Blasted high into a cloud of heat and dust by an errant, 2,000-pound guided missile, the Air Force sergeant thought he'd left earth behind for good. Unable to see or hear, he felt himself lofting over a chaotic Afghan battlefield into a quiet, numbing blackness.

"It was just a floating feeling of being pulled upward ... total sensory deprivation," said the sergeant, Mike, whose full name was withheld by the military. Sgt. Mike landed alive – inside an ancient Afghan fort filled with armed, rioting Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners.

It was late last November, and Sgt. Mike – a member of a highly specialized, little-known group of elite US fighters known as combat controllers (CCTs) – and his team were at the prison uprising near Mazar-e Sharif trying to recover the body of slain CIA agent Johnny Michael Spann.

If the war in Afghanistan has showcased a lethal partnership of US Special Operations Forces and precision air power – combat controllers are the critical go-betweens, the most sophisticated human ground to air link.

Now on brief rotations back home from Afghanistan, some of the first CCTs on the ground in the Afghan war are telling their stories. They are stories of bravery and ingenuity, of spotting targets from horseback using laptops and laser goggles, of melding 19th century Afghan warfare with 21st century US military technology in unprecedented ways.

"Nobody out there knows more about the ground plan and the air plan, so when things go bad we are the ones who try to pull it all together," says Senior MasterSgt. Robert Rankin, commandant of the Combat Control School at Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina. "Our main job is to bring calm to chaos."

A TINY force of less than 400 men, CCTs are in such demand that the Air Force has imposed a "stop loss" order, barring any from leaving or retiring. Experts in setting up remote landing strips and drop zones, guiding warplanes with radios and radar, and calling in strikes for ground troops, their motto is "First There." Indeed, in Afghanistan, CCTs were among the first to arrive behind enemy lines, infiltrating the country with US special operationsteams about a month after Sept. 11 to begin spotting targets for the Northern Alliance.

One of those spotters, Sgt. Calvin, landed north of Kabul and within 30 hours called the first airstrikes on Taliban positions, according to an Air Force account released last month.

Northern Alliance officers were so impressed that during an intense firefight with Taliban forces, one of them moved to shield Calvin.

"He said if something happened to him ... someone else would step in," Calvin said. "But if something happened to me, the planes could not come."

Round-the-clock bombing followed. Calvin and others directed more than 100 sorties by B-52s, F-18s, and other US warplanes, shattering Taliban defenses. The battle for the capital that military planners estimated would last six months took 25 days.

Key to the success was the precision with which Calvin and others helped pilots miles above to steer the "smart bombs." Using binoculars, laser target-designators, Global Positioning Systems devices, and radios, the CCTs helped ensure the pilots "saw" the correct targets.

In the battle for Mazar-e Sharif and other towns, CCTs like Sgt. Mike took positions on hilltops, using tripods and laser goggles to pinpoint strikes that coincided with calvary charges by Afghan fighters. "The timing was so precise that, as the soldiers described it, hundreds of Afghan horsemen literally came riding out of the smoke," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of the Mazar assault.

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