SEAL Team 6 and a man left for dead: a grainy

ultimately died, the Air Force says that Slabinski was wrong – and that Chapman not only was alive, but also fought on alone for more than an hour after the SEALs had retreated. The Air Force secretary is pushing for a Medal of Honor, the military’s highest award, after new technology used in an examination of videos from aircraft flying overhead helped officials conclude that the sergeant had killed two fighters with al-Qaeda – one in hand-to-hand combat – before dying in an attempt to protect arriving reinforcements.

The new account of Chapman’s last act reopens old wounds for SEAL Team 6, the elite US Navy unit that would later kill Osama bin Laden. The findings could rekindle tensions between Team 6 and other Special Operations organisations that lost men in the March 4, 2002, mission, which they felt the SEALs had planned and executed poorly, according to current and former military officials.

While saying the sergeant should be recognised for his valour if the Air Force narrative was correct, Slabinski still expressed scepticism that the new evidence – gleaned from software that can isolate pixel representations of people and help track their movements – was reliable. SEAL Team 6 supports the proposed award, military officials said, but is not taking a position on whether Chapman was alive when the SEALs retreated.

If approved by the president, the award will be the first of the more than 3,500 Medals of Honor given since the Civil War to rely not on eyewitness accounts but primarily on technology.

A retreat under fire

Slabinski’s team was ordered to establish an observation post on top of the mountain, Takur Ghar, during Operation Anaconda, an effort to encircle and destroy al-Qaeda forces in the Shah-e-Kot Valley in eastern Afghanistan, about 25 miles from Pakistan. The battle occurred less than three months after Bin Laden had escaped at Tora Bora, and US commanders still hoped to capture or kill senior al-Qaeda leaders.

Slabinski’s plan was to land by helicopter near the base of the 10,000-foot mountain at about midnight and climb up stealthily, but a series of delays involving aircraft left no time to do that before dawn. Under pressure from superiors, he said, he reluc- tantly flew to the peak at about 3am.

Unbeknown to the SEALs, al-Qaeda forces were already there, and they hit the helicopter with heavy fire. One of Slabinski’s men, Petty Officer 1st Class Neil C Roberts, fell out about 10 feet above the ground, and the pilot could not retrieve him before the stricken aircraft crash-landed a few miles away.

Shortly before 5am, the five remaining SEALs and Chapman returned to the top – later called “Roberts Ridge” – on another helicopter to try to rescue Roberts. They did not know that enemy fighters had already killed and tried to decapitate him.

The Americans were again met by a withering barrage. Rushing through thigh-deep snow, Chapman charged ahead of Slabinski, and they killed two fighters in a bunker – a hole dug in the ground under a tree – before the airman was wounded.

Under fire, the SEALs retreated about 15 minutes later.

Soon after, the military opened an investigation to determine what had gone wrong. The chief investigator, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Milani of the Army, wrote later that an Air Force gunship had failed to detect the militants on the mountaintop and the SEALs had “violated a basic tenet of reconnaissance” by landing directly on their observation post instead of hiking up to it.

Milani also looked into footage captured by a Predator drone about 50 minutes after the SEALs had left the mountaintop. The grainy images showed someone in the bunker defending himself against two attackers and killing one with a rifle shot, prompting the question: Who was that?

Milani’s investigation remains classified, but an unclassified paper that he wrote in 2003 offered two possible explanations: The al-Qaeda fighters had become confused and were firing at one another, or Chapman, still alive, had resumed fighting. The colonel did not reach a conclusion, based on the evidence he had. But the suggestion that members of one of the military’s most elite Special Operations units might have, even unintentionally, left someone from another service to fight and die alone added to the tensions.

New view of a battle

A briefing prepared by Air Force special operations officials dismisses as “not viable” Milani’s suggestion that the gunfight caught on video by the CIA Predator might have involved militants fighting one another, accord- ing to people who have received it. That the airman was alive and fighting “is fully supported by the evidence”, the briefing slides state.

The use of the imagery-enhancement technology to scrutinise the Predator video was central to the findings, particularly when combined with footage, from an AC-130 gunship, that had not been available to Milani. As the drone circled more than 6,500 feet above the peak, trees and other objects impeded its view, and it had trouble staying locked on to the men in the fight.

The imagery technology, still being refined in an Air Force lab, enabled the service to assign each person in the blurry videos a “pixel signature” based on his size, his clothing and the weapons he carried, people who have been briefed said. By identifying Chapman shortly after he stepped out of the helicopter with the SEALs, the briefing slides say, its imagery analysts could follow him around the mountaintop, picking him up even when trees or other obstacles partly obscured him.

Outside experts familiar with the technology said having video footage from the gunship as well as from the Predator drone would have provided the analysts with more tracking angles and clarity.