On May 7 , the White House announced that President Donald Trump would award a retired SEAL Team 6 sniper the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest decoration for battlefield valor. Normally, the presentation of the Medal of Honor is a solemn and meaningful recognition of bravery and heroism. But the announcement of the award for Britt Slabinski — and the concurrent decision to give the same award to John Chapman, a deceased Air Force combat controller — came after a yearslong campaign to recognize disputed events 16 years ago on a remote mountain in Afghanistan. The awards have exposed a rift in the special operations community, a long-running argument pitting the Air Force against the Navy SEALs. More significantly, the decision to award a Medal of Honor to Slabinski represents the enduring failure of the SEALs, the Pentagon, Congress, and the White House to reckon with the dark history of SEAL Team 6 in the post-9/11 wars. All these authorities have refused to conduct any meaningful or robust oversight of a group of elite commandos who have committed war crimes abroad and gone to great lengths to cover them up.

On March 3, 2002 , a small SEAL Team 6 reconnaissance team led by Slabinski landed atop Takur Ghar, a 10,000-foot peak above the Shah-i-Kot valley in eastern Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border. The mission was part of the U.S. military’s Operation Anaconda, a multi-day effort to squeeze out and kill the last large group of Al Qaeda militants and Taliban fighters hiding in the valley. As it attempted to land, the helicopter took fire from Al Qaeda fighters, and SEAL Neil Roberts fell from the back of the helicopter. The helicopter was heading back to a nearby base when Slabinski and his team realized they had lost a teammate. For two hours, SEAL Team 6 and officers from the Joint Special Operations Command scrambled a rescue force to recover Roberts. Again their helicopter took fire as it landed near the top. Slabinski and his team, including John Chapman, rushed out amid small arms fire from the Al Qaeda militants. The team split and Chapman was hit two minutes after engaging the militants. With additional teammates severely wounded, and believing Chapman was dead, Slabinski ordered his SEAL team to retreat down the mountain. A quick reaction force, consisting mostly of Army Rangers, then engaged in a pitched battle for control of Takur Ghar, as Slabinski called in airstrikes from his position down the side of the mountain. Ultimately, Roberts, Chapman, and five others were killed over the course of the battle, which became known as Roberts Ridge.

Photo: U.S. Air Force

These details are largely agreed upon. Chapman and Slabinski both received service crosses, the military’s second-highest award. After Roberts’s body was recovered, the military determined that he had been mutilated, a horrific act that led SEAL Team 6 operators to engage in a cycle of vengeance against enemy fighters in both Afghanistan and Iraq. From practically the moment Slabinski and his team returned to Bagram Air Base, others in the special operations community questioned whether he had erred in his assessment that Chapman was dead and retreated with a member of his team still alive. In 2016, after the Pentagon began reassessing silver stars and service crosses awarded during the war on terror, the Air Force put together forensics and drone video that they claimed showed Chapman got up after Slabinski and the SEALs retreated and continued to fight, alone and outnumbered, before succumbing to his wounds. The SEALs disagreed, and Rear Adm. Timothy Szymanski, the commanding officer of Naval Special Warfare, pushed for an upgrade for Slabinski’s service cross. Both current and former military members say the inter-service fight between the SEALs and the Air Force special operations command has been ugly and unbecoming. According to a Navy officer, the SEALs made several efforts to block an upgrade for Chapman, infuriating the Air Force. Presentations of the Medal of Honor are almost always fraught with questions about whether the awards are handed out to make those involved in operations feel better about a loss of life. There’s “always some kind of solace sought in decorating someone with the award,” said one of Slabinski’s former leaders at SEAL Team 6, who spent more than 30 years in Special Operations. “A lot of it has to do with politics and rank and stature and always, in my opinion, the more dynamic and public the screw-up, the more likely it is that someone is going to get highly decorated.” Another of Slabinski’s former teammates said 25 years of experience as a SEAL convinced him that the award system for valorous action has little integrity. “One of my commanders told me point-blank: The bigger the fuck-up, the bigger the award.” The retired SEAL leader, who studied the battle at Roberts Ridge extensively for the military and discussed the events with Slabinski, said the issue was not whether Chapman or Slabinski were deserving of a medal upgrade, but why the military was motivated to extend that honor so many years later. “This is the madness of the Medal of Honor,” he said. “Rarely is it granted when things go well.” By awarding both Chapman and Slabinski the Medal of Honor, the Pentagon presents an impossible version of what happened on Roberts Ridge. By awarding it to Chapman, the military endorses the view that Chapman survived his initial injuries and fought with valor after Slabinski and his SEAL team retreated down the mountain. If that’s true, then Slabinski left his teammate behind, violating the first rule of special operations. By awarding Slabinski the Medal of Honor, the military essentially ignores the Chapman narrative and supports the notion that Slabinski’s actions that day were heroic. Both versions of what happened at Takur Ghar cannot be true. But the argument over how Slabinski determined Chapman was dead, and when Chapman may have died, is really a distraction from the true significance of what came down from Takur Ghar after the battle for Roberts Ridge.

Photo: U.S. Navy

No one pushed for the upgrade more than Szymanski, according to both current and former Navy officers. Members of SEAL Team 6 have told me they believe the award is meant, in large part, to help validate and cover up a series of ultimately fatal decisions taken by Szymanski and other senior SEAL Team 6 officers. As the SEAL Team 6 operations officer at Bagram Air Base, Szymanski was the mission planner for Slabinski’s reconnaissance team. Szymanski and his superior officers effectively limited Slabinski’s options, forcing him to land on what they later discovered was a well-established enemy position, rather than allowing the team to land lower on the mountain and clandestinely patrol the top. The former unit leader who served several years with Szymanski said he had no doubt that his former teammate pushed for the upgrade to assuage his own guilt about putting Slabinski and his team in what became a disastrous position. Slabinski’s military career did not end on March 4, 2002. He spent another 12 years in the military, almost all of it at SEAL Team 6, where he ended up as a senior enlisted leader. For many, he was a legendary SEAL. Inside the secret world of what the military refers to as a “Tier 1” unit, however, Slabinski is part of another legacy, one which also stems from what happened during Roberts Ridge. That legacy involves Szymanski as well. In the days after Takur Ghar, Slabinski and others in SEAL Team 6 sought “payback” for Roberts, Chapman, and the other casualties. Slabinski later told author Malcolm MacPherson, in a taped interview obtained by The Intercept, that a few days after the battle, his team ambushed and killed nearly two dozen Al Qaeda fighters headed toward the Pakistan border. After the militants had been killed, Slabinski described a form of “therapy”: I mean, talk about the funny stuff we do. After I shot this dude in the head, there was a guy who had his feet, just his feet, sticking out of some little rut or something over here. I mean, he was dead, but people have got nerves. I shot him about 20 times in the legs, and every time you’d kick him, er, shoot him, he would kick up, you could see his body twitching and all that. It was like a game. Like, ‘hey look at this dude,’ and the guy would just twitch again. It was just good therapy. It was really good therapy for everybody who was there.