Airman left for dead apparently fought on
Britt Slabinski could hear the bullets ricochet off the rocks in the darkness. It was the first firefight for his six-man reconnaissance unit from SEAL Team 6, and it was outnumbered, outgunned and taking casualties on an Afghan mountaintop.
A half-dozen feet or so to his right, John Chapman, a US Air Force technical sergeant acting as the unit’s radio man, lay wounded in the snow.
Then another of the Americans was struck in a furious exchange of grenades and machine-gun fire, and the senior chief petty officer realised his team had to get off the peak immediately.
He looked back over at Chapman. The rifle laser was no longer moving, Slabinski recalls, though he was not close enough to check the airman’s pulse. Chased by bullets that hit a second SEAL in the leg, the chief said, he crawled on top of the sergeant but could not detect any response, so he slid down the mountain face with the other men. When they reached temporary cover, one asked: “Where’s John? Where’s Chappy?” Slabinski responded, “He’s dead.”
Now, more than 14 years after that brutal fight, in which seven Americans 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.
Push for honour
The Air Force secretary is pushing for a Medal of Honour, 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 Qaida before dying in an attempt to protect arriving reinforcements.
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.
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 Qaida forces in the Shah-e-Kot Valley in eastern Afghanistan, about 25 miles from Pakistan.
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 reluctantly flew to the peak at about 3am.
Unbeknown to the SEALs, Al Qaida forces were already there, and they hit the helicopter with heavy fire.