even go through the system, and just check in right with me and we would go right to town.

Q: We didn’t hear too much about the A-10s until real late in the battle. Is there a reason for that?

TSgt Hotaling: Unknown to me. It is my world through a soda straw, but when the A-10s showed up, it was great and very effective.

Q: Are we getting close on interoperability with coalition partners?

TSgt Hotaling: I tell you, it was like the Olympics of special forces over there. You would walk into the compound and all the different national flags were there and it was seamless integration. I was literally able to bounce from one team to another seamless. Now that adds to our training and to y’all’s training. They were top notch. There wasn’t one team over there that I thought shouldn’t be here. Those nations that sent their best truly did. I think we are very close. I think we helped each other. There were certain things that I brought to the fight. There were certain things that they brought to the fight, but together it was definitely the best. Again, I cannot thank the coalition partners enough. It was awesome.

Q: Talk about how your criminal justice background played into your role here?

TSgt Hotaling: It has nothing to do with it. (Laughter). That is what I am right there [points to American flag behind him]. I am just an American. That is all it is.

Q: How effective were the precision-guided munitions?

TSgt Hotaling: It was amazing. What I tell most of the guys are I was amazed at the weapons effects. You would see a 2,000 pound bomb drop in the middle of a pack of these guys and a bunch of them run away. The effects of the munitions were surprising. A lot of time we go out and we train in the deserts on these bombing ranges and 2,000 pound bomb wipes everything out and they are the greatest thing. But when you put it into a mountainous region with a lot of terrain and trees and things like that, it actually affects the way that the blast patterns are and things like that. It was an education for me, when I really got into the fight, on the weapons effects. But I was overall pleased and I felt the technology was dead-on. I am a big believer in JDAM. I am a big believer in conventional CAS. And the technology that we actually had out there worked fairly well. It actually did.

Q: Can you talk about the effectiveness of bunker buster bombs?

TSgt Hotaling: I tell you what, special tactics guys are re-writing the books on how to actually effectively take out caves, at least, using bunker buster bombs and things like that. Yes, we have learned a lot over there and we ‘ve got guys in this room that have destroyed hundreds and hundreds of caves and we’ve taken all those lessons learned and now we can effectively take them on a little bit better now.

Q: How long have you been called up to active duty for and when are you going to go back to eating donuts?

TSgt Hotaling: I was called up for a year and I actually turn into a pumpkin on the 24th of this month. I am going back home to Mama on the 24th.

Q: How prepared are you for an all-expense paid vacation into Iraq?

TSgt Hotaling: The bottom line is this: we are prepared for anything. I was a able to—you know, who knew we were going into Afghanistan? Nobody knew but we were ready to go. So, you tell us tomorrow we are going to the moon, we’re going to the moon and we are going to do the mission, so it doesn’t matter.

Q: All the SOF people here in the room who were involved in these operations should stand up and be recognized.

TSgt Hotaling: Absolutely [SOF personnel stand up to applause].

Q: You mentioned blowing up caves. During this period of time, exactly how effective was it to go into a complex of underground caves and destroy them so that the al Qaeda or the future al Qaeda members wouldn’t be able to come back in and regroup? Can you give us a little explanation on that?

TSgt Hotaling: We are not occupying the country. So we can’t put a guard at every cave entrance. So all we did was the best that we could. We would close the entrances down. We would exploit the sites first. We would destroy anything that was their war-making capabilities within it and then we would close the caves as best we could, whether that was through demolitions or whether it was through the bombs and that is kind of how we left it.

Q: I was just curious about closing the entrances. That seemed like it would be a temporary fix.

TSgt Hotaling: Above my head, sir.

Q: How was your relationship American SOF?

TSgt Hotaling: Very good. Because this was just my personal vacation slide show, I was only with the SEALS for U.S. guys on a couple missions, but we had guys permanently assigned to Army SF teams. We had guys permanently assigned to the SEALS and other things. We were spread out through the whole spectrum. I myself was just not employed by the SF teams.

Q: How much time did you get between operations?

TSgt Hotaling: We had a shortage of qualified guys to meet the demand of so many teams going out there and we had a couple of young guys and it was just one of those – I was one of the older guys that kind of could provide some initial leadership into some of these teams. Plus, I volunteered. I wasn’t going to be fool and that is why my wife is not here because I can say this. You know, I volunteered for the missions so it was a stroke of luck that I was able to get on all these missions. All but that one high-value target body snatch that we did were well mission-prepped. We had up to a week of preparation time to where we knew exactly what we were facing and how we were going to get in there and things like that. So we had plenty of time. We were never really rushed on any of the missions.

Q: Was this your first combat experience?

TSgt Hotaling: No. Ever since I joined in 1987, I have been going to war ever since. It is a great job. It is a great job.

Q: If you could ask the Congress to do one thing, do you know what it would be? The budget, perhaps?

TSgt Hotaling: The budget. Absolutely. I think we are finally being recognized as a fighting force – Special Tactics – what we bring, force enablers on this and the budget for sure. It definitely lacks. It is the trickle down effect. I am not a politician. But you ask any combat controller and he’d say he wished had a little bit better gear. But who doesn’t? Personally, I’d want them to know what the coalition guys did. That is for me. I want them to know what our brothers are out there dying for also. That is the most important thing to me.

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