Bushkin. It was March fourth, two thousand and two, fewer than six months after the World Trade Centers fell. The sun was rising on a bleak and snowy mountaintop in eastern Afghanistan. It was a little after six in the morning, and Air Force technical Sergeant John Chapman was alone in enemy territory, bleeding to death. He had been shot, he was losing strength, he was low in ammunition, and it was bitterly brutally cold. For hours in the dark, it
faced off against Taliban and al Qaeda militants. He was outnumbered, outgunned, but he fought on it killed at least five men, one in hand to hand combat, and he was fending off the rest from the relative safety of a makeshift bunker basically just a shallow trench dug at the base of a tree, keeping his head down, trying to survive until reinforcements would arrive, he hoped. Suddenly, the unmistakable sound of a helicopter filled the air. A black Chinook appeared
on the horizon. Back up was finally here, but Chapman had seen what happened to helicopters had tried to land on this mountain. The two previous ones, including the one that brought him here, had been hit hard by enemy fire. He knew the men on that helicopter might die unless he could do something. He had two options, stay where he was not exactly safe but safer, or he could venture out into the open to try and provide covering fire for the helicopter to try and save those men.
The snow around him was drenched in blood, his and the man he'd killed. He shouldered his assault rifle, and then, looking out into the thin light of the morning sun, he stood up. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and this is Medal of Honor Stories of Courage. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States, awarded for gallantry and bravery in combat at the risk of life,
above and beyond the call of duty. Each candidate must be approved all the way up the chain of command, from the supervisory officer in the field to the White House. This show is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. John Chapman's story is the last one we will tell this season, and more than any other, it tells us why the Medal of Honor is so important. It's the story that reveals an essential truth.
The medal isn't really for the recipients themselves. Those heroes would insist that their acts of bravery don't need an audience or accolades. They would say, as doctor Mary Walker famous, he did, I could not do otherwise. It's not for them. The medal of Honor is for the rest of us, to remind us of our human capacity for bravery and self sacrifice, and to show us that even if those acts of courage are unseen, invisible to others, they still matter.
They maybe even matter more. When John Chapman was growing up in the little town of Windsorlocks, Connecticut, his mom, Terry, noticed something different about him. He was, even as a kid, strangely attuned to other people.
He was born with this ability to sense people's feelings or sense when people were in need of help. He always put others before himself. He felt that that's that's the right thing to do.
John was a standout athlete, a soccer star, and a state champion diver. A well loved kid with an easy laugh, square jawed and handsome, he could have been the worst kind of popular high school boy, but John had a distaste for social clicks and bullies. He had a way of making other people feel comfortable and to drive to push himself hard to do good in the world.
His senior year book quote was give up yourself before taking of others.
He went to college for a semester, but it was clear he wanted a different kind of challenge. He dropped out and repaired cars while he fixated on his next step, joining the Air Force. Within a few years of enlisting, he had another higher goal. He wanted to become a combat controller. Combat controllers, or CCTs are battlefield experts who in bed with the lead forces, the Navy Seals or the Army rangers and call in air strikes from the field.
It's a key role in any dangerous mission, going into a combat zone and working as an on the ground air traffic controller triangulating bombers and drones under the most intense pressure. CCTs go through grueling months of training, not just for the technical skills they need, but also to prepare for every kind of hostile environment. They learned combat diving, wilderness survival, any special tactic you can imagine only a
small percentage make it through. The few who succeed are ready to deploy undetected to establish assault zones behind enemy lines. Their motto is first there. Of the one hundred and twenty men who signed up for training when John did, only two became CCTs. John, of course, was one of those two, and soon thereafter he qualified for the twenty fourth Special Tactic Squadron, the most elite of the elite
of the Air Force. At the same time as John was honing his lethal skills at work, he was creating a safe haven of a home life in a small house in North Carolina with his wife, Valerie, and two little girls, Madison and Brianna. Valerie remembers how all in he was as a father.
You didn't know if he just came off a training mission, and you know, he'd walks the door and he was daddy. He was bathing the girls, playing barbie dolls with them, reading them bedtime stories he used to love.
You know.
After the bath, he'd wrap them up in a towel and swing them and throw them onto the couch. And he was just fully present hundred percent of the time. I mean, you never would know what he was trained to.
Do what he was trained to do, of course, was annihilate the enemy. But for a while in the late nineteen nineties, it looked like he might not put those skills to the test in an American war. By the age of thirty six, John and realized he might never go to battle. Then came nine to eleven. We all remember watching it on the news that day.
And you can see the two towers, a huge explosion now raiding to pray on all of us, we never get.
Out of the bank.
The unthinkable happened today the World Trade Center, both towers gone, and we are all witnesses to it, and to some degree we are all victims.
This conflict was begun on the timing in terms of others.
It will end in a way, and at an hour of our choosing.
The first major American military operation in Afghanistan took place in March of two thousand and two in the Shycote Valley, a roughly sixty square mile area ringed with rocky, snowcapped mountains. The US forces called it Operation Anaconda because the idea was to squeeze the joint Taliban and Al Kaeda forces in the valley, but the situation was more treacherous than anticipated.
The terrain was difficult, the snow waist deep, the weather unimaginably cold, and the enemy almost tripled the size expected. Well armed, well trained, and dug into the higher elevations. Even history was on Afghanistan's side. Afghan fighters in this valley had battled back invading forces for two thousand years, from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Army. On the night of March fourth, a group of Navy seals sealed to him six which would famously go on to kill
Osama bin Lauden. Ready to enter the fight, they were led by a quiet and wiry senior chief named Britt Slabinsky. Their combat controller was John Chapman. The two men had worked together since the previous October, and John and the seals were a well integrated team, all more than ready to get into the action. They'd been waiting in Afghanistan
for over a month by now. Their mission was to go to a mountain called Takergar on the southern side of the shy Coote Valley and secure an area of operations from which they could call in air strikes on enemy forces. They would do this under the cover of darkness, fly by helicopter to the base of the mountain in the middle of the night, then stealthily ascend to the ten thousand foot summit, giving them a chance to see exactly what they were up against before anyone noticed them.
But that tightly formulated plan was about to hit some insurmountable obstacles. First, the helicopter they were supposed to use that night had a faulty engine. The team had to call in a replacement, costing precious time. It became clear to his Slebinski that if they hiked to the top of the mountainous planned, they would arrive after the sun of prison too exposed, too dangerous, so he asked command if he could delay the mission for twenty four Their
quest was denied. Instead, it was decided that their helicopter would land at the top of Takogar rather than the base, announcing themselves instantly to anyone who happened to be on the mountain. They didn't know exactly what was up there, but they knew they were enemy soldiers on many of those mountains, and those soldiers were ready to fight. But an order was an order, So at two fifty five am, the team loaded into a Chinook helicopter and headed for the peak. Here's Slabinsky remembering.
Soon as we landed, our helicopter came under rocket RPG, rocket prolgrenade fire, and heavy machine got fire.
Another combat controller, Jay Hill, was on a different mountain, just a few kilometers away, with a view of Takagar. He watched as a Chinook carrying the Seals and John was hit with a rocket propelled grenade, then another and another, screaming through the night sky.
And as soon as it sat down on top of the mountain top, we saw the RPG strike the aircraft.
In the aircraft move towards the valley.
Slabinsky realized they were in deep trouble and ordered the helicopter to retreat. But as the damage Chinnook lifted off again, it started shaking and rolling, and a member of his seal team, Petty Officer Neil Roberts, lost his footing and slid down the open ramp into the darkness and onto the snowy peak of Takragar.
I knew Neil was in trouble. I knew he was in the midst of the enemy and numerically superior force they had me out gunned. They were at extreme altitudes, we were in extreme temperatures and pretty much opering at the extreme end of all aircraft capabilities.
But the Seals, of course have a motto leave no man behind. So as soon as the mangled Chinnook save crash landed, Slabinsky and the team started making plans to go back and get Roberts. Knowing what awaited them at.
The top of Takagar, I made the decision that we're going to make an immediate rescue attempt to go back and get Neil.
John Chapman was all in. He didn't have to go back, but he was part of the team. He wouldn't think of staying behind. Chief Master Sergeant Rob Harrison was there as part of a gunship crew providing reconnaissance and air strikes. Like all the men, he knew how dangerous this mission would be.
These guys knew that they were going right back into the same spot that their original aircraft was shot up and they lost a teammate out of the back end of the helicopter. So these guys, they knew what risk they were facing, and they charged right back in there to save one of their very own.
By now it was four thirty five am, still dark, but not for long. The seals in John were outfitted with night vision goggles for red strobe lights and laser sights on their rifles, Otherwise they would be completing this mission in total darkness, another dangerous layer to an already lethal errand. As the new helicopter rose into the frigid night sky, Slabinsky felt the enormity of what was ahead of them.
I remember got my night vision goggles on and everything's green looking through my goggles to stick my head, but have outside the aircraft to look at my mouth coming up that I'm getting ready to go fight on. And I'm looking at it and I'm like, Wow, what a majestic mountain. This thing looks like. Ah, And now what a crazy thought about what we're a ready getting to go do looking at this thing.
The helicopter didn't have enough fuel for a reconnaissance pass over the mountain, and they couldn't drop mortars on the waiting enemy for fear of harming Roberts. They would just have to go in themselves. Six men on the mountain and above them an air Force gunship ready a fire on the enemy. Once John gave the call, plus a
US Predator drone silently recording the action. As the Chinook landed, it was immediately slammed by enemy fire, just as the first helicopter had been, but this time the seals in John dove off the chopper into the knee deep snow. Over the roar of the helicopter's rotors, they could hear the sound of enemy machine guns.
I asked John, say, John, what do you have? He said, you know, I don't know. And then right away we started taking heavy fire from a bunker that was right in front of us.
John could see that the enemy had the advantage of the high ground and positions that were dug into the rocky, snowy terrain. Even without night vision goggles, enemy soldiers would be able to pick off the members of his team. John needed a protected spot to set up his gear and call in airstrikes. He decided that he had to get to the bunker and clear it, whatever the cost. So John didn't hesitate. He ran uphill towards the bunker, which was dug underneath a solitary tree. His heart was
pounding in the thin atmosphere. He held his MFOL rifle against his shoulder, firing and firing again. He was first up the mountain through the blackness into the fire, breaking a trail to the heavy inches of snow, never looking back. Slabinski followed behind.
As I look around, there's all these all these mozo flashes from everywhere, and I'm thinking there's a lot of people up here. There's well, it's snapping by our heads, like little snapping, and you can see puffs of snow coming up all around us.
Inside the makeshift bunker, two fighters sat in the dark. John materialized out of the night and shot them both. Slabinski joined him in the bunker. It provided some shelter, but shots were still blazing in from a second bunker twenty five feet away, strafing the two men and the four other seals on the mountain. Both John and Slabinsky fired back, centering the laser points of their rifles on
the muzzle flashes they saw in the darkness. Moving out of the bunker to expose themselves to danger again and again. Above them, that predator drone hovered invisible. Its pilot was fifteen hundred miles away. His role was to watch what was happening on the mountain and report what he saw to the gunship crew. The footage was grainy, just the
heat signatures of bodies moving through space. The pilot couldn't tell who was who, but the drone had captured the shapes of the men as they had exited the helicopter as they engaged the enemy. A silent witness to what was happening on Taka Gar Now just outside the bunker, an al Qaeda fighter charged to John from the right, firing. John went towards him out of the bunker. He shot his rifle and the fighter fell. But before John could sight another target, the sound of machine gun fire caught
the darkness. John was thrown backwards into the snow, shot twice in the torso. For Britz Slabinski, it was becoming clear that the mission's goal had to change. He had come to save one man, and now it seemed like he had lost another. He knew John was down. He was lying ten feet away outside of the bunker, but Slebinsky could see the laser of John's rifle pointing against the tree, rising and falling with his breath, and then John's laser stopped moving. Slobinsky concluded he must be dead.
In the meantime, the other seals were getting picked off in the dark, two of them seriously wounded. They had to retreat or Slobinsky was sure they would all end up like John.
I look around at all my guys again and I see there still heavy amounts of fire come in. I look over at John. I'm seeing no movement from John. And I realized that because we're out in the open life expectancy now, it's going to be measured, probably in second. So I make the command that we're going to reposition my force just over the side of the cliff.
The five remaining seals huddled together then retreated as quickly as they could, sliding down the snow and over the side of the ridge. They would group further down the mountain and call for reinforcements. It was five ten am, fifteen minutes into the mission. As soon as the sun rose, they would be in even more trouble, no longer able to hide in the dark. The Predator drone still harbored above. On his screen, its pilot could see the shape of
a still warm body under a tree. He watched as another group of figures came together below the bunker and then dropped one by one down the snowy ledge pick slated shapes moving in the pre dawn night. John Chapman had rushed to the bunker to save the seals on his team. Now he lay motionless and alone in the snow. For a moment, everything was quiet at the peak of Taco Gar, a freezing wind, a silent predator drone overhead.
But just five minutes later something changed. Back at the peak where those two bunkers were, the drone picked up movement.
The main element had withdrawn a couple hundred meters, but all of a sudden, at the original point there was an iron strobe active again.
At the top of Taco Gar, an infrared strobe worn by an American came alive. We'll be right back. John Chapman was lying in the snow, his legs crumpled beneath him, alone at the peak of Takregar. His team was certain he was dead. He had taken two gunshot wounds to his torso, but he was alive. Because John was alone, it's impossible to know what he was thinking, how he felt in those moments when he regained consciousness. Pain, certainly,
but also a jolt back to where he was. His purpose there to protect what remained of his team to move back into the safety of the bunker and to call for air support, as he had been trained to do. His frozen fingers must have fumbled with the radio he had strapped to his chest. He switched it to a battlefield common frequency, and then he spoke using his call sign, any station, any station, this is MAKO three zero Charlie
three kilometers away. His fellow combat controller, j Hill heard it and responded, but only static came back over the radio. John called again and again, but he never heard Jay's responses. It's not clear if they ever reached him. Anyway, he had bigger issues for one thing, the enemy now knew he was there for another. Once Slebinsky had left the peak, he had been able to call the air strikes to the top of Takergar, not realizing that John was alive
up there. John crouched in the bunker as the American gunship fired rounds down on the mountain. Undeterred, the enemy fighters stalked closer to John's position. The Predator drone hovered overhead, but to anyone watching it wasn't clear what it showed. It was just anonymous shapes moving on a screen. Two al Qaeda fighters rushed the bunker and John shot them.
He engaged another in hand to hand combat. Now, in addition to the two gunshot wounds, his face was battered, he had shrapnel in his arms, but still he fought on the sun slowly crept up above the horizon. His ammunition dwindled, and then just after six a m. John heard the rotors of a helicopter beating against the sky.
Slabinsky had called in a Quick Reaction Force or QRF to come to the aid of his remaining group of seals, But now this helicopter full of eighteen men was going to land right in the middle of the hornet's nest, just as the tube before it had. Major G. Brown was the combat controller on that Shinnuk. He remembers it clearly.
Sun was coming up.
It was just about dawn.
We did one pass over the mountain top, and on that second pass we began to flare to land.
John knew what would happen to that helicopter as soon as it got close, and he knew that he had to draw fire away from it. He was taking cover in that bunker, likely shaking from blood loss and exhaustion and exposure to the freezing temperatures, but he was still alive, and as long as he was alive, he was going to protect those men.
He knew the very immediate danger he was in.
Lieutenant Colonel Ken Rodriguez wasn't on tacker Gar, but he knew John who he was as a man and as an airman. He was John's commander in the Elite twenty fourth Special Tech Squadron.
He's already been wounded multiple times, and now he sees the helicopter, the quick reaction helicopter coming in, and he came out from cover and exposed himself to very accurate enemy fire. Now John's would never say I know for a fact I won't get through this. John was a very much I'll do whatever I can to get through this. But he knew in his hardest hearts. I'm convinced he knew what kind of danger he was exposing himself to.
The enormous risk that he placed himself in when he stepped out to defend that quick reaction for his helicopter and the lives of the men on board.
Roughly an hour after he had woken up alone on the peak of Takagar, John Chapman stood in the early morning light. He shouldered his rifle. Then he slid down the slope, legs in front of him, firing rounds in a desperate attempt to protect the helicopter. He watched as the Chinook was hit by an RPG. He fired the last of his ammunition, and then he was shot through the heart. He fell back onto the snow for the second time that morning. He was dead. Nobody on the
helicopter saw John fall. They weren't looking for him, after all, they believed he had died long before John did what he did invisibly. No one knew then what sacrifice he had made. It wasn't until later that they found out and realized what it meant.
He sacrificed himself for the for the q R AFT that came in.
It was almost the case that no one ever knew about John Chapman's one man's stand, We'll be right back. Ultimately, seven lives would be lost on tackle. Gar Neil Roberts, the first seal to follow that day, died before they reached him John Chapman and five men from the QRF. But the mountaintop would eventually be secured an operation and a conda would be considered a success. It fell to Canrodriguez to tell John's family, Valerie, Madison and Brianna, what
had happened. He went to that little house in North Carolina where John and his girls felt so safe.
When I went to Valerie's doorstep to tell her that John wasn't coming home, and I saw those two, those beautiful little girls, there were five and three times, I thought, yeah, they're good, you grow up without their daddy. I just I think that every time I might thank him John.
Both John Chapman and Britt Slabinski were awarded for their bravery on Taka Gar. Slabinsky was decorated with the Navy Cross, John with the Air Force Cross. He was honored for his fearless race across the snow to that first bunker, for eliminating the enemy there and protecting the seals of his team, all actions from before they were treated down the mountain. But after hearing about his incredible one man stand, you've got to be wondering, why not the medal of honor.
Here's why nobody knew that John Chapman had survived past that first time he was shot. There had been no eye witnesses to his final power long battle. So the Air Force Cross might have been the end of the story. Except in May of twenty fifteen, thirteen years after John's death, Deborhly James, then Secretary of the Air Force, read an.
Article The Air Force Times had a headline what's to take for an airman to be awarded the Medal of Honor? And they had various accounts of airmen who had distinguished themselves above and beyond the call of duty in combat, who had been awarded the second highest award, but not the Medal of Honor. And when I read about John Chapman and his exploits in March of two thousand and two in Afghanistan, I could not understand why this case, for example, didn't merit a higher level award.
So James ordered a review. She is, by her own admission, obsessed with fairness, and there were parts of the story it didn't make sense if John had been killed the first time he was shot. She wondered, did his heroism deserve something more? And she discovered the answer it did. The Air Force Cross had only honored half of John's story. Nobody had seen the rest of it, except for that drone.
The most important thing for me was there was drone footage, which, for whatever reason, was not reviewed at the time.
The drone footage was hazy. The person who had been monitoring at that day was thousands of miles from the action. At the time, it wasn't clear exactly what it showed, but James and the review board ran the footage through newly available software which could isolate pixel representations of people and track their movements.
We could see the moment that Chapman went down. We could see when the rest of the team withdrew from the mountain. The rest of the team we know, believed Chapman to be dead at that time, and certainly he was down, but we also know from that footage that Chapman got back up again and continued fighting while he was alone. So that drone footage just as well could have been DNA in a crime scene to me, But.
By now you know this isn't how Medal of Honors submissions usually work. Remember Alwen Cash. The Medal of Honor relies on eyewitness testimony, but in this case, John was alone. The only humans on tackle Guard to witness his one man's stand were enemy fighters, and Britt Slabinski was certain John was dead or he never would have left him.
I believe this was the first case ever in history that relied to a degree on forensic type evidence technical evidence. Every other Medal of Honor case heretofore was solely on Eyewitnes accounts.
Alongside the Joan footage, they scrutinized John's autopsy, which showed injuries that could only have been received after the rest of the sealed team departed. Jay Hill, the other combat controller, told them about hearing John's call sign again and again the stress in John's voice. Plus there was the fact that John had used up almost all of his ammunition, proof of a prolonged fight. James saw an obvious conclusion. What she didn't foresee was pushback.
The Special Operations community, much to my surprise, questioned that the technical evidence that we thought was the slam dunk proof that Chapman had survived the initial wounding, got back up and continued fighting. This went on and on and on for months. I came to believe over time that it was simply too hard for these other human beings who were representing people who had done the very best that they could do on the worst day of their life.
That they had left someone behind alive. I think they could not come to grips with that, and so they rejected that piece of the argument they believed and continued to say, we believe that Chapman was dead at the time we withdrew, and so without that new evidence, the package was stalling. Without their coordination, it was taking more time.
You can only imagine how hard it must have been for the Seals to think that they had left John there alone. Leave no man behind is an article of faith for the Seals. This new information changed the narrative in a way that was heroic for John but horrifying for the others who'd been there. And just to be clear, nobody second guest bittz Slobinski's decision to retreat from the top of Takergar.
I believe firmly that every single man on that hill made the very best decisions they possibly could while bullets are flying, while people are getting wounded, and to say anything other than that would be a miscarriage of what really went on.
Even John's mom agrees Johnny would have wanted them to do just that, to take their wounded off the mountain.
Deborly, James, who saw John's medal as her fight, who believed it was her duty as Secretary of the Air Force to honor all aspects of his bravery, couldn't believe the package was getting slowed down.
I thought that the desire to honor a fallen brother would overcome any other possible feelings that might be out there. I think the truth of the matter is they wanted to do both. They wanted to honor him, but they could not take that additional step of admitting a mistake. A mistake, as I said earlier, was honest, and it wasn't the fog of war. It was the whipping wind and snow of war and the uncertainty that comes in these situations. I don't fall to anybody for what they
did that day. I just wish they had been more supportive of getting this package through without controversy.
For John Chapman, James kept pushing for what she thought was fair and right, navigating the package to the hurdles of defensiveness and doubt, and finally, in August of twenty eighteen, President Donald Trump awarded John his Medal of Honor. But you can't imagine that the medal have mattered to John.
I believe John will hear.
He would say, every one that would have done the same thing as they're trained to do.
One of the great gifts of working on this podcast series has been getting to explore the extreme reaches of the human spirit, the exceptional bravery, as the military says, above and beyond the call of duty, exemplified by the Medal of Honor. It's interesting to me that so many
of these stories have happened in the dark. Henry Johnson battling at midnight against the German raiding party, Ted Rubin holding that North Korean ridge all night long, Jave Argus and his men in the Vietnamese cemetery, and now John Chapman alone in the dark attacker gar It didn't matter to John if his acts of bravery were seen, if
anyone knew about them. That wasn't the point. It never is Deborly, James would tell you that the Medal of hon is important because it teaches those in the military what they can achieve.
The stories of Medal of Honor recipients live on for decades and even centuries in the US military. Military students learn about these stories in school. These are stories that go down in the history of the services.
But stories like John Chapman's should matter to the rest of us for a different reason. Most people would probably assume that anyone in their right mind would stay in that bunker if they were wounded and outnumbered like John was. His story is proof that not everybody would. That being human can mean sacrificing yourself alone in the dark, with no hope of being famous or richly rewarded. Medal of
Honor recipients make exactly those kinds of choices. Only look at the official citations for each recipient, those short few paragraphs the President reads at the ceremony. You're left with a pretty unrelatable snapshot of an extraordinary moment in time. That's why I wanted to make this show. The Medal of Honor isn't meant to take these people and put them on an unreachable pedestal. It's meant as an inspiration challenge.
And by learning who the recipients were as people, what they went through, what they were like, you understand these aren't comic book heroes. These are human beings. Through the medal, its recipients stay alive in our collective memory, encouraging us forward in the same way that Valley believes that John lives on to their daughters.
His legacy will continues as long as you know they tell his story to their children and their children's children.
I mean, he will live forever.
Courage doesn't just happen on the battlefield. So many people all over the planet are bravely struggling alone, unseen, fighting their own battles in their own ways, overcoming incredible odds in circumstances that we can never fully appreciate or understand. That's why it matters that we bring these stories of
heroism out of the dark and into the light. With each one, we acknowledge a hero's service and their sacrifice, but we also acknowledge the strength that's within all of us, the potential to do better, to be better, and to make a difference, even if nobody can see what a difference you've made. Medal of Honor. Stories of Courage is written by Meredith Rollins and produced by Meredith Rollins, Costanza Gallardo,
and Izzy Carter. Our editor is Ben the Dafaffrey. Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorsky, Recording engineering by Nina Lawrence, fact checking by Arthur Gombert's Original music by Eric Phillips. The rest of our team includes Carl Ketel, Grete Cone, Christina Slomon, Sarah Nix, Nicole upden Bosch, Eric Sandler, Kerry Brody, Taly Emlin, and Jake Flanagan. Special thanks to series creator Dan McGinn to the Congressional Medal of Honor
Society and Adam Plumpton. I'm your Host Malcolin Babbo