Below is the excerpt from a book Danger Close by Steve Call about the TACP Brian Wilchenski. The book is highly recommended for anyone who is interested in learning about USAF ROMAND, JTAC, TACP, and CCT.

(Excerpt begins) One particularly intense example of TACPs unexpectedly coming in handy occurred near the town of Khowst as Operation Anaconda was winding down. S.St. Brian Wilchenski had been a conventional TACP with the 20th ASOS before 11 September, and when they couldn’t find enough SOF TACPs to meet the needs of the SOF ramp-up for Afghani-stan, Wilchenski volunteered to go through the crash course to become an augmentee. Wilchenski was accepted, trained, and deployed to Afghanistan around mid-December 2001. He worked at TF Dagger headquarters for awhile, and finally joined a SOF team in early February. While with this team he pretty much ran the gamut of SOF duties. Most of it was quite routine, even boring, but Wilchenski was looking back on it as one of the most rewarding experiences of his career. His tour was nearly over when, as often happens, he had his closest brush with death.

This was right around the third week in March at the tail end of An-aconda. We all went to sleep [on our] third or fourth night back in Khowst… About midnight all of a sudden things start exploding. We had mortar rounds and automatic weapons fire coming in from four different directions. … As I’m heading out of the building, frickin’ tracer rounds start bouncing off the wall right in front of me. … My body armor and helmet were already turned in and locked up ’cause I was going to leave in a couple of days. [Amazingly, this is standard practice-two or three days before troops redeploy home they turn in all their equipment, including protective gear, which then gets packed up and sent to the shipping terminal.] As I get up on top of the roof … I hear a snap, snap. There’s different sounds you hear when you’re in battle. A zing is, you know, it’s close, it could be a couple yards away. A snap is a near miss. You heard a round snap, what it’s doing is breaking the sound barrier over your head and it’s usually only a couple of inches away. A round snaps here and a round snaps there and I’m like, “Oh damn!” I got no helmet and no body armor on and I lay on my back, “Oh, this sucks!” I get on the radio and I just happen to say, you know, it’s like calling God, “Hey, is there anybody out there?” and all of a sudden an aircraft checks in and he says, “Yep I’m here.” And it was just a big, “Phew, yeah!” He goes, “I’m a B-1B, and I got .. “I’m like, “Oh man, let me guess, you got like twenty-seven Mk-82s and eighteen JDAMs. “Yep, that’s what I got.” I go, “Hold on, they’re way too close to us. We’re right in town and I really can’t have you dropping bombs.”….. “What do you need from me?” he asks, and I go, “Listen, I need you to do a flyby. I need you to come down as low as you possibly can. I need you to [kick in] your afterburners and pop flares,” you know, so the people attacking us would know that we’re certain to do business. “All right, l’ll be in there in thirty seconds.” He comes down and he’s just rocking the whole compound ’cause the B-1B hauls ass. …And he comes rolling in and frickin’ all of a sudden kicks in afterburners right over my head. Woooshhhhhhhh! You know, and the building shook and everybody’s screaming, “Yeah! Wooo!” Everybody’s pumped up. And as he’s pulling up his afterburners are freakin’ flashing the [compound]. He probably got down to five hundred feet, I mean, he got right down. He popped flares as he pulled off and everything got quiet-for about a minute. It didn’t last very long. “How was that?” he asked. “Fucking awesome! It was awesome That did the job!” Everything’s quiet for a couple seconds, then they started firing again. He’s like, “All right, what can I do for you now?” “Listen, since you have direct [communication] with the AWACS, I need to know when the [AC-130] can get here. I need the gunship because these guys are in close. I got guys within two hundred meters right now shooting at us.” He says, “All right, stand by. … He’ll be here in fifteen minutes.” Then he asked, “Well what do you want me to do till they get here?” “I need you to do another flyby.” He did another flyby just to keep their heads down till the gunship showed up. He did [a third] flyby and by that time, the gunship showed up. I got on the radio with the commander … and I tell him, “I’ve got a gunship showing up … I need to know where you want the fires.” We had a prison just to the north of us and we were getting the majority of our fire from the prison. He says, “I want the northwest corner of that prison taken out.” “All right, I’lI have rounds down in about a min-ute. ..” I called the gunship, “Listen, I need you to find our position. We’re halfway up the airfield on the north side, in the compound.” And he goes, “All right, I got your position. . . “”All right, I’m going to sparkle [designate the target with the laser] the [prison] 150 meters away.” He said, “Okay, I got your sparkle… “”All right, good, now I need you to go to the northwest corner and tell me what you see.” “Yeah, I got at least twenty guys in the corner, looks like they’re shooting. What do you want me to do?” I go, “Stand by,” and I get with the commander, “All right sir, I got twenty guys in the corner [of the prison] compound. I’m ready to lay fire, are you ready?” “Yep.” “All right, tell everybody to get down,” and I told [the gunship], “Fire for effect! You’re cleared to fire!” And all of a sudden they put down twenty-five rounds of 105, fifty rounds of 40-mm, and it was like fireworks! And all of a sudden the whole compound, the 101st [Airborne Division] guys, the SF guys, everybody was screaming, and I’m up on top of the roof, “Yeah! Hell, yeah!” We’re all pumped up. I mean everything was just like lighting up in the corner of that compound. We had rocks and stuff hitting the front of our compound. And then things got quiet. Pretty much the attack stops. … The commander got on the radio and said, “Ski, that was an awesome job. You probably saved a lot of lives tonight.”

Shortly after this episode Wilchenski went home.

The BDU came from the time of the story. It would’ve been his garrison uniform. Note the 20th ASOS patch and 10th Mountain Division SSI and Special Forces combat patch. At one point of Wilchenski’s career, he got transferred to 5th ASOS and attached to 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 2nd Infantry Division. With that unit he would deploy to Iraq twice in 2003(?) then 2007. Eventually he returned to Afghanistan in 2012.