The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
An airman left for dead, a grainy hint of life
14 years later, technology detects heroism in firefight.
Britt Slabinski could hear the bullets ricochet off the rocks in the darkness. It was the first firefight for his sixman 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 U.S. Air Force technical sergeant acting as the unit’s radio man, lay wounded in the snow. Slabinski, a senior chief petty officer, could see through his night-vision goggles an aiming laser from Chapman’s rifle rising and falling with his breathing, a sign he was alive.
Then another of the Americans was struck in a furious exchange of grenades and machine-gun fire, and the chief realized that his team had to get off the peak immediately.
He looked back over at Chapman. The 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.
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-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.
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-Qaida forces in the Shah-e-Kot Valley in eastern Afghanistan, about 25 miles from Pakistan. The battle occurred less than three months after Osama bin Laden had escaped U.S. capture at Tora Bora, and U.S. commanders still hoped to apprehend or kill senior al-Qaida leaders.
Slabinski’s plan was to land by helicopter near the base of the 10,000-foot mountain 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 about 3 a.m.
Unbeknown to the SEALs, al-Qaida 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 5 a.m., the five remaining SEALs and Chapman returned to the top 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. 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. Slabinski said his plan was to take cover and let a circling Air Force gunship hammer the al-Qaida fighters before trying again to seize the peak and recover Sergeant Chapman’s body.
But grenades and mortar fire drove the SEALs farther down the mountain, making it impossible to return. Three Army Rangers, an Army helicopter crewman and another Air Force commando were killed later that morning after arriving as reinforcements.
Soon after, the military opened an investigation to determine what had gone wrong. The chief investigator, Lt. Col. 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-Qaida fighters had become confused and were firing at one another, or Chapman, still alive, had resumed fighting.
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, according 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 scrutinize 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.
Lingering questions
A team led by the Air Force’s 24th Special Operations Wing commander, Col. Matthew Davidson, briefed Slabinski on the findings late last year.
“I didn’t see anything new,” Slabinski said. “It was just presented differently.”
Davidson said the Air Force could see Chapman “moving in and around the bunker” where he and Slabinski had killed the two enemy fighters, the chief said.
But because the bunker was under a tree that largely obscured it, this was not clear to Slabinski watching the video.
The chief, who is now 46 and retired, acknowledged that he might have made a mistake under intense fire in thinking that Chapman was dead. What stays with him the most is that morning he led his team into battle to try to save one man, only to be told later that he had left another fighting for his life.
“Is it within John’s character to go on and do this? Without a question,” the chief said. “If John did this stuff, I want him to get recognized.”