Any debate over the validity of the awards would be unfair to the men being recognized, says Sterner. Written testimony from four of his teammates was key to his initial award.

A former senior Team 6 member told The New York Times that Slabinski, the squadron’s senior enlisted man, had directed the operators to kill every adult male they encountered on the raid. “He selflessly moved in front of the enemy machine gun in Bunker 2 in order to engage the threat to the inbound helicopter.”, That decision is worthy of a Medal of Honor on its own, according to the former combat controller. It’s led to some tough, painful questions about whether the Navy SEALs who fought alongside Chapman left him behind, mistakenly believing he was dead when they withdrew under heavy fire. Since the Vietnam War, no Air Force personnel have received the Medal of Honor. But it does show him and two other SEALs moving past the body of Neil Roberts as they begin their retreat. “People were afraid of getting blamed for the fact that the mission didn’t go well, and then on top of that it’s a godawful thing to believe now that you left someone behind for dead who in fact was alive,” she says. As Mako 30’s combat controller, Chapman’s primary role was to call in airstrikes. “There’s a lot of guilt going on here, and there’s also the reputation of the SEALs at stake.”. “Nobody was accusing Slabinski or any of the other members of the team of having done anything other than their very best under these terrible circumstances,” James says. What Chapman did next cost him his life — but the military believes his actions also saved the lives of the Rangers. A Chinook helicopter carrying Army Rangers approached, and a group of militants took aim at it with rocket-propelled grenade launchers. “When I made the decision to rescue Neil, I just knew at the time that that was going to be the last thing that I did on this earth,” Slabinski told a Navy SEAL Foundation audience in New York on March 2, 2017. A third Chinook, Razor 01, carrying a quick reaction force of Rangers and special tactics airmen approached shortly after 5:40 a.m. That made it even more important for the team to combine fragments of information from a wide variety of sources to assemble the whole story. It’s an amazing, courageous thing to do.”, The Rangers eventually found his body in the first bunker. However, the Trump administration has yet to make an announcement regarding either package. But by that fall, they had started to change their stance in their efforts to resist the Air Force’s attempt to upgrade the airman’s award. Defense Secretary James Mattis eventually agreed, sending the recommendation to award Chapman a Medal of Honor to the White House in the fall of 2017. In addition to the video and Jay’s witness statement, Chapman’s autopsy, which the Air Force re-analyzed as part of its investigation, also supported the case that he had fought for a sustained period on the peak. And to James’s surprise—and alarm—it did. The article said that the Air Force’s “findings could rekindle old tensions” in the special operations community over the mission. However, we were told he had not been subject to any disciplinary action. That’s an example of how multiple pieces of evidence were combined to sleuth out when Chapman could — or could not — have been killed. The team of SEALs helicoptered toward a mountaintop they thought was unoccupied, but it turned out to be “a hornet’s nest of enemy activity” and “basically their headquarters, or their strong point,” the special tactics officer said. The team leader’s intent was to suppress the enemy with airpower. It is at this point that Slabinski has said he glanced at Chapman and assessed he was still alive. The mission was classified, which resulted in “stovepipes” and restricted access to certain records like his autopsy when the decorations board met.

However, Air Force officials and others close to the Chapman upgrade effort were seemingly unaware that he did so. “That’s why I was like, ‘OK, we’ve got to move.’”, However, the Predator video, which offers an uninterrupted view of Slabinski during this period, does not appear to show him crawling anywhere near Chapman.

Slabinski follows, at one point almost catching up with him.

One of those teams, led by Slabinski, was called Mako 30. “The Air Force has never said a negative word about Slabinski,” James says. The previous reviews were for after-action reports, or to determine what went wrong in the Battle of Roberts Ridge.

The team established the international airport in 28 minutes, and ran the global relief effort for two weeks unsupported, exceeding the maximum capacity of the airport by a staggering 1,400 percent. (Like the Navy Cross and the Army’s Distinguished Service Cross, the Air Force Cross is a valor award second only to the Medal of Honor.) Dan Schilling spoke with Air & Space senior associate editor Diane Tedeschi in July. Milani’s probe remains classified, but he repeated his findings in an unclassified paper he wrote while attending the Army War College in 2003. Chapman fires into the first bunker. In one, Slabinski told his men before a mission that he wanted “a head on a platter,” according to The Intercept. A key piece of evidence supporting the Air Force’s case that Chapman did not die within minutes of the SEAL team’s arrival on the mountaintop, but instead later regained consciousness and made a furious last stand by himself, was the grainy video feed from an MQ-1 Predator that flew overhead. "As [the SEALs] were moving, they were under fire from three directions. The team hoped to eliminate the threat, locate Petty Officer Roberts, recover Sergeant Chapman’s body and fulfill their commitment to leave no man behind. Events soon changed her mind. Although the Intercept article covered all three episodes, only the 2002 incident was raised to the attention of the Pentagon officials considering whether to forward Slabinski’s Medal of Honor recommendation to the White House. The downside is you are one man—alone—with the responsibility for everyone. “He climbs out of the bunker having been shot a half a dozen times [and attacked in] hand-to-hand combat, and then the final two rounds that took his life are the only thing that stopped him,” he says. Indeed, throughout 2016, the SEALs tried to persuade the Air Force and then Carter’s office to justify Chapman’s upgrade solely on the basis of his actions before the SEALs left the mountain, Camarillo says. Aware that the militants were unlikely to spare Roberts if they captured him, six members of Mako 30 quickly boarded another special ops aircraft that flew them back to the mountain. Is it typical for a combat controller to be deployed alone? “So now they’re trying to save face.”, Even members of Slabinski’s own service were taken aback. Chapman and Slabinski headed uphill, slogging through the knee-deep snow to reach a bunker from which they were taking fire. John Chapman used all of his skills to bring in close air support and rescue helicopters and in doing so helped to save his entire Navy SEAL team. “I don’t know how many [militants] he took out, but it was a hell of a battle.”, Mike’s analysis notes the man in the bunker is firing in almost every direction. |, Alone at Dawn: Medal of Honor Recipient John Chapman and the Untold Story of the World's Deadliest Special Operations Force, In the early jet age, pilots had good reason to fear the F7U, The Case for Past Life on Mars Gets Stronger, Scorned at First, These Seven Airplanes (Finally) Proved Their Mettle. Feeling he had little choice, Slabinski asked the Army special operations helicopter crew to fly his team straight to the peak. The SEALs, however, reject the claim that Chapman was alive when they fled. For two days, the militants used automatic weapons and mortar fire to pin down the Americans and forced their Afghan allies to retreat before even reaching the valley. For Air Force Secretary James, it was the latter, and particularly the video evidence, that convinced her that Chapman deserved the Medal of Honor. He comes from an Air Force family, and his investigative reports have won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists. A final piece of evidence supporting the Air Force’s case: According to two sources familiar with the details of Chapman’s award package, when he and his gear were recovered, he was found to have fired all his usable ammunition before succumbing to his wounds, Chapman had emptied six 30-round magazines—far more than he would have during the two minutes or less that elapsed before Slabinski saw him fall. Slabinski, in particular, credited Chapman with saving their lives. “There should be no controversy here,” he says. 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Should President Donald Trump sign off on it, Chapman’s Medal of Honor would be the first based primarily on technical intelligence rather than eyewitness accounts. As an Air Force officer narrates, the video shows Slabinski jumping from the back ramp of the Chinook, losing his balance and falling into the snow. The DShK ("dishka") 12.7 mm heavy machine gun that Al-Qaeda used in the second bunker.