Airman was left for dead by SEALs, but there are signs he fought al-Qaida alone This is the site of a 2002 firefight between Navy SEALs and insurgents on Takur Ghar, a mountain in the Shah-i-Kot valley of eastern Afghanistan. SEALs take it as an article of faith that no fallen comrade will be left behind, but that could be what happened to Air Force Tech Sgt. John Chapman, who was working with the SEAL unit. U.S. DEPT. OF DEFENSE NYT
By SEAN D. NAYLOR and CHRISTOPHER DREW
New York Times
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 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 – 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 U.S. Navy unit that would later kill Osama bin Laden. The findings could rekindle tensions between Team 6 and other Special Operations organizations 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.
Like some other military units, Team 6 accepts as an article of faith that its members never leave a fallen comrade behind. While that can be difficult to fulfill, it is a creed as old as warfare itself, a pact with those facing great peril. Abandoning a wounded man to fight and die by himself, however inadvertent, officers say, would be devastating.
“These things happen in combat, but it’d be awful,” said Maj. Gen. Gary Harrell, a retired Delta Force commander who was involved in the broader operation that included the mountaintop episode. “It’d be terrible to find that out.”
He cautioned anyone who had not been there against second-guessing. “It’s easy to say, ‘Well, I’d never leave someone behind,’” he said. “It’s a lot harder when you’re getting your ass shot off.”
He added, “If anybody thought Chapman was alive, we would have been trying to move heaven and earth to get him out of there.”
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Poster Comment:
There are a lot of unsung heroes out there. But if my buddies left me for dead, and I got out of there, I would take care of them one by one. ;)