Almost as instantly as Chapman’s Chinook arrived it became riddled with small arms fire and took a direct hit from a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG), which resulted in a Navy SEAL falling from the craft onto the snow-packed hilltop below. Like, ‘hey look at this dude,’ and the guy would just twitch again. His ability to direct accurate and lethal fire upon the enemy made him a prized asset to the Special Operations Community. John Chapman will forever be enshrined in the halls of military history and has earned the eternal respect of any who know that he fought at the now infamous Takur Ghar. Unfortunately and unbeknownst to them, Roberts had already been killed about an hour before they returned. Sgt. The Medal of Honor will be awarded to Britt Slabinski, who was banned from SEAL Team 6 for alleged war crimes.

The teams call for extraction and another Chinook, Razor 01, is inbound before getting lit up again by enemy RPG fire. After I shot this dude in the head, there was a guy who had his feet, just his feet, sticking out of some little rut or something over here. Due to his heroic actions, the lives of several of his allies on Razor-01 were saved. He spent another 12 years in the military, almost all of it at SEAL Team 6, where he ended up as a senior enlisted leader. Prior to that, one would need to harken back to the Vietnam War where men made their stand in the jungles of Vietnam.

As the storm of enemy machine gun fire and rockets continued to rain down on the men, it appeared that Chapman had suffered mortal injuries and was presumed dead during the middle of the fight. I mean, he was dead, but people have got nerves.

Normally, the presentation of the Medal of Honor is a solemn and meaningful recognition of bravery and heroism. Britt Slabinski, a former leader of Navy SEAL Team 6, received the Medal of Honor for valor in a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan. on about your day, ask yourself: How likely is it that the story you just read would have been produced by a different news outlet if The Intercept hadn’t done it? The command thus demonstrated that it was perfectly capable of determining the truth for internal purposes — and once again proved it was unwilling to expose even its pariahs to external scrutiny or justice. However, in 2018 the Pentagon could not escape the fact that what these men displayed during the Battle of Takur Ghar was in keeping with the finest traditions and inexplicable gallantry of the Medal of Honor.

The team split and Chapman was hit two minutes after engaging the militants.

Chapman received training in the combat control field where coordinating fire for ground operations would be his primary duty. What everyone learns from this is that cover-ups work — don’t say anything bad about your teammates, keep quiet and we’ll get through it. Recommendations for the highest military honor to be bestowed upon Slabinski and Chapman were quickly put forward.

John Chapman was born in 1965 in Springfield, Massachusetts. Chapman had survived the engagement and continued to fight after the SEAL team withdrew. Well, they did. He can be seen fighting with multiple enemy combatants, even dispatching one during hand to hand combat. The former unit leader who served several years with Szymanski said he had no doubt that his former teammate pushed for the upgrade to assuage his own guilt about putting Slabinski and his team in what became a disastrous position. One would stand before the President to receive his honor, while the other man never left the snowy mountain top that cold evening in March of 2002. The operator force and the two QRF teams of Rangers had their own ordeal in getting to the battlefield (which is another story in itself). Already barred from serving at SEAL Team 6, Slabinski was now physically banished. John Chapman enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1983 and became a combat air controller. The kind of reporting we do is essential to democracy, but it is not easy, cheap, or profitable. He came upon the enemy and killed two instantly while moving onto a second entrenched machine gun. The mission was part of the U.S. military’s Operation Anaconda, a multi-day effort to squeeze out and kill the last large group of Al Qaeda militants and Taliban fighters hiding in the valley. But instead he emerged to assault the machine gun nest in the second nearby bunker, suppressing its fire and allowing his SEAL teammates to move forward.