Controversy surrounds a Navy SEAL's Medal of Honor - Sensationalist Headlines

As a Navy SEAL receives the Medal of Honor, frustrations remain .. Two Chinook helicopters carrying elite U.S. troops roared through the chilly Afghan air above a mountaintop when disaster struck. Rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun fire ripped into one of the lumbering aircraft as it approached a landing zone, ejecting a Navy SEAL Team 6 member and prompting a rescue operation. On Thursday, President Trump awarded retired Master Chief Petty Officer Britt K. Slabinski the nation’s highest award for valor in combat, the Medal of Honor, for his actions 16 years ago on 10,000-foot Takur Ghar mountain. The Navy SEAL is credited with braving withering fire from Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in waist-deep snow while leading the rest of his team — call sign “Mako 30” — in search of missing Petty Officer 1st Class Neil C. Roberts. “Britt wants the country to know that for him, the recognition he is about to receive is an honor that falls on the whole team — he wants you folks to know that, on the whole team,” Trump said at a ceremony at the White House. “When every American warrior who fought the forces of terror on that snowy Afghan ridge, each of them has entered the eternal chronicle of American valor and American bravery. Britt, we salute you, we thank you, we thank God for making you a United States SEAL.” Slabinski was recognized for his actions in March 2002 in what became known as the Battle of Roberts Ridge. The operation has spawned books, prompted study at U.S. warfare schools and been depicted in a video game, in large part because of its dire nature. Seven Americans, including Roberts, were killed, and the operation was scrutinized afterward for its flawed planning and communication at more senior levels. “I’ll accept that medal with great humility, because all my guys followed me up the mountain that day, as did the aircrews that kept the flights coming, and the Rangers who came not because they knew us, but because they knew we were in trouble,” Slabinski said in an interview published by Breaking Defense on Thursday before the ceremony. “In many ways I’m uncomfortable being singled out because when you wrap your head around that whole battle, every one of them deserved this medal. That’s no exaggeration.” But there is another part of the story: Air Force Tech. Sgt. John A. Chapman, one of Slabinski’s deceased teammates, also has been nominated for the Medal of Honor. The White House and Pentagon have not disclosed whether the president will award it. In a sad, cruel twist in Chapman’s case, the Air Force concluded that he was forced to fight to his death alone after Slabinski ordered that SEALs evacuate in the face of a vastly larger enemy force. Slabinski believed that Chapman was dead, the Air Force found. But the service, using Predator drone video that was not originally considered, concluded in 2016 that Chapman was probably unconscious at the time and continued to fight off al-Qaeda fighters when he regained consciousness. That finding, first reported by the New York Times, marked the first time the military had based a valor award nomination on drone video footage. Traditionally, cases rely primarily on witness accounts. The two sons of New England grew up as strangers about 50 miles apart, but are connected by their actions during the opening months of the war in Afghanistan. Slabinski, originally of Northampton, Mass., completed a 25-year career in 2014. He was considered a legend in the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 and received a Navy Cross — the second-highest award for valor — in recognition of his actions on Takur Ghar mountain. More recently, he has been dogged by media reports suggesting he mishandled enemy remains, including a story by the Intercept that included previously unpublished audio in which a voice said to be his describes shooting one dead enemy fighter up to 20 times in the legs and calls it a form of therapy. Chapman, a native of Windsor Locks, Conn., posthumously received the Air Force Cross for his valor in 2003 and already was considered perhaps his service’s greatest modern war hero. He left behind a wife and two young daughters. He was a combat controller, an enlisted airman who specializes in communicating with pilots to guide airstrikes on target in the middle of hair-raising special operations. More on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/us/politics/medal-of-honor-slabinski-trump.html The Navy SEALs Allegedly Left Behind a Man in Afghanistan. Did T.. With Medal of Honor, SEAL Team 6 Rewards a Culture of War Crimes

It's pretty disgusting that they would cover up something like that.

They've covered up far worse.

There's been a lot of shady shit in the SEALs in the last few years. I think they got too big a head after blowing away Osama.

If youve ever read about the mission to kill Osama, youd know that Seal Team 6 is basically an assassination squad. They dont play by the same rules everyone else does because theyre not really supposed to exist.

NYT (iirc) did a multi page expose on the hidden culture of the SEAL teams, in particular, their golden boys DEVGRU. To cut a long story short: torture, mutilation, taking body parts as war trophies, weird fetishization of native american war symbolism and so on. It's still bemusing to me that people are surprised to find out men selected for and trained to sneak into foreign countries, into peoples houses, kill them in their sleep, kidnap and assassinate are more than a little broken. I'd go as far as calling them pyschopaths, but theres always some idiot who watches too much hollywood who wants to give me the speech about "functional" sociopaths because it helps him keep the hero fantasy going.

I think most special forces groups try to weed out the real idiots though. Gungho people are usually not what special forces group want.

its not about being gungho, its special operations units in general have an over-representation of people with psychopathic traits - not my opinion, thats what psychological research conducted since the 80s has concluded. An interesting thing is the cultural difference in how this is perceived amongst the UK government vs the US, for example in the UK its long since been casually accepted that the guys in special forces are probably not all there. One of the more infamous members of the famous Iranian embassy siege when the SAS first popped into popular consciousness of the public, was "snapper" who was jokingly called certifiably insane by his peers - it wasn't far from the truth; "snapper" had been in and out of psych evals his entire career. As far as the UK mil is concerned, he and the rest of them were the right men for the job whatever their shortcomings as human beings mightve been. Allegedly one of the other team members dragged one of the terrorists outside to execute him before realizing there were camera crews nearby. Allegedly, but its certainly not hard to believe. My point is exactly this; the kind of people who end up in these jobs are the exact kind of people you'd expect to find when you spell it out plainly what they do, instead of dressing it up in flowery language: murder, assassination, kidnapping, theft. So then, it's really never surprising, at least to me, to find out that when they're given a long leash on operations that they get up to all sorts of repugnant shit like mutilation and torture.

Wow. Sounds a lot like the Blue Shield of Silence type of bullshit you see in corrupt police departments.

As someone who works with USSOCOM, you have no idea what you are rambling about.

https://twitter.com/ScottFrazier19/status/999977971598413824 That little swoop to keep Trump's tiny cheeto hands away from it How can someone manage to have less grace in motion than a drunk hippo

He really needs to fix his posture, he's god major sway back.

I wonder how pissed off the SF community is in general at certain SEALs right now, given how, you know, they are supposed to avoid the spotlight and all