When we went into Iraq, a lot of people say it was the largest scale urban warfare since World War II. So the objective was Mosul, but there was a lot of towns and pockets of ISIS along the way that we had to deal with Bert mission. It's his job to tell pilots which targets to take out and where. Plus, elite members of special operations forces in the world as trained and lethal as any Navy Seal. Yet most people have never even heard of them. They are the US. Air Force combat controllers.
Welcome to heroes behind headlines. I'm your host, Ralph Pazulo. Our guest today is Air Force Combat Controller Josh Apple. At age 28, while managing a successful business in Florida, josh felt a calling to join the military and serve his country on the front lines of wars raging in Afghanistan and Iraq. His initial interest was in becoming a Navy Seal or joining army special Forces.
But the more he learned about Air Force combat controllers and how they provide combat air support to special operators on missions all over the globe, the more drawn to them he became.
Today, Josh is going to talk about the rigorous training path he followed to become an Air Force combat controller and the role he played in the pivotal battle of Mosul in Iraq and rescuing CNN reporter Arwa Damon and her cameraman during the heat of the battle from ISIS fighters who are trying to take them hostage. We're very honored to welcome air Force combat controller Josh Apple is today's hero behind the Headlines. So background on me.
My dad was a GM for Sam's Club in Dallas, and he was a hard working guy and still had a lot of good values into me growing up. Didn't really have anybody in my side of the family that was in the military, but at a young age, always gravitated towards it. I think a lot of young boys, GI. Joe kind of was the show to watch, things like that. So I was about six years old whenever we moved to Pensacola, Florida, for the first time, which Pensacola is
kind of known as the cradle of naval aviation. Yes. So I can remember as a young kid, my dad taking me there. That was one of my favorite places to go, seeing all the displays, all the aircraft, learning about the different wars. So it really kind of took off at that young age. And I can even remember as a kid. I love going into the gift shop that they had there and they had all the different models.
So I started getting into airplane model building and just I loved aviation, but I also loved the ground side of the house for the military for a really long time. But anyways, back and forth. My dad got transferred back to Dallas at one point. We lived there for a couple more years and then got transferred back to Pensacola and then he kind of set up roots there.
He was kind of tired of the corporate structure, so to speak, and wanted to kind of do his own thing, so he bought an independent grocery store down here in pensacola and started running a business. And so I kind of got to grow up in that business. I kind of got cast into the fire, so to speak, bagging groceries, mopping floors, all of that. So over the years, I remember whenever I was a senior in high school, I went to east hill christian private school.
We had a marine recruiter come in my senior year, and he made the pitch, man, he made it sound good, and I was really interested at that time. I strongly consider joining the marines, but I kind of wanted to go to college, get some of those things under my belt, so just kind of put it on the back burner. But always had tremendous respect for the military, for the guys that had gone before me, so to speak.
I won't say it died on the vine for a little while, but I got more and more involved in my dad's business. As I was going to college, I started managing it. I met my wife there, actually. She worked for my dad for a while, so I was now married, had a son. Everybody expected me to take over the family business, and it was a great place. I learned a lot of life lessons. FlashForward I'm now about 28.
Everybody just kind of anticipates me taking over to the family business, and I really started having some regrets for not joining the military. I had two really good friends. One of them that I kind of grew up with. We kind of went to the same church and stuff like that, and he went on to be a green beret, and he's got an amazing story, and I always just looked at him as a guy that he carried himself differently.
The way that he saw the world was a lot different than I saw the world, and that was something that I wanted to experience. So I kind of started sneaking in, looking at the recruiter sites for different jobs in the military. And the wife, I brought it up to her, and she was not real enthused about me thinking about doing that, because we had trajectory. My son was just a couple of years old at the time, and we had a good life. We had a good thing going.
But, man, it just kept kind of way in heavier and heavier on me, and finally kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. My wife and I had been pretty involved in a church in pensacola. So anyways, during this church service, I had kind of gotten to a point where I was like, man, I don't know if this military thing is going to work out for me. I've got a career. I've got a family now. I've got all these things going on. I'm older. I'm 28 now. And so just didn't really know if it was for me.
There was just kind of too many obstacles in the way and too many things that were going to keep me from doing it. And so in this church service, I knew the pastor pretty well at this time, and he started talking about how if we feel like we're called to do something, but we're systematically making up excuses for why we can't do it, we may be getting in the way of doing something great. And I remember that hit me really hard. It made me feel pretty small, to be honest.
Like, you know, I think I can do this, and I want to do it. And furthermore, I want to go into some sort of special operations career field. I really want to challenge myself. So I kind of made the decision that day that I was going to at least start pursuing it. And so I started doing research on the different career fields out there. And I remember buying a book went to Barnes and Noble and I bought a book called American Heroes and Special Operations by Oliver North.
And it was really cool because it has these little vignettes of all the different special operations career fields, green Berets, Seals. And there was a couple about combat controllers, some sweat guys, some of the special warfare boat teams. Yeah, because people usually don't think of combat controllers. No. Special operators. Yeah, I had never really heard about them, but I got to reading the stories, and I was like, man, this is pretty incredible. This is kind of a cool sound of job.
Yes, they're key. I reached out to my Seal buddy and my Green Beret buddy and kind of asked them, and both of them kind of gave me their pitch. One of them wanted me to go be a Green Beret, and one of them wanted me to go be a Seal. And they both sounded pretty cool. And obviously those career fields are kind of legendary, right? Absolutely. It's very difficult not to hear about those guys or think about those guys when we think about American Special Operations.
So I asked them both. I said, well, do you guys know anything about combat controllers? And, oh, yeah, man, we had those guys attached to us. And oh, man, they were incredible. And they remembered the names of the guys. They remembered situations where maybe they had bailed them out of trouble. And so I said, well, I'm really leaning towards that.
And my Green Beret buddy, he told me, he said, man, I'd love to talk you into being a Green Beret, but he's like, I actually think you would do really good as a combat controller. That kind of started it off. And I went to a recruiter, the Air Force recruiter in Pensacola, and the door was locked and they had a sign on the front, and it said basically by appointment only kind of thing. So I took down the number, I called, and I left a message.
A couple of days later, the recruiter called me back, and I told him, I said, hey, my name is Josh. Live in the area. I'm really interested in the combat Control program. And he kind of laughed, and he was like, yeah, you and everybody else, kind of thing, which was fair. And so he said, well, how old are you? I said, I'm 28. And he goes, well, the age cut off is 28 to join the Air Force right now. And I said, well, is there anything we can do about that?
And he's like, man, there's a lot of paperwork. There's a lot of this. And to his credit, I think a lot of people say they want to go into these career fields, but maybe they don't count the full measure, right? They don't know what it entails. Yeah, correct.
So at this time, I was doing a lot of research on it, found out I was going to have to go to dive school and considered myself as a brave floridian that grew up in the water and out there that, oh, man, I'm a good swimmer, and come to find out that swimming laps and swimming underwater is completely different than just not drowning. So I remember anyways, I don't want to get out of order here, but that's kind of where I was at. And he kind of was like, well, let me talk to a few people.
I'll give you a call back, see what we'd have to do kind of thing. I got real serious about training and swimming in the pool, and so I started catching a little bit of traction with the recruiter. I think he saw that I was serious, and he came to me one day. I went to his office one day, and he closed the door, and he said, all right, here's the deal, buddy. He said at the time, they had what they call these Iron Man standards for the recruiting guys.
And they said that if you can run so fast, swim so fast, do your calisthenics to this level, and also score over a certain percentage on the azvab, you've got a very high rate of percentage of being successful. And so they said they had never had a guy from our recruiting office make those standards before. And I was right there.
Basically, they said that as long as you can meet these standards and you'll draft a letter to the six in our chain of command and tell them why you want to be a combat controller and why it's basically more or less worth our time to take some risk on you as an older guy to join this pipeline, then we think we can make this happen. So my next pass test, I did make those iron man standards.
I did score pretty high on the Azweb test, and so they basically told me at that time, hey, man, we're going to get you a contract. V Six is signed off on your exception, a policy letter for age, and we're just waiting for a contract to come up. In the midst of this. My family was super, super supportive of it, but to everybody else, I was crazy.
Well, why in the world would you give up this great gig and being home with your family every night to go out and join a career field that you've only got a 10% chance of making it, and then if you do make it, be put in some dangerous situations and possibly be killed. And I wasn't naive about that. I didn't have any delusions of grandeur that it was going to be an easy road, but I just really felt like I was supposed to do it.
When Josh walked into the Air Force Recruiter's office, he was not the eager teenager the recruiters were used to seeing. Instead, he was a 28 year old successful business owner with a wife and young son. His goal, like that of many other enlisties, was to become an Air Force combat controller attached to a Special operations team like Seal Teams, Special Forces, or Delta.
He'd heard that these highly specialized airmen were trained in a wide range of skills, including scuba, parachuting and snowmobiling, as well as being FAA certified air traffic controllers. Because air combat controllers had to deploy into battle zones alongside other special operations teams to provide critical air support, that was often the margin between life and death. The nearly two year long training Josh had to endure was among the most rigorous in the US.
Military, with a wash out rate of 90% to 95%. You know, if you look at it from really, the Combat Control Foundational mission, what it was was airfield seizures. There's a fantastic book called The First to Jump by Jerome Priestler, and he kind of talks about how combat control was set into motion with the pathfinders of World War II. But yes, the majority of what we were doing, especially in Afghanistan, was attaching as a JTAC Joint Terminal Attack Controller.
So you had to be able to do air traffic control, land helicopters, maybe land fixed wing assets on Austere airfields, on top of bringing all of the close air support capability to that team. Because if you think about it in the terms of special operations, with an ODA plus myself, plus maybe a couple of other enablers, it's a pretty small team and some of the fights that you could find yourself in. Yeah, airpower was absolutely critical. Yes.
I mean, I've spoken to lots of Special Forces, Seals, Delta Force, and they all talk about the air controllers and how they saved their ass so many times, like they would be in impossible situations in firefights, and if it wasn't for that guy with the headset, with all the computers usually wasn't as ripped and crazy as they were. They would have never made it out of there.
And sometimes they were like, I don't know how the hell they did it because there was no room, planes were coming in over our heads and so on. Can you tell I'm not ripped from here? Is that what you're saying? No, I'm not saying that at all. I'm not saying that at all. But they're always like, oh yeah, that little guy on the computer with the headsets that we never paid any attention to them. And then suddenly it's like, oh my God, get us out of here, bring in air support.
And he's doing all his stuff. Coordination. Yeah, there is no rhyme or reason I found that to how the guys look. I remember day one on the selections lined up on the pool deck and there was a guy next to me that looked like a Calvin Klein model and the guy next to me on this side looks like a Calvin Klein model and I'm like, Maybe I'm in the wrong spot. But we've had short guys, huge guys, everything in between.
But yeah, the core capability, it's so cool over the years to work with all the teams that I have and have guys come up to me and say, oh, did you know this guy? He was RCC during this time. And you're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants at that point because that's a long if you think about it.
It's a long relationship building exercise to be able to go to an ODA that's been together for a long time or a Seal Platinum that's been together for a long time and for them to trust you within that organization and to go out with those guys. I loved it. I always thought that was one of the coolest parts of the job, is that you better be ready to prove yourself every single time.
And it's interesting that the role of the air controller has changed so much and especially, I guess, since just before the war on terror started. We really didn't know. The first time I heard about the importance of air controllers was Afghanistan when they first went in there in 2001. And these guys with all this equipment calling in B 52 strikes and I'm like, what are you talking about?
You have a guy with you who's like lighting up targets from the ground and B 52s are locking in on it and they're like, yeah, so can you talk about that a little bit, how the role has changed over time? Yeah, absolutely. You're exactly right. Afghanistan especially, we had had that capability before for close air support, but at the time it was called an Etac, not a JTAK.
And so if you think about those early days in Afghanistan, you have the horse soldiers, mass Sergeant Bart Decker, who was on the cover of Time magazine. All of those kind of TTPs and principles were put into play during that time. And it was really just the ingenuity and the creative application of what they were trying to do that stood up what the JTAG program became and how it could utterly turn the tide of a battle, especially in a place like Afghanistan. Absolutely.
The first phase of the war in 2001 was basically won by air support. There were very few people on the ground and it was just these guys, special Forces team with an air controller attached, calling in air strikes, basically, on Taliban and Al Qaeda targets. Yeah, I love reading up on that stuff. I think it's really cool. Yeah. So Josh, there must be a lot of technical training aside from the physical stuff, which you nail the technical side of. It must be pretty intense.
It is. The Air Traffic Control School at the time was the first place that we went to after our initial selection. And you report to the Combat Control Cadre instructors for the first couple of hours of every morning. So you're doing your PT, your beach runs, all of those things. Then you come back and you get changed real quick. And then you have to go through Air Force Air Traffic Control School because that was one of the core skills. And we lost a lot of guys just from the academics there.
Not only the physical stuff, but the academics for everything that we had to do. So, I mean, just right out of the gate you're there working on becoming a licensed air traffic controller for the first three and a half months. And that even under itself is kind of a different language to try and learn. But yes, a lot of technical skills manning different weapons systems. How do we coordinate air and ground power? It's a very lengthy process.
And then on top of all of that, your Joint Terminal Attack Controller rating actually normally comes later. You have to go to your unit and then from there they decide to get you trained up and decide if you are a good fit for the JTAC program. Right. So first you learn how to be an air traffic controller, correct? Yeah. And is that because if you take over an airfield, you have to fly guys like you in to immediately start coordinating landings and take offs and so on?
Correct? Yeah. So I think you look at Granada, that's a perfect historical example of this. You could have guys jump in to take over and secure the airfield. And then the next step is you've got to bring in all of the airpower behind it. The refueling capabilities, the equipment, all the communications, all of those things have to come in afterwards. That is and still remains one of our legacy missions.
So you're able to do both that and deploy with the Special Operations team on the ground that's correct. Yeah. So some of the core Special Tactics missions, if you look at them as what they call global access, which would be airfield seizure operations, assault zone operations, and then on top of that, and you kind of get formed into two different categories a lot of the times.
And so sometimes you'll be doing that mission as a combat controller, and then the JTAG mission is the one that's gotten a little more press and that is getting attached to another soft unit and deploying with those guys. And your primary role is delivering close air support on the battery. Okay. So is that a whole other phase of training? It is. That's a whole another school and qualification to go through. Wow. How long does that last? It's largely dependent on the individual.
Normally a JTAC initial qualification course is about a month long. And then once you make it through that, then you have to work on basically your mission readiness. And so you're going to be doing a lot of working with close air support aircraft, strike aircraft, your rotary wing aircraft, artillery, things like that. You've got to understand the capability of each kind of aircraft, right? That's correct. And what kind of conditions they can deliver effective support. Right, absolutely.
There's a lot of technical knowledge that you have to have. Yeah, absolutely. So from even the airframe capability itself, down to what they bring in sensor suites and what they bring in their communication suite, and then obviously the weaponeering, having to know the vast array of different types of air to ground munitions that can be deployed and then knowing how to use those effectively against specific target sets. Wow. Amazing. Okay, so when do you first deploy? Am I missing something?
If I'm skipping something, please just jump in. But when do you first deploy and how does that happen? What is the process there? Sure. So I graduated the Special Tactics Training Schoolhouse towards the end of 2014, November 2014, and my first duty station was the 23rd Special Tactics Squadron in Hurlburg. So I reported to the team and they were in the process of their pre deployment spin up.
So at the time, initially I was told that I was not going to be deploying, that they were going to send me to start working on my JTAC rating. That quickly changed because somebody wasn't going to be able to make the deployment. So I actually got selected to be on one of those combat control teams to go into Afghanistan and be working more the traditional combat control legacy mission. So run an airfields and things like that. So I deployed March of 2015 to Afghanistan
for the first time in that role. Okay. Did you get an opportunity to run an airstrip or work at a base? I did. We were predominantly staged out of Bagram at the time, but we were bouncing all over the country. One of the big things that was going down at that time was the Kundus area was under attack. And so they flushed a couple of different ODAS up there to reinforce and support.
And then I myself and my team leader were both chosen to go up there to act as the kind of airfield liaisons to help run the airfield and things like that. So it was cool because it was my first opportunity to integrate with the ODAS, kind of start shooting with them and everything. And it's so funny because a lot of people don't know that there's kind of those two different vision sets for combat controllers. So they would always just refer to me as a JTAK.
And I said, well, technically I'm not a JTAK yet, and scratching their head and confusing, but, well, yeah, but she talked to airplanes. I'm like, yeah. So we kind of had to work through that. But it was an awesome time. I got to work with my team leader, who was a well established JTAC. And so we were already going through exercises. He was kind of teaching me the lingo because that's what I wanted to be. I wanted to go and deploy with a team and provide that capability.
Okay, and when did you get that first opportunity? So I came back from that deployment and immediately went into the JTAG program. Joint Terminal Attack Controller, or JTAC is the term used in the US. Armed Forces and other militaries around the world for a qualified service member who directs the action of combat aircraft engaged in close air support and other offensive air operations from a forward position.
In 2016, when Josh had completed his training and was ready to deploy, he expected to go to Afghanistan to support a Special Forces A team on commando missions there. But he was sent instead to Iraq to work with Iraqi and US. Special operation units that were gearing up to liberate the northern city of Mosul.
Two years earlier, Iraq's second most populous city had fallen to approximately 10 ISIS militants, largely because of the Sunni population's deep distrust of the primarily Shia Iraqi government. Since then, Mosul had become the center of ISIS expansion into northern Iraq and Syria. In September 2016, when Josh arrived in Iraq, a coalition of U. S. Special operators and Iraqi forces were preparing to drive ISIS out of Mosul.
Two years earlier, Iraq's second most populous city had fallen to approximately 1000 ISIS fighters, largely because of the Sunni population deep distrust of the primarily Shia Iraqi government. Since then, Mosul had become the center of ISIS expansion into northern Iraq and Syria. In September 2012, when Josh arrived in Iraq, a coalition of US.
Special operators and Iraqi forces made up of Iraqi security forces, the ISF Popular Mobilization Forces and Peshmerga and Kurdist Freedom Party fighters from Kurdistan were preparing to drive ISIS out of Mosul. So a lot of times, very similar to how the ODAS are there to provide either a Ta, A-T-A or a Tip AAA mission, train, advise, train, advise, assist, or train, advise, assist a company with their Afghan counterparts. This was very similar makeup in Iraq.
So we had some Seal platoons that were supporting the Kurdish Peshmerga. We had some Seal platoons that were supporting some of the different Afghan army counterparts. And then the platoon that I was assigned to specifically was supporting the Iraqi Isof counterterrorism. And what were they like? Service. We moved in when we were initially set up was Camp Spiker, Iraq. Okay. That was once a massive airfield, a massive spread. And where is that? In the Kurdish area or more down south.
So it is closer to Crit. And it was bare bones. I mean, it looked like a ghost town in there. You had the Iraqi counterterrorism service that was kind of gearing up, and then we had to kind of set up the base camp, everything like that.
It was lean living in those early days, but our mission was training, advise, assist, and then a company as well, because it was a completely different fight than what most people were used to at the time, where you would go into maybe a small village in Afghanistan with your ODA plus your 30 to 40 Afghan commandos and do a village clearance. This was flat forward line of troops, warfare like, big maneuver elements. And the Isoft guys were great. They were aggressive.
There seemed to be a level of patriotism and disdain for what ISIS had done to their country. And, man, they were motivated. That's great. We are welcomed in. I don't think the American people hear that enough. Yeah. The level of dedication that a lot of the local troops bring to the fight. Yeah. And Isofth was a unique entity, and I didn't learn a lot of these things until it was in country, but they're kind of rock stars in Iraq. They've got music videos and stuff like that. Wow.
You can Google it. I remember looking it up, and I got these Isofth guys dancing around these music videos. And they're all us trained at the time? Yes and no. Okay. Obviously we had our guys that were working with them and training them, but this was kind of the big initiative whenever NATO and everybody decided that they were going to go in and we were going to push ISIS out. So it was a very large scale endeavor. There was Canadian software.
There was not only the local populace and their fighters. You had French guys. I mean, you had people from all over that joined in to help out. Wow. So a lot of coordination involved. A lot of coordination. And, you know, the way I had to start wrapping my mind around it was, okay, hey, these are my guys. We come up with our portion of the plan that fits into the bigger plan. And then myself specifically as a JTAC and.
A combat controller, I had to start looking at how can I specifically help and support these guys, because airpower played a very large role in this battle as well. A lot of people don't realize I mean, this was the biggest offensive since 2003 when we went into Iraq. The United States went into Iraq, and a lot of people say it was the biggest or the largest scale urban warfare since World War II.
So the objective was mosul, but there was a lot of towns and pockets of ISIS along the way that we had to deal with. So it was a wild time. I had to learn a lot really quickly because we kind of just anticipated that it was going to be Afghanistan like in the airspace picture, but there was a lot of teams that were going to be converging in at the same place at the same time, so it required a lot of detail coordination to get it right, I bet.
And the fact that you have different countries in there as well, are you working with them? I mean, you have to coordinate with them to a certain extent because they probably had air assets in theater as well, right? Exactly. Yeah. The British had put up some typhoons. We had air assets from all different countries. Belgian aircraft, French aircraft.
There was a whole bunch that were being thrown into the mix, so you never really knew, if you're going out, who was going to be tasked to support you. So sometimes you had us. Aircraft, sometimes you had different NATO aircraft that were supporting you, and you're able to communicate with all of them easily or not. I would imagine that's pretty difficult. Easily is the right word. Got it. Well, everybody has the same common language. It's kind of English is the common language for ATC.
So yes, in that regard, it was just some differences in how the aircraft were employed and some TTPs and things like that, but surprisingly, it wasn't as difficult as you would think. Some aircraft, just because of the thick accents and things like that, became rather difficult to work with. But luckily, most of the time we had American assets. Okay. For our guys anyway.
Okay, josh, before we get into specific battles that you were involved in, if you could talk a little bit about how you do your job and when you go into the battlefield, what are you bringing with you in terms of equipment? So from the preparation phase for me, when I'm always most interested in and kind of our role is bringing together air and ground players. If the ground Seal platoon wants to, they're obviously working day in and day out with the Isoft guys at this time.
They would develop a joint plan, and then we would get together and they would say, okay, this is where we're going to go, or this is the town that we're going to go. Liberate we're going to go clear it. It then became my job to figure out how to work our assets into it. A big part of my job, and you'll hear from a lot of our guys, is we're sitting there and we're thinking about all the different contingencies, okay, if I get this type of aircraft, how best can they support?
Not only that, how can I utilize those assets, not just in the strike role, but as a reconnaissance role? Now I have extra eyes in the sky. That's my early alert network. So you go to ground just kind of really making sure that you understand the ground tactical plan, but then also being able to translate that to the airplayers to make sure that everything is integrated as seamlessly as possible. And that was kind of how I approached those problems.
In terms of equipment, you got the standard loadout that you would probably see most ground special operations forces. So primary weapon, I often carried a M 203 grenade launcher with smoke rounds and Http rounds. So if I needed to, if an aircraft was having a hard time getting talked on the target, I could utilize the smoke grenades to help dial them in. DualCom is kind of a standard. I would have two different radios.
One I could communicate to the ground party and one that I was communicating to the air players with. I would normally have a SATCOM capability as well. So communications was a huge piece. Essential, absolutely essential. Battle tracking, that's probably one of the biggest, and especially my battle tracking.
Josh so whenever we would go in, you have to think about as I'm leaning forward and thinking about the application of air power, I need to know where every single one of my guys are at any given time, because that is one of the worst fears of a JTAK is fratricide. At no point do you want to get these munitions too close to your guys. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but you have mitigation measures that you put in place to make sure that that doesn't happen.
And so that was one of the huge ones, is trying to keep track of where all the Isoft guys, where all the Seals calling out, and knowing where any civilians may be, because it was absolutely a mission of mine. Most all of our guys, you never want to put anybody in harm's way that doesn't deserve it. And ISIS was vicious with that. They would use human shields, they would bring civilians into the fight. And so we had to be really deliberate.
And it became incumbent upon me to be able to weapon, hearer, and pick things that were not going to do any unnecessary harm to any civilian populace, and especially my guys as well. Josh how do you track that in practical terms? A lot of our old school guys, they have maps and markers, and they were just going and tracking. Wow, everybody has their own so you're on the phone, you're on the headset, you got your sat phone, and you're looking at a map. Correct.
A lot of times we call them gridded reference graphics. It was going to be a layout of everywhere we were going, overhead imagery. And then we also had a couple of different apparatuses that basically would look like a small phone or a small computer that allowed us to battle track a lot easier.
You can lean on those devices to make sure you knew where you guys were, calculate distances, final attack headings and things like that, so that you could mitigate any risk to friendlies on the ground should you need to deliver airpower. Wow, that's a lot of responsibility. It was. And I tell people, I don't know if I was the greatest at the job, but I know I was effective at it, and I took it very seriously. I have to yeah, split second, right?
You're making split second decisions one after the other. I would imagine you are, and you're working together with the pilots. And then on top of that, I worked for the Seal platoon leader. He was the Ground Force commander. So you kind of had this triangle, this trifecta, where I could make recommendations on how to best solve the air to ground problem that we needed. And luckily, I had a lot of trust built up with those guys at that point. So that kind of expedites the process.
And when you have the pilots, the platoon leader, or the ground force commander and yourself all in concert working together, it can become a very expedite and streamlined process. And it's good because you have those cross checks in place, you know? Wow. Incredible. So you're probably like, how familiar are you with the pilots?
Obviously, you're very familiar with the people you're coordinating with on the ground, but I would imagine pilots are coming and going, they're coming in from different bases. It must be a lot more difficult. It was to an extent. It was definitely nice. Whenever we got assets that were familiar with our mission, that knew what we were doing, we got some UAVs that was pretty much the same crew, armed UAVs that were the same crew every day. And, oh, man, it made it so much easier.
As a matter of fact, one of the stories I'll tell later talks about how much easier it made it, but they knew our vehicles, they knew our guys, they knew the plan. And so they were just very far forward, leaning on helping us out and communicating things to us. And at the time, most of the assets, they knew generally how the fight was going, how they were going to be employed. So it was never a big lift. But yes, it definitely when you had assets that checked on that kind of knew the scope of
the battlefield, it made things a lot easier. Okay. And when we're talking about the battle, this general battle in Mosul, what kind of air assets were being deployed? So if I was going to back up so we started into crit, so Camp Spiker, and we were basically maneuvering or moving with every time the Isoft was moving, we had to move. And so there was Kiara airfield. Key west was one of the areas that we had to go in and secure.
Basically everything that we were doing was pushing ISIS out in these individual areas. And there was these simultaneous efforts going on with other teams to push ISIS out of the area so that everybody could converge on Mosul. So Mosul was the main objective. But we had a lot of other smaller operations that were going on that led us there as we were trailing ice off and moving with our Iraqi counterparts to get to Mosul. Because it was very clear that the Kurdish. They had a phase line.
They were going to fight ISIS off to a certain area. And then it became the Iraqis problem. And so I saw the partner force that we were supporting, they were going to spearhead the offensive into Mosul. And so it was a lot of pressure and a lot of buildup up to that moment. Going back to air assets, like, what kind of air assets are you using? Pretty much anything and everything you can think of. We had AC 130. There were a ten s. We had F. We had some NATO aircraft.
The Typhoons Rafaels Apaches. To a limited degree, there was some concern for surface to air capabilities that the enemy might have. So we did have Apaches. We weren't doing a lot of helicopter work. Almost everything was out of gun trucks and moving through, not helicopters because of the Stinger missiles and things like that.
Yeah, it was never really talked about too much, but we knew, just strictly based off some of the restrictions that those guys had, that somebody up the chain had deemed that it was not the best idea. And just on top of that, I mean, the large scale maneuvering that was going on, it would have been difficult to interject helicopters into the scenarios that we're going okay, when you talk about large scale movement, how many troops were deployed in this battle from the US.
Side of the house, or whenever we're talking about the Iraqi counterparts and how many us, just to give you the scale of it, I was attached to one Seal platoon. That one Seal platoon had about 500 Iraqi counterterrorism service guys in. That basically who we were supporting for that. And so now if you start to think about all the other teams that were in the area, they all had about that same size battalion or so that they were supporting on top of that.
So, I mean, this was the Iraqi army, this was the Kurdish, this was Iraqi counterterrorism service. We're talking 10,000, 20,000 or more. So there was 1000 just in Iraqi isoff. And we were supporting one battalion, second Isofth. So, yeah, I tell people whenever I get up on a rooftop to start directing and battle tracking and doing all those things. It was like watching a giant game of risk. I mean, just vehicles on vehicles. It was wild.
So many crazy things happen almost on a daily basis that it became hard to keep track of the stories. It really did, and it was very involved. I didn't get a lot of sleep, especially during the early days, because ISIS was always mounting counter offensive. And then Isofth was calling us saying, hey, we're being attacked, and so have to get upset air assets, help try and fix the problem for those guys on the ground. And what did ISIS have in terms of equipment?
Man, they were creative, very creative. Standard small arms that you would think they had armored vehicles, they had technical vehicles. They had large caliber weapons, dishes. They had mortars Katusha rockets and not Katusha rockets in the same way that they were employed in Afghanistan, where they prop one up on a rock with an oven timer.
We got rocketed one day, and based on we had an EOD guy with us, and he said, based off the range that these have and roughly the asthma they came in at, here's some locations they could be. So we put some arrow sets overhead to see if we could scope it. And it looked like an old livestock pin with about 13 of these Katusha rocket systems up on the rails pointed in our location. You talk about one of the crazier ones.
We had been getting reports from the Isoft that there was a vehicle, they called it a refrigerator truck. And they said, there's this big refrigerator truck, and there's a big gun in the back of it. And so I was like, okay. So I started utilizing air assets and trying to find what I figured was probably an 18 wheeler. Sure enough, they picked one up, and it looked like a big 18 wheeler semi truck. And they opened up the back doors of it, and you saw a massive outgoing.
And so we kind of figured that maybe they had a mortar system in there that was set up for direct lay. And it was a pretty big gun. So we ended up using up using the F, hit it with a 500 pound bomb. And I was coordinating something else. So I was just kind of waiting for the report to come back of what had happened to it. And they said, hey, man, there's something in the back of this truck here. We're waiting for the smoke to clear.
It turns out they had put a tank turret in the back of this just basically took the tank turret off of the tracks and put it into the back of this vehicle. So the creativity level and the level of preparation that ISIS had to dig in to get their tunnel network. The vehicle born IEDs, that was a huge concern every time we went out, because they would weld these armor plates to these things.
They would load it up with explosives, and then they would just drive it right into the midst of an encampment or against our counterparts vehicles and things like that. So that became a huge concern of ours that we were always looking out for. Arwa Damon was a senior international correspondent for CNN who covered the Middle East. Previously, she had reported the ivory wars in the Congo and the Benghazi attack in Libya, and the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
In September 2016, she went with a cameraman to report on the Battle of Mosul. Riding with a convoy consisting of members of the press and Iraqi soldiers, she came under heavy fire by ISIS troops and was trapped near the outskirts of Mosul. As a female American reporter, should she fall into the hands of ISIS, she would yield a huge public relations bonanza and would likely be beheaded.
Like U. S. Reporters Stephen Sotloff and James Foley and others before her vehicles were destroyed, soldiers were injured, and Arwa and cameraman Bryce Lane took shelter in people's homes while ISIS units tried to find them and take them hostage. Josh called in airstrikes to push the ISIS militants back. So I can't recall when the first time that we came in contact with our first reporter. That was out there as far as the date goes.
But I remember we were meeting up with the Isoft guys, and we were setting up some equipment and things like that in an old farmhouse. And I was getting up on the rooftop, and I jumped out of one of the gun trucks. I had air assets overhead. There was getting ready to be a pretty good sized offensive going on. And I turn around, and I see a blonde haired female jump out of one of the trucks. And the Isofth guys, they were all black. We were all black to fit in with them.
And I said, this isn't normal. This isn't good. So like a good combat controller, I delegated. Yeah, I went to our platoon. I got to find out who that is. No, I went to our platoon chief, because I think I spotted her first. And I said, hey, chief, there's a female over there. I think she's a reporter, because I think I see a cameraman with her, too. So he says, what? This is no place for he kind of got a little worried, so he runs over there, and they have a dialogue.
And I think that he relayed the seriousness of the situation and gave some advice to her. Came to an agreement that they wouldn't videotape or try and talk to any of the guys that were out there at the time. And that was kind of the end of it. So we knew, or for that day, I should say, that was kind of the end of it. We knew that there was a presence, an American reporter presence that was out there, that was also with the isofth guys and you're with us.
What kind of sealed detachment this was a platoon? Yep, seal platoon I was with. So flash forward, this would have been November 8, november 9. I was actually turning over to another combat controller at this time. I was only a couple weeks from coming home from the end of my deployment, and I had gotten a word that my grandfather, who I was very close to, had an accident where he fell off his riding lawn mower and it hit his head and he was in a coma.
And the family didn't tell me because they didn't want me to get worried. But it got to the point where they realized that he wasn't coming back from this. And so they called me to let me know that, hey, we are going to have to take him off life support and it would be great if you could get back for the funeral. So I spent a lot of my summers up in rural Oklahoma with my grandfather, taught me how to shoot, taught me how to drive.
So this was a hard time for me because I was always very invested into the success of the team. Once I was the way that the team brings you in and you're one of the guys and they trust you and you trust them. And so I didn't know if I wanted to go home, but I put the feelers out anyways to my chief and my commander at the time.
And luckily there was another combat controller nearby who had the same ratings and credentials as me, and he said that he volunteered to come in and take my spot to finish out the deployment. And so I talked to the seal leadership, the platoon leadership, and they fully supported it. And so I was just a couple of days away from coming home and was in the midst of my turnover with this other controller.
We were supposed to go out to the flot that day to go out and support the Iraqi push because we were still moving into the outskirts on the eastern side of Mosul, pushing west. And I was told, I said, one of the guys grabbing, they said, hey, that reporter and some of the isofth guys got ambushed as they were moving through mosul, and they are now cut off and they've taken up sanctuary in a house and they've had to abandon most of their vehicles, and these guys are up on the rooftops repelling.
And so everything kind of shifted at that point because from an information wars perspective and the propaganda that ISIS could use to leverage taking out not only that many isoft guys taking out those vehicles or even taking control of those vehicles on top of having a news reporter and her cameraman would be very bad. Yes. Was she an American? She was. Okay, that was a disaster.
I say that Arwada Mon was her name and she did a piece after this, I think it was called Mosel 28 Hours in Hell or something of that effect, which I didn't know her name or who she was up until this time. I didn't recognize her or anything like that. And at this time I still didn't know her name. And yes, she was an American journalist.
After all of this had gone down, I found out that she had made a documentary about this and kind of you can go on and watch it and talks about her experience and everything like that, which I imagine was very harrowing for her. Yeah. So there was another JTAC that had basically reached out to me. They had taken operational control, his entity and his commander had taken operational control of this thing.
And we were basically trying to figure out, okay, how can we leverage air power to keep ISIS away from her? So that ISAF they were basically trying to use a bulldozer that they had in their convoy to be able to break through, to get to her and to be able to evacuate the Isofth troops that were pretty beleaguered at this point, as well as the reporter and her cameraman. We got air assets attached to us and immediately it was a hornet's nest.
I mean, the level of aggression that they were throwing at this building in order to get in there was it became very clear that this wasn't just, hey, we're going to take out some Isoft guys. I think they knew what they could get out of this. Yeah. What a public relations bonanza they would get out of that. Yeah. So, man, we had to start working some danger close strikes, quite a few.
I basically took from the building south, this other JTAG took from the building north and we just had to start working air to ground solutions and that was the name of the game at that point. And luckily somebody within the chain of command had her contact number and was able to communicate with her directly so that we had a good idea where she was in the building.
Because that's some of the things that we are starting to try and think about is how close can we get these munitions, because we need to make sure that we know where her, the Iraqis, and there was a family inside of this building as well. Oh, my God, she had a satellite phone. Correct? I guess I don't know the details of it. All I know is that we were being fed real time information about where she was, the status of the guys and things like that. How many Iraqis were with her?
I want to say approximately 20 at this point. I want to say it was four or five vehicles. Yeah. And we could see them on the rooftops of this building taking turns pulling security. And they were pretty beleaguered from what I heard in the After Action report. So, yeah, it became very much really trying to weaponeer and utilizing the assets that we had overhead to keep everybody away from her to allow this effort to get to her while simultaneously not endangering anybody in that building. Right.
Do you remember what you were calling in, in terms of air assets? There was quite a few at the time, and I think due to the sensitivity of it, we won't go into any great details, but we are utilizing a lot of health fires, things like that, that had very low collateral damage, weapons systems. I will throw a big bomb in there. Well, eventually there were some talks, and I wasn't too involved with these talks, but eventually they did release a 500 pound bomb from a B 52 in close proximity.
They were that confident in their ability to do it, to help eliminate the threat and not endanger anybody there. And they did do it to great success. There was actually two. This is open source. The Air Force puts out a publication and they kind of highlight different stories and things like that from pilots, St guys. And his account of what happened here is actually captured in this publication. So they put a laser marker on it on the site, or how are they able to get it as so precise? GPS.
From my understanding, this was a GPS guided bomb that they released, and they were just that confident in there and all the information that they had been given to be able to do it. I actually got to meet the guy. No kidding. The pilot. I did. Again, I was not the one that coordinated that specific strike. I think I ran six other danger close strikes at the time, but I got to meet him up in DC. He was up there giving a speech, and I was up there for a different event.
I believe it was an awards ceremony. And so I got to meet him and talk with him. So that was kind of a neat closing of loop. Where were B 52s flying in from? Were they in Iraq or they were out, like, somewhere? I want to say that the B were flying in from Instrik, Turkey. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I mean, there was a lot of air assets flying in from all over. I mean, we had carrier based F Eighteens that were flying at the time. Wow. So she got a lot of attention from both sides.
It became the objective. We were going to do everything that we could to facilitate getting her out and to making sure that she was safe, and that was our objective. So that was kind of the last operational thing that I got to do at the time, I don't think I really thought about the scope of it. It was very much one of those things that you became so focused on.
You were so front sight focused on the mission and everything else that you didn't really take time to think about the implications later on. And I can't even remember when it was after I got home that I remembered thinking about it and looking it up. I wonder if there's any publicity that came across this. And then I came across the CNN documentary that was of it, and I was like, I don't think it got a lot of news play. I don't remember hearing about it
until the documentary came out. Yeah. And I think what was going on in Iraq was happening on such a large scale, but I also don't know of how much real time reporting was going on outside of that effort. So I think there was probably a lot of unknowns for people what was going on. Absolutely, yeah. To the scale that it was. Did you ever meet her afterwards? I did not.
A lot of our guys from her platinum ended up going out, doing a link up and recovering her to turn her back over to make sure that she was out of there all the way. I did not get to go because I had to answer a lot of questions and there was a lot of coordination to be done after that in terms of everything that had just happened and making sure that we had properly documented and cataloged everything that had went on.
Approximately how long did it take between when you found out that they were stuck in this area until you got them out? So I didn't find out until the morning of as I went back and watched the documentary afterwards. This actually started the day before for them. And so I believe total time for her ended up being 27 or 28 hours from the beginning of this thing to the end of it. Now. I was probably only involved for about twelve to 14 of those hours once she had been gotten into this building.
And we started working through the air problem, so to speak, to make sure that we could deliver close air support to keep her defended. Yeah. Wow. Intense. It was. It was wild. And again, at the time I didn't really think anything of it or the wider spread implications, but as I reflected on it later, I thought, man, that could have been really, really bad.
Thanks to the brave efforts of Josh Apple and others after 28 hours of fighting, CNN reporter Arwa Damon and her cameraman and the Iraqi soldiers with them were rescued. Had they fallen into ISIS hands, the result could have been horrific. It turned out to be another example of an Air Force combat controller saving the day. Former Commander of US. Special Operations General. Brian Brown had this to say, and I quote during this kind of warfare, the US.
Air Force combat controller guys really carried an incredible load. Quite frankly, no one wants to go into war without them. They are admired, capable, and their true impact on the battlefields around the world will never be known or appreciated. They are absolutely phenomenal. We totally agree with General Brown and thank Josh Apple and other air Force combat controllers for their expertise and brave service.
And we especially thank Josh, who is the recipient of a bronze Star in combat action medal, for telling us what it was like to train and become a combat controller and for explaining the critical role they play. We're proud to call Air Force combat controller Josh Apple today's hero behind the headlines. Thanks for listening. I'm your host, Ralph Pazulo.
If you haven't already, please download, rate review and subscribe and check out some of our past episodes, such as the epic battle of Merebot and World War II's most infamous survival story. And don't forget to tune in to the next episode. Episode of Heroes Behind.