Jim Garamone at the DoD News offers the below information:
WASHINGTON, May 24, 2018 —
Sitting in the White House reading the citation for the Medal of Honor doesn’t
give the real flavor of why retired Navy Master Chief Petty Officer and special
warfare operator Britt K. Slabinski (seen in the above and below photos) is receiving the award.
The nicely air conditioned
room with comfortable chairs, impeccable floors, historic artwork and gilt on
many surfaces isn’t right, somehow.
The dispassionate words on
the award talk of Slabinski’s heroism in assaulting bunkers, rallying his men,
and going back into the center of the firefight.
The White House is literally
half a world away from a mountain in Afghanistan in 2002, where Slabinski --
and America -- lost seven good men.
When the master chief talks
of the action, you realize he is reliving his time atop Takur Ghar -- a
10,000-foot mountain near Ghazni, on March 4, 2002. He is remembering his
decisions. He is remembering what he felt. And he is remembering his brothers
who were killed.
He speaks in present tense,
because in his mind’s eye. It is still happening.
‘I Was Just Doing My Job’
He believes he did nothing
special. “I was just doing my job that day,” Slabinski said during an
interview.
Slabinski -- then a senior
chief petty officer -- and his men were just supposed to set up an overwatch
position on the mountain to support the conventional forces in the valley
below. “Now the enemy gets a vote,” he said. “We plan, we train, we rehearse
and we rehearse some more for every possible contingency, but sometimes the fog
and friction of war is just out of your control and a leader has to adapt.”
The team was aboard an Army
MH-47 helicopter and as it was landing, well dug-in al-Qaida fighters opened
up. “When we land, the ramp goes down,” he said. “I’m standing on the very back
of the helicopter … and almost immediately take an RPG rocket to the side of
the aircraft. It goes off, fills the aircraft full of smoke and we are getting
shot up right away. There’s bullets flying through the aircraft the size of
your finger [from] 12.7 machine guns that were up there.”
The pilot was able to take
off, but the bird was wounded and experienced what Slabinski called “the worst
turbulence you could imagine.”
Those gyrations caused Navy
Petty Officer 1st Class Neil Roberts to fall off the ramp. The crew chief
grabbed Roberts’ pack, and the weight of the SEAL pulled him off the ramp, too.
But the crew chief was tethered into the aircraft and was able to get back in.
Roberts fell 10 feet into the meter-deep snow.
“It happens that fast,”
Slabinski said as he snapped his fingers.
He told the pilot that he had
lost a man, but with the chopper’s hydraulics shot out, there was no way the
bird could circle and retrieve him. “[The pilot] was flying a brick,” Slabinski
said. “It was basically a controlled crash into the enemy-held valley.”
The master chief assessed the
situation. “Now my mission originally was to support the overwatch, then my
teammate Neil fell out, and now I have a downed helicopter I have to deal
with,” he said.
Calling For Support
The first problem he dealt
with was the helicopter, and he called in a second aircraft to take the crew
and team to a safe place. Once there, Slabinski was able to focus his attention
on Neil.
The information he received
was Roberts was alive. “I knew there was a superior enemy force up there and
they had heavier weapons than I had,” he said.
The enemy, the cold, the
altitude -- “Everything that could be stacked against us, was stacked against
us going back, and I had the feeling that this was a one-way trip,” he said. “I
knew though, that if I go now, there’s a chance I could rescue Neil. I knew if
I tried to develop a battle plan more on my terms, it would certainly be
better, but I knew Neil didn’t have that time.”
The weight was on Slabinski’s
shoulders. “I remember sitting in the helicopter,” he said. “The [rotors are]
turning, it’s cold, trying to sort through the tactical piece of it … and this
thought keeps coming back to me: If I go now what’s the cost going to be versus
the cost if I wait. If you are the leader and you have peoples’ lives that you
are responsible for, the decisions don’t come easy.”
This was Slabinski’s
loneliest moment. He was sitting in the chopper with a headset on and people
are talking to him. He was thinking of all the tactical problems and the lives.
“And this thought kept coming back to me, and it’s the first line of the Boy
Scout Oath … ‘On my honor, I will do my best,’” said Slabinski, who attained
the rank of Eagle Scout at his hometown troop in Northampton, Massachusetts
“The only thing that is in the back of my mind is, ‘On my honor I will do my
best, On my honor I will do my best, On my honor I will do my best.’
“That’s when I said, ‘I’m
gonna go do this.’”
The master chief assigned his
men jobs, and the pilot of the first aircraft, Army Chief Warrant Officer Al
Mack, went up to Slabinski and told him he would be flying them back in the new
MH-47, even though he had just survived a harrowing experience with the first
helicopter.
There was no other place to
land, so the team had to go right back to the place the first bird took the
fire. As the chopper took off, it got quiet for Slabinski and he thought of his
son, who was 6 years old at the time. “I remember saying, ‘I love you. Sorry
for what’s to come. Be great,’” he said. “Then I put it in another room in my
brain and went on with my duties.”
Enemy Fire
This Chinook also took fire
coming in to the landing area, and as soon as the ramp went down, the team went
off the back of the ramp. Two men went to the right, two to the left and the
master chief and Tech. Sgt. John Chapman, an Air Force combat controller, went
out together.
Slabinski and Chapman were
hit by a burst of automatic weapons fire. “The burst hit John and he went
down,” Slabinski said. “The bullets from the same burst went through my clothes
on each side, and I jumped behind a rock.”
The belt-fed weapon kept
firing at them. “I looked for John and he is lying in a very odd position, and
I look to my other guys and they are engaged with another dug-in position and
the two to my left are engaged there. There are enemy muzzle flashes on three
sides.”
There is no cover, and
Slabinski tosses two grenades at the bunker, but the position is too well dug
in. He looks to his men and sees Chapman still in the same odd position and the
others engaging the enemy. His M60 gunner is next to me. “I have a 40mm grenade
launcher … and I have six grenades,” he said. “I’m too close to the big bunker
because they won’t go off. They have to spin to arm.”
Firefight Continues
He fired at the farther
bunkers and silenced those, but the big bunker remains a deadly problem. He has
the M60-gunner fire on the bunker and he wants to charge to the bunker to clear
it under the cover of that automatic fire. Before he could do that, a grenade
flies out of the bunker and explodes right in front of the barrel of the M60,
wounding the gunner.
Slabinski again assesses the
situation. “The gunner is down. John hasn’t moved and my other two guys are
still engaged in contact,” he said. “The plan in my head isn’t working so I
have to do something different.”
He decided to get his small
band out of direct fire. As he is doing that another SEAL was hit in the leg
from the same machine gun Slabinski was trying to take out. “I sent the wounded
over first and I crawled over to John, looking for some sign of life from John
and didn’t get anything,” he said.
The place he chose to seek
shelter from the fire was just about 30 feet away over the side of the
mountain.
Mortar Fire
Slabinski called for support
from an AC-130 gunship to hit the bunkers. At the same time as the aircraft was
hitting the mountain he noticed shell fragments were landing around the team.
Slabinski thinks at first it is the AC-130, but it is from an enemy mortar that
is ranging his position.
He moves again to a more
protected area and now the U.S. Army Ranger quick reaction force is coming in.
The first chopper is hit and crashes on the top of the mountain. Slabinski
contacted the second bird and it lands on another spit of land and the Rangers
work their way to the SEAL position and attack up the mountain to secure the
top.
The master chief can’t move
his wounded to the top of the mountain, so he moved to a place he could secure
and await medevac, which came that night.
Estimates of the number of
al-Qaida fighters on the top of that mountain range between 40 and 100. They
had heavy weapons galore with automatic machine guns, mortars, RPGs and
recoilless rifles. It was the headquarters for al-Qaida operating against U.S.
forces engaged in Operation Anaconda. The SEAL team went in to try to rescue
Roberts with six men.
Footage taken by a remotely
piloted vehicle and examined later showed that Chapman was not dead. The
technical sergeant regained consciousness and engaged the enemy killing two of
them -- one in hand-to-hand combat. “I was 100 percent convinced that John was
dead,” Slabinski said. “I never lost track of John.”
He never would have left the
airman on that mountain, he said, if he thought for an instant that Chapman was
alive.
For his actions that day,
Slabinski received the Navy Cross, the nation’s second-highest award for valor.
As part of then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s directive to the services to
re-examine all of the valor awards beginning in 2001, the Navy recommended
upgrading that award to the Medal of Honor. The master chief -- who retired
from the Navy in 2014 -- received a call from President Donald J. Trump in
March telling him of the decision.
The master chief is
conflicted about the award. He believes he was just doing his job and still
feels the loss of the seven men -- Navy, Army and Air Force -- he served with
that day. “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about them,” he
said. “If I could give up this medal to have them back, I would.”
