Ardie Dahl was hooked up with Mike in the past....came accross this article when it turned up on a google search.
anyhoo..great moments in Hog busting : )
Fayetteville (NC) Observer
July 11, 2002
Pope Pilots Credited With Anaconda Kills
By J.S. Newton, Staff writer
Two A-10 ''Warthog" attack pilots from Pope Air Force Base are credited with killing between 200 and 300 al-Qaida and Taliban fighters during Operation Anaconda in eastern Afghanistan. They did it in a single mission, said Lt. Col. Arden Dahl, commander of the 74th Fighter Squadron at Pope. The pilots are Lt. Col. Edward ''K-9" Kostelnik and Capt. Scott ''Soup" Campbell. The mission happened in March, but details of the part played by people from Pope Air Force Base were not disclosed until Wednesday. Dahl, who recently returned from Afghanistan, where he flew 11 combat missions, spoke with reporters during a deployment ceremony for a sister unit, the 75th Fighter Squadron. The 75th Fighter Squadron is going soon to Southwest Asia. The aim of Operation Anaconda, which was carried out in March in the mountains of Afghanistan, was to hunt down and kill al-Qaida and Taliban troops. On One day in March, the enemy was discovered forming for an attack on a small group of soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division. The enemy force was nearly within strike distance -- about a mile and a half away -- when the Pope A-10 pilots attacked with bombs and 30 mm armor-piercing rounds. After the attack, Dahl said, ''there wasn't anybody left.'' Dahl said that mission and another mission around the same time inflicted heavy damage on enemy forces. Initially, Pope A-10 crews were not expecting to fly in Afghanistan. They were told that they would be patrolling the skies over Iraq and keeping Saddam Hussein in check. But when Anaconda began, the 74th Fighter Squadron was called into action. An undisclosed number of Pope personnel were sent to a classified base on March 10. From there, Pope pilots flew missions in support of Anaconda ground forces. The first combat sorties launched just 15 hours after the 74th received mission notice. The pilots flew their first mission and landed at a secret base even before an advance team arrived to park their jets. The pilots did not know where they were landing until they were already in the air. In all, during the 10-day mission, Pope planes flew 275 hours in 36 sorties. They dropped 19,500 pounds of bombs and fired 14 rockets and 740 rounds of 30 mm high-explosive, incendiary ammunition. While the pilots may get a lot of the glory, Dahl said, it was a dedicated group of maintenance people, catching catnaps between launches, that kept the aircraft in the air. The maintenance crews took "cat naps" between launches. Pope A-10 pilots and crew members helped change the course of the war with their actions in Anaconda, Dahl said. ''After that night, all the al-Qaida and Taliban, and their buddies, were on the run,'' Dahl said. ''They just got swacked.'' Air Force officials have submitted requests for Kostelnik and Campbell to receive Silver Stars. The Silver Star is the Air Force's third highest award for valor in combat. After the Anaconda mission, the Pope pilots no longer had clearance to remain at the secret air base. They had to go back to the Persian Gulf to regroup. They spent the next seven days preparing to go to Bagram Air Base in the eastern Afghan mountains. Their original deployment '' started out as a 90-day rotation and turned into something else,'' said Capt. Jeff Baldwin. ''It was basically unheard of what we did: to go to a forward location and then to go forward again. Nothing like that has been done since Vietnam.'' Dahl said his squadron flew into Bagram, a former Soviet air base littered with wrecked MIG fighters and bomb craters and made it operational. They arrived March 20 in Bagram. The base is at the foothills of the Hindu Kush Mountains. Peaks in the area reach as high as 22,000 feet. There was no running water and no toilets. There were unexploded bombs and mines everywhere. Everything had to be shipped in, as during the Berlin Airlift, Dahl said. By the time the 74th Fighter Squadron left, Bagram was up and running. The base was handed off to a reserve unit April 28, but some Pope personnel were still there in May. Master Sgt. Tim Isaacs, an aircraft maintenance section chief, said his experience in Afghanistan was great because the troops got to do what they had trained for. Bagram is dusty and hot, he says, but adds: ''It's a beautiful place. It's too bad there is a war there.''