The following was taken from, Brothers in Berets: The Evolution of Air Force Special Tactics, 1953–2003 by Forrest L. Marion. Pages 163-178

In October 1983 the United States intervened militarily on the small eastern Caribbean Island of Grenada to remove a Marxist government threatening the security of the region. It was the largest American military operation since withdrawing from Southeast Asia a decade earlier. It was also a very uneven affair; in football terms it was something akin to a National Football League team competing against a small “scrub” team, with a tally of 7–3. One author described it as “a communist nutmeg . . . smashed by an enormous American sledgehammer.” Although a “win” for the United States, it was an ugly win, with many problems surrounding the employment of SOFs. Carney, disappointed and frustrated with his combat controllers being denied the opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities, wrote to the JSOC commander after the operation. He told Maj Gen Richard A. “Dick” Scholtes, US Army, that the command “needs to get back to blocking and tackling . . . if you’re a ‘tackle,’ you do ‘tackle’ things, if you’re a ‘center,’ you do ‘center’ things, if you’re a ‘quarterback,’ you do ‘quarterback’.” Carney had seen enough of the “jack-of-all-trades and masters of none” mentality within JSOC.

Carney’s observation represented one of several steps toward bringing pararescuemen (PJ) into his combat controller detachment, by then known as Detachment 4, Numbered Air Force Combat Operations Staff (Det 4, NAFCOS). With the March 1983 activation of the Military Airlift Command’s (MAC) Twenty-Third Air Force as the numbered air force for all Air Force SOF, the designation of the “cool” sounding “Det 1, MACOS” was changed to “Det 4, NAFCOS.” Despite the new designation, which many combat controllers hated, the 1983–84 period witnessed the de facto birth of the first Air Force “special tactics” unit. The unit resulted from the initiative of Carney and several other key leaders in MAC/Twenty-Third Air Force.

A small island dependent mainly upon tourism, the former British colony of Grenada gained independence in 1974. Five years later in a nearly bloodless coup, a Marxist movement known as the New Jewel Movement came to power under the leadership of Maurice Bishop. Over the next several years, officials in Washington observed with increasing anxiety as Grenada allied itself with Cuba and the Soviet Union.

In early 1983 Washington noted construction of an international airport with a 9,000-foot runway at the island’s southwestern tip, Point Salines. Grenadian officials explained that the long runway was necessary for handling large commercial aircraft expected to boost tourism. However, Reagan administration officials took a dimmer view—the hotels needed to support a larger tourist trade were conspicuously absent. Moreover, Cuba was providing much of the funding, materials, and workers. The US chargé d’affaires in Barbados expressed the feelings of many: “It isn’t the airport per se that bothers us. Lots of islands around here have airports of comparable size,” he said. “It is that the airport in Grenada was primarily financed and built by the Cubans, who tend not to do these things out of a sense of Christian charity.”

Once the runway was completed it could support Soviet military aircraft, enabling MiG-23s from Cuba and Grenada to enjoy “overlapping ranges covering the entire Caribbean.” Furthermore, Grenada was situated 1,000 miles east of Cuba. A Grenadian base offered a clear strategic advantage for any deployments of Cuban forces to and from Africa, such as during the fighting in Angola. Pres. Ronald W. Reagan referred to Grenada as “a Soviet–Cuban colony being readied as a major military bastion to . . . undermine democracy.”

In mid-October 1983 the island’s Marxists—increasingly displeased with Bishop, who was not leftist enough for some—arrested the country’s prime minister. Bishop was murdered on 19 October leaving a junta, the Revolutionary Military Council, in power. Although endangerment from the junta’s arbitrary actions was real, the US citizens on the island may have been no more endangered than the 100,000 Grenadians. But the junta’s announcement of a curfew on the evening of the 19th gave the Reagan administration the feel of a developing hostage crisis. Indeed, Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger viewed it in terms of “another Tehran.” Later, he wrote, “Once the announcement of the twenty-four-hour curfew, with its open license to kill, was made by the most fanatical and irresponsible of the leftist elements in Grenada, who had already murdered Bishop and his colleagues, we naturally had to think about how we could either extricate the Americans there or prevent their being seized as hostages in a reprise of the Iranian seizure . . . in 1979.”

As Weinberger indicated, the administration’s primary objective was to rescue the American citizens on Grenada, most of whom were students attending the St. George’s University School of Medicine. The memory of the Iranian hostage crisis and the possibility of one in Grenada haunted Reagan administration officials. It could hardly have been otherwise, as Reagan’s team came to Washington in part as a result of his predecessor’s failure to resolve the Iranian crisis. British author Mark Adkin, a staff officer with the Barbados Defence Force during the operation, explained the administration’s decision:

The decision to intervene in Grenada was made on the basis of seizing a fleeting strategic-political advantage, which had the added merit that inevitable military success would raise U.S. flagging morale. It was justified by a possible potential danger to U.S. citizens on the island and an urgent plea for help by [Organization of Eastern Caribbean] states, together with Barbados and Jamaica. That the governor-general had requested invasion was, in all probability, a fabrication to strengthen the shaky legality of the operation.

It was a bold decision, fraught with risks. It succeeded. Because of its success, the president is entitled to the credit and the enduring gratitude of Grenadians and other Caribbean communities who were saved from a grim future.

While an in-depth discussion of the poorly coordinated planning (including numerous changes) and the uneven execution of Urgent Fury will not be attempted here, a brief sketch places the role of SOF combat controllers in its proper context. Prior to Bishop’s murder, the Reagan administration directed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS), Gen John W. Vessey, Jr., US Army, to begin planning for a noncombatant evacuation of US citizens from Grenada. Bishop’s execution pushed President Reagan to order plans to be drawn up for possible hostilities on the island—a task that fell to US Atlantic Command (LantCom). On 20 October Secretary of State George Shultz and Chairman Vessey warned the Special Situation Group (SSG), chaired by Vice President George H. W. Bush, that the military junta in Grenada might oppose an evacuation of US citizens. The unknown intentions of the several hundred Cuban construction workers on Grenada, which some US analysts believed to be military members in disguise, complicated the situation. Such uncertainties highlighted the woeful US human intelligence assets on the small island that had been the focus of US concern for four years. Two analysts put it bluntly, stating, “military intelligence with respect to Grenada was deficient.”

The SSG approved Vessey’s recommendation for an expanded mission, including neutralizing the Grenadian forces and, if necessary, the Cubans. Vessey envisioned an assault in which either Rangers or Marines in conjunction with airborne forces, in the words of historian Ronald Cole, conducted “multiple simultaneous rescue and combat operations.” President Reagan approved the chairman’s recommendation to employ the Rangers and the Marines in the US ground force after US intelligence agencies reported that Grenadian troops and the Cubans were indeed organizing to fight. Shortly thereafter, LantCom commander Adm Wesley L. McDonald designated a tactical boundary across Grenada. The Marines took responsibility for the north, while the Rangers took the south, which included the critical Point Salines runway. Late in the afternoon of 22 October, the JCS issued the execute order for Urgent Fury to “conduct military operations to protect and evacuate US and designated foreign nationals from Grenada, neutralize Grenadian forces, stabilize the internal situation, and maintain the peace.”

LantCom, headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia, was a Navy command with only limited representation from the other services. Lant- Com’s staff lacked adequate representation of ground, air, and special operations components and had not planned a major joint operation since World War II. In the context of John Carney’s combat controllers, LantCom’s unfamiliarity with special operations proved to be the most significant deficiency, but the most damaging aspect pertained to H-hour—the hour on which a combat operation is to be initiated—on 25 October. Although originally planned for 0200, various circumstances—including inadequate intelligence—led Admiral McDonald to push H-hour to 0500. The inevitable result was that the multiple SOF missions scheduled just prior to or after H-hour were executed mostly in daylight. In today’s operational environment, a daylight mission is almost unthinkable, but even in the early 1980s special operators generally conducted missions under cover of darkness. In daylight, the typically lightly armed SOF forces were far more vulnerable to an adversary’s conventional forces. Unfortunately, the leadership at LantCom appeared unaware of such considerations. “The conventional planners seemed to have no inkling what this would mean for those [SOF] who needed darkness on D day to carry out their missions,” Adkin wrote.

Although overall casualties in the brief operation were light by historical standards (19 US fatalities, about 120 wounded), the US military sustained several losses that resulted from “friendly fire” or accidents. In one tragic incident on the evening of 23 October, four US Navy SEALs perished in a night water jump at the start of a planned surveillance and reconnaissance mission.

Grenada is an oval-shaped island, roughly 20 miles in length along a northeast–southwest axis and about 12 miles wide. Most of it consists of jungle-covered mountains, with a coastal plain wider in the south. Available intelligence for planning Urgent Fury was sadly lacking, including a much-publicized dearth of basic maps of the island, despite the fact Grenada had been a political concern to US officials since 1979. Recent photographs of the island, if any existed, were unavailable to military planners. Thus, the actual conditions of the runway at Point Salines airfield were unknown. Planners advocated deploying a combined SEAL/CCT to survey the airfield and emplace radio navigation beacons prior to the assault. Remarks after the operation confirmed the wisdom of the attempted reconnaissance. “It was not a good runway. The runway wasn’t finished and didn’t have lighting or off-ramps. The surface was still being prepared and it didn’t have the traditional markings for safety,” Lt Col Allen A. Pichon, a C-141 pilot and 53rd Military Airlift Squadron commander, recalled. Brig Gen Robert B. Patterson, the commander of airlift forces for Urgent Fury—who landed at Salines several hours after the assault began—described the airfield:

You have to realize that this was a classic construction site. No one had ever landed an airplane on it prior to our assault. Like any other construction site, it had debris including bricks, barricades and many barrels. The Cubans had moved more than 100 fifty gallon drums, barbed wire and pieces of large construction equipment. The Rangers somehow moved all of this off. They initially got enough moved to land the C-130s in order to begin the airflow.

Patterson, a no-nonsense Southern gentleman, whose father earned two Silver Stars in World War I, understood the combat control business extremely well. In addition to having worked with combat controllers in tactical airlift assignments, in his Air War College research paper he recommended reorganizing CCTs to improve career progression for the few officers in the career field. At Point Salines, he witnessed their work firsthand, and approved of what he saw. Moreover, Patterson possessed more than the expected professional concern for the progress of the mission at the forward airfield. His son, Robert “Buzz” Patterson, piloted a C-141 filled with paratroopers to Grenada on the morning of the assault. While on the ground at Grenada, the general took the opportunity to check out one of several warehouses filled with ammunition. A grisly, old sergeant in the 82nd Airborne approached and asked Patterson if he had a son in the Air Force, to which the general responded affirmatively. “He flew us down here today,” responded the sergeant. Years later, General Patterson laughingly recalled the incident: “Not many people in the back end of a C-141 know who’s up front, but I thought that was pretty interesting.”

Maj Gen Duane H. Cassidy commanded the Twenty-First Air Force at the time of the Grenada operation. Later, retired General Cassidy recalled an anecdote involving the construction equipment at Salines. While at Pope AFB prior to the operation’s start, Cassidy learned that Soviet vehicles might be on the runway. He mentioned the Soviet vehicles while mingling with the troops on Pope’s “Green Ramp” and asked, “Can you get them off of there?” One soldier responded immediately, “Hey, General, I’m from New York. I can jump anything!” Cassidy recounted that the troops “hot-wired a few of them and then pushed the rest . . . off with the ones they hot-wired, and we were in there in no time!”

However, prior to commencing the operation the leadership hungered for “ground truth” concerning the runway’s condition. Accordingly, LantCom assigned General Scholtes’s Task Force (TF) 123—Army Rangers, Delta, Navy SEALs, and an Air Force CCT—a reconnaissance mission at the Salines airfield. After darkness set in on 23 October, Colonel Carney was to lead four combat controllers to assess the site prior to the Rangers’ planned assault early on D-day, the 25th. In addition to securing the airfield to allow for “air-landing” of follow-on forces, the Rangers planned to rescue the several hundred medical students believed to be residing nearby.

Prior to Urgent Fury, the only known location of US students was the “True Blue” campus, situated about a mile from the eastern end of the Point Salines runway. Actually, less than one-third of the students lived there, a potentially disastrous intelligence failure. The task force had no knowledge of the whereabouts of most of the 600 students. Only after the operation was underway did task force members learn of a second campus and then a third area where more than 400 students resided (some 200 at each). The safety of US citizens was the Reagan administration’s primary objective, but if any Grenadians had intended to harm Americans or take hostages, they could easily have done so even after the start of operations. As was typical of various official (unclassified) reports after Grenada, planning and operational failures were largely dismissed or ignored. The LantCom report on Urgent Fury, signed by Admiral McDonald, stated, “Available basic intelligence was generally adequate for overall planning purposes. Estimates of Grenadian personnel and equipment strengths were sufficiently accurate, and estimated number of Cuban personnel was within an acceptable range of uncertainty.” Mark Adkin, referring to that part of the report, viewed the statement as “a polite way of saying nobody had the faintest idea.”

The plan called for Carney’s men to be transported to a nearby destroyer, the USS Clifton Sprague, which was to carry them to a predetermined area in the waters off the coast of Grenada. Meanwhile, two MC-130E Combat Talon aircraft were to fly a SEAL contingent of 12 (possibly 16) men expected to parachute into the water and board two Boston Whaler boats (dropped with the SEALs). After boarding the boats, the SEALs were to transport Carney’s men near Point Salines. There, after conducting reconnaissance and emplacing the radio beacons for the initial assault aircraft, the combat controllers were to take cover between the runway and the shoreline just to the south, remaining undetected until the start of the assault early on the 25th. Unfortunately, the SEAL/CCT team never made it to Salines.

Accounts of what actually transpired vary, and SEAL Team Six’s documentation has never been released. But, clearly, planning errors and marginal weather conditions complicated the mission. One error was a failure to take into account the seasonal time change that turned the clock back by one hour on 23 October. Instead of the intended daylight jump, the jump took place in the dark, on a moonless night. The commander of SEAL Team Six wrote,

Urgent Fury had been planned on “local” time. Eastern Daylight Time was the same as Atlantic Standard Time, which applies in Grenada. That is, it was the same, until 0200 of the day we launched the reconnaissance team: the Atlantic time zone didn’t observe daylight saving time. When we “fell back,” they stayed the same. Instead of an easy daylight drop, my men had to do a more complicated night drop. I didn’t know it at the time, but SEAL Team Six had never done a night boat drop—or any night water parachuting, for that matter.

In the best description of the failed SEAL mission, Orr Kelly, longtime Washington news correspondent and author, wrote that the wind was at least 20 knots, “creating moderate waves, with many whitecaps and some spray.” A training jump was not permitted under such conditions, an indicator of the likelihood of serious difficulties in an operational setting.

Kelly gave two possibilities for what happened when the SEALs hit the water. Perhaps the SEALs’ 100- to 400-pounds of weapons, ammunition, and gear weighed them down to the point their life jackets could not keep them afloat or bring them back to the surface quickly enough after they hit the water. As a result, they were pulled under and drowned. Or, they may have been unable to extricate themselves from the parachute shroud lines after hitting the water, with the same deadly outcome. Possibly both explanations are correct, as four individuals were lost, perhaps independently of one another. Whatever the reason, the four never surfaced that night. The Boston Whaler was also lost.

While no combat controllers were lost that night or in the operation overall, the loss of the four SEALs was keenly felt by their Air Force brothers. Some CCTs, including Wayne Norrad, had jumped a number of times in training with at least three of the four SEALs who perished.

Meanwhile, two of the four combat controllers climbed into the Sprague’s safety boat to await the parachuting SEALs.35 The Air Force men were Carney, tech sergeants Jerry Jones and Johnny Pantages, and Desert One veteran Dick West. Following the disastrous jump, the surviving jumpers and combat controllers searched unsuccessfully for the four missing SEALs. Using the lone Boston Whaler recovered after the drop, an undetermined number of SEALs—at least eight (possibly as many as 12)—headed toward Grenada with Carney’s men. The Sprague continued its search in vain. Carney recalled the boat was about 30 miles from Grenada when an unidentified vessel arrived in the area “panning with its searchlight.” Several accounts stated that the SEALs cut the boat’s motor to avoid detection and were unable to restart it, apparently due to a flooded engine. With dawn approaching, the team aborted the night’s mission and drifted The plan called for Carney’s men to be transported to a nearby destroyer, the USS Clifton Sprague, which was to carry them to a predetermined area in the waters off the coast of Grenada. Meanwhile, two MC-130E Combat Talon aircraft were to fly a SEAL contingent of 12 (possibly 16) men expected to parachute into the water and board two Boston Whaler boats (dropped with the SEALs). After boarding the boats, the SEALs were to transport Carney’s men near Point Salines. There, after conducting reconnaissance and emplacing the radio beacons for the initial assault aircraft, the combat controllers were to take cover between the runway and the shoreline just to the south, remaining undetected until the start of the assault early on the 25th. Unfortunately, the SEAL/CCT team never made it to Salines.

Accounts of what actually transpired vary, and SEAL Team Six’s documentation has never been released. But, clearly, planning errors and marginal weather conditions complicated the mission. One error was a failure to take into account the seasonal time change that turned the clock back by one hour on 23 October. Instead of the intended daylight jump, the jump took place in the dark, on a moonless night. The commander of SEAL Team Six wrote:

“Urgent Fury had been planned on ‘local’ time. Eastern Daylight Time was the same as Atlantic Standard Time, which applies in Grenada. That is, it was the same, until 0200 of the day we launched the reconnaissance team: the Atlantic time zone didn’t observe daylight saving time. When we ‘fell back,’ they stayed the same. Instead of an easy daylight drop, my men had to do a more complicated night drop. I didn’t know it at the time, but SEAL Team Six had never done a night boat drop—or any night water parachuting, for that matter.”

In the best description of the failed SEAL mission, Orr Kelly, longtime Washington news correspondent and author, wrote that the wind was at least 20 knots, “creating moderate waves, with many whitecaps and some spray.” A training jump was not permitted under such conditions, an indicator of the likelihood of serious difficulties in an operational setting.

Kelly gave two possibilities for what happened when the SEALs hit the water. Perhaps the SEALs’ 100- to 400-pounds of weapons, ammunition, and gear weighed them down to the point their life jackets could not keep them afloat or bring them back to the surface quickly enough after they hit the water. As a result, they were pulled under and drowned. Or, they may have been unable to extricate themselves from the parachute shroud lines after hitting the water, with the same deadly outcome. Possibly both explanations are correct, as four individuals were lost, perhaps independently of one another. Whatever the reason, the four never surfaced that night. The Boston Whaler was also lost.

While no combat controllers were lost that night or in the operation overall, the loss of the four SEALs was keenly felt by their Air Force brothers. Some CCTs, including Wayne Norrad, had jumped a number of times in training with at least three of the four SEALs who perished.

Meanwhile, two of the four combat controllers climbed into the Sprague’s safety boat to await the parachuting SEALs. The Air Force men were Carney, tech sergeants Jerry Jones and Johnny Pantages, and Desert One veteran Dick West. Following the disastrous jump, the surviving jumpers and combat controllers searched unsuccessfully for the four missing SEALs. Using the lone Boston Whaler recovered after the drop, an undetermined number of SEALs—at least eight (possibly as many as 12)—headed toward Grenada with Carney’s men. The Sprague continued its search in vain. Carney recalled the boat was about 30 miles from Grenada when an unidentified vessel arrived in the area “panning with its searchlight.” Several accounts stated that the SEALs cut the boat’s motor to avoid detection and were unable to restart it, apparently due to a flooded engine. With dawn approaching, the team aborted the night’s mission and drifted back out to sea, where the Sprague picked them up. They hoped to try again the next night.

General Scholtes, the special ops task force commander, still wanted a CCT-conducted reconnaissance at Salines in addition to the emplacement of radio navigation beacons for the assault transports. He requested a 24-hour delay to H-hour, but the Department of State feared the fragile coalition of Caribbean states might not hold that long. Scholtes settled initially for a two-hour delay, which later was pushed back another hour. The revised H-hour was set for 0500 on 25 October, just before dawn. ‘Owning the night’ was standard practice for US special operations, but in Grenada the initial SOF missions lacked the protective cover of darkness. Special operators were dangerously exposed and almost certainly sustained unnecessary casualties as a result. The initial assault at Point Salines, where most of the fighting took place, did not begin until 0534, by which time the advantage of darkness had passed.

On the evening of 24 October, the SEALs again tried to insert Carney’s men onto Grenada’s shores. This time, a single Boston Whaler was dropped near the Sprague, about 15 miles from Point Salines. Unlike the previous night, the SEALs waited with the combat controllers on the destroyer’s deck. At about 2200, Carney’s men and half of the SEALs launched in a second whaler—the surviving whaler from the previous night’s tragedy—towing an inflatable Zodiac boat. The remainder of the team boarded the freshly-dropped whaler, and all three small boats headed toward Point Salines. Carney recalled:

“The weather was bad, the sea was rough, and problems with motors on our Whaler required the SEAL team leader to ask the Sprague for a close tow to within four miles of the island. We made it to within about a mile of the beach running at high speed when a Grenadian patrol boat approached again. When its searchlight panned in our direction, our coxswains cut the boats’ powerful engines. As a result of the sudden stop and heavy seas, the wakes behind the boats came over the transoms, flooding the Whalers and our radios and equipment and shutting down their motors. At this point, we had the Zodiac and two inert Boston Whalers. We transferred to the Zodiac. We spent hours working on the motors, drying the spark plugs, and attempting to get back under way. We drifted seaward about four miles from Point Salines. Daylight was about to break.”

At that point, any possibility of completing the reconnaissance mission evaporated when Carney realized the satellite communications link had been lost. Even if they made it to the airfield, the team had no means to communicate its findings to JSOC. The team floundered in the water until near dawn before being recovered by the USS Caron, a signals intelligence ship.

In a disturbing case of post-Grenada distortion and blame shifting, the SEAL Team Six commander, Robert A. Gormly, wrote that it was “the Air Force lieutenant colonel” who decided that the Boston Whaler “was in no condition to proceed.” The SEAL team leader “felt they could continue but the lieutenant colonel was adamant. They finally returned to the destroyer.” Years later, retired Colonel Carney recalled the incident with For the remainder of that day and into the next, Lampe’s CCT established control of the airfield. As Lampe had witnessed a decade earlier in Southeast Asia, one C-130 after another landed under fire, slowed almost to a stop on the runway before dropping the ramp, and then pushed the throttles forward causing its load to slide out the rear of the aircraft. A moment later, the Hercules rolled to take off. At some point late that night, Lampe’s men “pretty much crashed along the side of the runway” for a few hours’ sleep.

The CCT was situated inside the Rangers’ perimeter around the Point Salines airfield, and except for sporadic, random small-arms fire, they were relatively secure. Near the end of his time controlling the airflow at Salines, Lampe refused permission for an unusual request: a bulldozer drop. The aircrew was not pleased with the decision, but Lampe knew there was no real need for the bulldozer and did not want to risk damaging or obstructing the runway in the event of a problem with the drop.

By midday on 26 October (D plus one), the CCT relief element of Capt Ronald L. “Ron” Watkins arrived on Grenada. Shortly thereafter, Lampe and Watkins began the handoff between their respective CCTs at the Salines airfield. Watkins’s 317th Tactical Airlift Wing CCT deployed from Pope AFB to Barbados, then to Grenada. “Our deployment was very confused and . . . we got very disorganized alert notices and messages” about what the team was to do, Watkins recalled. “It finally was released to us that we were going to control an airport. Initially, it was a drop zone, then it was a landing zone, and [then] it was, okay, you are going to control this airport,” the retired colonel continued. “We were given the wrong times to be ready, the wrong aircraft to show up and load on. In fact, I had to jump the fence. I remember banging on the door of the control tower . . . to be let in, so I can call the aircraft back so we won’t get left behind.” In short, “It was not a pretty deployment.”

Problems at the airfield itself were not surprising. In the handoff briefing, Det 4’s CCT informed Watkins of the SOF missions then in progress. What proved more challenging was gaining control of the airfield itself, which took about 18 hours, he recalled. “Our real issue . . . was that the Army and the Navy and Marine Corps were all attempting to use the airfield as well [as the Air Force], and no one had deconflicted the control. . . . Everybody had their own plan. . . . [and] was trying to execute it on the same piece of real estate,” Watkins said. General Patterson observed that each service, quite erroneously, believed itself to be the primary user of the field and in charge.

The commander of airlift forces had landed at Salines in a C-130 shortly before noon on D-day. “I had a great deal of concern for the potential for disaster on that runway at Pt. Salines. We just had a hell of a time getting that under control,” he recalled. He noted that within three hours the first C-141 landed on the runway, despite the presence of debris. Although he did not allow any C-141s to land the first night due to the debris and lack of lighting, he approved landings for 26–27 October. “The combat controllers, with their . . . (beanbag) lights, did a great job,” Patterson said. The general may not have been aware that Watkins’s CCT “had never even talked with a gunship prior to going to Grenada,” indicative of the wide gap in training that existed in that era between the conventional combat controllers and those in JSOC.

Retired Colonel Watkins recalled several difficult and dangerous issues during his time at Salines. An artillery battery set up on one side of the airfield and commenced firing without any warning to aircraft in the vicinity. “We had seen them setting up,” Watkins remembered, “but we didn’t believe that they were going to fire, they were firing across the runway.” For Ron Watkins, a well-built, quiet-spoken, and affable CCT officer, getting the Army to stop firing over the runway required the most “confrontational, physical event” he ever experienced with “friendlies;” he came close to striking a superior officer. Years later, responding to a query about the frequency of near misses at the airfield, Watkins said they had occurred “all the time. I had helicopter conflicts, [and our] folks were on all-terrain vehicles constantly chasing down helicopters for disregarding control instructions . . . there [were] quite a number of conflicts.”

Chief Nick Kiraly of Det 4 and two other combat controllers—one of whom was Desert One veteran Rex Wollmann—supported the Army’s Delta Force. He recalled that Grenada was one mission many of his teammates did not expect. He had planned to retire in December and start a civilian security job in Savannah. But when the operation developed, the chief deployed one last time. He supported the Delta missions at several installations around the capital city of St. George’s, including air strikes against Forts Rupert and Frederick situated a few miles north of Point Salines. The use of different maps by the ground elements and the pilots greatly complicated the coordination of the strikes—just one of myriad examples of the lack of jointness during Urgent Fury. Fort Rupert served as the Grenadians’ army headquarters; Fort Frederick was a command post.

Kiraly remembered accompanying Delta and keeping a close watch across the bay on Grenada’s west coast, “talking to [AC-130] gunships, putting gunships in support of Delta,” and seeing other “fast movers” who came south because of a lack of activity over the northern part of the island. He contacted them on guard frequency (UHF 243.0, VHF 121.5) and directed them against targets around St. George’s. Despite the fact that “they didn’t have our frequencies, [and] we didn’t have their frequencies”—in addition to the different maps— the combat controllers and pilots somehow managed to work together. “It was not the picture perfect assault that was shown in the media,” Kiraly said. Wollmann, from Hurlburt’s 1st Special Operations Wing, recalled witnessing the crash of a US helicopter hit by ground fire. The aircraft plummeted roughly 200 feet into the water offshore. There was no chance the pilot survived.

Beginning on 26 October, Lampe began to redeploy individual members of his team to reconstitute JSOC’s CCT in case a tasking for another mission emerged. By 27 October, the handoff to Watkins’s team was complete. By the 28th, Lampe’s men were back home in the United States.

As the operation progressed, Watkins’s conventional combat controllers transitioned from the ground next to the Salines airfield and moved to the control tower. Eventually, they managed to get all local aircraft talking on the same frequencies. However, for the first two or three days, Watkins’s men found out “how long you can go without sleep because there was no opportunity for it.” In any case, living in a ditch next to the runway and sleeping “in parachutes left by Army [R]angers,” as recorded in one command history, was not particularly conducive to sleep. His CCT remained on Grenada for more than a week before redeploying in early November.

Despite a difficult beginning to the Grenada operation, by 28 October the remaining medical students had been located and airlifted to the United States. Combat operations were all but over, and only an occasional sniper interrupted mop-up work and the search for several key leaders of the revolutionary junta. In one of the last Urgent Fury combat control missions, on 31 October a four-man CCT flew to Pearls Airport. As the main combat force was withdrawing from Pearls, General Patterson requested a CCT to provide continued air traffic control. The team occupied the tower and quickly took control of the airfield, operating it for the C-130s until 1 November when it was relieved by Airmen who deployed from the continental US. On 2 November, combat operations officially ended in Grenada. Historian Ron Cole summarized the Grenada operation and its effects:

"Despite faults in execution, Operation Urgent Fury accomplished all of its objectives. The eight thousand soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines rescued nearly 600 Americans and 120 foreigners, restored popular government to Grenada, and eliminated the potential strategic threat to US lines of communication in the area. Urgent Fury cost US forces 19 killed and 116 wounded; Cuban forces lost 25 killed, 59 wounded and 638 captured. Grenadian forces suffered 45 killed and 358 wounded; at least 24 Grenadian civilians were killed. Urgent Fury reinforced awareness of weaknesses in the joint system and helped prod Congress to undertake the fundamental reforms embodied in the Goldwater-Nichols DOD Reorganization Act of 1986."

Despite its problems, Urgent Fury gave the United States a morale-boosting military success. But for MAC/Twenty-Third Air Force’s combat controllers, Grenada meant more than the first large-scale opportunity to perform in combat since the withdrawal from Southeast Asia. Retired chief Kiraly, one of Carney’s original combat controllers in the detachment, felt that Urgent Fury “validated” the CCTs in a combat situation in which they “overcame a lot of obstacles to make it happen. . . . Our guys did their job and did well. . . . [Grenada] was our ‘coming out party,’ I guess.” Of great importance to the future of the combat control and pararescue career fields, Urgent Fury proved to be the catalyst for what became known as Air Force Special Tactics.

In Grenada’s aftermath, Carney, drawing on his football background, wrote to General Scholtes that the command needed to “get back to blocking and tackling.” Moreover, Carney had observed within some SOF elements an attitude he viewed as counterproductive to jointness and interoperability.

Similarly, Tim Brown, who deployed to Grenada with Det 4, remembered that one of the operation’s shortfalls was in tactical medical care. “We had a lot of guys that had battlefield trauma care capability, but going through the course and maintaining those skills are two different things. Their job [was] to secure radios, not medical packs,” Brown, a retired Air Force chief master sergeant, recalled. “If somebody got hurt, they knew how to use the medical pack, but it was not their job. We figured that there is only so much that one man could do well, so we brought in folks that could do those things well all the time.”