SEAL Team 6 Leaves a Man Behind | Rob Harrison | Ep. 354

This interview features AC-130 aircrew member Rob Harrison, providing his firsthand perspective on the Roberts Ridge mission. It presents a detailed examination of the critical decisions and complex events concerning John Chapman's Medal of Honor. The discussion aims to clarify the complexities and controversies of this significant military operation, offering insights into its historical record from an eyewitness. Today's Sponsors: StopBox USA⬇️ Get firearm security redesigned and save with BOGO the StopBox Pro AND 10% off @StopBoxUSA with code HOUSE at https://www.stopboxusa.com/HOUSE GhostBed⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 10% off! For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics... JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouse To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video -early access to shows -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse New merch, patches, and stickers! ⬇️ https://theteamhouse-shop.fourthwall.com Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse ___________________________________________________ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured __________________________________ Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample "Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio" 00:00 Start 09:00: SEAL team inserts; Roberts falls during initial contact. 15:00: Aircrew prioritizes finding Roberts over pre-assault fires. 53:32: SEAL team unexpectedly lands directly on target (the "X"). 58:05: Chapman engages Bunker One alone, then Bunker Two; sustains mortal wound. 1:00:09: Aircrew spots new strobe, indicating Chapman may still be alive. 1:15:24: Mission video tapes confiscated; digital copies later recovered. 1:34:00: Medal of Honor review initiated for Air Force valor, with Chapman as focus. 1:40:00: Air Force presents MoH evidence; Slab's story contradicts video. 2:06:00: Allegations of false narratives by SEAL leadership regarding the events. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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  Special Operations.

• 1:36Speaker 04

  Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park.

• 1:52Speaker 05

  Hey, welcome to Team House, episode 354. I'm Dave, this is Jack, joined tonight with by our guest, Rob Harrison, a former Air Force intel guy, with some very interesting stories about his own career, and also about the Chapman incident on Robert Shridge as a firsthand, has some firsthand accounts of that, and then the aftermath also. So, Rob, thank you very much for joining us tonight.

• 2:24Speaker 06

  Thanks, guys. I appreciate you all having me. My name is Rob Harrison. I spent about 26 years active duty in the Air Force and retired in 2021.

• 2:36Speaker 05

  So, Rob, the first thing we always like to ask is our, you know, guest's origin story. What led you, how did you grow up and what led you to the military?

• 2:47Speaker 06

  The, yeah, I would say, there's some poetry references in here somewhere, but I didn't take a traditional path. Like many young, young men out there, I might not have known exactly what I wanted to do. I graduated high school, I was always a good student, ended up on an academic scholarship to a local junior college where I was gonna go ahead and knock out my general education requirements before going off to a bigger university, and had always had the military in mind, specifically the Air Force, based on some, some family lineage folks that

• 3:29Speaker 06

  had also served. And I ended up deciding, I came up with this, this awesome plan. I was like, alright, well, I'm gonna party my first semester, and I know that I need to have a 3.0, so I'll squeak by the first semester, and then I'll pull a 4.0 on the second one after I get it all out of my system, and everything will be good. But there was this fine print in my, in my scholarship, and I needed to maintain a 3.0 for each portion of the academic year. And so, I got the, we regret to inform you, Mr. Harrison, but we're gonna have to pull your academic scholarship. So I had to tuck my tail between my legs, go back home to mom and dad, fess up to them what had happened, and my dad said, well, what are you gonna do about it?

• 4:14Speaker 06

  So I I decided not to put that burden on anybody else and so well, I think I'm gonna go talk to the Air Force recruiter and he said, I think that's a good idea.

• 4:25Speaker 05

  And so you went to the recruiter and how did you choose the job that you ended up with?

• 4:33Speaker 06

  So that's another, there's a story of irony with this one. I went in, I wanted to fly. I knew that if I was gonna join the Air Force, I wanted to be on airplanes. That's what the Air Force does, right? We fly, fight and win. So I went in to the recruiter, the recruiter said, yes, sorry, I don't have any of those jobs available for you. And I but but I took all these aptitude tests and I qualify for all this stuff. And he says, well, you want to be a linguist. And I said, I'm a redneck from Mississippi. I can barely speak English. What do you mean, you know, study foreign language? He said, well, you, you know, you qualify for this test, you've you've done it, you passed it, you could go do that. And

• 5:15Speaker 06

  I was like, I don't think so. So I went in open electronics and in week five, back then in Air Force basic training, they gave you your job assignments. And I grew up, you know, having family connections to the Air Force that that had served in earlier generations. I knew enough about that. And thanks to the Discovery Channel's Wings, you know, episodes way back when, I knew enough about the Air Force to know that to be a missile maintenance guy in the bottom of a silo was not a garden spot.

• 5:49Speaker 05

  Right.

• 5:49Speaker 06

  And so I raised my hand in the middle of week five of basic training and said, somebody said that I could be a linguist and I I passed for this test and so forth. And the guy stopped and he said, anybody else take that test? And somebody caught on to what was going on and they raised their hand. A side door opened up and an in-service recruiter came and rescued us for a few hours out of out of basic training. We went down a side hallway into a private room, signed new contracts, got a Coke and a smile and became, you know, contracted to become an airborne cryptologic linguist.

• 6:27Speaker 05

  Fascinating. And so, so then I assume, so was DLI the next step for you?

• 6:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, after basic, you would go through DLI, pick up your, your basic language acquisition. I studied Persian Farsi. I finished that and went into the intelligence and the aircrew training pipelines. So you go through your intel analysis schools. We do that in a place called Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas. Then, most of our survival stuff, most of it happens up in Washington State. And then, by June of 97, I'd spent just shy of two years in, in the, you know, initial accession pipeline. I made it to my first duty station at Offutt Air Force Base outside of Omaha, Nebraska, in a little town called Bellevue.

• 7:20Speaker 05

  Fascinating. And so, what, what were you responsible for there, when you were there at Offutt?

• 7:27Speaker 06

  At Offutt, I was a, you know, a new crypto linguist. We were assigned to the RC-135s. I got a chance to, to qualify on the, the, what we call the, the rivet joint, the combat scent and the Cobra Ball. I flew probably about 10 different deployments. Fortunately, they were all relatively short aircrew deployments by, by normal deployment standards. And it all has to do with, you know, aircrew hours and, you know, keeping, keeping folks physiologically from being, you know, like overflowing, if you will. So, back and forth to the sandbox. You know, this was Operation Southern Watch, Northern Watch. Most of my deployments would have been to Prince Sultan Air Base.

• 8:10Speaker 06

  I did one up to Insulik, Turkey. And that happened to coincide with events that were unfolding in 99 for Allied Force. But, on my very first deployment, I went out with the combat scent and the Cobra Ball, excuse me, the combat scent and the rivet joint, and we redeployed back through Ramstein, Germany. And there, I ran into an AC-130 Spectre crew, and a guy that, the personality sticks out, his name is James Patterson O'Brien. And, and if you could imagine, he's from Boston, and he's got family members that were cops and firemen, and probably one that was a priest. But, OB, as they called him.

• 8:56Speaker 06

  He was an intimidating fellow because he had this cool Spectre patch and he was wearing all of this subdued patches and my aircrew patches all look like a bright shining rainbow compared to his. And he's, he looks at me and gives me this stern, you know, evil look. He's like, what are you, a fucking dizzle? And I, I had to look at my supervisor at the time. I'm like, what, what is he talking about? I was like, I, I don't speak that. He's like, well, you had asked, you know, could you ever go down and, and do our, do our job in Florida? And he's like, that's what he's talking about. I was like, oh. So I was like, we can fly on gunships? And so at that point, it dawned on me on my very first deployment that I was not

• 9:38Speaker 06

  in the airframe that I was most suited for. Uh, you know, the, the rivet joint was, was cool. Uh, I, I like to say it can spy on the devil and talk to God. Uh, there's enough whizbing gadgetry on this aircraft, uh, to, to handle all of today's work. And you have a 12-way adjustable captain's chair, you know, like all, all kinds of, uh, comfort, uh, on this aircraft. Um, so anyway, I, I find out on that very first deployment that I can go work with Air Force Special Operations and from, you know, that planted a seed. And so I had to figure out like, okay, how do you chart that path? What do you have to do? What do you, how do you qualify to get considered to go and do that, that sort of work? So

• 10:23Speaker 06

  fast forward, that's what I did. Uh, and by 2000, I had done a number of deployments, uh, around the world and, uh, and I went down to do assess, uh, assessment for what we called commando look. And that was so that I could become an intel, uh, professional supporting, uh, Air Force Special Operations on their various airframes, whether it was AC-130 gunships, MC-130 Talons, uh, they had 53 payblows, um, and then ultimately, uh, they ended up Ospreys and so on. I got a chance to, uh, do and fly all of those.

• 10:56Speaker 05

  It, it sounds kind of challenging, just even rivet joint. It sounds kind of challenging because like when you talk about, you know, somebody who is doing signals intelligence at like a regional collection, uh, facility or something like that, you know, obviously there is that real time aspect, but they can also record it. They can go back. They can like assess it, but they're kind of depending on you guys for real time, like side by side interpretation or, or translation as, as you're flying, right?

• 11:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's a, there's a number of aspects, like ways that you would look at it from the, the intelligence process that goes along with all of it. But like first and foremost, you know, any intel professional that is assigned to one of those crews, your, your duty is to the platform itself. And then, oh, by the way, you know, whatever, you know, national priority requirements might be levied upon you for tasking and that sort of thing.

• 11:53Speaker 05

  Right.

• 11:53Speaker 06

  So you, you know, you basically triage based on prioritization, you know, so preservation of the platform itself comes first and foremost, and then, then going after whatever national requirements might be tasked to you.

• 12:05Speaker 05

  Right. Was it a, I don't want to say rivet joint in, in particular, but, but it was a NISR platform that was brushed and downed by the Chinese a few years ago, right?

• 12:20Speaker 06

  So it wasn't a, it wasn't a rivet joint. I think the one that you're talking about is the Navy P3 and the Hainan Island incident.

• 12:29Speaker 05

  In 99.

• 12:30Speaker 06

  And oddly enough, I was just having a conversation with somebody about that story today. You know, fast forward towards the end of my career, I got a chance to be a superintendent of the, the intel squadron that, that handled all of the, the flyers for the RC-135, specifically for the Pacific. And that Hainan Island incident was one of our alum, he was what we would have called a niner, the 390th Intelligence Squadron, Kirk Towns is name. He actually happened to be an airman that was augment in that Navy P3 crew when the Hainan Island incident happened. And, and I had several mentors that were part of the repatriation process and, and so forth. But yeah, that, that was an interesting story.

• 13:16Speaker 06

  Maybe one for another episode.

• 13:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:19Speaker 06

  There's a, there's a lot of opinions out there on, on whether or not landing at Hainan Island is the right call under the circumstances.

• 13:26Speaker 05

  Right. And then, and then I guess that, not to go too, but I guess that there wasn't a, they didn't do a sufficient burn of, of everything on the aircraft either.

• 13:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's a, there's a ton of story that I would, that I'd love to share with you one day over, over a beverage when we're, when we're not on this call.

• 13:46Speaker 05

  Sounds good, sounds good. So anyway.

• 13:49Speaker 06

  That's a, that's a deep story.

• 13:51Speaker 05

  But, but just to, just kind of point out that, you know, you talk about intelligence on an AC 130 versus like a 135 and those, those ones that, you know, the, most ISR platforms are fairly defenseless.

• 14:08Speaker 05

  Like they're out there kind of hanging it out, right?

• 14:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, you, you operate within, you know, international standards, you know, what is, what is known, you know, everybody's going to do some form of reconnaissance on one another, you know, intelligence gathering, what have you. But yeah, you go out there, you, you typically, you know, at altitude, you're, you're in international airspace or within an area that you're approved to fly. And then, you know, you're executing your mission, you know, depending on the AOR. I've done everything from off the, off the coast of the Kanchak Peninsula to, you know, in the, in the Pacific theater, whether it

• 14:51Speaker 06

  be, you know, North Korea, China, across the Middle East. Most of my deployments and the rest of my formative years were on the AVSOC side. So majority of my time was spent deploying to Iraq, Afghanistan, Horn of Africa, that sort of thing.

• 15:05Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, so you make it through this selection and I assume that there's, you know, additional training for you then at that point?

• 15:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, the, the worst part of, of selection is the, is the psych eval. I hated that part. It was too damn long and they asked the same question over and over. So I, I despised it. Turns out the guy that was doing my position.

• 15:35Speaker 06

  With OB on that, that Spectre crew, ended up being on my board when I was going through the selection process. And so Jack is his name. Jack ends up telling me, yeah, the psych doc came in and debriefed how irritated you got with the number of questions and that you thought that it was bullshit because there wasn't any like actual correct answer in the five choices that they gave you. I was like, yeah, that's about right. So he, he gives the readout on the situation and everybody's like, well, okay. And they, they did their vote around the room. Everybody slaps the table on approval for Rob. He's like, and then I just started

• 16:16Speaker 06

  laughing, you know, and I was like, well, what was so funny? I was like, because the psych doc said the same thing when I assessed. So I just laughed at all of them said, you just let another one of me in to get at you dumb asses.

• 16:28Speaker 05

  So you end up at the 25th Intelligence Squadron at Hurlberg. And what, what's it like for you when you first show up there?

• 16:38Speaker 06

  Back then, really small squadron. We were maybe, maybe 80 strong. Small unit. It hadn't, it hadn't exploded yet. And, and when I say exploded, a lot of stuff, you know, coincided with, with 9/11, War on Terror, the deployments that resulted from all of that. But we were 80 people strong. I was a, a young guy coming from the RC-135 arena, trying to figure out, okay, how do I do an intelligence job to support, you know, Air Force Special Operations platforms and so on. I had several guys. One of my mentors, a buddy named Ted Gamboge,

• 17:19Speaker 06

  another guy named Shane Kimmett, you know, we lost Shane in O2 in an aircraft accident in Roosevelt Roads. But but those guys kind of helped steer me, you know, down the successful path of how to navigate from the the traditional strategic ISR platform down to the the soft side and, you know, how to operate in the weeds and and do, you know, how do you fit in within that crew? And and it really, you know, boiled down to airmanship and and learning, learning your airframe, learning your craft and being able to mix and mingle with whether it be a special operations airlift mission, or a strike, or CAS platform, or rescue,

• 18:02Speaker 06

  you know, with the rotary lift, you name it. So they helped me navigate it. Jack was one of my primary instructors. And and I leaned on him heavily because in the late 90s, Jack and another guy named John Scott had been in some key missions over in Bosnia and Serbia. And Jack specifically, he was the he was the Dizzo on the Pavlo mission that flew in to rescue, at the time, it was Lieutenant Colonel Goldfein. He was the squadron commander, I think, of the Triple Nickel, the 555th out of Abiano, if I have all that historically out there. And when Goldfein group went on to become the Chief of Staff

• 18:46Speaker 06

  of the Air Force, that night, he described it as he, he said it was his least proud moment when he successfully intercepted an SA3 missile, meaning he got shot down. So anyway, Jack and the crew get the Pavlos get get tasked to go and recover those guys, recover him. And if you can imagine, like, where his air F-16 gets shot down, like, it's in a heavily defended, you know, air defense, surface-to-air missile type environment. So Jack, as an intel capability on the Pavlos, helps them navigate through low-level terrain,

• 19:28Speaker 06

  masking, threat avoidance, threat warning, that sort of thing. These guys literally fly the gauntlet in order to go and pick up Goldfein. And Goldfein, you know, lives and becomes to the capabilities of Air Force Special Operations, and specifically, the the ones we call the the steel horse, the Pavlos.

• 19:48Speaker 05

  That's wild. That's wild. So while you're at the 25th on your first tour, that's when 9/11 happens?

• 19:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, 9/11 happened, obviously, September 11th that year. I had just by about July time period, I had gotten qualified on the U model gunship known as Spooky, AC130U. And when, once 9/11 happened, immediately, everybody is in deployment mode. Like, you're just waiting, you know, that the orders are gonna come. It's just a matter of like, the tasking flowing and that sort of thing. So our unit immediately starts spinning people up on additional airframes, so that you can maximize, you know, support and, you know, expand capability and so on. They build out the deployment team.

• 20:42Speaker 06

  And I, there's a handful of people that know this story, but Rick Cox, if you're listening, I apologize for what I'm about to say, sorry, not sorry.

• 20:54Speaker 06

  They were building out the initial deployment team, and I wasn't on the list. And I was recently, you know, like, I was the guy who had just assessed into the unit, but I was the one who had most recent, you know, experience in our intel mission in that AOR. And so, our guys were looking at the seasoned folks, and Rick Cox's name was on the list as one of our folks. And he was out in the Pacific Theater, and as they're going around the room with the initial deployment plan,

• 21:29Speaker 06

  a fellow named, he becomes Colonel Sip, but Captain Sipowicz, big, tall, athletic dude, grizzled jaw, you know, he just sitting there, stone cold, you know, killer, planning, you know, the deployment operation for our mission set. And he does the around the room, and I'm like, yep, new guy here, I got a question. And I made my pitch, I was like, I'm the most recent, I'm newly qualified on this, but I've got recent experience in this AOR, I've been busting my ass, and my name's not on that list.

• 22:02Speaker 06

  I want, I want that changed. And he stops and he listens, goes around the rooms. A whole bunch of people said thumbs up. He's like, all right, Cox is out, Harrison, you're in. And, uh, and that story has come back, especially after I had made chief. He's like, I remember the day when you. And, uh, and it was, you know, just a moment where open mouths get fed. You, you, you speak up.

• 22:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:26Speaker 06

  And in this case, I had, uh, I had reason to, um, and man, i- if I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have made the initial deployment and things hadn't, wouldn't have unfolded the way they did in my career. And, um, well, anyway, sorry, Rick, not something.

• 22:41Speaker 05

  So let's talk about that initial deployment because Gecko, Rhino, Anaconda, Roberts, like you were there for it.

• 22:51Speaker 06

  Yeah. Um, so I had, I was extremely fortunate. So I was brand new and to say brand new, uh, amongst, uh, you know, an operator crowd, I didn't even know what a rock drill was. So I was new, you know, when it came to that level of, of operations. Um, I had some senior folks, a fellow named Ken Wellborn that took me under his wing. Uh, he showed me the ropes.

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  StopBox. So your first deployment with them includes Gecko and Rhino, Anaconda, along with Roberts Ridge. Can you tell us about that deployment and how it starts out for you?

• 26:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I had just mentioned a fellow by the name of Ken Wellborn, who was our, he was our senior guy and had taken me under his wing, showed me the ropes and kept me from walking into propellers and all kinds of stuff. Ken was a typical, you know, just, he was the epitome of a, of an awesome senior NCO. He, he had done a ton of cool stuff in his career and so at this point, like, this might have been towards the end of, of, of his actual active duty career. So he put me, you know, out in front, you know, as much as he possibly could. I had the, the fortune of being on the very first AC-130 that crossed

• 27:03Speaker 06

  into Afghanistan airspace after nine eleven. And then that led to that initial mission at Gecko and Rhino, which was the airfield seizure that the Rangers had taken over what became Rhino and Camp Rhino, I think is what the Marines called it, once they, once they took over from the Rangers. And to all the Marines, the Rangers were there first. Then Gecko was Mullah Omar's palace. And that night, that was a huge joint special operations mission, tons of rotary wing aircraft, fixed wing. I remember charging at the border and

• 27:44Speaker 06

  we had, we had three gunships and three Talons, so six C-130s line abreast, trying to hit tankers as we're pressing in. And the tanker crews were hilarious because they're like, no, this tail number is supposed to be behind this tanker. And we're like, dude, we don't give a shit, just give us gas. And so they gave us gas and we pressed on because they were about to screw up time zone target. So anyway, we push in, the airborne mission commander is Pete Blaber, he's on board the aircraft that I'm on. And yeah, it was wild.

• 28:22Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting because, you know, having been involved in all this stuff, you know, the AC-130 is a platform that's sort of been under fire, you know, like, we, we don't need it anymore since Vietnam. And it's, and from what I hear, it's under fire again. I mean, but with, with, as they continue to update it, do you see anything else that can replace its capabilities?

• 28:49Speaker 06

  Man, I think we'd have to sit here and go to the whiteboard with some sci-fi capabilities. You know, when you talk about, you know, persistent CAS and so on. The debate nowadays is, you know, penetrating platforms and, you know, having an environment that allows for a persistent CAS platform. Whether the debate is over the A-10 that is, you know, phased out and said to be replaced by the F-35, like, you know, nothing will ever, you know, purposely, specifically be able to replace what the A-10 Warthog could do, just like nothing would ever be able to specifically replace what an AC-130 can do. I, could there be something?

• 29:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, but I'm, I'm your typical, you know, I'm a, I'm a soft guy at heart, you know, so what do we do? We think outside the box. I, I could come up with a number of Bar Napkin ideas on how we could do that. But, I don't know, I, I think there are certain platforms that will always be near and dear and sentimental. So, I would, I'd vote to keep it around as long as you can because, I mean, look at, look at what's going on in Iran and Israel right now. If, if Israel is able to, you know, establish, you know, air superiority, well, now you have the ability to penetrate with those platforms that weren't initially designed to penetrate.

• 30:15Speaker 05

  Right.

• 30:15Speaker 06

  You know, so, I, I'd say there's still a need, still the capability that would exist and still in the future, you know, if push came to shove, you would, you would allow, you'd create the environment that would allow their, their operations to continue.

• 30:31Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, um, so let's go on to Robert Sprig, if you don't mind. Can, can you tell us sort of the, the mission brief for you guys? What your responsibility was and how it all played out?

• 30:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, so that initial deployment was, you know, October. Roberts Ridge is associated with Operation Anaconda. So we've got to fast forward to February, March time period of 2002. So just chronologically, you've gone through, you know, Pabul has fallen, Kandahar has fallen, the north has fallen. The Al Qaeda fighters and Taliban had moved to Tora Bora. And we've gone through the winter time where they've, they've kind of retreated into their, their high ground, if you will, basically pages out of the playbook that they had used against the Russians in the eighties.

• 31:30Speaker 06

  Ironically, that was required reading for us as we were going in. I remember books, you know, showing up by the case for the bear went over the mountain and the other side of the mountain. So it was eighties, you know, war story perspectives, one from, you know, Russian commanders and others from commanders of the Mujahideen. So we obviously cared what the other side of the mountain looked like. And what was unfolding in Operation Anaconda was exactly what we anticipated based on how they had behaved against the Russians in the eighties. So the mission brief is that this is the spring offensive. It's briefed as hammer and anvil.

• 32:11Speaker 06

  You're going to have special operations, Overwatch calling in fire support. You're going to have SOF working with indigenous, pushing up against the anvil that is a conventional force. And it's all going to happen right there in the Shai Kope Valley. For anybody that follows the, you know, Afghan, you know, critical battles and stuff, the, the nearest town that would be significant is that of Marzac. You know, there, there's, there's areas like the, the safe house is up in Gerdas. You know, the, some of the forces had come out of Bagram down to this area. But anyway, Operation Anaconda is going to be the kickoff of all of that.

• 32:56Speaker 06

  Ironically, the very first night of Anaconda gets delayed with weather and so forth. And then, once we start to move, you know, American forces into position, it becomes immediately obvious that the enemy is already there and they already have a foothold in the high ground. We, we essentially don't have enough dedicated close air support on station during the very first night of Operation Anaconda, which causes a shuffle of the, the scheduling plan for the next night. And then we just basically saturate it. So we've got three gunships coming out of the north, out of Uzbekistan. We've got three gunships coming

• 33:36Speaker 06

  out of Messera. Six birds on station staggered over the period of darkness to make sure that there's plenty of CAS to go around. And not to mention, you know, the platforms that were well beyond, you know, just the AC130s. You had other, other fixed wing capabilities in the area as well. For, for our specific mission, when Robert's Ridge is unfolding, we are the emergency on-call CAS platform. We don't have a dedicated customer that night. Our goal is to, to basically take off, fly right through Afghanistan airspace, immediately hit a tanker in Pakistan, top off our tanks, and then just stand by for any emergency that

• 34:18Speaker 06

  may pop up. While that happens, one of our sister ships, Nail, a Nail Flight, I think it was Nail 20, they were originally tasked for the MAKO infill via the Razor elements. So Razor was the MH47. Some of your listeners, the audience may be familiar with Alan Mack. He's the, the Chief Warrant Officer that was piloting Razor 03. He's the guy who's taking in the SEAL team that is MAKO 30. And their combat controller is MAKO 30 Charlie, John Chapman. We are on tanker while Nail is supposed to be covering that infill. Well,

• 35:00Speaker 06

  there's a series of, of delays, some of it's maintenance related. And then meanwhile,

• 35:08Speaker 06

  Causd airfield comes under attack. So since the infill that Nail is supposed to cover is delayed, Airborne Command and Control decides to re-roll the Nail element to cover the troops in contact situation that erupts at Causd. And when this is going on, we're literally flying right by that airspace. And we even come up on the radio going, hey, they've got a dedicated mission. Are you sure you don't want us to cover that troops in contact since we're the emergency on call platform? They're like, nope, nope, nails got it. The other guys are delayed. You guys proceed to tanker and don't mess up the tanker flow. So we proceed to the AR track for air refueling.

• 35:48Speaker 06

  We, uh, we, we're topping off our tanks when all of a sudden you hear mayday, mayday, mayday, any grim, any nail. This is Mako three zero Charlie. And when you hear that, you know, everybody's, you know, quiet as, you know, you can hear a pin drop on the aircraft, believe it or not. Um, we're, we're in the middle of like the 130 gets heavy behind a tanker and we have to execute what they call a toboggan. So you're descending with the tanker in order to maintain airspeed and stay connected all while this mayday call is going on. So pilot's talking to the engineer, I'm getting a location of a downed aircraft over some special equipment that I have on board.

• 36:30Speaker 06

  Um, they, they execute an emergency breakaway from the tanker and I passed the coordinates of the, of the downed aircraft and the, the source of where, you know, John Chapman's on the radio. And we just make a beeline to their, uh, to their location. Sensors flew to those, uh, specific coordinates and we just fly straight there and establish an orbit over what is now, uh, downed Razor zero three, uh, in the valley just north of their original, uh, infill position that was at Takar Gar at the mountaintop.

• 37:01Speaker 05

  So, uh, so you guys are looking at the downed aircraft. Um, meanwhile, things are going on on the, the ridge line. Uh, are you paying attention to both or do you have a priority there?

• 37:17Speaker 06

  So when we, when we fly in, uh, we're, we're trained to, uh, trained, uh, the sensors are, are specifically looking at, uh, at the coordinates and what turns out to be like the actual helicopter and you can see friendlies around the crash site. As we're flying in and establishing that orbit, Chappie's on the, on the radio as three zero Charlie telling us that they lost a teammate on top of, uh, the mountain and says, hey, we've got a friendly up there. Can you, uh, shift eyes and shift your orbit to that location? And so we hadn't even established a full orbit, but we just slide, immediately slew the sensor to the mountaintop.

• 37:58Speaker 06

  That's where we see, uh, an active IR strobe and an individual, uh, laid out on the mountaintop. Um, we've got a sister ship, another grim element that, uh, that picks up an orbit around the helicopter. And then we just slid our orbit over to the mountain. So there's, there's two specter gunships, uh, in neighboring orbits, uh, covering the, uh, the air, the helicopter's crash site and the original infill location. So we're eyes on the infill location. We are grim three two.

• 38:27Speaker 05

  Okay. And is at this point, at this point that, well, uh, are you, so are you guys there when, uh, Chappie, when Slab's team comes in?

• 38:39Speaker 06

  So when they initially tried to infill, no, we were not. So we didn't see any of that, that what I've, what I have seen of, of that mission is from old historic footage and I can't find that stuff anymore. Um, like I, I know it still exists, uh, but there's some interesting story in all of that because that's where, uh, Fifi, uh, Petty Officer Neil Roberts, uh, was the guy who, who fell out of the back of the helicopter.

• 39:05Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 39:05Speaker 06

  There's a variety of accounts of, uh, of what happened, um, in that immediate aftermath. I was not specifically there, but I've spoken to one of my mentors, uh, was the intel guy that was, um, that was supporting, uh, those airframes out of, uh, Uzbekistan. And he literally debriefed those crews. And so, uh, the, the story is that, that Fifi fell out of that helicopter. He got jostled loose as they had positioned, getting ready for, uh, the infill. So the team is up and they're, they're positioning towards the, the ramp. And then, once they're coming in, um, the enemy activity is seen, uh, by the, the crew of the, the helicopter.

• 39:47Speaker 06

  And they start taking, uh, enemy fire, they wave off of the infill. And that's when Roberts gets knocked loose. And, uh, the, the, uh, the forty seven gunner, um, that was there, it would have been a crew chief in the back. Uh, he's the tail gunner, uh, if you will, that's what we would have called him in the air force. But he said that, uh, that when Fifi fell, it was happening in slow motion and all I could see was him smiling back up at him. And so there's, there's different accounts on, on how exactly that fall, uh, happens. And, and I'll save, uh, part of that story for Frank Daly, since he was the one who debriefed those guys. But, uh, but anyway, um, the gunner, uh, the crew chief had fallen.

• 40:31Speaker 06

  Fifi's involved in helping recover that guy and then Fifi falls, uh, after all of that. And, um, the story is that, that Fifi survived that fall and Fifi seen engaging the enemy. Um, but, uh, that footage was out there and then that footage got scrapped. Um, like it, it got, I, I don't know, I don't know what the circumstances are. Uh, but I remember, I remember seeing Fifi, uh, fight against the enemy out there. And this is all before, like, before our gunship. Uh, when I say I saw it, it was after the fact. Uh, I had seen video of this, um, but I haven't seen it since. Uh, and so our perspective, when all this unfolds, that helicopter is now limped off north of the valley.

• 41:16Speaker 06

  Uh, interesting stories from Alan Mack on, on how all that happens. Uh, amazing airmanship, uh, involved, uh, all the way around on that crew. Um, well, by the time we see what's going on, we've put eyes on, based on Chappie's direction. Petty Officer Roberts is laid out with an active IR strobe and we see him just laid out stationary on top of the mountain. Upon further inspection, our sensors can see what turns out to be foot pads. And it it looks it looks like if you were to do um and explay um you know, like a spliced view of an anthill. It's like you could see the little foot foot pads and the difference is because of the heat and uh of the uh

• 42:02Speaker 06

  of the melted snow where uh where they've been walking back and forth versus the cold of the uh the snow top, you know, uh mountain. And so you've got the hotspot of uh of Robert's body, you've got dark uh dark, what I call rat lines uh for the foot pads. And then all of a sudden, the enemy just come out of the woodwork and they just surround him. So at that point, the strobe is extinguished. Um, we don't know the fate of Roberts. Um, we have to assume that we have that we're dealing with a potential survivor. Um, next thing you know, uh Roberts is positioned up against uh the area that they call the boulder. And so that's the big rock outcrop. So if you're if you're looking up slope uh where where the

• 42:46Speaker 06

  the teams would have infilled to the top of that mountain and then fighting uphill towards bunk, what was known as bunker one and bunker two. The the rock outcrop, the boulder is that that big, you know, rock structure that's up there kind of center mass.

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• 46:47Speaker 06

  Well, Roberts gets propped up right there. We assume that the enemy's wounded him and propped him up and left him his bait, knowing that the Americans are going to come back for him and basically lay in an ambush for anybody that comes back.

• 47:00Speaker 05

  Right. And is he on the, from where we see Chappie's infill, is he on the near side or the far side or the top side or the bottom side of the boulder? Do you remember?

• 47:12Speaker 06

  Roberts is on the near side. So where the, where the, where you look at videos that show the Mako 3.0 element and Chapman all, you know, infilling and then going up the mountain, that you can actually see the hotspot that is Petty Officer Roberts. And he's kind of, if you're looking at the boulder and bunker one, he's closer to bunker one than he is the far side of the boulder. But he's propped up against the boulder.

• 47:44Speaker 05

  Yeah. I don't know if that was included in the, the video and the analysis that, what was his, the gentleman who wrote the book, I can't remember. But on the YouTube.

• 47:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's Dan Schilling.

• 47:59Speaker 05

  Right, Dan Schilling, yes.

• 48:01Speaker 06

  Right over my shoulder here, Lori Chapman Longfritz and Dan Schilling wrote Alone at Dawn. There's a great video out there that Dan narrates and that's based on the culmination of all of the Air Force's research that went into the John Chapman Medal of Honor package.

• 48:20Speaker 06

  You can, you can look, you can see what's in that book and you can look at that video and hear what Dan narrates and you can take that as gospel.

• 48:28Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, okay. So, um, so then how long before, uh, the Mako three team goes in for the recovery?

• 48:38Speaker 06

  Yeah. Um, without having the times right in front of me, I can't give you, uh, an exact one. Um,

• 48:45Speaker 05

  Can you roughly?

• 48:46Speaker 06

  I would say it's probably about an hour before they get the, um, they, they re-insert to try and recover Roberts. And the difference is that, um, so Razor Zero Three's down in the valley. Zero Four had infilled a separate Mako element, but they're the, the second of the MH forty sevens. Cause normally, you know, any rotary lift is usually going to fly in a two ship so that they have self-recovery capability. But they had two distinct teams and two separate infill locations that they were working. But Zero Four's not going to come home until they've, you know, gotten words on Zero Three. So he's orbiting in what we would describe as a black hole, uh, you know, away from populated areas.

• 49:28Speaker 06

  But he's terrain masked, uh, from a line of sight on the, on the radios with his, uh, his teammate Razor Zero Three who's now crashed. Um, so Zero Four's talking to us, we're talking to Zero Three and we're giving them an update. And Chappy as, as Three Zero Charlie is, um, is coordinating, you know, the pickup. Uh, and there's an interesting storyline there because you can look at some of the videos and Slab says that he, he ended up, uh, having a mission change. And now his mission became to rescue that air crew. And as a teammate, uh, as a, as a soft team on a helicopter that crashes,

• 50:08Speaker 06

  unless you literally gather those guys and you X-fill on the ground away from that, you're not rescuing anybody, you're being rescued.

• 50:17Speaker 05

  Right.

• 50:17Speaker 06

  Unless you're the combat controller who is trained to coordinate rescue assets coming in and doing that sort of thing. So Chappy as Three Zero Charlie is the one who actually coordinates via Grim Three Two. Two Razor Zero Four to come in and pick them up and then they reconstitute at the safe house, figure out their plan of attack and then they come back to, uh, to the top of the mountain to recover Roberts. So there's, there's videos out there, uh, it's part of the growing, you know, false narrative that the Navy pushed with Britt Slavinsky and, uh, one of those elements of what I would consider stolen valor. Uh, you know, John's the one who affected the rescue of that crew, but the people that did the rescuing were Razor Zero Four.

• 51:01Speaker 05

  Right.

• 51:01Speaker 06

  So, anyway.

• 51:03Speaker 05

  So.

• 51:04Speaker 06

  Started splitting hairs, but I think it, it detracts from the credibility of, uh, of slab and, uh, the rest of the drama that goes on with all of this.

• 51:11Speaker 05

  Yeah. So are you guys on station then when, when that insertion happens?

• 51:16Speaker 06

  Yes. So we are, uh, we're on station and, um, what, what sucks during all of this is anybody, under these circumstances, you would want, uh, a close air support platform to potentially soften targets.

• 51:32Speaker 05

  Right.

• 51:33Speaker 06

  To do some pre-assault fires. Um, but we are a gunship thinking of a survivor on the ground and everything is danger close proximity.

• 51:42Speaker 05

  Right.

• 51:42Speaker 06

  And oh, by the way, we were a crew that was involved in a fratricide the very night before. And so you can, you know, armchair quarterback it. I would tell you that the fratricide event that happened the night before, while it was in the mind of the crew, this crew was seasoned and professional enough to, to put that piece aside and deal with the situation at hand. And the fratricide event from the night before did not, you know, actually impact like the reason why we didn't shoot. We didn't shoot pre-assault fires because we didn't know for sure the status of Roberts and he was literally danger close. And by definition, there was nobody there that could give us the authority to

• 52:22Speaker 06

  fire our munitions right there, danger close proximity when, when he wasn't in comms giving us the authorization because he was the one in, in harm's way.

• 52:32Speaker 05

  But, but for instance, you said that you guys could identify through thermal, um, the rat lines and stuff. So you could see the termination points. So you could essentially in a way identify the bunkers, correct?

• 52:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, like we knew at times you could see the personnel and then other times they would mask themselves, right? Camouflage, concealment. But you knew where positions were. You could see where some trenches, you could see where some paths were. You could see areas that would definitely be of interest for us to put down fires. But every one of those would have been in the danger close proximity of where Roberts was because of how close that area is.

• 53:15Speaker 05

  Well, and I don't want to mend the morning quarterback this because obviously I wasn't there and I'm like, and the good idea of ferry always happens afterwards. But do you guys have like smoke capability on your bird?

• 53:27Speaker 06

  So there would have been, back in the day, we would have flown what they called Willie Pete rounds. You're probably familiar with the white phosphorus. We didn't have them on board during these. But yeah, their capabilities, yes. And then one of the other things, you know, discussion that had happened between whether it was command and control, us onboard, that sort of thing, there were ideas of laying down fire on the far side of the ridge and walking them up towards the fighter positions and then keeping our fires on the other side of the boulder that then would have shielded Petty Officer Roberts. So there were a number of tactical, you know, considerations that were given, but ultimately,

• 54:13Speaker 06

  like they wanted pre-assault fires. We didn't give them as a result of, you know, not knowing the fate of Roberts and again, danger close.

• 54:21Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 54:21Speaker 06

  And then we were identifying the spot that we wanted them to infill to. And the idea was that they would come in, get on the ground, establish two-way comms with us, and then they would talk us onto targets and then we would establish their position on the mountain. Well, I think the tactical debate, and this is, you know, to put words in the mouth of the team leader.

• 54:50Speaker 06

  And maybe it's not even that. I've seen interviews and heard his, uh, his take on it, but they didn't want to fight uphill. Uh, there was a sense of urgency. They had a teammate that was down. They wanted to get right back to the X. And so the normal consideration of either doing an offset or landing where we had marked for them, didn't make tactical sense to them. And so they chose to blow right through our spot. And then infield literally right back on the X caught us by surprise because we were literally lazing where we wanted them to go.

• 55:20Speaker 05

  Right.

• 55:20Speaker 06

  And then they blew right through it. And I remember, you know, us talking about it because, you know, somebody's like, hey, keep eyes on, uh, on this. Keep marking the LZ. And we're like, they're already back on the, on the X. Like they've already hit the ground.

• 55:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 55:34Speaker 06

  And some of the crew that didn't have eyes on the sensors, that was them catching up on, uh, the reality of what was going on. So it happened pretty quick.

• 55:43Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, um, so they land on the X. You guys see, uh, you guys see somebody fall. Um, and you, you think that it's due to enemy fire. Later we found out he just like, it was snow, like he fell.

• 55:58Speaker 06

  Yeah. So after, after actions, uh, you know, the order in which they, they, the team, Mako, uh, three zero all exits the aircraft. Uh, Slab was first. He doubles over, uh, uh, according to his, uh, his account in the snow, um, not, not realizing how deep that snow was. From an aircrew perspective, we literally thought they had been hit by enemy fire. And, and that he was down, down. Um, that's what put Chapman on point because Chapman leapfrogged over, uh, Slab at this point. And he's, he's recovering from snow in the face and goggles and, and everything else. And so Chapman's on point going up the slope as the rest of the team gets, gets together to include Slab.

• 56:42Speaker 06

  And they, they form a little circle. Uh, some folks would call it a wagon wheel and, uh, and Chappie's slightly up slope from them. So he's, he's between their formation and bunker one, closest to the most formidable threat, which is bunker one at this moment.

• 56:56Speaker 05

  Right.

• 56:57Speaker 06

  And then they start taking fire from three different directions and all hell breaks loose.

• 57:00Speaker 05

  Right. So Chappie, it looks to me like watching the video, Chappie moves to contact. And he is, he's probably expecting. The people on his six to move to contact with him. And they decided, you know, I'm not saying they're wrong. I don't know their tactics, but they're not moving to contact. They are deciding what they're going to do next.

• 57:27Speaker 06

  Yes. So the I'm going to piece this together, just culmination of stuff. And this is access to people who had done the analysis, other other SEALs that had analyzed it. Others, Air Force Special Tactics folks that had looked at it. What you had, you had two different thoughts, trains of thought, the move to contact, and then those that didn't. And there was a difference in training of tactics that that was going on within that community, according to Eric Deming. He he had explained it to me as this the close quarters defense guys, that that school of thought moved to contact.

• 58:10Speaker 06

  And then whatever this other variation of training tactics was, they didn't do it the same way. And so John goes towards the gun.

• 58:20Speaker 05

  Right.

• 58:20Speaker 06

  And is attack the attacker. You've got to go through the ambush, as it was explained to me.

• 58:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:26Speaker 06

  He's doing that, and a wedge never forms behind him. Instead, they're breaking off into two man fire teams. So the only person that actually follows behind Chappie is Slab himself. Because two guys are covering downslope. Two guys are going towards what if we just consider their infill point and look up the mountain, I'll just say left and right. Two guys go over to the left of the boulder. And then that would put Chapman on point, Slab a good distance behind him going towards bunker one.

• 58:59Speaker 05

  Right.

• 58:59Speaker 06

  And and Chappie is the one who is, you know, laying hate to to bunker one, eliminates bunker one. Eventually Slab catches up to him, but it's after Chappie's eliminated that threat. He's gone through a magazine or two. He he literally goes inside that bunker and, you know, eliminates him at point. Point blank range and then after all of that, after he's going in and come out on the other side. That's when slab finally closes that distance and he fires some confirmatory shots into the bunker. And then slab and Chappie are both then engage in what we call bunker two that's higher above that.

• 59:40Speaker 06

  And it's actually a bigger threat. It was just, it was masked by the tree and, and the rock there. So Chappie, Chappie's on the far right and then slab is approaching bunker two. Between the boulder and the tree that is right there at bunker one. So he's got some cover and concealment, but they're both in the fray and they're both trying to direct fires at bunker two. And that's when Chappie sustains a mortal wound, gets taken out of the fight incapacitated. And ultimately slab believes he's killed. And, and then he ends up breaking contact from the bunker two engagement, coming up with a different plan.

• 1:00:22Speaker 06

  You can see that unfold on the video. There's a gunner that climbs up on top of the rock. Enemy frags the top of the grenade, the top of that rock with a grenade. The gunner falls down and then shortly thereafter slabs. Assessing the situation and the team makes a collective decision to tactically retreat. They, they throw some smoke grenades to cover their movement and they break contact. And all of this is unfolding before our eyes and we do not have two-way radio contact with the team at all.

• 1:00:57Speaker 05

  Right. And, and so, yeah, and that difference in tactics is definitely to me, to me and, and Jack, you've seen the video like. To me, Chapman was moving like a ranger, like it was, you know, it was, it was infantry tactics, right? Movement to contact and the SEALs were not necessarily following that same protocol. They had their own sort of, their own sort of protocol.

• 1:01:21Speaker 06

  Yeah. Chappie wasn't foreign to this team, you know, so he had worked with them and, and he had. Not only been in the field, he had done pre-deployment stuff with the, with these same, same teams. He was, he was no, no newbie. When it came to working with, with this particular SEAL team.

• 1:01:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. So then, is there any point, like during that operation where you guys, real time, realize that Chapman is still alive?

• 1:01:53Speaker 06

  There's a moment of fog and friction, and it happens right as they break contact. So the main element of Mako breaks contact. We assume that all of Mako 3-0 is together, except for Petty Officer Roberts. The radio call comes across and it is, it's now slab on the radio. And it is, hey Grim, this is Mako 3-0. We are no longer on top of the mountain, got troops down, possible KIA, need fire on tops now. And it's a, it's an unconventional nine line is, is what he's telling us, right?

• 1:02:34Speaker 06

  We know where they are. We've, we've got a strobe on their main element. As you can imagine, you get on top of an objective, if everybody has their strobe emitting, then it presents confusion for sensors that are out there. So there'll be like one main guy that keeps a strobe on for, for the team. And then everybody else has their other marking, you know, capabilities and, and we can see who's who. I will say that we momentarily lost eyes on what would have been Chappy. When he sustains that, that initial mortal wound and is incapacitated. Cause when they break contact, Chappy's kind of under the cover of the branches of that tree next to bunker one.

• 1:03:18Speaker 06

  And we think that that whole team is together. And when he says possible KIA, we assume that he's talking about Petty Officer Roberts.

• 1:03:26Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:03:26Speaker 06

  Because they were literally right next to Roberts up against that boulder.

• 1:03:30Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:03:30Speaker 06

  So like, we're literally seeing them right next to each other.

• 1:03:33Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:03:33Speaker 06

  So. You know, the only thing that seems to make sense is that, but again, you assume, right? So we didn't, you know, TTPs have since evolved and we're, we're way more deliberate about, you know, number of personnel that go on an objective and calling out all of those, uh, those key elements of information so that you keep tabs on all the right stuff. Um, but at that moment, no, we didn't know. And he calls for fire and we immediately start trying to put down rounds. Well, on side, uh, onboard the gunship, um, we're trying to shoot with the 40 millimeter Bofors and on the Spectre, we call that gun five. Um, there's a gun malfunction with gun five.

• 1:04:16Speaker 06

  The gunners have to take that down, so we switch over, uh, primary weapon to gun six, the 105 howitzer. The, uh, we had proximity rounds, uh, loaded in the 105. So the gunners have to do a round change because that proximity round, the way that thing's gonna work, it's gonna spin up and when it, the way the fuse works on that thing, after it gets so many feet above the ground, it's gonna airburst and it's gonna shrapnel. Right. So since you've got a potential friendly and unknown, you know, uh, unknown status, we don't wanna shoot the, the prox rounds, uh, unless we're literally, we know that we're shooting at soft enemy targets. Right. So they switch over to a point detonating round.

• 1:04:59Speaker 06

  That takes the better part of half an orbit, uh, you know, so we're talking from the call for fire to the initial rounds impacting, probably about a minute and a half or so have transpired. So we start going hot with the 105, um, the infrared sensor is primary on that gun. The TV sensor, he can see all light level TV. So think of this like an NVG capability. He, he can see, you know, the, uh, ambient light that's magnified 60 some odd thousand times that, uh, of what it actually is. So he's looking for light sources and, uh, a gunship's tactics will end up being where,

• 1:05:39Speaker 06

  you know, if one sensor's firing, another sensor will always be primary on the friendlies. So that, that sensor is the TV, Chris. Chris is primary on the friendlies, so he's scanning back and forth where the IR is engaging and where the friendlies have egressed to. And that way, we can keep tabs on what's going on. And then he can also look for light emissions around where we're actually engaging. Well, it's in that moment of those initial rounds that we put down that are all 105 on those known fighting positions up around the higher, uh, higher terrain elevation. That Chris says, hey, uh, Foco, that's the fire control officer that's in charge of the, the sensors that are actually doing the shooting.

• 1:06:21Speaker 06

  Uh, he's like, hey, Foco, I've got another strobe up here. He's like, but this one doesn't look like the others. I've got like the main element of friendlies are here and I got this other strobe here. And so as a crew, they start to de-conflict, like what they're actually seeing. What we're seeing doesn't match what we just heard from, uh, from slab is Mako three zero. And then before you ever get a chance to really communicate that particular fog and friction, the enemy starts lobbing mortars in on top of the LZ and they're walking them close to, uh, to where the Mako element is. So you're on to the next closest alligator to the boat. So we saw that strobe come active and, and I've seen it.

• 1:07:02Speaker 06

  I've, I saw it in real time. I saw it better, you know, in the aftermath of all the analysis. Well, you see Chappie literally crawl back into bunker one at that point.

• 1:07:12Jack Murphy?

  Holy shit.

• 1:07:13Speaker 06

  And so what makes sense to me is that his strobe looks different either A, because he was using a different, uh, different strobe, like maybe a backup strobe. We had little, uh, little IR fireflies, we called them, that stuck on the end of nine volt batteries. If it wasn't that, if he, if he was using the same exact strobe, then perhaps it was the, um, the dispersment of light based on the, uh, the tree canopy or the, uh, any covering that would have been over the bunker, uh, area. So anyway, there was a distinct, you know, light emission difference when you're looking at those from the, uh, from the footage. And then we're literally going after, you know, the mortar situation and trying to

• 1:07:57Speaker 06

  cover the team's movement and they're moving further, further down the mountain at this point. And we'd never come back to the idea of there being one of their original team that went back after Roberts being left up there. We never knew that they left a teammate behind.

• 1:08:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:08:13Speaker 06

  But we did see that strobe come active and that was the, the aha moment. Um, but you're now covering the, the movement of the team. You're on to something else. You don't have radio comms with anybody else up there. And the sun's coming up and command and control is ordering us off station.

• 1:08:30Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:08:31Speaker 06

  You name it. It's like Murphy had a party up there that night.

• 1:08:35Speaker 05

  So, yeah, and, and one of the things about the AC platform that maybe the viewers don't know is because it is a slow-moving, uh, low-flying, uh, aircraft, the air force is not like them up, uh, when the sun is up.

• 1:08:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was expressly against our, uh, our doctrine to operate during, during daytime operations and it, it stems back to the first Gulf War. Um, there's an aircraft that everybody in the gunship community knows, uh, Spirit Zero Three. Um, they were, they were done with their mission. There were Marines that needed support. Um, there wasn't believed to be certain surface-to-air missile threats, uh, in the AO, uh, in that area of operations at the time. And the gunship stayed in daylight to help out some, uh, Marines that needed close air support. Lo and behold, uh, a shoulder-launched, uh, surface-to-air man, you know, missile man pad, man portable air defense system, uh, gets launched up at them.

• 1:09:37Speaker 06

  And it, uh, it takes out Spirit Zero Three and kills the crew. So that is, you know, it's one of those things like when you go through gunship training, um, when you go through any of our formal training, it's, uh, they have a Spirit Zero Three award, uh, in the formal schoolhouse, you know, for that top student and that sort of thing. So like you know this story if you fly gunships. So everybody knows, don't fly during day, daylight at this point in time. So anyway, they're, they're literally ordering us off station. Sun's coming up. It is, you know, past that moment of what we call beginning morning nautical twilight. So it's when you can first start to distinct, you know, daylight from, from darkness type of deal.

• 1:10:17Speaker 06

  We had, we had shut off a couple of command and control radios because we didn't like what we were hearing from them. And they were kind of mud, muddying up the, the airwaves from our perspective. So, you know, we didn't like being told to go home. So from a, from a cruise standpoint, we had all checked in nose to tail on call at the direction of the pilot. Like, hey, we know what's going on here. Stay or go. Everybody check in and, and it was unanimous from, from nose to tail that we wanted to stay and, and not leave those guys behind.

• 1:10:52Speaker 06

  But

• 1:10:54Speaker 06

  higher headquarters prevailed, ended up getting a hold of us, even though we had shut off the, that particular comm net. They found us on another one and we couldn't hide from them anymore and we had to break contact. So as we were doing that, we, we facilitated a handoff with a two ship of F-15E Strike Eagles. It was Twister 51 and 52. Gave them the low down, gave them that last known position of, of Roberts in that bunker where we had seen the strobe. Gave them the last known position of the main NACO element, told them what was going on, told, you know, hey, it's hot. Don't go back up there. And then in that fog and friction, none of that information makes it to the QRF,

• 1:11:34Speaker 06

  the Quick Reaction Force helicopters that are Razor 01 and 02 with the Ranger elements that are coming in to, to help bail those guys out. They do a 17 plus hour stand. At this point, we've recovered up in, in Uzbekistan. So I'm not there for the rest of that battle, but it was a significant one and, and the Rangers saved the day.

• 1:11:58Speaker 05

  So in Schilling's video, because we see like the time after Chapman recovers and then re-engages. What, what, and that's one video, I believe, right? It's not a compilation video. Um.

• 1:12:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, so it it's one video that he has, uh, he has narrated. There are splicing of different sensors.

• 1:12:23Speaker 05

  I see.

• 1:12:23Speaker 06

  At times during during that, but they're all time synced. So, um, it it is as accurate of as of a depiction as you could get from the totality of footage that existed.

• 1:12:35Speaker 05

  So do you do you recall what the other, because because you left as, uh, Chapman crawled back into bunker one. Um, and then and then there was still like Chapman, like there's hours after that, correct? Hours where he continues to fight. Um, do you know what other platforms were involved in that?

• 1:12:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, so there's a, uh, there's a Navy platform that nobody wants to talk about. Um, there's a Predator, uh, that is up there. Um, that's the majority of the other footage. Um, but, uh, the, when I I mentioned the, um, the Roberts, uh, footage before, um, the Navy possesses the the footage that showed what Roberts did up there that night. And and they're they're part of why it, why you don't see it anymore.

• 1:13:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, um, so at any point in time, uh, so so with these Predator feeds and these other platforms, are are there people real time watching Chapman continue to fight?

• 1:13:41Speaker 06

  Yes. Yeah, so there the the theories, um, like if you go back to the, uh, the book that was written by Malcolm McPherson called Roberts Ridge, um, he he had, you know, access to the people and the the studies and, uh, the information that was out there at the time. I think that book published in oh five. Um, the theories were, uh, there were, there were three of them. Um, people thought that that that person still fighting up there was Roberts. Then there was the Air Force's, uh, you know, side of it, that it was Chapman. And then the competing theory was that it was red on red, uh, as an enemy fighting enemy in broad daylight in close quarters, shooting each other. The face.

• 1:14:24Speaker 05

  Right. I wonder who is.

• 1:14:25Speaker 06

  That one, that one does not hold water.

• 1:14:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:14:28Speaker 06

  And that, that continues to be part of the, um, the counter narrative that the Navy pushed the whole time. So that they didn't have to face the music that Chapman survived. He was unfortunately left. Now, at the time, in real time, like, they didn't know. They, they, I, I believe that they, they assumed that he was taken out.

• 1:14:49Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:14:50Speaker 06

  Okay. I, I think that was just straight up fog and friction of war and an honest mistake. And under the tactical circumstances, whether the SEALs ever want to admit that they left somebody behind. It just is what it is, and that's what happened in this case.

• 1:15:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:15:06Speaker 06

  So, like, I don't fault anybody for that at all. You know. Look back in the, you know, the cases that, that I tell you where our mistakes were.

• 1:15:15Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:15:16Speaker 06

  Pre-assault fires, the fracture side the night before. You know, clarifying, hey, we saw a strobe in the midst of all of that. Like, there's so many things that could be hot washed and debriefed. And everybody could learn and be better and be stronger the next day for it. If people would have the integrity to just own your mistake and accept it. And make yourself and your organization, your unit bigger, better, faster, stronger tomorrow.

• 1:15:41Speaker 05

  Well, you know, and, and there's, obviously there, there's a reason, or at least a perceived reason why they don't, whether it's internal. You know, uh, you know, higher going, oh, you know, you messed up, or it's the public, the public not understanding fog war. You know, we can look at stuff like Tillman, like, we can look at all these things. And people have been in combat, will say, you know what? Shit happens, unfortunately. Like, there, there is the fog war. You know, there, mistakes happen all the time. It's horrible. We try to mitigate it, but they happen. Um, and the civilians won't, civilians often won't get that. They don't understand, uh, how those things happen. Uh, and also if there's, if there's, you know, punitive stuff going on. Um, but I thought what was really interesting with this is you told us something that we had never heard before.

• 1:16:27Speaker 05

  That, uh, that this looks like, or had, I don't want to say, well, to me, I'll say, to me, it looks like. It was a cover up from the very beginning because you said that, uh, that. Dead group actually sent people up to confiscate the video.

• 1:16:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, the very next day. The very next day. So, you know, that period of darkness is three to four March. All right. So we're landing in the early daylight hours of four March. By the next day, on the fifth, somebody had showed up at Uzbekistan, at Karshikhanavod, and confiscated the tapes.

• 1:17:10Jack Murphy?

  Did they even have like the authority to do that? Because you guys are in like separate commands.

• 1:17:17Speaker 06

  That's a good question. You know, so a couple of dudes showed up, said, hand it over. You know, I, I, I wasn't there when, when that piece happened. I know who was. I've spoken directly to him. He said it was two guys from Blue that showed up in, in suits, not in uniform, and said, you'll hand it over. And it was based on their commander down in Barim. So I think exactly what authority they cited. But yeah, at that point, we, we fell subordinate to what would have been Task Force Dagger. And then, you know, there's a, there's a handful of elements. I don't want to misstate anything, but I went, I was part of everything from TF Sword

• 1:18:00Speaker 06

  to Dagger to Support and K-Bar and somewhere in there TF-11 showed up. So like there's a, there's a whole, you know, change of like who's running what show.

• 1:18:12Jack Murphy?

  But it wasn't, it wasn't like somebody coming down from JSOC, for instance. It was directly from the command itself, from, from Dev Group coming, which is what makes it particularly odd or irregular.

• 1:18:24Speaker 06

  That's my understanding. Now, I don't know, you know, like, I think everybody that is familiar with this knows that General Trevone was the, the DCG, the Deputy Commanding General at the time that was there forward with them. So I don't know if they, they cited his name or authority or what, but yeah, they confiscated it.

• 1:18:44Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:45Speaker 06

  And that, that, you know, so here's the funny thing, and I'll fast forward a little bit. But those tapes are initially recorded on VHS. They're converted to digital and stored on a CD-ROM, and the VHSs get recorded over and re- You know, rinsed and repeated, you know, on mission after mission. So they're washed out of the VHS. They're stored on the digital. Well, the analyst had already uploaded that stuff to DOD because of the significance of what had happened. So that stuff had transited via email over a server that was deployed with this. We called it the Terra server. Well, in the end, they confiscated the CD-ROMs.

• 1:19:27Speaker 06

  What they didn't realize is that the packets of information that transited over that Terra server still resided on the Terra server itself. They just happened to be partitioned into 2,000 little chunks. So in the end, during the Air Force research, they pieced all of that together, complete with all the correct timestamps. And I know the individual that did it. Jackie did a hell of a job on that one.

• 1:19:56Jack Murphy?

  Rob.

• 1:19:56Speaker 06

  Between her and Frank Daly, the analyst that was there at the time, and started out as the initial analyst to do the research for John Chapman's Medal of Honor. What would have been the, it was like a higher valor review board or something, valor decoration board or something that was commissioned by the Air Force Special Operations Command based on guidance from the Secretary of the Air Force.

• 1:20:22Jack Murphy?

  Rob, just one quick follow up to that. In your career, how many times did you have MIBs show up and confiscate tape like that?

• 1:20:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, do you ever see anybody from Red or Green or anybody else?

• 1:20:36Jack Murphy?

  Or another command, a superior command, a subordinate command, anything?

• 1:20:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, so the moment we landed, our number two in command for the Spectres that were deployed, he met us at the aircraft the moment that the crew door opened and said, give me the tapes. Not welcome back, not how you doing, just give me the tapes. So we gave him the tapes. We knew that, you know, something significant had transpired. Hell, we just covered the mission, right? So. As that's going on, he's going back into the talk. I don't know what he's doing with the tapes at that point, but they have to get immediately triaged, right? So they had to transmit stuff. They got that piece done before the Men in Black showed up

• 1:21:25Speaker 06

  and confiscated what was, you know, believed to be the only copy. So when, when that Colonel showed up and said, "Give me the tapes", we had deplaned and there were a couple of us from the Tac Crew who had met up underneath the left wing. And that's where we're having that initial conversation of Chris is like, from the TV center, he's like, "There was somebody still up there when we left." He's like, "We left somebody alive fighting on top of that mountain. He was still up there." And so that thought is in our mind, but at the same time, we just landed, we're immediately going into crew rest, and you're gonna fly the next day to cover the next group of guys that, uh, that need your help. Right.

• 1:22:06Speaker 06

  So the, the debrief is, is somewhat hasty. It's done. They've got the tapes. They'll triage it. We give them what we can from an intelligence standpoint, and then we're on to the next mission. So this thing essentially, like when they show up and they say, "Give me the tapes", like that thing is put to rest. It's put to bed until, you know, service secretaries say, "Hey, what about, how come", you know, the question was, "What, what does it take to win the Medal of Honor", I think is, uh, is the quote from the article from the Secretary of the Air Force at the time. Because there, there is a ton of significant valor stories, especially out of the Air Force Special Tactics community.

• 1:22:49Speaker 06

  I could think of a handful that should be on a list, uh, for, uh, consideration for Medal of Honor upgrade. But Chapman's story resonated with those that, uh, that recalled it. It was the strongest, uh, case for evidence for an upgrade. And then with the ability to piecemeal all of the 2,000 chunks of the original footage back together, then they were able to, uh, to make the case. And then it, it only got stronger from there. There's a, a number of elements of analysis that went into, to all of this from the imagery. Analysis to the medical forensics, you name it, it goes further.

• 1:23:25Speaker 05

  So let's, let's continue with your chronology because this does come back. What we're talking about right now, the review and everything. You're actually a part of that around 2014, right? So, but, but, but between this point in 2014, I want to continue with your story. And then we'll roll back, we'll roll back to this. So from, from that deployment, which was about roughly a six month deployment. You then go. Migraine makes me miss out on the moments that matter. So I asked my doctor about saying yep to V I E P T, eptinezumab, J J M R. An IV infusion given every three months that helps prevent migraine attacks in adults. Don't receive if allergic to V I E P T.

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• 1:25:09Speaker 05

  Language, right? And then.

• 1:25:15Speaker 05

  And then you get involved with MC12 project?

• 1:25:19Speaker 06

  Yes, so between, between O2 and 11, I had stayed essentially in that particular mission as a direct support operator for various AFSoC platforms, re-language, you know, picked up Somali. I, I came back to the unit. At this point, I'm a, I'm an experienced, seasoned operator, instructor, evaluator. We end up having a new mission that emerges that we, we call it a light ISR mission, as in light aircraft intel surveillance reconnaissance. We're doing precision geolocation, working with a lot of full motion video. Essentially, we're

• 1:26:03Speaker 06

  the find and fix to finding all the bad guys that are out there. So, we were, we were building this, this capability as a seasoned operator on one side. I was asked to help stand that up. So, we had a hundred new, new airmen that showed up in this flavor over the span of about a year, year and a half. Hell, I, I probably personally trained about 55 of the first hundred. But, we built out this capability to, to do this, this new mission set, and that led to me getting selected to, to help, they called it normalizing the MC12 platform. So, MC12 was birthed out of a contingency need, and they were trying

• 1:26:48Speaker 06

  to expand this same mission of precision geolocation matched with full motion video sensors to conventional forces beyond just that of a traditional SOF customer. And so, while that was being done, it was all done as a pickup game. So, the, the capability is literally bought and fielded within six months. It rivaled that of the P51 Mustang. This thing got all kinds of accolades over the year. Hell, they, they even competed for the, what they called the Collier Trophy. It's a National Aeronautic Association. So, think of- The Mars lander and Felix Baumgartner, who, you know, parachuted from outer space.

• 1:27:31Speaker 06

  We were competing against the likes of those platforms for the most significant, you know, contribution to aviation, all based on the, the speed and scope of the Project Liberty. So, anyway, when they do that mission, that mission is, is birthed from idea. It's being fielded by the Mississippi Air National Guard, my home state. And then, everybody basically goes down to Mississippi, gets trained up on the aircraft, gets qualified, and then goes forward and operates them, you know, whether it's in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever they happened to be forward deployed to at the time. This is, the capabilities fielded around oh nine. And so by eleven, the Air Force has said,

• 1:28:15Speaker 06

  okay, we're no longer going to make this just a, a pickup game. We want them to have a traditional, you know, host wing that owns that mission. And they decided to make the ninth reconnaissance wing at Beale Air Force Base out in, uh, north of Sacramento, California, the, the home station for it. And so I get, I get tasked to go out there, stand up a, a unit of intelligence operators that are going to operate the back of it. And, um, yeah, the rest was history. Spent three years with that mission. Based on prior experiences, you know, kind of handpicked for it.

• 1:28:51Speaker 06

  Grew a capability with some, some awesome young airmen. They, they really kicked butt. And then, uh, after three years of that, I got brought back, uh, down to our parent ISR group. You know, an echelon above the squadrons as an ops superintendent and then eventually made chief out of there. And that's when I got, that's in that fourteen to sixteen time period where I was brought on to the Chapman, um, you know, research project.

• 1:29:16Speaker 05

  So, um, and I, I didn't mean to skip so far ahead. If we missed anything, uh, significant within the rest of your time in and out of the twenty-fifth, because, you know, from two thousand and one to two thousand and eleven is quite a tour. Did, did we miss anything significant?

• 1:29:32Speaker 06

  Well, so, I mean, a, a couple of just quick, uh, I guess, brief highlights, but you mentioned Pat Tillman. I was in Afghanistan in oh four when that, when that unfolded. I was not airborne in the midst of the firefight that, that took Pat's life, but the aftermath of his unit going after the guys that ambushed them, I was there for that. That was interesting. I was part of the, I was on the ramp. I was in the, in the hangar when they recited the Ranger Creed, got to listen to all of the stanzas and we sat out there and did the honor guide on with our headlamps as, as

• 1:30:12Speaker 06

  we repatriated his body via Humvee onto a C seventeen and he was flown back stateside.

• 1:30:20Speaker 06

  Fast forward, I was on a, on a mission in the Horn of Africa. So, most people know about the Maersk, the Maersk, Alabama. After that, there was the, there was a blue water yacht that had been pirated. I was, I was overhead that aftermath and that one was a mess. Not the way things typically go down and there's some, there's some his, some historical, you know, SEAL, you know, information that, that coincides with how the Alabama went down and then what happened with the blue water yacht incident. And so, the SEALs

• 1:31:03Speaker 06

  had basically been put on a leash and so the

• 1:31:09Speaker 06

  a hostage piracy recovery type of mission, the way you would typically think it would unfold, did not unfold the way you would have expected during that blue water yacht deal. They, they had been handcuffed so bad that essentially, they, they had coaxed the, the head pirate. Off of the boat, brought him on board a naval warship. And he was gonna, you know, negotiate, you know, the, uh, the transaction for payment and all that kinda stuff. Well, obviously, once we had him in our custody, they weren't gonna let him go. Um, and so then you had a bunch of idiots, uh, idiot pirates that are left. And they all flip out and in broad daylight, the assault takes place.

• 1:31:53Speaker 06

  Everybody dies. Uh, it was, it was horrible. Um, but I was, I was over head that one. That one, that one just sucked. Uh, but if you, if you think about the storylines that go along with, uh, with some of the, the narratives that get spun out of some of the SEAL war stories. I'm not saying the entire community is, is tainted. But when we look at the Chapman, uh, incident and how all of that stuff unfolded. You look back at, at who has the high ground here? And that is the Air Force, okay? Because when it comes to SEALs and stories, you know, uh, off the battlefield.

• 1:32:36Speaker 06

  Dude, we could sit here and have a three hour episode going through just, just up over the last twenty years. Yeah. Um, like I remember going through, uh, Joint Special Operations Senior enlisted Academy. Votel was the commander at SOCOM, uh, at the time. And one of the biggest things that we were hitting, this is in the, uh, late fifteen time period. And we were still hitting on, um, that incident where they had fragged the hostage with a grenade. Uh huh. And they had lied about using grenades on the objective. Yeah. And everything was about the integrity and why it was important to, to own your mistakes and to fess up and so forth. And we're coming out of all of that. It's like, nobody ever learns anything.

• 1:33:16Speaker 06

  All they do is just create another false narrative, pin a medal on somebody and move on and just can, continue this legend. Yeah. It's. I I find it distasteful. I don't think it does them any real honor. Um, I I would love to respect the Trident, but um, right now, there's a handful that just tarnished the shit out of it for me.

• 1:33:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Now, where, when you said they were handcuffed on on the Blue Water yacht, what was that because of actions that they took on the Maersk or or was it?

• 1:33:47Speaker 06

  That's my understanding. Now, like, I I wasn't directly involved in the in the Maersk Alabama uh, piece. But it was my understanding that those guys went off uh, a little half-cocked and and how they executed that one. They were successful, you know, like they they did it and, you know, there's great story that comes out of it. There's an another interesting one that Matt Cole tells about in his book and uh, Code of Our Country. But uh, but anyway, uh, that was uh, it was dubbed a success. From a leadership standpoint, in internal to like SOCOM channels, I don't think that everybody was in agreement in how that mission unfolded.

• 1:34:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:34:30Speaker 06

  And so when the Blue Water yacht uh, piece happened, they were literally handcuffed.

• 1:34:36Speaker 06

  So like, nothing about that unfolded the way you would have imagined the recovery of a pirated vessel.

• 1:34:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:34:44Speaker 06

  Like, uh, when when do we move on that in broad?

• 1:34:48Speaker 05

  Right, right. Yeah.

• 1:34:50Speaker 06

  Like, yeah, I mean, no, nothing about it made sense.

• 1:34:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:34:54Speaker 06

  And I I was, I was there from the moment that the that the naval warships, you know, initiated what they would have called the stalk. And so they were just over the horizon. And then, you know, that vessel is going back and uh, further and further towards Somali waters. And then you're up against a timeline of trying to, you know, figure out how you're gonna deal with the situation before they get into waters that technically we shouldn't have entered. Under the circumstances, I don't think it would have mattered, you know, whose flag of waters they were in. We were gonna get it one way or the other. Um, but but none of, none of that ever unfolded the way you would have imagined, you know, uh, without getting into specific TTPs. It just, it, none of it made sense.

• 1:35:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:35:39Speaker 06

  And then in the end, it ends up being broad daylight, everybody dies. So that is obviously not a success.

• 1:35:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. When you say everybody dies, you're talking about the pirates and the hostages.

• 1:35:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, the pirates, the pirates executed the hostages and it's pretty obvious that when the assaulters got on board.

• 1:35:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:35:59Speaker 06

  Nobody else lived.

• 1:36:00Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, so you, this brings us to 2014 where you are, um, at the 361st.

• 1:36:11Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:36:11Speaker 05

  And the, and I believe wasn't it an article, uh, for the Secretary of the Air Force, for some reason, I believe it was an article about, about airmen, about the Air Force not having won a, uh, you know, a Medal of Honor since Vietnam and only one was awarded then. And it's sort of like, what does it take for an airmen to win the Medal of Honor? And the Secretary of the Air Force is like, that's a good question. And can we review acts of valor that our airmen and airwomen have performed, um, you know, during the GWAT and see if there's anything that would qualify?

• 1:36:54Speaker 06

  Yep. Uh, that's the way I recall it. Um, the, it picked up steam based on an Air Force Times article. And I, I think that headline was, uh, what does it take to win the Medal of Honor?

• 1:37:05Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:37:06Speaker 06

  And, and it was based on a number of like Air Force crosses and, and things like that, that had specifically come out of the special tactics community. Um, but anyway, the, the service secretaries, uh, across all the services, uh, ordered a, a review of, uh, top valor awards to, uh, to make sure that we hadn't, uh, left a, left a stone unturned, if you will. Um, so when the Air Force did their initial look, they had a shortlist, um, but at the top of their shortlist was that of John Chapman and the, the story of Roberts Ridge. So.

• 1:37:41Speaker 06

  It um, it worked in the Air Force's favor that, you know, they still had that Terra server. Um, thanks to Frank Daly. Um, the funny story he told me was, uh, the young analyst that was with them was like, "Hey, those guys came and confiscated the, uh, the videos. Uh, I just found all these clips on the Terra server. Do you want me to go ahead and delete those?" He's like, "No, no, do not. Save that." And so i- if it had been for Frank, like, that stuff could have been lost and never recovered. Right. Um, but ironically, in the midst of all of this, once we really picked up steam, and we had already briefed a Mako element, this is like September of sixteen,

• 1:38:24Speaker 06

  but between then and eighteen, when the, uh, when the final, you know, like valor boards are being done at a four-star level and so forth, before it goes to the SecDEF, all of a sudden, an unmarked envelope shows up, um, and inside the double-wrapped package are the original classified handwritten-marked CDs and Frank Daly's handwriting, because he's the one who had, uh, had marked those original CDs from the original deployment. Yeah. And so wherever that stuff came from, I don't know if it, if it came from, uh, from Damnec or if it came from a treasure trove down in, uh, Tampa out of SOCOM. I don't know. It was not marked.

• 1:39:08Speaker 06

  Like, when you send something classified, there's specific rules and ways that you package stuff, but there was no way to tell exactly where the source of this was, but somebody wanted to make sure that we got all of it, and they sent it to us. And finally, we had everything to include the original gunship footage that showed our conversation onboard and the second strobe and him getting in. And then, oh, by the way, now you had all the rest of the Predator footage and all of the rest of those clips that had been pieced together. So it made for an airtight case, especially with all of the imagery analysis that went into it. I there's a guy I don't I don't talk about him because he's still working certain mission.

• 1:39:51Speaker 06

  But when they when they went in, they did the imagery analysis on this. They mapped this thing down to the to the Nats ass. Like you could you could, you know, basically put a pin drop anywhere on that mountain. You could put me in a laying prone, kneeling, standing tall, crouched, whatever. And you could look around and give me three hundred and sixty what my specific field of view was from that point on the mountain. And they did that over the entire area. And that's how we knew that there were inconsistencies in some of the SEALs narrative on, hey, I looked and saw the rise and fall of a laser. I could see him. I verified. I crawled right over the top of him. Right. Well, none of that was true.

• 1:40:34Speaker 06

  You know, there wasn't a laser illuminated that for that laser, it was a momentary switch. It would have meant that John would have had to have fallen incapacitated. And something had direct pressure on this hand, right? And then we would have seen that with our sensors because I can see when their lasers are active on their rifles. You use those as marking devices at times and then, you know, they let you know like where they're pointed towards. So enemy on the far side.

• 1:41:02Speaker 06

  Anyway, none of this stuff matched. Air Force's research is airtight. The crazy part was the Navy leadership. Yeah, I'm I'm kind of getting off script, you know, as far as time and order of all of this. But lo and behold, we briefed make the surviving members of Mako three zero. And what would have been Dev Group's commander at the time, Captain Jeremy Williams. We briefed them in a in a DC facility, September of sixteen. And they had their intel guy, Commander Artwell, I always get the dude's name mixed up. But.

• 1:41:46Speaker 06

  They had their intel guy in the room as we're briefing all of them our findings. And, and I say this because later on Hartwell is the one who shows up at all the valor boards with this other version of events. And this is the Navy's version of events, not like what all the research actually showed. And so there, they constantly say that John died within the first three minutes and they still stick to that story today. So there's a handful of people working on their own documentary, all funded by SEAL money, whatever it is, they still stick to that. Um, slabs at current accounts still says that John, John died right beside me on the initial assault.

• 1:42:28Speaker 06

  Well, no, he didn't, you know, but one, because you were never right beside him anyway, you know, but nevertheless, John was the one who went and did all that stuff. And then by the time he's, uh, he's killed, it's after the, the element has broken contact. John is still up in, uh, up around bunker one and the QRF is inbound. And he knows that if he doesn't put down suppressive fire after being up there for an hour and 20 minutes by himself, if he doesn't do that, then the helicopter is going to suffer the same fate that they did when they came in.

• 1:43:03Speaker 05

  So it, it, at, at that point in 2014, when you first get kind of picked for this, were you aware of the, the like extended fight that, that happened while you guys were grounded?

• 1:43:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, you're talking, you're talking about the extended fight on top of the mountain?

• 1:43:22Speaker 05

  The, the John, when, when he recovers and, and continues to fight, how, were you aware of any of that between like your involvement with that operation and 2014?

• 1:43:34Speaker 06

  I, I knew that, uh, between, between the time of the event and me being brought on to, uh, to the research team, I knew that there were three variations of the story. We knew that there was somebody that continued to fight up there after the Mako element had broken contact and before the QRF arrived.

• 1:43:52Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 1:43:53Speaker 06

  That was Captain Self and his Rangers, right?

• 1:43:57Speaker 06

  Um, the, I knew that the, that the competing theories were Roberts and then Chapman and then red on red. I didn't, I didn't believe the, like, we knew after the fact that the predator could confirm, based on the sawing motion, that they could see that they, they called, they would have, have, have told you right then and there, if we had been in direct comms with them, they would have told us right then and there that, uh, that, that Roberts had been killed already.

• 1:44:25Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 1:44:25Speaker 06

  We didn't know for sure.

• 1:44:27Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:44:27Speaker 06

  Um, but we weren't in comms with them. So there were people out there that knew that Roberts had been killed at that point.

• 1:44:34Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:44:34Speaker 06

  That the enemy moved his body and propped him up, uh, by the, uh, by the boulder there.

• 1:44:39Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:44:39Speaker 06

  Um, that only leaves Chappie and the, and the red on red theory. And the fact that the fighting is literally close proximity, I mean, like, we're talking, talking, you know, inside of 20 meters in broad daylight. For guys that had, had occupied that mountain for months, you don't shoot each other in the face in broad daylight. There's no red on red at that distance. I'm sorry. Like that, that absolutely does not hold water.

• 1:45:10Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:45:11Speaker 06

  And, and there's a funny story, uh, when all this stuff, uh, came to be, the final brief to Secretary of Defense Mattis, he asked what the view, the, what's the prevailing view of others? What's the, the leading competing theory? They explained that and Mattis is like, yeah, I don't buy it.

• 1:45:29Speaker 05

  Yeah. Especially because there was actually hand to hand at that point, too.

• 1:45:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. You can, you can see that in the footage, like they, they're literally hand to hand. And, and Chappie prevails in that engagement as well.

• 1:45:43Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:45:45Speaker 06

  And, oh, by the way, he was, so when we say that he was incapacitated, the medical forensics showed that that was a mortal wound with, without a tension, he would have died from that wound, right? Well, he's still, he's still, uh, my, this is Rob's theory, but. I think a 105 going off right next to your position is one hell of an alarm clock.

• 1:46:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:46:08Speaker 06

  I think if you're a seasoned, you know, combat controller, the first thing you're gonna do is illuminate a strobe and find cover.

• 1:46:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:46:15Speaker 06

  When that happens. That's what happened. That's what made sense.

• 1:46:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:46:19Speaker 06

  Like, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to put all this stuff together. But oh, by the way, we had so many different layers of evidence that, uh, that proved. Like, there's no question about John, his actions or the status of his medal. You know, like, he earned his stuff, right? If there's ever any question, it's why didn't they, you know, present two? Instead, the Air Force literally chose to combine the elements and make it one airtight case.

• 1:46:42Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:46:42Speaker 06

  Um, but, but you could, you could split those and you could, you could provide a basis for two medals of honor for John Chapman.

• 1:46:50Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, out of curiosity, because you said there was a shortlist of air, airmen who, who probably qualified. Do you think that the Air Force's, um, that the Air Force suffers from the fact that they are, their attachments? And so often do not get the recognition they deserve?

• 1:47:13Speaker 06

  From firsthand experience. Um, so I, um, I'm not a special tactics airman, right? But, but I'm a, I'm a special intelligence capability that exists within Air Force Special Operations. So my parent command is not Air Force Special Operations Command. So when, when our guys go out and they operate, you got different chains of command. So I've got my administrative chain. We're all, you know, chopped to the same people operationally to execute our missions. But when it comes time to decorate everybody, there's, there's different ways that that can happen. The, the operational authority can do that from theater and submit and cover everybody.

• 1:47:54Speaker 06

  Or if it doesn't happen in time and it comes to light later, now you're, you're geographically separated. You're with your administrative chain of command versus the operational one that you were attached to. And yeah, I, I, I think that absolutely plays a part in this.

• 1:48:10Speaker 05

  Yeah. It's, it's, it's gotta be frustrating.

• 1:48:14Speaker 05

  So you see this through 2014, 2016, you guys put it all together, the awards go up. If you weren't directly involved in the politics behind like how the decisions were made, then I don't want to get involved in that. But like, at what point do you kind of hand this off and you're done with it?

• 1:48:36Speaker 06

  So the last significant piece for me, if you think about the joint SOF community, with the point that you had just made, the Air Force is often attached, right? Like, very seldom are we like the primary unit that is executing a mission. Unless it's like an airborne platform, that's just typically not us. Our specialties are there to exist, other SOF teams and elements, right? So when we're going through the information process, the boarding process, that initial brief in September of 16, I'm talking with what would have been the 24th SAO commander.

• 1:49:20Speaker 06

  So he owned those respective special tactics airmen. And as we go in, you've got the medical professional, you've got the imagery analyst, you've got Jay Hill, who was on an adjacent mountain, who heard Chappie come up on the radio, asked 30 Charlie, knew him personally, recognized his radio etiquette, recognized his voice, tried to talk to him, but never had positive two-way cons. But he heard Chappie, and it was after the gunship had departed, but before the QRF had showed up. So between that and me articulating the eyewitness testimony from our video that's literally playing, showing Chappie's strobe illuminate and crawl into the bunker,

• 1:50:05Speaker 06

  and recounting the audio that is showing Chris explaining to the FOCO, "Hey, I've got a second strobe, this doesn't look like the others." And then they hear the rest of that mortar attack come in. Like, you can't refute that.

• 1:50:19Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:50:21Speaker 06

  As in the spirit of having to play nice with others in the joint SOF community, the special tactics community just said, hey, here are the facts and we're going to let the, the experts and the witnesses speak to these, uh, to these points. So, you know, if there's a preparation, you know, going into it, it's like, hey, Rob, don't hold back. Like when you get up there, I want you to tell your side of the story and, uh, and just don't back down.

• 1:50:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:50:48Speaker 06

  And I'm like, yeah, you know, you don't have to tell me that, Colonel. Like, I got you. I, I, I knew exactly what, what was going on in the situation that we were walking into because you knew that there was pushback already. And literally in that meeting, that's the moment where Slab changed his story because he went from the rise and fall of a laser on the chest to literally, it was, you remember, uh, the baseball drug scenario where Rafael Palmeiro says, "I did not use Performance and Handy. I did not use steroids before Congress." Slab has a moment like that and says, "I crawled right over the top of John."

• 1:51:23Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:51:25Speaker 06

  And we're literally showing in the video that has all of the breadcrumb data showing, like, we've gone back and established the order in which they exited. We have signed an IR signature to each individual and we can follow the chain of custody greater than 90% chance of accuracy based on the totality of all that information. And we can literally see the area where Slab says, "I crawled right over him." Like, no, you didn't. You crawled over, you crawled over Roberts.

• 1:51:57Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:51:57Speaker 06

  And you guys still say that y'all never saw Roberts.

• 1:52:00Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:52:00Speaker 06

  You were right on top of Roberts.

• 1:52:01Speaker 05

  At the boulder.

• 1:52:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:52:04Speaker 05

  At the boulder. He would have had to crawl over Chappy up near the bunker.

• 1:52:10Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:52:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:52:12Speaker 06

  Yeah. And at the point of, like, you follow their egress, the, the only time that he would have had eyes on Chappy being incapacitated was when they were both engaged in bunker two and Slab would have been to the, uh, to the left of the tree up against the boulder.

• 1:52:29Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:52:29Speaker 06

  The boulder's on his left, facing up towards bunker two. And Chappie's on the right of that tree. But we also dropped breadcrumbs there and showed Slab what his, uh, what his field of view would have been. Like, we could literally spin him around, like, the entire area was scanned to, to include under the tree. Like, you could see, this is what the canopy was, this is where your terrain was, this is what you could see. And if, if Chappie had fallen and he was laying out prone, the way you described, you literally can't see him from where you said you could.

• 1:52:59Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 1:53:02Speaker 06

  And so, anyway, his story changed in that, in that briefing, at that moment, said he crawled right over the top of Chappie. The only person he crawled over the top of was Petty Officer Roberts.

• 1:53:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's weird because, you know, there have been a, a number of attempts to, uh, you know, i- uh, like, after, after some of this came out, then, then the, I think there was an argument that, well, you know, Chappie was out of his lane, he was there to provide, you know, to provide, to be the CCT. He shouldn't have been assaulting, like, you know, there have been so many attempts to sort of like,

• 1:53:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:53:41Jack Murphy?

  There was also the theory, right, that he saw Roberts and thought that was Chapman.

• 1:53:46Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:53:47Jack Murphy?

  Um, fog of war, yeah, I don't know what the truth is there, but,

• 1:53:51Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:53:51Jack Murphy?

  Maybe.

• 1:53:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:53:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think a boat team would ever misidentify, uh, one of their original six or the, the seventh, uh, combat controller that was, um, that was augment and, uh, like, I, I don't buy it.

• 1:54:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:54:09Speaker 05

  Um, so, that's part of your, uh, two and a half years, uh, at the 360 first. Um, and then, um, then you go to the, uh, to, to work with the RC 30, uh, 135?

• 1:54:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, I ended up in my in my unit of assignment, I got voted off the island as I had promoted. You know, there were, you know, limited number of positions, they were already filled. I drew the straw to go out to what turned out to be the best assignment of my career. I love the mission that we were just talking about, but as far as best overhaul assignment for me and my family, going out to Okinawa and being the senior enlisted leader for the 390th Intelligence Squadron, that was friggin cool. And the reason is, is that that's the birthplace of airborne ISR from a modern standpoint.

• 1:55:03Speaker 06

  Now, I got a former commander who's a historian, bona fide, he's a professor. He would tell you that the birthplace of airborne ISR started in the European theater. There's, he's absolutely true, I'm not going to argue with him, but as far as the Air Force specific units that we support with the RC-135, there's a mission that used to be the Combat Apple, that's what became and grew into the RC-135 that we know today. And it was stood up by a gentleman by the name of Doyle Larson. Most of the folks in the ISR community like know who this is from an Air Force perspective.

• 1:55:45Speaker 06

  Our building's named after him, I got to go out there, was there during that unit's 50th anniversary. I know that doesn't seem like much, we just celebrated the Army as 250th, but hey, you know, give us a.

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• 1:57:10Speaker 06

  ...break, the Air Force is still young. But our squadron had turned 50 out there. I got a chance to be part of that unit while we were doing what we called the pivot to the Pacific. So iron was flowing from the central theaters over the Middle East, away from Central Command, back over to what is now Indo-PACOM.

• 1:57:34Speaker 06

  Our unit, they covered everything from the summit in Singapore, where Trump met with the leader of North Korea, to the Olympics, and then we would help take care of the South China Sea. You know, with the Chinese like to expand their maritime claims a little bit further than what it is internationally recognized.

• 1:58:05Speaker 05

  That's fascinating.

• 1:58:08Speaker 05

  And then from there, you became the IG Superintendent for the 16th Air Force?

• 1:58:14Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:58:15Speaker 05

  And can you tell us about that? So now you're like a big boss.

• 1:58:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, kinda, I guess, always the number two. You know, so I, as a senior enlisted leader, you know, we're advising the, those commanders. Yeah, if you, if you look back at some of my, some of my past experiences, you know, from a, just from the service, it was nice, a nice kind of twilight assignment there as the IG superintendent, because your, your whole goal is to speak truth to power, hold people accountable, you know, take care of airmen that are out executing mission and so on. Uh, so that was a, a pretty sweet moment to be able to do that at the end.

• 1:58:59Speaker 06

  And then, you know, to, to have had, um, this is around the time period, you know, some 18 is when,

• 1:59:10Speaker 06

  August of 18 is when Chapman is awarded his Medal of Honor. Um, I got a chance to attend that, uh, at the White House, um, as a, as a guest and member of the research team.

• 1:59:22Speaker 06

  Then I had reassigned there at the end of 18, uh, to 16th Air Force. Uh, so I was, you know, home was San Antonio. And then, uh, yeah, towards the, the end of the IG tour, you know, you, you do your best to, uh, to, you know, speak up for, uh, for airmen, hold people accountable when, uh, when necessary, and just make sure that mission is executed the way it should be.

• 1:59:48Speaker 05

  Was there, you know, was there any heartache on the part of like the research team?

• 1:59:55Speaker 05

  Obviously, there are stories about the back, the backroom deals that had to be made with the Navy in terms of, you know, but those are stories. But what we do know is that Slavinsky was awarded a Medal of Honor and he was awarded the Medal of Honor not at the same time as Chapman. They made sure that his was awarded like prior to.

• 2:00:17Speaker 06

  So, yeah, so back up to September of 16, I told you, we briefed, we briefed the surviving members, Captain Jeremy Williams and Mako. So, all the surviving members of Mako 3-0 are either present in the room, three of them in the room, and one on a telecon, and it's us presenting information to them, and then the only other extra person in the room is Commander Hartwell. At the end of that meeting, we're getting ready to shuffle out the door, and Jeremy Williams is sitting right next to, he's standing next to Slab, close to the exit, he's, he's just looks over at Slab, he's like, huh, maybe we should look at upgrading

• 2:01:00Speaker 06

  yours. This is September of 16. By December of 16, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mavis makes a trip out to, to Dam Neck. Britt Slavinsky, in his own words in an interview, I've got clips, I, hopefully I get this to Dee and y'all can get these uploaded, but, but Britt describes the first time that he was informed that he was going to be receiving the Medal of Honor, and that's when the SecNav shows up in September, or December of 16, and makes the announcement to their home unit at Dam Neck. And Britt's not even, like, he's out of the service at this point, he was brought back as a guest, under the ruse of somebody

• 2:01:44Speaker 06

  else's award, and then, oh, by the way, the SecNav makes that announcement. So, you don't go from September of 16, Captain Jeremy Williams saying, maybe we should look at upgrading yours, to SecNav showing up within 90 days, like, Medals of Honor do not happen that fast, especially ones that are from events that are, you know, what would that have been, 16, go back to 2, that would have been 14 years old?

• 2:02:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, and, and, and it's not as if new information came out favoring Slavinsky.

• 2:02:23Speaker 06

  Were you, were you an intel guy?

• 2:02:27Speaker 06

  I mean that as a compliment.

• 2:02:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no.

• 2:02:31Speaker 06

  So, yeah, no, there's no new information for slab. So like, everybody knew, all right, so back up to the the original decorations that were handed out for Britt Slavinsky and John Chapman were their respective service crosses. Slab was awarded the Navy Cross. Chappy was awarded the Air Force Cross. And that was for them being credited to storming and eliminating bunker one, saving the team.

• 2:03:00Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:03:02Speaker 06

  Well, go back and look at the footage. Tell me who eliminated bunker one.

• 2:03:06Speaker 05

  Right. Right.

• 2:03:08Speaker 06

  It wasn't Britt Slavinsky.

• 2:03:09Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:03:10Speaker 06

  Was he present? Was he, was he part of all of this? Absa friggin lutely. I won't take anything from the dude. Except for when you want to go down the road of stolen valor and Navy false narratives.

• 2:03:22Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:03:22Speaker 06

  That's, that's crap. And then now you're tarnishing the legacy of John Chapman. Now it's submitted in the history books, right? Chappy has his Medal of Honor and it is what it is. But then fast forward to after all of this and the, you know, the museum. And then they just take a big dump all over the guy again.

• 2:03:42Speaker 05

  Well, it's, it's the Navy SEAL Museum sponsored by the Medal of Honor.

• 2:03:46Speaker 06

  Ta-da.

• 2:03:48Speaker 05

  You know, so, um, yeah. Um, and then for you, uh, you wrap up at, uh, Joint Force, uh, Joint Force Headquarters Cyber. Right?

• 2:04:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, it, this, we were downsizing the, uh, the Inspector General team. Um, I still had a little bit of, uh, time left before I was, uh, before I was actually retiring. And so for my last 12 months, I, I, I served as a senior enlisted leader for, um, for a cyber element, uh, that, uh, was, was there in Texas. There's a number of them on the Joint Force Headquarters side. They align to, uh, to US Cybercom. Uh, and then they execute various, uh, various missions based on their geographic alignment, uh, depending on who's, uh, who's in the lead. Like the Army runs one, the Navy runs one, the Air Force runs one.

• 2:04:38Speaker 05

  Fantastic. And so what about now? Like, what are you doing post, uh, Air Force career?

• 2:04:45Speaker 06

  So I retired from active duty. I didn't, I didn't go too far from the herd. You know, we, I think we kind of like to stay with our tribe. I got, I got a wife who's, who's not very risk averse. My goal was to, to not be a government mule. I wanted to move as far away from, from the actual service. I wanted to go hit industry and, you know, see where I could make my mark as a civilian truly.

• 2:05:13Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 2:05:14Speaker 06

  She was like, no, no, no, no, no, that, that's cutthroat. I'm like, yeah, that's fine with me. I'm going to survive. You know, but, but anyway, it becomes a family decision at that point. So I stayed close by. I'm still working in the intelligence community as a, as a government civilian now. I, I did a, a transition moment as a, as a contractor, as, as many people, you know, do after their active duty career. And so I work on strategic plans for an intel directorate for a training command in the air force and life is good, man. I'm, I'm surrounded by good people, have a good culture, good team. The mission ain't near as sexy as what it used to be.

• 2:05:55Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 2:05:55Speaker 06

  But, but you're around good people. So that I can deal with.

• 2:06:00Speaker 05

  That's awesome.

• 2:06:03Speaker 05

  Did we leave anything out? Do we, where can people, are you on social media or anything like that? Where, where can people find you if they're looking for you?

• 2:06:10Speaker 06

  I, so I'm not a, I'm not a, a super, super public guy. Yeah, I've got a persona out there. But, but there's also a handful of folks that aren't necessarily my biggest fans that, that are busy pushing what I call the, the SEAL false narratives.

• 2:06:27Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 2:06:28Speaker 06

  So I don't get, I don't get too far into that. Where, where you will find me is with individuals like y'all that, that have the ability to use your platform for, for those of us interested in speaking truth to power. And, and for that, I, I say thank you from the bottom of my heart. What, I'm sure many people have, have mentioned this to you on the side, but I'd like to say it here. The initial, the initial,

• 2:07:00Speaker 06

  damn it. I just, I just had a senior moment. When we.

• 2:07:08Speaker 06

  What the hell do you call that thing that people sign? Like an affidavit? No, the one that you started, Dave. Oh, the petition. Oh, the petition? The petition. Yeah, yeah. Damn.

• 2:07:22Speaker 06

  Um, okay, so the petition that you signed, like, that kickstarted a lot.

• 2:07:29Speaker 06

  It wasn't until between that and Lori's, Lori's actual post as to what was going on at the Medal of Honor Museum. That's what smoked me out on this. You know, like, so I didn't, like, I thought this was all water under the bridge. Yeah. Slab got his medal, Chapman got his, and I thought we had all moved on. Right. Well, I didn't realize that Slab had landed, like, key board positions and that he was involved such, in such a high manner with the Medal of Honor Museum. Right. Not to mention the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. Right. Um, and then, then I start looking based off of what Lori's post was, and I was like, son of a gun.

• 2:08:10Speaker 06

  I was, I could, I was, I could not believe that they were literally going out there and sticking to the false narrative. Yeah. That they used to try to subvert Chapman's medal upgrade to begin with. Yeah, yeah. That's the point where it's like, all right, well, I'm not naive. I understand where people have power and people have connection and so forth. And if they're not going to be held accountable, all right, that's on somebody else. But I'll tell you this, they won't get away with it. Yeah. So I will do my best to make sure that the truth is known and understood. Chapman is a bona fide friggin' hero. 100%, yeah.

• 2:08:50Speaker 06

  That is an amazing win, and I can't wait until that story becomes more broadly understood. Um, you know, there are efforts underway to, uh, to do all of that.

• 2:09:01Speaker 06

  But you just, like, you have to take with a grain of salt.

• 2:09:06Speaker 06

  And I hate to say this because it it then tarnishes the rest of the good seals that are out there.

• 2:09:11Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:12Speaker 06

  But but if you hear a story about seals and heroics, you you you might want to consider that like a barroom legend. You know, you you know, those stories where you just have to have 10% truth?

• 2:09:23Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:24Speaker 06

  And then it then it makes for a great story. Um, there there's too many of those that are out there, especially of late. And all of that stuff ties right back to the the specific personality that was Tim Zemansky. And then you can follow the lineage down with key leaders. Wyman Howard is one of them. He's the guy that they called Hatchet Man. Um, documented in Matt Cole's book. I, you know, I don't have to go any further, but how he connects to the Chapman Medal of Honor upgrade. When the seals went down the road of their false narrative, they went and recreated their own videos. Well, guess where Wyman Howard was assigned while all that was going on?

• 2:10:07Speaker 06

  He was the D O of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. So if you want to recreate footage, if you want to recreate anything, like the same people that mapped that mountaintop and did everything that I was telling you that we could do.

• 2:10:24Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:25Speaker 06

  He was the D O, a G, a general officer at that that premier agency.

• 2:10:32Speaker 06

  All while this was going on with the Medal of Honor upgrade and the board and the SEAL false narrative and the subversion efforts.

• 2:10:39Jack Murphy?

  Wyman is a interesting guy. I, you know, I've had like people tell me in the past that like he was totally different than like the General McChrystal's and the Scotty Millers, you know, the like calm, cool, collected kind of personality. That Wyman was like, he would like seethe, like there's like anger vibrating off of this dude.

• 2:11:00Speaker 06

  So the my experience when I met him in person, like I didn't meet him face to face, but but that that same deployment, it's the 2011 time period when the Blue Water yacht deal goes down.

• 2:11:16Speaker 06

  He comes and pays us a visit based on, you know, at the time, he's the the Dev Group commander. And they were in charge of that that particular AO. He comes in and gives us a hoo-ya speech in a hangar. Well, he showed up on one of the one of the slick jets. They step off in what we all call the smoothes, you know, he's got his suit on, but but open collar, no tie. He strutted into that damn hangar, you would have thought he was Tom Brady, like just swagger. And and I don't like not a, I don't think that he just exuded arrogance, I'm not saying that, but just like you were looking at a dude that you knew was a significant individual

• 2:11:59Speaker 06

  and he just had that executive presence about him. That that was what my personal experience, you know, being in at least in the same hangar within, you know, throw in distance of the of the guy. But but it wasn't until I like I I knew I know folks that that work with him directly.

• 2:12:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, I've heard good stories, I've read bad, you know, I don't think that's for me to judge, but what I would do is I will I will leave you with the connective tissue that when they created their false narrative against John Chapman surviving that initial mortal wound, Wyman Howard was the GO, the Director of Operations at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

• 2:12:42Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 2:12:43Speaker 06

  At that same time, Jeremy Williams had fledged up to the Dev Group position, so he's the CEO at Dev Group, and the Commander of Naval Special Warfare is Tim Zemansky. So how do you go from slab Medal of Honor from September of 16 to SecNav making the announcement in December of 16?

• 2:13:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:13:02Speaker 06

  Because Zemansky was sitting on that and had it ready to ready to go with no new information, nothing to expand beyond the basis of his of his Navy Cross unless we...

• 2:13:15Speaker 06

  We add in that, hey, I rescued the air crew. Uh, hey, I was in, uh, in combat for 14 hours.

• 2:13:22Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:13:22Speaker 06

  Well, like dude, they were in combat for like 10 minutes and they broke contact.

• 2:13:27Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:13:27Speaker 06

  And they weren't, they weren't engaged, you know, like after they broke contact.

• 2:13:31Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:13:32Speaker 06

  Now, did he have wounded? Like, was there a huge fray initially? Absolutely.

• 2:13:37Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:13:37Speaker 06

  Won't take anything away from it. But look at the basis of his, uh, of his Medal of Honor, and I can poke holes in it left and right.

• 2:13:43Speaker 05

  Well, they, they basically took a lot of what was on Chapman's and just transferred it over. Basically a cop and, copy and paste. So.

• 2:13:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, so there's a, there's a nugget of information on that one. And, uh, and I'll speak cryptically about this. But when I say that Jeremy Williams is a seedy character, like he's a seedy character. This dude is a, he's a general officer right now, competing for a potential three-star position. If this man goes into a three-star position as a SEAL Naval Special Warfare Officer, that means that he's going to be commanding in a joint environment. All right? How does a guy go into a three-star joint command position, whether it's command or a, a senior staff position that's at a three-star level?

• 2:14:35Speaker 06

  How do you do that in a joint environment, knowing full well that you subverted an Air Force teammate's Medal of Honor upgrade based on a bullshit false narrative?

• 2:14:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:14:46Speaker 06

  And so the, to take this further, the cryptic message is, when I say that the Navy had every bit of the Air Force information, it wasn't just because the Air Force was willing to share it with them. All right? There was a moment when Jeremy Williams deliberately took the information.

• 2:15:07Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:15:08Speaker 06

  And I just, I'll leave it at that. But, but there are specific people that know exactly what happened.

• 2:15:15Speaker 00

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• 2:15:59Speaker 00

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• 2:16:29Speaker 06

  and that man continues to go unanswered because he was in some significant places also in 2011 so he's got you know a permanent get out of jail free card for some of his own command and and his teams you know actions it's bullshit people need to hold these guys accountable and and I'm not in a position to change it but I am in a position to speak out

• 2:16:58Speaker 05

  yeah yeah well thanks so much for coming on and sharing this this is a lot of firsthand yeah do we got questions D

• 2:17:13Speaker 04

  appreciate the respect and description regarding your teammate from Boston can you share a story regarding this bean town badass thanks for the show guys

• 2:17:27Speaker 06

  that's gotta be OB himself

• 2:17:31Speaker 04

  no that's from Matt Matt Gavin

• 2:17:36Speaker 06

  okay all right um yeah from OB being badass uh man

• 2:17:45Speaker 06

  I never had to see him fight but I would tell you that the the Boston accent was enough to make anybody think twice

• 2:17:58Speaker 04

  one more from Corbin over the course of your career would you say technology has helped to increase the effectiveness of communication

• 2:18:06Speaker 06

  Between tasked asset in the stack and the eyes on the ground tasking said asset. Or is it just mixed, a mixed bag dependent on the people involved in the event?

• 2:18:19Speaker 06

  Yes, on all phases. So inherently, I'm a, I'm a, you know, I'm a positive thinker. I'd like to say, yes, it improves, but, but you gotta take all that with a grain of salt. There's a, the, the Malani report regarding Roberts Ridge in the battle at Takkar Gar. Talks about the, the advent of technology and how that at times was, was believed to be the same as having true situational awareness for what was going on in the battlefield. And, and I think anybody that's been there knows that that, that'll never replace boots on ground.

• 2:19:03Speaker 06

  If you listen to, or if you've read any of Blaver's books, that's one of the, the consistent themes that, that he espouses in, in his book, The Mission, The Men and Me, he always gives credence to the men on the ground. He always, his lesson is listen to the boots on the ground. So I, I think there's elements where the technology will never completely and totally replace that level of situational awareness. But absolutely it enhances as long as it's not abused or misused.

• 2:19:38Speaker 05

  That's it. Hey, Rob, thank you so much. We really, we deeply appreciate it. It's fascinating.

• 2:19:45Speaker 06

  Guys, I appreciate y'all having me. Thanks for the opportunity. Now, most people want to hear the, the rest of the story on the, on the Chapman piece. Thanks for giving me a chance to tell a little bit of what I would say is otherwise insignificant. You know, if, if I had to, to surmise like the, the key event in, in my overall career, it's literally having an impact on Chapman's metal upgrade and, and being there and what's actually carried forward to now. But, but otherwise I would, I'm just a small cog in a wheel, but happened to be able to speak truth to power when it counted for that matter. And, you know, damn a seal false narrative.

• 2:20:29Speaker 06

  You want to tell lies in front of general officers, I'm gonna call you out, Commander Hartwell.

• 2:20:34Speaker 05

  And for a bonus for our Patreon viewers, we are trying to get access to your G Drive, where you have basically documented, clip-wise, slabs changing story over time.

• 2:20:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, I will work with Dee to get that drive at least over to you guys. You'll have like read-only, but however you can technically make that available to your Patreon folks. Dude, this is all public stuff, and if nothing else, you can look at the file names and just Google the stuff yourself. It's out there on YouTube. Like, it's nothing that came from my own private collection.

• 2:21:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, fantastic. Thanks again, Rob. We really appreciate it.

• 2:21:22Speaker 06

  My pleasure, guys. Thank you all. I appreciate you having me.

• 2:21:26Speaker 05

  All right, everybody. Thank you.

• 2:21:28Speaker 06

  I have, I got one thing. My wife put in my ear, we were talking about the petition before. So you kicked off a huge interest in what was going on at the Medal of Honor Museum.

• 2:21:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:21:39Speaker 06

  At the same time, Matt Kubler started a petition that ties back to Representative Paulina Luna out of Tampa, Florida.

• 2:21:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:21:50Speaker 06

  There was confusion amongst the audiences out there. And so what I would, what I wanted to relay was, A, thank you for what you did with your original petition. But if there's any way that you can spark interest towards the one that's tied towards Paulina Luna and having Congress take a look at this event itself.

• 2:22:09Speaker 05

  Yes, absolutely will. I absolutely will. In fact, I'll, I'll link, it'll be in the link below. We'll put it in links below. And I will also, through the, through my petition, send out a link to Matt's petition.

• 2:22:27Speaker 06

  Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you, guys, again. It was a pleasure being here.

• 2:22:32Speaker 05

  Thanks.

• 2:22:32Jack Murphy?

  Thanks.

• 2:22:36Jack Murphy?

  Hey guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for a moment about how you can support the show. If you've been watching it, enjoying it, but you'd like to get a little bit more involved and help us continue to do this, you can check out our Patreon. It is patreon.com/the Team House. And for $5 a month, you can get access to all of these episodes of The Team House ad-free. The same goes with our affiliated podcast Eyes On with Andy Milburn, Jason Lyons, Mick Mulroy. That one, you will also get all of those episodes ad-free. And you support the channel and the show, and we really appreciate it. The Patreon members are literally what has

• 2:23:15Jack Murphy?

  helped this company, this small business survive, especially during our early years. And you are what continues to help this thing going, even as we navigate the turbulent world of YouTube advertising. So we really appreciate all of you guys. There's going to be a link down in the description to that Patreon page. And there is also going to be a link to our new merch shop. So if you guys want to go and get some Team House merchandise, we got stickers, and we also have patches. And I should mention, if you sign up for Patreon at $10 a month, we will mail you this patch as well. So we really appreciate that. But they're also for sale on the merch shop.

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  Migraine makes me miss out on the moments that matter. So I asked my doctor about saying yep to VYAPT, eptinezumab, JJMR, an IV infusion given every three months that helps prevent migraine attacks in adults. Don't receive if allergic to VYAPT. Get help right away for allergic reactions like rash, swelling of face, lips, tongue, or throat, trouble breathing, hives, or facial redness. Tell your doctor if you have constipation that is severe or associated with severe or constant belly pain or swelling, vomiting, or bloating. If you have increased blood pressure or color changes, pain, or numbness in fingers or toes. Common side effects are stuffy nose, scratchy throat, and allergic reactions. Tap the ad to see how many migraine-free days you might reclaim and see the full prescribing information at vyapt.com.

• 2:30:09Speaker 02

  It's big, spooky, and wicked. Spinquest.com. Grab a handful of Halloween treats like blackjack, bubble craps, and slots. All your freaking faves in one beautiful place. Spinquest.com. And right now, new monsters get $30 coin packs for 10. Visit spinquest.com or download the app tonight.

• 2:30:33Speaker 03

  Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:30:45Speaker 00

  Migraine makes me miss out on the moments that matter. So I asked my doctor about saying yep to VYAPT, eptinezumab, JJMR, an IV infusion given every three months that helps prevent migraine attacks in adults. Don't receive if allergic to VYAPT. Get help right away for allergic reactions like rash, swelling of face, lips, tongue, or throat, trouble breathing, hives, or facial redness. Tell your doctor if you have constipation that is severe or associated with severe or constant belly pain or swelling, vomiting, or bloating. If you have increased blood pressure or color changes, pain... Or numbness in fingers or toes. Common side effects are stuffy nose, scratchy throat, and allergic reactions. Tap the ad to see how many migraine-free days you might reclaim and see the full prescribing information at vype.com.

• 2:31:29Speaker 00

  Hey guys, Lady Luck here. I just love the fall season. Cris Morning's Pumpkin Spice Latte, and it's the best time to cozy up and play Spin Quest. They have over a thousand different slots in all my favorite casino-style games. And they're running a deal for all new players, a $30 coin package for just $10. So this fall, grab your favorite blanket, visit spinquest.com, and download the app today.

• 2:31:53Speaker 03

  Spin Quest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:32:07Speaker 00

  Migraine makes me miss out on the moments that matter. So I asked my doctor about saying yep to vype, eptinezumab, JJMR, an IV infusion given every three months that helps prevent migraine attacks in adults. Don't receive if allergic to vype. Get help right away for allergic reactions like rash, swelling of face, lips, tongue, or throat, trouble breathing, hives, or facial redness. Tell your doctor if you have constipation that is severe or associated with severe or constant belly pain or swelling, vomiting, or bloating. If you have increased blood pressure or color changes, pain, or numbness in fingers or toes. Common side effects are stuffy nose, scratchy throat, and allergic reactions. Tap the ad to see how many migraine-free days you might reclaim and see the full prescribing information at vype.com.

• 2:32:51Speaker 00

  Hey guys, Lady Luck here. I just love the fall season. Cris Morning's Pumpkin Spice Latte, and it's the best time to cozy up and play Spin Quest. They have over a thousand different slots in all my favorite casino-style games. And they're running a deal for all new players, a $30 coin package for just $10. So this

• 2:33:11Speaker 03

  Grab your favorite blanket, visit spinquest.com and download the app today. Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:33:21Speaker 00

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolaire, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 2:33:34Speaker 01

  Zolaire 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolaire, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolaire. Zolaire may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolaire should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolaire is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolaire.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolaire.

• 2:34:17Speaker 01

  This is an advertisement for Zolaire, paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 2:34:22Speaker 04

  Yo, it's Bluff here. I've been giving out king-size candy bars to all the kids all day, and luckily karma was right around the corner. This Halloween, Spinquest is giving away a scary-good deal, $30 for $10 coin pack. They have over 1,000 games available, and with instant cash prize redemptions, there's no waiting like those other schmucks. Don't miss out. Go to spinquest.com or download the app right now.

• 2:34:44Speaker 03

  Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details. Monday night brings one more big matchup to settle into. And when every play matters, the last thing you want to do is step away to figure out dinner. That's where DiGiorno comes in. Get a DiGiorno pizza ready before kickoff, then enjoy restaurant-quality taste fresh from your own oven while you stay locked into every play. Stock up on DiGiorno over the weekend so when Monday night rolls around, the only thing you sweat is the game. Shop now at the link in the episode description. It's not delivery, it's DiGiorno.