Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Takur Ghar and the Fog of War vs. the Facts | Mitch Hall & Brian Bloom | Ep. 470

Episode Date: September 20, 2026

Mitch Hall served in Naval Special Warfare, Brian Bloom came from film and games. Neither of them set out to spend six years on a single morning in March of 2002. They did anyway. Their project, Ground Truth, is built on seventy-five interviews, a trip back to the summit of Takur Ghar, the full unedited Predator and AC-130 footage, the radio traffic, the jock logs, and a forensic team that reconstructed the terrain and every camera orbit down to the inch. Part one of three this week. The episode lays out the uncontested account first. A friendly fire incident that almost ended Operation Anaconda before it started. A reconnaissance element pushed onto the tallest mountain in the valley on a compressed timeline, without the delay it requested, and told the summit was empty. A SEAL out of a helicopter under fire. A crash landing miles off target. A second attempt with no armor, no rucks, and ten minutes of fuel. Four Rangers killed on and around a ramp as the sun came up. Seven Americans dead by the end of the day. What follows is the part that has never been public. The viral video most people cite as proof is nine minutes assembled from an hour and forty-nine minutes of raw footage, out of sequence, with a closing sequence taken from four minutes after everyone agrees the fight was over. The technology credited with reopening the medal case is examined by name. So is the bunker, the two fighters said to be inside it, and the decision to pull air support with the quick reaction force on final. Two Medals of Honor came out of this mountain. So did a feud between two branches that has run for more than twenty years. Ground Truth Documentary: https://www.groundtruthdoc.com/ Today's Sponsors:  Montana Knife Company:  https://www.montanknifecompany.com LMNT:  https://www.drinklmnt.com

Good morning, everybody. If you follow the show, you know that I don't really do intros to episodes. I haven't for quite some time. I did many years ago and then I've just started letting the episodes fire off and right into the conversation. Today, for this week, we're going to make an exception because this week is a little bit different. There is going to be a Monday episode today, obviously, a Wednesday episode and a Friday episode. Essentially, they are all interconnected and they are all on one topic. And we are going to be discussing at length and in-depth Roberts Ridge. In total, it's about eight hours, perhaps eight and a half. And I just didn't want to put that out as a single contiguous episode because I didn't

know if anybody has time to consume that level of content. So today, specifically, we're going to be talking about everything up to the QRF with the Rangers with one chalk landing on the X and another one landing offset a little bit coming in. And then we're going to have a break. And on Wednesday, we are going to chat with two rangers, one that survived. I can't even begin to describe the evolution of landing on the X and what happened there in the casualties and fatalities that occurred. And then another one that landed offset and then hiked up, combined 16 hours on the mountaintop. And then Friday, we will close it up with Mitch and Brian again.

They present the rest of what it is they wanted to present. And then we leave it back with the audience. Clean up a little admin for me. One thing that I do at the end of most episodes is I'll ask people, where can you be found? And I forgot to do so for this episode because we had been talking for so long. Mitch and Brian are working on. They have not yet published a documentary. It is called The Ground Truth or Ground Truth.

Or Ground Truth. And you can find it or will be able to find it at Groundtruth.com. That is when it is live. I believe, as of the time of the recording, and this was recorded two weeks ago, that they said it was going to be about two to three months from them. So sometime later in 26 near the tail end of the year. What else? I think that's about it. I'll put that in the show notes, obviously,

and perhaps at the tail end of the episodes as well. Other than that, this is a difficult conversation to have. I already know up front that I'm going to accuse of being an apologist for the SEAL community and the SEAL brand. I hope that people realize, based off the volume of content that I have put out in the conversations that I have had. That isn't the case. I care more than anything about integrity and the truth.

I, and we open with this in the conversation, but I'm going to reinforce it right now. I knew that Mitch and Brian were working on this. They offered me the opportunity to see the material before they came on the show, and I declined because I wanted to be presented with the material in real time and ask the questions in real time as if I was seeing it for the first time,

which I was. I considered that to be much more impartial and much more fair, if you will. And this is going to upset people. And that's okay. Some conversations should. Accus me of what you will.

Think what you want. Believe what you want. But regardless of how this conversation went, whatever it was showing, whatever evidence pointed in that direction, that's the way it would have gone, whether that made the seal teams look good, bad, everywhere in between.

I wish I could say that war is precise. It's not. It's quite ugly. and most of the time, it's not a choice between a good decision and a bad decision. You're choosing between two shit sandwiches and which one do you want to take the bigger bite out of. With that, these episodes are already long enough. Let me go ahead and shut my trap and we can get into it. Again, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of this week.

They are all tied together. Enjoy. Smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. I was thinking about this. in the effort of ultimate transparency and honesty, we have to start with, because we're going to get picked apart regardless.

For sure. Like I'll talk about before the episode comes out, this is going to be a three-part series. We'll talk for a couple of hours. We're going to bring in some Rangers who are involved, and then we'll talk for a couple of hours tomorrow. It'll encompass a week. People will look at us, specifically, probably you and I,

and they will say, some people will say that we are apologists for the Navy or that we are biased. We all have our own bias, which I think is fair to acknowledge, but I think as long as you can see through or around your bias, you're going to be okay. But also, we've known each other,

the three of us, for quite some time. It's like 10 years. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You were at Blue Squadron for a period of time. I was a Gold Squadron for a period of time. We both met Brian working on,

wait for it, everyone. The most secretive squadron at Development Group, which is the call of duty squadron. No, it was like the first time I ever got to wear ping pong balls and understand motion capture. But you guys hit me up about talking about this. And in the conversation, you asked if I wanted the information up front.

And I said no, because although, yes, I come from the Navy, and I knew peripherally that you guys were working on this. And you guys have looked at this topic for six years, which is a tremendous amount of time. And you guys can all unpack who you've, talked to and all of that. But I said no to getting the information up front because I am aware of Roberts Ridge. I know Britt Slabinsky not well. Last time I saw him of all places was walking back from Point to Hawk in Normandy on the 80th anniversary. I was walking along like, hello, Britt,

how are you? We talked for like two minutes of all places to run into him. He deployed with us in 2003. So I have a brief awareness. Obviously, I wasn't there. None of us were there for the event. So I don't have any firsthand knowledge of it. I have heard him directly tell this story one time when we were overseas in 2023. So it was pretty fresh from him before the invasion actually began. But other than that, I have not spent a lot of time doing any research on this.

And the reason I didn't want the information is I want to give you guys the opportunity to present this. And then I can look at it cold and actually ask. questions as somebody who is receiving it for the first time. Yeah, I was in the Navy. Good. I was at the same command. I, as I have said, on almost every, I'll use the Rob O'Neill and Matt Bissonette episodes or even the Red Ring one. I care more about the truth and integrity of the SEAL community than anything else. So yeah, I might be biased because I come from the Navy, but that doesn't mean that I don't believe in accountability and telling the truth, even if that hurts the SEAL community. And I don't know what data you guys have, because you've looked at this

for six years. Yeah. And so we'll just play it like that. For people who think that we can't have an objective conversation about this, I leave you two thinking that way. For everybody else, maybe give it a listen. And hopefully we can find some semblance of reality on the ground versus what people feel about the topic. Because as an outsider, and I have the internet like everybody else,

oftentimes what I see is people talking about the facts of what happened that day, but what they are inserting are actually feelings because they haven't spent the time or probably didn't have access to the people that you have for the past six years looking at this. My first question for you, well, first off, pull the microphone closer to your face. I knew you do that.

Just let it travel with you. Yeah. Why this topic? For you two, why this topic? How did you guys, what did you, we were doing a Zoom call, Brian? I think you said you, over a thousand days of looking at this.

Why? Why this one? even closer. Uncomfortable. Touching with your lips. Your Percy little. We knew, I knew at least initially

when the topic of this came up. I knew there were things, the intuition was there were things that were wrong with the story. There were people arguing about it and usually when people are arguing about something for so long, there's something missing.

There's a missing piece and missing bit of information. And we started talking about, I think someone even asked us, you know, like what's a story that hasn't been told? or to hold properly. And I brought this up.

And that was in 2016-ish. And we hadn't really started the project. And it was just like, we know there's something to do here. We don't know if we're actually going to do it. Yeah, it was really before the controversy hit the kind of public in terms of awareness. And for clarity, what we're talking about is that I'll call it the Medal of Honor controversy. Which was pitched. And again, this is somebody not involved in any of this.

What it sounded like was the Navy is a, attempting to stand in the way of the Medal of Honor being awarded to John Chapman. So those are the two individuals or the two medals of honor, which have been awarded at this point and the controversy surrounding that. That is the topic that we're talking about. Right, right. And so, and we will level set here in a minute and just try to run through the entire story. So, you know, some people will have some familiarity with the story. Yeah. But we will bridge that gap in here. But I'd love to say part of the problem with this topic is that it feels like that's the topic. And ultimately it is that's at the juicy center of it. But it's

really the story is bigger than all that always should have been. And that's part of the myopic view that it boils down to only those two things is part of what perpetuates them. Okay. But to make the point about the 2015-16 kind of entrance into this idea, this is an incredible war story without the controversy. Yes. If nothing happened after 2018, this is stuff of movies. They made movies of lesser stories. And this was early on too. Yeah. Yeah.

So this is an incredible war story. There's tons to learn from it. Now there's even more to learn from it since 2018 on happened with all this controversy. So the story we're going to tell is going to go very much against the grain of the public perception, what the public understands of the story right now. We want everyone to hear us out. We're going to show, not tell. We think that this part of what's happened over the last, say, eight years or so, seven years is that people go on shows, podcasts. write books, whatever they're doing.

And it's hearsay. It's anecdotal. But what we're bringing here today, what we'll be on the screen, what we'll discuss at length, is proof, is, you know, radio comms, videos, predator feeds, gunship feeds.

Documents. Documents, stuff. It's never been seen before. Referenced, but never been seen. So we hope people hear us out. And, you know, we know stories stories serve us in some way. It's hard to change your mind when you've invested in a story

and it's been going one way for so long so we understand that it'll take a minute. They'll hear this, they'll have to process it and then eventually, hopefully come around to what's actually true about this story, what's real about this story.

It's a heavy task. Yeah, it is. So I think we get into the actual kind of the wave tops of the story I feel like this is going to be a 10 or 15 minute ordeal while we just go through what's not contested about the story, just the major muscle moves of what happened

with Operation Anaconda. I think the story itself at a baseline. I mean, again, you and I were both at that command. I'm not even familiar with soup to nuts. I mean, I am familiar with, and I think most people are, the emphasis is on what happened on that ridge line. But let's do it.

Yes, do it. Let's do it. You know, just to say what this is. Yeah. Right. So we were a map the space. Chico Valley, this is Dr. Gar here. There's a lot of other important landmarks and all this,

but boiling the story down to this again. Yeah, that's the issue. But just to say it, there was a much wider operation going on down here called Operation Anaconda. And, you know, this, what happened on this mountain top is now kind of what everyone remembers about this story. So let's do it. Let's get into this.

Fire away. So 9-11, you know, we're about the time this airs, you know, I think will be past the 25 year anniversary, but... Only if you talk into the microphone. Only, you can only understand, you can only understand this story. You'll get it. Just take it with you. You can only understand this story if you, and be fair to the people and the participants in the story, if you attempt to remember the feelings and the vibe of post-9-11.

You're talking about just the days after? Days and months. Well, the days after was the most cohesive I've ever felt our nation being. Yes. And the months after that slipped, which is, I think. I think normal, but there's still pictures of people standing around the block from military recruiting stations. Right.

We were all Americans for a matter of months, and the politics crept in. But if you were in the military in the 90s going into 9-11, you really didn't do much. You know, there were a couple blips. Maybe we call them intra-wars. There was Panama. There was Grenada, a couple other small things. But for the most part, we were in a peacetime state. No one was seasoned.

no one had pulled the trigger in anything, no one had dropped a bomb on much. And now this thing happens, and here we go. You know, I think a lot of people hadn't even heard of al-Qaeda or Taliban. Right. Right? So this whole thing was new.

We're going to this place where, you know, no one's been for a long time. You know, Russia had their experience there. And now it's our turn. And so we convene in, in Afghanistan, I was fortunate enough to be the first pump over there.

So OEF1. And by the time we left in December, we got there in October, by the time we left in December, the general feelings were, and you were gold. I think I came back over Christmas. Right, right, right.

This is 01, right, right. I had just moved to VB to start Green Team in O2. So the sentiment was, by the time we got back, and I think I even said this to our buddy, like I don't even think Gold Squad and we'll get over here. This thing's done.

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Don't mess about. Back to the show. You know, it's just a matter of finding Minnaud and Zawahiri, Mullah Omar. But the war is done. Taliban's gone. Al-Qaeda is scattered for the most part. And if you remember December of that year, an operation called Toribora, right,

where we thought we had them. You know, that was mostly a Kag-led operation. and he got away. And moving into the next year, Operation Anaconda came to come into focus and seemed like it was going to be the next attempt and maybe the last attempt before he went to Pakistan to grab bin Laden, Zawahiri, Omar.

At the same time, a new concept is being formed called AFO, Advanced Force Operations. And that's being led by guy by the name of Pete Blaber. He has some teams that he's putting out in some of these mountains. Well, not yet. Let me back up. Their job is to go look for the next frontier. Where is this war going?

And they're going to be there first, and then they're going to bring the rest of the machine, the war machine there. And so at some point in February of 2002, the Shaiqo Valley was mentioned. And it was mentioned because they thought they saw troop movements. They thought they saw, you know, tall people and back then every tall person was bin Laden. I remember this.

Right? And that was the guy we needed. That's how we end this thing. Because we get him and we could probably pack it up. That's what we thought. And so, a thing called trash int. Trash intelligence. Amazing.

Was mentioned by an Intel analyst and they thought they saw trash piles moving across this valley, potentially headed to Pakistan. When you say this, you're talking about actual garbage piles? Garbage piles. And by the amount of garbage, by the size of the garbage, they're like, but this is this many people. Indicative of a number of people moving to various positions across the valley to either hold them. All right. First time I've heard that term, but okay. Trash it, yeah. And so, and so this thing started to come into focus in mid-February and Pete started putting in, Pete Blabber started putting in teams on top of some of these mountain tops,

some of these key terrain features. And, um, then the 101st, now conventional force is going to come in. And what's hatched is a plan that's going to have a Afghan-led force push up against the, you know, whatever enemy they find in the valley over here, and push them against the 101st. And what they were going to do is cut off all these lanes right here. See, all these, this is one's called Ginger Pass. They all had names.

And what they believed was those were roots to Pakistan. So Operation Anticona, the premise of it was Don't let Bin Laden or any of those guys get away again Like in December. So they were trying to push everybody towards the conventional force Yeah, hammer and an anvil scenario. Yeah, so again, just a reminder of everyone, the urgency, the vibe, the feeling, the leaning forward, the aggressiveness from everyone

Because every single unit element team in this space was trying to get some because why not? Like this is it. Like this is what we may not be back here a year. For clarity, that was the same vibe we had because I was at OIF one. Yeah. Let's just say if we had been able to polymarket bet on whether we would be there for 20 years or one, we'd all be broke. Right.

Yeah. It was the exact same vibe. I think out of the 75 people we interviewed, almost everyone thought this would be over quickly, one, I believe it was Jimmy, said he always believed it would go much further. Why did we ever think that? What? That it would be a short one? That we would be able to do something that a Russian occupied military was not.

Why did we ever think that? No idea. We were unseasoned on practice. Didn't know what we were really doing. Well, one of the things that this really boils down to and again, I did not serve, but I'm enthusiast, certainly. And I would say that we were talking about this off-camera before, the peacetime to wartime transition.

I think there's a factor in all of this is feeling like this is my chance. I don't think it can be over-emphasized either, even at the highest levels of the tier one units, which is a term that people are familiar with now that I don't think they were back then. Correct. Even at that level,

their incredible capability, incredible competency, but there was no currency when it came to actual combat operations. At the highest level of U.S. military in any unit, I remember a guy who had a BV at T. five when I first checked in. He was a god. Probably a god. Yeah. He got it in Somalia.

If he would have asked me to lay naked on coals and crawl a quarter mile, like, yes, I will absolutely do that. But that was his combat exposure and experience was measured in days. Yeah. Over in Somalia. So it just, the force. Not sustained combat. But those days loom large is the is the message. Yes, but it just, they did loom large. And it's just so important for people listening to understand that even at the highest levels, it was a, it was a, it was a conception. job for careers, then it switched over it to being a practical job. And there is a learning curve associated with that. And it was fast. And I think we did a very good job of adapting. I think so too. But it has to be remembered where the U.S. military's capability in currency was back in 2002.

And it's not, if you look at it through the lens of 2026 now, it's it unrecognizable. Right. But we, you know, we are quickly headed back to that. Like we are, you know, We're going back to peace time. Yep. We're out. A bunch of guys are out. All that experience is gone. Yep.

And eventually, at this, you know, if this continues, there will be no one who will pull the trigger on anything or dropped a bomb on anything. Yeah. All right. So let's get back to our story here. So now we're approaching early March 2002. Operation Anaconda is happening. It's official.

And again, it's a Afghan-led force. General Zia, General by the name of General Zia, is leading the Afghan force that's going to push them into the 100 first over on those hills and mountains. What happens next is pretty unfortunate, but as Zia's forces are coming in, there's a gunship in the air. Of course there is. And it misidentifies this convoy that is led by an SF group with, I forget exactly how many Afghan forces, but I think it's in the hundreds. And there's a friendly fire incident. Which this speaks to directly what we were just talking about. Right. Nobody would ever intend to do that, but an environment where you're untested, unproven, we've got to get it all in right now.

And things like this do happen. I think they happen less as the time went on, but it speaks to the exact point we were just talking about. And there's a story, and we're going to put some pins. As we tell this story, again, we're telling the uncontroversial story,

the thing that everyone agrees happened. Because you could stop here and talk about this. Yeah, we could literally stop here and talk for an hour or two. But we're going to put a pin in this moment, this friendly fire incident is pivotal in the entire story. General Zia's forces pack up and go home. They're like, we're out of here.

This isn't what we signed up. for to get killed by our partner force. AFO is having some success. Actually, a lot of success. They're taking out DISH positions, you know, anti-aircraft gun positions along some of these OPs. We mentioned the anvil before the anvil is gone.

Right, yeah. Bring it back. And are they just calling fire? The AFO positions are just to call for five. Yeah, you know, it's small, three, four, five-man teams. One of them is from our command, but the others are Caglet elements. and but they're having major success

and there's some conversations that happen that get this thing back online but basically because of that friendly fire incident Operation Atta Konda was about to be canceled the biggest operation since Vietnam that's a true statement was about to be canceled because of this friendly fire incident

okay the sorry I just lost my train of thought here so they're back in the fight and what's determined is that they need one more OP installed and that's a blue element

a TIF, you know, our command and they want to put it on what's the tallest mountain here. They already have a bunch of other teams in here but they will now want to occupy the tallest mountain and that is they send in what's the call sign MAKO-3-0

led by Britt Slavinsky. It's a six-person team attached to that team is a combat controller named John Chapman and they are pushed over to Gardez, the safe house that AFO's headquartered at

and against some against the wishes of AFO they were told to insert that night you know all these other teams had days weeks to acclimate to figure out what this terrain is

but this team is pushed in in a single night. Slab and the team asked for a 24-hour role because what happens next is the time might starts getting compressed. They have a flame out with one of the helicopters. You have a major operation here, lots of moving parts, B-52's coming through, dropping, you know,

carpet bombing shit, and helicopter problems and where they were supposed to go, they were supposed to offset right over here, and march up the mountain, take their time, take all night, and see if they can occupy the top of that mountain. All right? Take all night.

I'm looking at that map. Take all week. Yeah. Well, surprisingly, in the daytime, this will come into the discussion later on. And the Rangers did it. Yeah, you could actually get up this mountain in about two or three hours. Just so you know Rangers are way better hiking up things than seals, just for clarity. Probably.

Yeah. Okay. So the timeline is getting compressed. Running out of darkness. They're running out of darkness, right, to get into place. They want to, you know, we don't want to do this in the daytime. And so the request for a 24-hour rule is sent in and it's denied. And we'll get into why that's denied, why we think it was denied.

And now they are forced with the option of just flying straight to the mountaintop with an MH-47. Al-Mack was on your show. And, well, it's told persons of that story. It's an amazing story just from the one-stitching. 60th point of view. Yeah. But it's not ideal. We will touch on this later as to why it's not ideal, but I think some of it's obvious.

But they are then... Make sure I don't forget anything here. They're told the mountain is clear. Yeah, they're told the mountain is clear. Was that based off of satellite imagery? Was that based off of ISR? This gets really interesting. And, you know, without, again, this is another full stop kind of...

Well, you put a pin in it and come back to a few lines. We were. We were. But they... It's important to know. it's not as simple as it either was or wasn't or where did the intel come from, but the fact is they went in believing that the mountain was clear. There had been, we'll talk much more about this, but more than one AC130 in the air. Part of the problem here is the offset. Part of the problem is the offset point. Yep. And then the fact that they were going to land on top maybe hadn't been properly communicated. So, Well, also even, you know, C-130 is going overhead or ISR, the angle that they're looking at, snow on the ground, whatever it may be. If you're looking at it from directly above, if you're satellite imagery, it looks different than if you're cutting those angles.

Like, there's a whole lot that goes into that. Yeah. But knowing what we know now, or even knowing what we knew hours later in this story, it was occupied. And it is hard to imagine them missing all the people that were up there. Right, it's key terrain. Yep. You know, most of your audience knows what that means. Those who don't, you know, that means both sides want it.

If it's good for the enemy, it's good for the friendlies. It's high ground, which has worked since the days of human beings fighting with sticks and stones. Yep. Okay, so 24-hour role is denied. Everyone agrees on that. That is not actually a point of controversy. And here they come. And at about 2 a.m. in the morning, give or take, or I'm going to be religious with my

times here. They direct insert on top of the, on top of the mountain and are immediately hit by an RPG. And with the image on the screen, obviously that is not the helicopter. Correct. But you'd be talking to the peak just to the left of the helicopter on the ground. Is that what they're, basically the, generally that's probably. Generally the LZs, there are three helicopters in this story. Yeah. All of them land somewhere. Okay. Around here. It's actually probably really fortunate. They didn't go for that high ground position up until the pilot's left. Right. At least they had a little bit of, you know, of an angle to support them there. Not that that's an optimal position to land, but...

Okay, so to continue, what happens is like they get hit by an RPG and New Roberts falls out of the helicopter. Now, let's just talk about what falls mean. We don't know. Nobody knows exactly what happened there. There's some books that say it was hydraulic fluid talking to some other people. We don't know if he was shot. We don't know if he was shot and slipped on hydraulic fluid or something. else. But nevertheless, Neil Roberts is out of the helicopter, and this helicopter is powering up, as Alice discussed with you. In fact, one of the aircrew was out of the helicopter

trying to, and tried to reach for Neil. So there's a... Did anybody physically see him exit the bird? Okay. Yeah. But in that story, where they, you know, Al is trying to keep this in flight, and, you know, you remember the hydraulic fluid story where they're pumping, or they're burning cans, pulling it in there, they get like 45, 50 seconds of control. Which for any aviation enthusiasts out there, not optimal. Right. So they end up going from here and crash landing over here. Yeah.

And by the time they crash land here, you know, again, you can watch the other episode and hear Alice version of that. You know, they were surprised to be alive. And now that... I believe the quote is, holy shit, we're not dead. Right. Yeah. And now the challenge is convincing higher-ups that they're down one person because no one wants to believe that. Well, who physically saw him leaving the bird? Slap. Slab. Slap. And one of the crew

chiefs fell out on a monkey in arras. Tether, fell out trying to grab them. Yeah. And so they're looking at like, you know, they're seeing someone saw Neil fall out, Slab and some others. Yeah. That guy obviously saw him because he went for him, missed him. And now, um, have you guys talked to that crew chief? No. No. I don't want anybody to speak for Slab, but how did he describe what, did it look like it was an intentional move out of the helicopter by Neil, or how does he describe it? He said, I think the quote was he saw his legs falling out of the back. Okay. So, which implies it was airborne to some, you know, maybe it was 10 feet, five feet,

whatever. If he saw his legs last, that would be a head low attitude, yeah. Okay. All right. So they're crash landed here. You can imagine the urgency to get back up on that mountain, knowing what's up there and knowing that your teammates somewhere up there now. It's worth mentioning that when they crash landed here.

of course. Take the microphone with you. Al Mack and his team had, let me be used to it. Thanks, Andy. Sorry. Al Mack and his team had a much better idea

of where they were than slab steam, which is understandable based on the fact that they weren't flying the bird. So Maco, Slab thought that they were here. So they immediately thought,

well, we're going to, we're going to patrol back up to that mountain and go rescue our teammate. The problem is they thought they were here, but they were here. So that was seven kilometers away.

Yeah, I mean, they're flying at probably close to 100 miles an hour. For the, audience, you know, each of these, each of these squares is a kilometer, right? Yeah. So it's a 1,000 meter by 1,000 meter square for people looking at it. Um, okay. So the helicopter's down. They're trying to get the message to the headquarters that they're down in one person and trying to develop a plan to go back and get Neil Roberts. And the plan to go directly back up there

is denied. It's not even possible because of what Brian just described. So a new helicopter flies in and we have the footage of this uh parks it right next to it they transload get all the crew um because of the because of the crash landing i think it's fair to call it that i'll refers to it that way you know there's some there's some injuries there's some medical attention that's necessary so returning the crew back to uh gardez in this case uh is a necessary step and as you guys understand the tactical nightmare of trying to figure out what to do with that team if you were going to fly back. Yeah.

They can't stay in that position for long. There's nobody there. There's nobody to set up a perimeter for them. So this is a factor in determining what that next move is. Again, we're going to put a pin in this idea, but while that's happening, while they're transloading, another near-friendly fire incident almost happens. Because now they have a gunship over the crash site, watching these guys transload. And they're seeing Operation Antaconda unfold, and there's units all over the place in the valley.

And one of them is mistaken for an enemy mortar team. It's a hundred and first mortar. Almost open up on them. Again, we'll get into that story. But that's, you know, one definite friendly fire incident happened in a near miss here all within 24 hours. I want to say we don't know these things because we've heard them through interviews only. We know these things because you can hear them. Yeah.

Because they're on the comms. Okay. So they go back to Garda's safe house. Again, just imagine the urgency like your teammate is somewhere where he's not supposed to be surrounded by people. people that, you know, aren't friendly to him. And did they have anything overhead, Neil, at that time? Yes. Yes, there's a proof of life piece of this.

We can get into it in a big way later. It's difficult to defer all these different things, but when I get through the story, but that's a huge factor, and it's right to ask it at this point. And, but you imagine the assumption. You kind of almost have to assume he's a lot. If you were the MAKO team, you almost have to assume these are alive.

You're going to unless you have definitive evidence otherwise for sure. Right. Right. And right now they don't have that definitive evidence. So until they get that definitive evidence, we have to be making plans to go get him. Yep, that's fair. And every minute that goes by is, you know, crucial. A new helicopter comes in, Razor, Razor 4. And that is flown by Greg Calvert and Chuck Gantt. They transload one person, opts out of going back in, and I want to just focus on this for a second, imagine making the decision to go back in. You know what's up there. You know what just happened. For the last two hours, you're trying to rally everything, get the right things in place to go back up there and make

an attempt. You haven't heard that he's dead yet, so the assumption is he's alive and this is possible. And you've heard the opposite. You've heard that there's a strobe, and you've heard that individuals approached the person with the strobe, and that's enough for Slab at that point. That's all he has at that point, I believe. And for the audience who may not be familiar with that term, talking about an IRBacon, essentially, that flashes. It should be invisible to the naked eye.

Yeah, right. When you say somebody opted out, was this a team guy? No, it was a signalist guy. Okay. Which, I don't fault the guy. He's not, this is the opposite now changed. Yeah. You know, it went from an O.P.

to now an attempt to rescue, maybe a recovery. So we don't need a signal this guy anymore. But I just want to say, like, he didn't, you know, he wasn't needed, but he also opted out. I would like to believe that I have the stones, if they would have even given you the choice, hey, do you want to go or not? That I'd be like, we're 100% going. But I don't think you know unless you're in that moment. I think you're right.

I don't think you can replicate that moment. I would love to say that, yeah, yes, we're going to go in three bags full. That's easy to say sitting here in an air-conditioned room. Right. I would love to believe, I don't have any judgment of that person. I would love to believe that I would have had the courage to make the opposite call, but I don't judge that person at all. Yeah.

You know, there's a deeper philosophical question here. You know, like one of the things we tackle in the project is attempting to define heroism. And, you know, we'll get into that later as well. But with the culture that we grew up in and the culture that the wider military has, You could also make the argument that there was no option not to go back. How are you going to live with yourself if you don't try? Yeah. Right?

And there's a, again, a much deeper philosophical conversation to be had there. But so you can see it both ways. Okay. And this is a component of the valor that leads to the metals. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So Razor 4, a couple hours later now.

It's coming up on 5 a.m. Eastern glow at this point? Or still dark? No. So dark. So dark. Sunrise, official sunrise. Doesn't happen until about 619.

Okay. Depending on which site you use, which organization you trust, 617, 619-ish local time. They're limited on a gas. They dropped their rucksacks. Again, they were a wrecky element. They were going in there to sit there for days.

They don't have body armor in some cases. They don't have ballistic helmets. They have pro-techs in some cases, which is funny. Which is funny. was all I had for clarity leading up till 9-11. Right. It's good for skateboard injuries.

Right. Which there were a ton of here. Yeah. And so they're outfitted for a recid knot, any type of assault or recovery. And there is a plan put in place, a very definitive plan. And this is, if we're going to put a major pen in this later on in our conversation. Because if you don't understand what the intent was to go back there and how it was supposed to go down, you really can't comment on the rest of the operation. they go back to the mountain and again we're going to skip over a lot right here we'll come back to it

and they as you can expect get into another firefight immediately they had the element of surprise for a minute then some things happen that we'll discuss and now they're immediately within a minute or so back into a firefight and you can imagine what this is like for the enemy now they're seeing their second you know helicopter of the night arrive at the same place so the same way that it's moving back into the belly of the beast or this hornet's nest that's already been kicked, the hornets are like, I can't believe our luck. Allah is delivering. Well, there's a reason they pick that key terrain.

Right. Right. This firefight takes place over about 11.5 minutes. In the first three or four minutes, their combat controller is shot. in the next few minutes a seal by the name of Brett Margone is shot a few minutes later a seal by the name

what's called him turbo is shot in the leg and they decide that this position is untenable and they dump over the side and they leave what they believe to be a dead John Chapman KIA there everyone else goes over the side

and they go over this eastern side which you can probably guess is pretty steep. You know, but they have no choice. You know, the other thing to notice here, that helicopter is 50 feet long. Yeah. Right?

So that gives you some scale. This firefight happens here. So we're not talking, you know, from here, all the way, you know, we'll call this the entire battlefield. From the top of the mountain, all the way to what's called the rocky outcropping, give or take 125, 150 meters. Okay, so this

and that's important to understand as well because this is happening. I mean, we've heard people call it the phone, the firefight in a phone booth, but this is close proximity. This is not at distance. You're talking about baseball field distances in terms of, you know, home plate to second base,

home plate to the pitcher's mound, depending on what terrain features you pick. Okay. They go over the side and they're in trouble. They have two guys shot. They've left a person up on top of the mountain, John Chapman, and they call in for the quick reaction force.

The quick reaction force is comprised of Rangers from the 175. And these Rangers are in Bogram. They're spun up. They're not quite sure what the mission is yet, but they're, you know, as you can imagine, all running to the airfield, grabbing all other shit, trying to decide who's on what bird. there ends up being two birds, chalk one and chalk two,

that start to go inbound towards this area of operation. I believe it's less than a, I think it's like a four-year-50-minute flight. As they're flying in, as I just stated, they don't know what the mission is. Some of them believe, if you would hit pause and ask three people in the back of those birds, what are you doing? You would have gotten three different answers.

And we got those three different answers. Yeah. And we hit pause effectively with hindsight, of course, now being filled in for them, you know, 20 years later during these interviews. And they were consistently, this is not hyperbole, they would tell you, we didn't know if we were going to a helicopter crash site

where we were securing a bird, where we were securing a team. They heard something about a Navy SEAL, right, a missing man, was the missing man here? They heard something about a missing man here. So there's a lot of confusion. here and there's no there's no clarity some of them are you know in some of our interviews and it's it's really shitty to hear you know one of the guys is is seeing this mountain top and he's like i thought

we're going to the valley why are we see they're not even dressed for the mountain top yeah like why are we seeing a snowy mountain when i thought we were going to collect an american in the valley that's with some friendlies before you go further yeah when britain and his team were on the mountain top Did they either see or find Neil? No. Okay. No. We'll talk more about that.

We'll talk more about that as well. So the tragic part of this, probably one of the most tragic parts of this story is what happens next. Chalk two splits off, goes to Gardess. Chalk 1 continues onto the mountain. Again, not knowing exactly what the mission is, but in their minds, we'll figure this out when we get there. I think it's important to mention they also do not know that that. there's a SEAL team here at all. They don't know that that spilled over the other side is what's left of MECO-3-0.

Right. So now the sun's coming up. This next part of the story, the main movement happens around 614 or so. Again, five minutes before sunrise, the mountains in this case, and this is worth mentioning, sunrise in these mountain regions isn't exactly sunrise. It has to peek over the mountains too. So even though the sun came up at 619, 617, it still probably had 20 more minutes to go

before you actually saw the sun. But nevertheless, you're starting to see some glow. These guys come in. That's their helicopter. That's where it never left. And it was immediately shot down. And they got what I would describe as the saving private Ryan on a snowy mountain top.

So instead of the beaches of Normandy when that LCU ramp opened up and they're getting shot in a can that's what's happening here as soon as they stepped up the ramp right or probably before they short final on final they're hit with an RPG

and their door gunner Philo Svetak is immediately killed as they crash land you know the ramps going down all the guys all the rangers are stuck to their tethers trying to you know they're all lumped on the floor trying to you know untethered

and get out of this tin can. Mark Anderson, one of the Rangers is killed almost immediately. Bradley Croce. Bradley Croce, Matt Cummings, die on the ramp. And their teammates are stepping over them in the snow, in 24 inches, 18, 24 inches of snow trying to get the hell out of this bird.

And, yeah, it's really, you know, you'll see some clips here. it's really frustrating on that story from them. Pilot Greg Calver, we'll talk more about it. It's in the front and he is, he is, you know, you've talked about this with other people, including Al Mack. You're always piloting, right? You're never not piloting.

That's his job, right? That's his job. But he's not only piloting. He's also picked up an M4. So he's doing both at the same time. He's firing forward. It's out of a movie. Yeah.

It sounds crazy. I don't know if it's possible to flash a Nook with an M4 in your hand. Well, he's already on the ground. So he's trying to keep the thing from rolling. Right. Oh, God. And he's getting shot. And we have pictures of his body armor.

He's shot, I think it's like a bunch. It's multiple times. Taking in the plates. And then eventually. Saving his life. It's hitting his leg and his hand. And eventually his hand gets basically almost shot off. Wow.

Because he goes to reach for his gun and he misses it and he's like, okay, my hand's not there. There's hanging. Okay. I'm going to skip over a lot of this unless you, unless you, she's, something relevant, but what happens for the next day, 12 hours or so, because they don't get extracted until about, until darkness. I think we want to mention something else here, Mitch, before we get to that piece, which is, you know, chalk to. So you said, yes, it sort of lower and hiked up. Correct. Yeah. It's important to just kind of understand that, that link up and

how it works a little bit. We can get into some detail later. We'll talk to the Rangers at some point, and we'll flesh that out, but it's important to know that these guys, this is the first time that somebody is actually landing at that offset point. They've already heard. They're the first ones to begin to get finally some accurate intelligence. But it's bad news. They're hearing what's happened to chalk one. Yeah, I was going to say, so obviously at some point,

some of this has got to be starting to be pushed up as to what's happening, calling in casualties, calling in, you know, wounded or killed eagles. It's mayhem on the radios. And we all, again, when we get done with this part of the, the story will, you'll start to hear that stuff. It is absolute chaos on the videos. Everyone well-intentioned, but not having any clarity.

Is radio-flat your side? Probably being too far forward, stepping on each other. Who is in charge of this operation? That's a great. Not the O.P. The observation point, but Anaconda in general. General Hagenbeck was the general on the American side. Okay.

I believe he's with 101st or 10th Mountain. Was he 10th Mountain? I don't know. Do you remember? 10th Mountain. But he was the one that these comms were essentially trying to reach. Well, not really. So this part of the operation, and this is, again, part of the complexity of the story,

AFO was running these teams. Okay. Task Force 11, right, which is us, TF Blue, the J-Soc component of this push. Because again, this is a conventional and J-Soc operation. We are in support of the larger conventional operation going on down in the valley. So you have people chiming in from Masira in Oman, on Ireland. You have people in Bogram in various jocks and talks for whichever unit they were part of. Yeah, which is a joint operations.

You have a K2 in Uzbekistan with the gunships. It's a bowl of spaghetti. The Pentagon, as we understand, is, is. is beginning to get wind of all this and is also a piece of this in terms of decision making. So it's gradually, the decisions are coming from further and further away. Yeah. Again, everyone well-intentioned, but not one person knowing the full picture. Okay.

Okay. Chalk two. You're right. Good catch. So chalk two inserts at the bottom of the mountain. They insert like over in here. And they have a two and a half hour trek. up the mountain, again, with a lot of blind spots, are not sure what's going on,

but they are starting to hear the bad news. And they're attempting to link up with their guys. They don't know exactly where they are. Moving to the sound of the gunfire. Yeah. Because they don't know exactly where they are. Yes, literally. They're seeing F-15s doing strafing runs

up on top of the mountain. They're like, that must be where our guys are. They're throwing snowballs in the air to try to mark because the flares they sent up didn't work. and so it's a pretty desperate situation. They get to the top of the mountain finally. There's not much time before they link up and then set up a basin maneuver element

and take the top of the hill. By this time, it's like 10, 30, 11 o'clock in the morning. They realize what's happened. They see some of their dead comrades there. And as they push over the time, top of the mountain, they discover two Americans, John Chapman and Neil Roberts. And as in like right next to each other? Very close to each other. With the proximity of each other. As they push over the top there, I mean, they're like probably 20, 30, 40 feet away. Okay. And this is going to sound

crazy. And for a minute, they don't know if they just killed these Americans. Why are these Americans even up here? So when we say that information is filling in, the information that's not filling in, is that. Yeah. They still don't know that there was a John Chapin. What are these people doing up here? Did we just kill them? They do not know that they're, I still think we can talk more about this or look at it later with the Rangers. But who, you know, we talked about them not knowing that MACO3 is over the side.

I don't think that information is entirely clear to all of them. I think Chalk 2 had a visual on MACO30's position. but at that point they were concerned with linking back up with Chalk 1 and their teammates. So there's continued confusion there. They haven't coordinated this effort even with each other on the ground yet. Can you even fathom hiking up into that, linking up with your guys in an absolute shit show, fighting uphill, taking the top of the hill, and the first thing you see is American bodies, you didn't know we're there?

How about when you're seeing the vibrant souls during the gunfight? and you're shooting into the and you're like, I know that logo. Oh. Yeah, it's terrible. It's unfair. Those guys, you know,

again, you'll hear from some of them. We don't want to tell their story for them. But, um, so what happens next is they finally secured the top here and now they're trying to get out of there. A counterattack happens from the enemy.

Another person by the name of Jason Cunningham in Air Force PJ is hit. And he's been helping with this medical situation because people are shot up. You know, there's dead, but there's been dealing with... He's been dealing with... He gets shot, and now the urgency is dialed up

because he has some internal wounds. They're not quite clear on how bad he's wounded, but they have a instinct that we need to get him out of here faster. He's going to go. The decision is made that no one's coming. They've lost three helicopters at this point. You know, it's a limited...

resource and right or wrong, they decide we're going to wait until nightfall. We can't afford to go in there one more time. I can see this both ways, right? Obviously, the ranges want to get the hell out of there. They're wounded. People might, you know, more people might die. But imagine if another crew goes down. Who made that call? It was somewhat collective. You'll see in the in the in the documentary but uh one of the people was uh general kearney and msir and nate self has a story nate self is one of the is the platoon leader of these rangers he's an interesting story that he tells where he he knew immediately when he got on the radio the way this guy's voice sounded like they're not coming for us we talked to joe garst yeah joe garses

was the operations guy for tf 160th he tells a very similar story he said basically like we were lying to you, like to even, even insinuating that we might come, we knew we weren't coming. What he tells us, though, is if we lose another bird, we can't get you off the mountain. At all. We're losing the initiative in Anaconda by losing these, you know, $60 million helicopters. A very complex, tough decision. Now these guys have to wait for the rest of the, you know, until darkness. When that happens, some of the Red Squadron guys come in, you know, come in, birds come in.

coming the wrong way. There's even some bickering and arguing and controversy about that moment. It was confusing. But they get them out of there, literally with their dead teammates at their feet, you know, stacked. I think they said they said like... Stacked like cordwood. They said like the red glow of the helicopters. It's this eerie, you know, again, there's some pretty interesting stories. Harper has a story that's pretty moving or interesting. they get back to Bagram and off come the casualties, off come to KIA, and pretty much immediately, as you can imagine,

there's some finger pointing as people try to understand what the fuck just happened. You know, again, Rangers went in blind to this thing, now they're staring at dead, you know, now they're staring at empty cots in their tents, wondering like, what was that? Had Britt and his crew been collected as well from the base of the gun? Yes, yeah, right around the same time.

They, you know, they were, in my laser point, I won't get it, but they continued down in this valley. And they were also picked up. So everyone's back at Boggham right now. And everyone's back to, everything that should happen is beginning to happen now. But the questions are, the questions that you're asking now, over 20 years later,

are the questions they're beginning to ask on the front end of this tunnel? Okay. Yeah. The AARs, the discussions, the units talking to each other never really happened. And so that is the beginning of the cancer of this story. There's no official joint AAR hotwash of any kind. Everybody's doing this side-node way. The Rangers don't talk to the Rangers, the TF-1-60. You know, the thing that should have happened, and this, you know, this isn't the first time that has happened. This happened with the lone survivor as well. And the discussions that should have happened never happened.

The war continues. And now there is animosity and some heat between these units. Rightly so, if they, you know, if they're, if they're being told one thing happened, and whether it's true or not, there's an empty cot right there. Yeah. Someone's responsible for this. And what happens next is awards, you know, a couple years later, a year later, awards get, disseminated. There's a Navy

cross for Slabinsky. There's an Air Force Cross for John Chapman. There's silver stars and bronze stars. And there's another discussion about whether some of the Rangers were awarded properly concerning what they went through. We can touch on that later maybe. But the war continues. And a book's written, you know, a couple of years later to have I missed anything? I mean,

not because we're not choosing. Yeah, you know, a book is written on this by a journalist who was in country at the time. He wasn't on the mountain. He was attached to the, I think, the 10th Mountain. And, but he had a, I wouldn't say a front row seat, but he was there. And I think he realized what he saw. You know, and very quickly people were saying, like, things like, this is our Black Hawk down. Right. So the thing that happened in 93 in Mogadishu. This guy writes a book. The book comes out. It's pretty controversial. What was it called? Not a good day to die. by Sean Naylor.

He doesn't get everyone to participate for various reasons. We can guess some of it's obsects, some of it was trust-related, what story are you trying to tell? But that book comes out and is probably the beginning

of the public, the public-facing debate over what happened here. In my opinion, people might disagree with this, but it begins to pit people, units, teams, elements against each other. Are you specifically talking about Brit and John, the Air Force versus Navy? Or is it bigger than that?

More so. AFO versus the Navy. The Navy versus the Rangers. The Rangers. In every direction, there's some friction in this book. Sometimes it's subtle. Sometimes it's overt. So that book, and I remember when this book came out, you know,

he was being passed around the command. I don't think most of us actually read it, but we read excerpts of it and like, that's wrong, that's wrong, that's wrong, that's not true. That didn't happen. But again, like I said, the war continues. This thing's in the rearview mirror. And the story, for the most part, goes dormant for about 14 years. There are a couple attempts by the Air Force to get John Chapman's Air Force Cross upgraded.

They are unsuccessful. And then what happens in around 2015 and 2016 are a couple articles come out in the Air Force Times. Can you bring those up? When was Brits Award upgraded? 18. In the end of this story, we're creeping that direction. In 2018, both John and Slab get medals of honor. But we're not quite there yet.

We're in 2015-16 right now. Hey, go. Drag that sucker over. No, not this one. We want the Air Force Times. What's it going to take for? What's it going to take? Yeah.

Can we just acknowledge the sound of George's fan and his laptop, which I'm using air quotes? I'd say, what do you think? It's half the size of this table. Probably was current in the Civil War. Yeah. Who uses a PC in 2026? I'm going to speak to this and it'll appear on the screen hopefully in a minute. But an article comes out in the Air Force Times around mid-2015.

there's actually two. One says something like, what's it going to take for an Air Force service member to get the Medal of Honor? Another article comes out that says something like 80, he saved 80 lives.

So the Air Force is noticing that every service branch has multiple medals of honor throughout either Iraq or Afghanistan, and they've noticed that they have zero. And they haven't had a Medal of Honor since Vietnam. Okay.

Again, this is fact, this isn't arguable, but you can kind of see what I'm insinuating here. In January of 16, Ash Carter, the then Secretary of Defense, orders all services to review anything Silver Star or above to see if they miss something, right?

To see if, you know, because, and you'll remember this, and I often compare this to something like the Olympics in a diving competition or gymnastics or whatever, they don't start handing out tens at the beginning of the competition. because they want to see what they're going to, what new tricks, new techniques are going to happen.

And usually those tens start to happen and start to flow once they understand the competition. It's the same in a military operation. There we go. Is there a text here? I'll tell you it's just a PDF. Yeah. But anyway, that was the title that came out in May of 15. People can Google it and find it and read it.

But that's the gist. If you scroll down, there might be an image. Just, yeah. Secretary of the Air Force, Debra James. reads these articles naturally. And she is, she's asking the same question. So as the Ash Carter effort is happening,

she's already seen these articles around the same time just a little bit earlier and begins asking herself, what is it going to take? And she tells us this, and this is something that she's told other people. We sat down with her and we talked about this with her. And it's a good question.

This is not, this is not, this is not yet an attempt to do anything nefarious here. This is a valid question. Why are other service branches more represented in terms of medals and certainly the Medal of Honor at this stage of the global war on terror than the Air Force? I think that review was a little bit based off of they were looking at previous wars

and the medals of honor or higher Valor Awards that had been awarded. And I believe, although it may not have felt like it at the time that the G-WO was trending underneath that. And I'm not saying that was the whole reason behind it, but I believe you're being conversation about that. I think you're right. Yeah. But, so let's just quickly talk about awards. You know, so we didn't get paid a lot during the job that we did. It became independently wealthy. You obviously did do well with your E6 paycheck.

The, you know, so one of the only ways to really recognize someone is to give people these, these awards, whether they're valor awards or meritorious awards. So there is, and medals are stories, right? It creates legacy for for your institution. So when you talk about the Medal of Honor, you know, a situation for, you mean, you name it, Audie Murphy or something. Like there's a story and pride that goes along with that. Yeah. And so, you know, the same way you don't want to be a warrior without a war story, you don't want to be a service branch without these incredible, you know, Medal of Honor type stories. So, so Deborah James, in this case, and this is her story, she circles one of these,

one of these articles hands it off to an aide and says, let's look into this. So you have that combined with Ash Carter's mandate, and now they are having a new look at some of their options. John Chapman's name resurfaces. Again, this is probably the third or fourth time it's been looked at. But what's different about this, besides the fact that they have cracked the door open with Ash Carter's mandate, is they claim that the footage and some of the footage we're going to show you,

they have new technology that allowed them to see it differently than you did. It's called pixel tracking technology. So the predator drone that was overhead and the people have seen some of this footage and we're going to get into it extensively here coming up. But it was on station for almost two hours. And it's recording these events.

And that was the two hours was it over? Was it on station when Neil went out the back of the bird or shortly thereafter? It is on station later. Okay. Those events were recorded by another. Yeah, but... The one that's on station

that you're talking about now, would that be the time that Britt and his team went back or post that? I'm just trying to figure out when this... I'm talking about a gunship? No, I'm just talking about the new technology. When did that arrive overhead

and what two hours did it capture? Let me think for a second here. It caught wind that something was happening. I mean, in fact, I think we interviewed the pilot. Yeah. And one of the pilots, sorry. And I think they were just flying back from something rather routine and started to see something happening.

They didn't know what they were seeing. Yeah. But they knew it was something and just started orbiting. When did they start capturing footage? I'm just trying to place. Start capturing before the second insert, before what becomes the rescue insert. Because they have it on camera. So sometime before that second insert, around 5 a.m., they catch wind that something's going on here and they're filming it.

Okay. And so we have, you know, on YouTube, you can go watch the second insert of the Mako team. Okay. Okay. Where did I leave off, Brian? So you're about to get into how this video is basically... Yeah. So, so you're called Pinsoprotts.

So can you scroll to the top of this article? So New York Times article, again, Sean Naylor, the author of Not a Good Day to Die, I authors this article. And it's built into the title, a grainy picture of valor. The grainy picture is not this picture. The grainy picture is the predator footage. Correct. And, you know, he partners with Christopher Drew down there,

and they come up with this article. This is the second main time the public gets a look at this story. And now it's on the cover of the New York Times. So, question. The one time I heard Britt tell the story, and this was decades ago. But I remember him telling it and the conclusion he had come to that John was no longer alive is that his weapon-mounted laser was on and his weapon was across his chest. When he first saw him and realized he was injured, it was still moving up and down.

Before they ex-filled off the side of the mountain, he described it as being static or essentially the chest no longer going up and down. When did the narrative, you know... By the way, that's in this article as well. Yeah. I get people want to get attention on the things that they produce. Still Team 6 and a man left for dead. Relatively salacious. When did that narrative start coming out?

That John was alive versus... And again, this was the only person I've heard him say it one time, 20 plus years ago, that he was certain at least in his own mind, that John had expired. When did that switch? Around the 2015-16. So by the time this article lands

in the New York Times, the effort, the project of upgrading John's medal is happening. And they made that conclusion based off their new technology, the pixel tracking. Yes, we'll show you some videos

that lean on that extensively. Something happens later in the story that's kind of interesting because they distance themselves from that claim. But right now, pixel tracking is the, is the foot in the door.

Okay. Allow him to continue this campaign conversation. And the conclusion that he was alive, not dead. Right. The footage has been around already. The footage has been circulating for a number of years at this point. And we've been told through our interviews in this investigation that was part of the process of looking at the other upgrades that did not work out for John's metal. In fact.

But here's a new piece, which is the pixel tracking gives you a chance to look at it more closely. So just for the audience to understand, the difference is it's not that they found the footage, it said they found a way to analyze the footage better. Gotcha. Right. And this article, if I remember right, was the first time I think I saw a moving picture of anything from the Battle of Roberts Ridge. I think they had a short clip that you could click on. But I think nail her narrates. Yeah. They looted. And so now the public's getting in another look 14 years after the events, right? So the book comes out. So this is moving from an inward facing process, you know, in mentioning that you're seeing it for the first time.

I think it's important in terms of looking at the story to identify when it goes from an internal institutional establishment process to something where the outside layperson is now aware of it and has a chance to weigh in. And there's a bit of a, I will call it, a public-facing conversation has begun. I think that's fair. Yeah. Okay. the effort to get Johns Metal upgraded continues another article comes out in Newsweek also by Sean Naylor

so he's he's getting some traction on this story he's finding some success telling this story you know with the Times and Newsweek and a somewhere around 2017 no I'm sorry 18 it is announced that Brits Slobinski is being put up for the Medal of Honor. You can imagine that that causes some stir because remember in the blame game we talked about earlier,

they consider Slab to have left him up there alive. When you say they, are you speaking about the Air Force? The Air Force. So when you say the Air Force, are you talking about the 24th STS leadership? Are we talking about Air Force leadership? Because this is one of the issues that comes from conversations.

The Navy stood in the way of an Air Force medal. What do you mean when you say the Navy? Entity level, faction level, identification of the Navy, the Air Force. Because there's hundreds of thousands of people in each one of those branches. I'm going to keep this because I'm very tempted to get into the controversy, but I want to keep this clean right now

because we will circle back to the controversial points. So the effort's underway. It's gaining traction. The public's aware. Slab is put in for the Medal of Honor. John is approved for the Medal of Honor. Both those things happen in 2018. First slab, then John.

President Trump awards them. I think it's worth saying right now. This has nothing to do with politics. The presidents, the rubber stamp on this process. Ceremonial color. By the time it comes to him, he's just like, yes, let's do this. He was the guy who was an office of that. So it has nothing to do with politics.

Our project has nothing to do with politics. We don't care about the blue or the red. In fact, in the war of Afghanistan, we had two of each president. So there you go. The medals being awarded lights off a new shitstorm. And this begins to happen on YouTube and in social media. And, well, I mean, actually back up. No, I'm actually right.

In 2019, a former STS operator named Dan Schilling writes a book. That book's called Not a... Alone at Dawn, sorry. And on the same day as his book release, or within 24 hours, a YouTube video surfaces.

And that YouTube video is the first time, it's an eight minute and 52 second video, and it's narrated, and it's basically the story, the quick version of the story of what happened to John Chapman. I like to jump in here, Mitch.

I don't think, you know, It surfaces is the right way to say it, but I think for the purposes of exactitude in this story, it shows up on, it's posted on Dan Schilling books on YouTube. So it's his YouTube channel. That's the move an author would make with the book. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with it.

It's just I don't want you to feel like it appeared as someone found it on the dark web. That's all I mean. It is a book promotion tool. It is masquerading as science or official. Your description or his? This is mine. Yeah. But nevertheless, the timing is, you know, alludes to this as a book promotion tool at least.

And outside person would say that with them being released in that close proximity that one would be associated with the other. I think a reasonable person would associate that. And the book is written. The book is worked on endorsed by in concert with, again, the Air Force. You can find that on the book jacket. Yeah. Okay. So this starts a new chapter. We'll call it the social media chapter. the YouTube chapter, this thing, this video gets 21 million views. It goes viral. And you can, maybe we will at some point in this conversation. The comments are wild. This is, and I think there's even a comment like this, or there used to be, this is Chapman's Hold My Beer Moment. I'll go, I'll go do this myself. It's narrated, annotated. There's music assigned to it. It's, it's a beautiful story. And why would, you know, we'll get into it, but why wouldn't you

want to believe this story. This also starts slowly but surely the podcast portion of this story where a couple people are going on podcasts here and there talking about the story, mostly expressing anger and resentment towards the Navy or Slab or the Mako team. There's a binary piece of this that's beginning to form, which is that in order for one narrative to exist, another one needs to be laid to rest, which would mean that. to mean that if John Chapman did all these things, then Brits Lubinsky and the Mako team

had to have left him behind alive. There's also the aspect that around that time, podcast popularity was on the upswing, and these people were probably timing out of their military service, so they had the chance to speak about it openly. You're right. And there are pieces of this. I've been thinking about this the last few days.

It's interesting you bring that up. There are pieces of providence around this in terms of timing that are allowing for a new ecosystem to find its footing. and this subject matter and this piece is giving them a chance. You know, we just went from looking at the headline of an article

that's in the New York Times, but moments later, we're looking at something that's popularized on YouTube. So this is a moment when what some would call the legacy media, the traditional media,

is still holding, has more of a foothold than it does today, and this world of YouTube and social media is finding its foothold. So it's an interesting moment in the zeitgeist of what's happening. You have to remember what happened

right after 2019 as well. What's that? Oh, yeah. COVID. Yeah. And people were absolutely trapped in front of their devices. That's the biggest piece of Providence, if you want to call it that, that, you know, that's exactly what I'm back in. And that was, and I think anybody who had created content during that time period, I could show you guys, I could poll 10 years, because I think I've been doing this for almost 10 years.

In an instant, you both would be able to identify the two years of COVID. You're like, whoa. How did your audience get so much bigger like that? That's video games as well. Believe it or not. My old job has the same very very very. that begins to... Yeah.

So that is, man, that's a bizarre series of timing that would... Not that it drives people to this content, but they had more time where they normally maybe wouldn't have paid attention to it or wouldn't have come across it, but just consumption went through the roof. You're right. Right.

It's an important observation because you're basically talking about there is an audience and there's time to consume this and consider it. There's the... Also to get involved and engaged as opposed to just watching something and maybe not having the time

to invest yourself in it when you have nothing else going on and you're being paid to stay at home. Right. Yeah. And I know this is one of your favorite things, Andy. The reaction video world is beginning to happen. Yes.

Thank you for describing it as one of my favorite things. You described as one of your, yeah. I know you feel fondly about it. I don't have any shade on the people that do that. Because make your money however you want to make your money. It's easier, I think, to judge somebody else's creation than to go out and make something of your own. Even though I guess that video, the reaction video, is your own creation, but you're just consuming and largely tearing apart other people's content.

Or in this case, or in this case, because again, this is a very compelling story. Like this almost nine-minute video is somewhat masterful. And so the reaction videos are oftentimes people crying, people saying, this is the most incredible thing I've ever seen. You know, how did this happen? Why did they leave him? You know, all kinds of things. again, read the comments.

We'll actually go into this video here in a minute. But on that note, I'm glad people know his name and that that is the response and that they did have an emotional reaction to that. Because if my choice is that and even if people look at this and say, fuck the seal teams or nobody ever knows his name again, I'm going with the former, not the liar. Okay. Yeah. Sure.

probably the final chapter in this final piece in this is uh in 2025 you know there's been a series of podcasts and some more books even i think matthew cole matt cole wrote a book that referenced this so now you have now you have not a good day to die you have alone at dawn you have matt cole's book there's some others nate self one of the talking about the code over country one yes so that was like a chapter in a multi-chapter book yeah right yeah so that was like a chapter in a multi-chapter book yeah Yeah. You know, again, it was, that book, in my opinion, was a collection of our greatest missteps. But then the Medal of Honor Museum opens. And then the podcast world really kicks into gear.

So over the last year, I think something like 10 or more podcasts happened around the story of Roberts Ridge. Most of them are aimed at why the Medal of Honor Museum. is not giving John Chapman a major exhibit, a big exhibit, and that in contrast, Slabinsky is getting a big exhibit. You know, there's... And we went to the museum,

we did an interview there. I've been there. I've seen it. Okay, so yeah, so, you know, there are major exhibits. I'm trying to think of the right term here. There are bigger exhibits and some are just like small things on the wall.

There are installations that are central and that are larger and more extensive. That's what I would call it. Feature to exhibit. Yeah. And then, you know, and then the planning. is to over the years, months,

or whatever, rotate those. So if one person has one that's big and in the center of the room, eventually that will go and someone else will replace that. The controversy is that John's sister, the co-author of Alone at Dawn, states on some podcast

that she was promised that Chapman would have a big exhibit. And she's also pissed that slab has one. So it's two, things. It's a two-hander here. And she is tragically living with

the death of her brother. Yeah. Which I can't even fathom. Is I had heard that Slab has in some ways ties to the Medal of Honor Museum. Yes. He's on the board. So that has to add to the controversy as well. Yes. So they felt like it was an inside job. They felt like Slab is pulling the strings

here. He purposely minimized Chapman's exhibit and probably, you know, personally had a hand in making his a major exhibit. which from an outside perspective that is a tough optic to get through agreed um in this conspiratorial times in these conspiratorial times we live in especially if you are already leaning one way in this story yeah that's an easy that's an easy place to get to uh it's not true but um that was the thinking and the podcast world i mean i think i think we tabulated at one point

there are millions of views from the time the Medal of Honor Museum opened up, you know, for the next six months or so discussing. How do you know it's not true that Britt didn't have any? We talked to the museum and we talked to Slav. Was he aware of the controversy building before it opened? I don't think I know that. I don't think we know that. When he was aware, I'm not sure. Right.

And I think this is a discussion that should not be, you know, the purpose of this project. and ground truth in general is what we have firsthand and what we have in terms of evidence and what we can prove with documents and other things. I just want to be fair about people's critique of the Medal of Honor.

What I'll say is... Not the Medal of Honor, the museum. We'll take that one step further. So if that assertion is that, yeah, slab was on the inside, pulling the strings, making things happen or making other things not happen, what is the assertion of some based off

of what I've seen online. So then this guy has some sway over the rest of the board and can get them to stay and do things that, He wants them to do it. It's a little bit thin, but you're right. I'm just saying the optics are.

The optics is too bad. Yeah. It's a process. It's an expensive process. It's a big enterprise. There are a lot of people. It's a board of directors. There's,

there are people who support the museum with donations and other things. We don't represent the museum and not here to. I think that's a bigger discussion. It's worth having your right. Okay. I just want to be fair about the criticism that I've heard from people because if we leave that out, we're going to be accused and being biased for not bringing that up. completely. So I think that's, I think that wraps up the basic story and hopefully we did it in a way where we didn't, you know, it was the uncontroversial version. I'm sure someone will put a lever in somewhere, but. Now we have the rest of our time to go back and talk about those things. So again, that was a broad brush of so people understand what Roberts Ridge or and where it fit, fit inside of operation. So this is a, this again, a major operation in 2002, reverberating still to this day, a quarter century later,

still unsettled, still people pointing fingers at each other, still people feeling rather hot about it. And where do you want to go next, Brian? Well, I think we should just mention very, yeah. Oh, no, I, sorry. That's what you mentioned at the top of this that how is a former Gold Squadron guy and a former Blue Squadron guy

going to have this conversation in a fair way? And so I want to address that for, I want to give you my version of that for a second, or our version for a second. We approach this story using first principles. Like we basically assumed that nothing we had heard is true, and rebuilt the story, get rid of all the assumptions. We, you know, for this docu series, we've interviewed over 75 people. That includes Taliban, by the way, which is another story we'll get into. but we started over.

And for a minute, you know, we had to even consider the fact that like, okay, is slab, like, are we being used by slab here? And so, you know, some portion of our brains were like, let's watch out for this. But, you know, there is no such thing as perfect objectivity. Everyone has a bias in this particular story. And you'll see it in the comments after this, whenever this, comes out, you know, we will be accused of being biased, but for some reason no one else in this story is biased. The Air Force isn't biased. Lori Chapman isn't biased. Dan Schilling,

author of Alonat-Don, is not biased. Only we are biased. There's someone from the AC130, Grim 3-2 crew named Rob Harrison, who also makes, you know, has spent many hours in the, you know, sitting in the podcast chair talking about all this. And I think the point of mentioning this is not really to bring up those people, but is to say that this word bias is, it should be a two-way street. It's impossible to get away from it. But at some point, if you say the two Navy SEALs discussing this or bias when someone from the Air Force is discussing it, I think we have to look at the possibility that that measure or the valence of bias encircles all of these scenarios. So the point is for us to do the work, to work extra, to make sure that we are being

as objective as possible, which means we needed to run every one of these things that we mentioned in the first, I don't know how long we've been talking so far, but the things that we said, we'll get to that, we'll get to that, we'll get to that, each one of these flexion points in the story, we had to ask ourselves, well, what would make it possible for it to be true and what would make it possible for it to be not true? We did not sit and do interviews with people where we gave them an open four hours to just tell us anything. And where this bias thing becomes interesting is someone like you, someone like Mitch, even putting branch units and other things aside, has the ability or we would hope. And that's what we want here from you today, to ask difficult questions,

to ask the questions that people may not know to ask. Critical thinking has been central to this entire process. We tried to be really good at it. Yeah, we worked. as Brian just alluded to, we attempted to work the problem both ways. So if, you know, as we looked at the John Chapman version of the story, the Air Force version of the story, what would have to have happened for that to be true?

And then break that down into each component. And nobody, including slab, when they sat in our chair, no matter how many times they sat in our chair, even when we spoke to Slab, you know, because we sat with him a number of times through this. But from the first step all the way to the last step,

we continued to ask very difficult questions, not once, not twice. Some of these things we've discussed 10, 20 times. We've run them over and over again like any other good investigator would. As we're gathering information, is it consistent? Is it dependable? How durable has it been over the five or six years that we've been collecting it? We're not experts in this,

but we did our best to not be, to grow from novices and to people who are asking important questions and evaluating this stuff and not just becoming stenographers. Why do you think that system exists anyway, where a bias is associated towards the Navy side, but not anybody else. Why do you think that that is the foundation people start from? I have an answer. Yeah, I think part of it is, you know, John's dead.

There's some sympathy and empathy that goes along with that. You know, he slabs alive and it received the Medal of Honor. If you buy into the current narrative that Slab left him there alive to die, depending on which version you like, it feels villainous. And so this guy lost his life doing, you know, on this operation, you're alive. And now you're being, you know, now that it's being refrained as you left them there to die. I mean, some people even set on purpose, which is bizarre. What were you going to say?

I was going to say my version of that, that there's obviously, at least in our culture and cultures like it, there are stigmas associated with discussing people who have died. and certainly people who have been killed in action. And there's a sort of, and there should be in some ways, a spiritual moat built around their legacy and honoring them. So that's part of what's difficult about this process. We're not here. And as we cross that mode or weighed into it in this discussion

and across this process and in the documentary itself, that's not simple. It's something that needs to be handled with grace and elegance to some extent, if and when and where that's possible, that's part of our job. But if the truth is hidden on the wrong side of that moat, I don't know if that helps anybody either. Yeah. One of the, you know, in setting up guardrails against bias as best we possibly can, you know,

one example of that is we didn't ask for DOD participation. And part of the reason we didn't ask for it is we, I mean, in some ways they're, they're, they, caused this mess. You know, not anyone in particular. I mean, there are some people, but, but we wanted to be able to do this, uh, over time by ourselves. You know, we didn't try to sell this to a Netflix or a, or a, or a streamer too early because we didn't want execs telling us how to tell the story. And we still haven't. Yeah. And we want, we wanted neutral space to look at this objectively, um, and figure out where this story goes. Equals. We wanted outside cooks not in this

kitchen unless they were invited in as interview subjects or they had evidence for us not opinions from the outside and people that would direct or shape the story so that it would fit their platform or their needs for a demographic this is not about that well then that begs the most important question of the day what did you guys find okay the story we're gonna the evidence we're gonna show

goes obviously against the grain of what is currently understood. Brian mentioned some key things that I think are worth reiterating. We are going to armchair quarterback this. We think we've earned that right over the last five and a half years. But when you armchair quarterback something in which people lost their lives, we think what's critical is grace, elegance, generosity, charity, understanding the tone of that time. You know, it's very easy for us to look back and see how stupid we were 20 years ago.

Empathy and compassion become a piece of telling us. Imagine you're in that moment. Imagine you're leaning forward. Ben Laden just did what he did. You got to be generous to the people in that time to try to tell this story and truly understand it. So I think we just, I think we go to the video. Yeah, I think what's interesting now. So yes, what we found. Well, this is a great place to start because this is the place that 21 million people were, found something as well. Or a million people watched it 21 times.

I love it. You know how it works. You've seen that dashboard more than I have. Is that the way it works? I don't know. Yeah, I know. There are a few things that are evident here in this and there are other things that aren't.

We're going to tell you more about the plan. There are things for you to know. There are a lot of things to know. You got something. Yeah, it's volume on this one or no volume? No volume. But what I will say is, you know, so you know where we're going with this story.

at least, you know, we're... Honestly, I don't. We're raising some doubts. Well, I know that to a degree, but remember, when you guys asked about sharing info, I said, no, I don't want any. But you can... Okay. We are, what we are going to say, I said, by going against the grain of this story is we're

going to make the case that John Chapman was not left alive. He did not do the things that you're going to see in this video. And we're going to show you, not tell you why. That is a bold claim. It is. Now, one more thing on bias. I have said many times, you're probably tired of hearing you say it. I am, I love the SEAL teams.

I am not in love with the SEAL teams. I will be the first to admit we have our own, I mean, lone survivor is our version of this story, right? It is embellished. We have serious questions over the Medal of Honor in that story. I haven't done a hard look into that, so I'm going to be somewhat careful, but I have serious doubts about that story.

Are we the first to say the SEALs make mistakes, mistakes. You know, you have Lyndon Norgrove, you have Eddie Gallagher, you have, there's all kinds of controversial stories. But the reason I feel comfortable talking about those is because for every one of those, there are a thousand stories no one's ever heard of that go well. So I'm not afraid to talk about seal missteps. I just want to be honest about them. But that also means if there are a thousand, you know, for every one there's a thousand successful ops, it also means that or some blunders that no one's ever heard about too, right? But I just want to make it very clear that we're,

I am not afraid to talk about, you know, stuff that's in code over country and some of that stuff's true. You know, any organization makes mistakes. Yeah. But with the popularity of the SEAL teams and people, you know, kind of falling in love with the idea and the mystery of it all, you know, we are in the spotlight. We have stepped into the spotlight as well.

Like we've, you know, leaned into this. But we meaning seals. Yeah, we meaning seals. Yeah. Some seal. Again, that's another tough one, right? Right. You say seals.

There's a forever there. Yes, there's a forever there also. Yeah. Yeah. So I agree with what you're saying. And anybody is familiar with my show should know that I'm not an apologist for the seal community either.

Yeah. You know, the most recent episode with Ross where we were talking about Operation Red Wings, we were talking about things that were completely opposite of the narrative of what has been publicly portrayed. Yeah. Again, I love the SEAL teams too.

Couldn't be more proud, but I'm not in love with them either. And I think that the integrity of the community is the most important thing. And if that has been lost or has waned over time, the only way back from that is to tell the truth. I want to tell a quick story. Oh, yeah, you're going to talk about. Yeah. So you just mentioned the lone survivor's story. We thought that was a really good interview.

I personally believe that was one of the final nails in the coffin of, you know, what's wrong with that story. again that story when what was that a month ago or something Ross came on here you know might have been too I held it for a little bit because of production we knew I mean people in the know

people in the seal teams knew there was problems with that story right the public knew probably over 10 years ago there were some cracks in that story um I was on a

you know I think you know I'm a cyclist and that's how I get my meditation and keep my sanity I was on a ride a couple weeks ago and one of the guys I was riding with brought up that show, the lone survivor, you know, Ross Schneiderman podcast.

And he's asking me what I thought about it. And I said, well, you know, he did a lot of research. And I think he was, I think he was spot on. And I think that story was long overdue. And for the next 30 minutes, I could see him, his name's Jake, I could see him squirm and just be completely uncomfortable to the point where he's even saying like, what the fuck, man? What rights does that journalists have to, you know, to say these things?

And it was super fascinating because what it demonstrated was, and I finally asked the question, I go, what does the story mean to you? Because even though he had listened to that podcast, and even though I was validating a lot of the information in that podcast, he could not wrap his head around that it was true. And the story that he had fallen in love with over time, he'd seen the movie, probably read the book.

that he couldn't wrap his head around in that moment that shit I got to tweak what I believe about this But yet he was bringing up the way you told me this story is he was bringing up the podcast and the article

because it had affected him and because he did understand that there was a gigantic value change after the two and a half or three hours of listening to Ross yeah but not enough to commit to right he was in his middle ground

he's having me validate your conversation with Ross Yep, that's true. That's how I understand it as well. But he, and I asked him, I go, Jake, what does this story mean to you? Because I can see you struggling. Like you're pushing back on it, even though I'm telling you, yes, yes, yes. And he said something like the story of a lone survivor maybe believe what was possible.

Like what's the best of us? To which I said, it can still be that in different ways, though. Because the story we all knew about that is just, it's just untrue. It's tough when you challenge people's core beliefs. Right. You know, especially if they have an emotional or moral or whatever it may be attachment to that. When you start challenging that, it takes, it's like an earthquake. It takes a little bit of time for it to settle.

Right. You're right, Andy. And there's another piece. I mean, this has been, this whole topic has been written pretty hard, right, about bias and cognitive bias and these other things. But, you know, at some point, when your identity in some way is now a social, whether it was your tribe or a tribe you want to be a part of or it gives you some purpose and meaning or whatever it is. I'm not accusing your friend of I wasn't there. But this is all part of the human condition. When we believe something, there's first impressions, there's latency issues.

There are things that can sit as different as we all are. I think it's fair to say if anybody disagrees, that's fine. But there are pieces that run through all of us that we see come up over and over again. And it is very difficult to hold on, to take a story like this, which has become essentially in many ways a piece of modern day mythology. This is a, this is a Phoenix rising. The John Chapman story is absolutely incredible. And challenging it has not been easy and believing it is unless you've seen what we've seen.

Yeah. The last thing I'll say about, well put, the last thing I'll say about Jake, what's even more interesting about him is he's a high power litigator. So he's used to dealing with truths, untruths, shifting of truth, facts versus, you know, so even that guy for whatever, you know, because he had attached

himself to the story of lone survivor was struggling in the face of hard evidence. So again, I thought that was an interesting story. I think it does apply here because we have to do a similar lift as we write this story that's been told, you know, inauthentically and improperly for years. Okay. The video. Yeah. You want to go? Well, let's, what I think we should do is we should play a piece of this video. I think there is some key. I don't think it's right to sit here and, and, and watch eight minutes and 59 seconds of it or what it is. Well, here's what we can do. We can put a link in the show notes to the video if people want to. So they could go, hit pause, go watch it if they want and come back. Please let's, yeah, so we're going to hit play. We're going to skip around just so people understand what this thing is. A lot of people have already seen it. So go ahead. Just give it a run.

U.S. Air Force combat controller and the SEALs are attempting to rescue their lost teammate. You'll watch Chapman's heroic actions as he saves the lives of his entire SEAL team and then another 18 members of a quick reaction force, earning America's highest award, the Medal of Honor. Is this the Rangers getting off the bird? This is the second insert. The second individual to exit and immediately moves in the direction of the summit. He can be seen moving off to the ride of the street. screen, alone. The team is taking heavy fire from every direction as indicated by the arrows

as Chapman begins engaging targets. You can see spent cartridges ejecting from his M-4. Chapman then begins closing with the enemy, forcing his way up slope and knee-and-thigh-deep snow. He is constantly under fire as he does this. Chapman's team leader begins to close on Chapman following his trail through the snow. The dark mass above Chapman is a fortified bunker containing two enemy fighters, each armed with AK-47s who are firing down on the team in the darkness. Okay, let's pause it. Okay, note that. A fortified bunker, and he is engaging enemy immediately in front of him. And again, that distance, this distance from where he is to what is referred to as bunker one, I mean, he's 20 feet, 30 feet.

feet, something like that? Okay. I mean, if that's Brit underneath him and that dot, I forget. I mean, Brit, let's call him six foot for easy math. It's like four Brits. Yeah. Okay.

Let's go to, what were the other marks, six something? So at this mark, you know, I want to go back. I want to talk about fortified bunker and want to talk about the fact that the claim here is that John is right on top of an enemy that is occupying this bunker. And you can see some heat signatures. At the left-hand side, it looked like something was appearing.

You can see them here as well. Uh, anyway. Before we, before we continue, I want to just call out something, because we're going to watch just a few more clips. We're not going to watch this whole nine minutes. Um, annotation, circles, colored circles, arrows, um, narration. Music. Music, score.

All of it is combined to do something. I mean, it's there for a reason, right? They didn't, they purposely didn't put this up there without any sound. They made a choice. So let's, we're going to get into that. in a minute. Skip to the next part, please. You can do it, George. I have faith in you.

And there you can see those heat signatures more clearly. Yeah. Engages the two combatants and kills them, saving the lives. One there. Yeah, one there. He does this from a distance of no more than 10 feet. These actions by themselves earned him his first medal of honor. He then climbs into and takes control of the bunker.

Having cleared the immediate threat, check. Okay. He paused for a second time. The statement it earns him his first Medal of Honor. Is that just the narrator's opinion? Or was that something in the Air Force? That's a good catch. Yeah, there are two material findings associated with this Medal of Honor package to simplify it for the audience and so that we can keep rolling. Material finding one is are these events and the events up until John goes down for the first time. Material finding two are the events that involve John. Let me correct that. Material finding one. is about the first 11 and a half minutes before the Mako team goes over the side. Okay. That's material finding one.

Material Finding two is the rest of the story after that. Gotcha. Fair? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Go to the next one, please. And just listen to the narration here. This is what we want to key in on. Again, annotations. What to play? Chose the second of several enemy charges. In this Stein display of determination and courage, Chapman-Kee.

can be seen fighting hand to hand with the fighter. In the larger screen display can be seen additional enemy moving on to the summit. But right now, John Chapman is fighting for his life. Six minutes later, in this new shot, Chapman can hear another helicopter approaching the summit. He is in the bottom center of the screen underneath the tree and can be seen in the magnified inset box as he begins his desperate final stand to save the lives of the 18 men on the helicopter. All right. the red dots. Pause it.

A lot of assumptions. A lot of speaking for him, telling us, telling the audience what he's thinking you're doing. Again, the music, the annotation, the box. Was there a clear, is there any clearer video of him supposedly fighting hand? Because honestly, that was skewing all over the place. The sensor was. We're going to go to this. Okay.

So, again, good catch. We're going to talk about it. Perfect questions. Yeah. There are answers looming here. Okay. Okay. I think we're ready to move on to, uh,

the first in our series of pictures here. But this was viewed by 21 million people. Again, it came out within a day of the book release. And, you know, to this day, people will say things like, if you question the story, if, and I had a Reddit experiment that I'll tell you about later, if you question the story at all, that was a mistake. People will say, look, you idiot, I saw the video.

What are you even talking about? Yeah. Okay. Can you pull up that first picture? Okay. Yeah. Do you want to talk about the judge or do you want to talk about? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I think that's more valuable at this point. I went off the screen to the left. There it is. No, no, no, no. There's another one we're going to show in between. Let's look at the... Leave that one up there. Yeah, just go. You can stack stuff on top.

Don't press play yet. I want to say what this is. Give it some context. Bring out a olive over here. There you go. You sure this is it? Yeah, Vids in court. Okay. So there's a case going on right now. It has captured a lot of people.

And it has some video evidence. This is the Charlie Kirk case. We are not going to show the Charlie Kirk videos or the, but the judge had, where we share some kinship here is I found something on Instagram that I thought was interesting, which is Judge Graff, I believe his name is Tony Graff. He, those videos that are in question, he's got some feelings and some issues with whether or not they are admissible due to how much work has been put into them, whether they've been manipulated, annotated, cut, edited, how produced are these videos? And we've been asking those same questions in order to look and really prosecute and adjudicate this case for ourselves here. So when I found this, I thought it was applicable.

Let's see if you agree. Okay. Do you have a version of this video that does not have alterations, such as zooming or circling? My concern is that if the 11-0-2 says what it says about the videos, these were the videos. Right. But then it was altered. And so do you have a version of this exhibit that does not have the zooming in or the circling? I don't know all the alterations that were made when they were made, but they were made how much was done to manipulate the video.

And I say manipulate to not saying it in a nefarious way, but I don't know what the scope of that is and how much it deviates from what was the original form. Is it, do you guys believe that that ISR footage, clearly there were annotations added, like you mentioned, the score, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. the voiceover, all of those things. The video itself, do you guys have concerns that there were alterations to the video? If you're talking about the pixels of the video, no. Okay. Talking about the edit of the video,

that's what we're going to get into next. Okay. Yes. Okay. Let's do it. Let's get rid of that. Okay. What you have here are three different videos.

The far right one is the one we just were skimming around on. Okay. Showing video. The middle one was also really, what is that, 2018, it was a minute and 30 long public affairs video. Yeah.

You know, it's seven or so minutes or eight minutes shorter than the Dan Schilling video, but basically follows the same story. It's just a truncated version. Okay. What you have in the far left is the raw footage unedited. If you look at the bars,

at the bottom, you see a gray bar at the very, very bottom. Yeah. That represents the original footage. That footage is one hour. The lowest bar. Yes. Yeah, the lowest bar.

Yes. one hour and 49 minutes of predator footage. Okay. The Dan Schilling video represented by the top bar where the orange blocks are those are the sections

of the totality of the video that are in Dan Schilling's video. Yeah, these orange chunks they're all comprised this nine minutes. Did he disclose that when he put it up in any way? Did they talk about that the video had been edited down from a larger... In fact, I have a story that I'll tell you. I've heard people comment on it,

but there is no... There's nothing that... What we just said right now, I don't know if that, I don't think you could Google that or find that anywhere. So it's the beginning of... Well, you can really compress actions to make them think that they're subsequent in nature, when in reality there's a vast time difference in between those things. Not only a vast time difference. Let's back up a little bit. there's a lot missing. Notice, for the most part, there's nothing in the middle. There's about an hour gap for people who are audio only.

Now, there are some very small slivers, but largely I would say 97% unused. Something like that. Something, the majority of it, they skip over this middle hour. Now, there are, 96. There are critical things happening in that middle time, which we'll get into with enemy movements and other developments in the story. There are, when we say we'll get into, I don't want to hold, let's stop holding things back. We're going to look at it more closely, but there are 11 orbits of the predator drone that are mostly, it does slew off, it does pan off at times, but it is mostly focused. You know, the area of interest is this bunker where there's movement or this bunker complex, as some call it.

We're going to get into exactly what those are as well, what they are and aren't in terms of their terrain and geo features. Can you go back to the other image that shows the three side by side? You're still good. This is actually it. This is demonstrating the Air Force. The Air Force has nothing from the center. See the red bars? That's why it's zero in that middle bar. Well, it was more than that.

The images appeared and maybe this was the way that they were captured. Oh, yeah. Go back. The contrast on them is different as well too. Possibly. But what's your note? Go back. Go back, please.

The other thing to notice is hot pictures. He's not an experienced Mac driver. He's not in hot corners or anything like. that. Notice how this is cropped, right? Yeah. You will look at the difference, look at the difference in the tree color on the image on the far right on the far left, which I'm not saying in and of itself. They might have just dialed the contrast on that. But what we're looking at is heat signatures. Well, it's not it's not necessarily a criticism to, because there are some measures that are taken through our investigation as well to get a closer and better look at all of this. Yeah. So what you're saying is you're identifying one. Yeah. I'm just noticing that there is a difference in the color tone that we're looking at. You're looking at. Yeah. I'm just noticing that there is a difference in the color tone that we're looking at. You're looking at. I'm just saying. I'm just. I'm just. I'm just. I'm just. I'm just. I'm just at. It's all black and white, but you can tell that one of them is, I'll call it a contrast, for lack of the better term. But then the other thing you notice is, I'd say 15 or 20 percent of the picture is cropped. That part of the, see these two trees right here? Yeah. They're up here. So was that a choice? Was that a YouTube constraint? You know, what's the purpose of cropping

the video? And again, we're going to touch on that in a second. Okay. George, go to the next one, please. Again, the next slide that we just watched demonstrates that the public affairs video, you know, essentially it goes blank for the middle hour, and you're missing a huge part of the story that's happening. It's not like the mountain went quiet and everyone just sat down in this middle hour. For clarity, yeah. A video is not going to get 21 million views

if it is almost two hours long. So I totally understand why somebody would want to compress that, but that's also why I asked if he disclosed that he did that because that, I believe, is the transparent step. If you're going to do that, I understand, but at least be consumer-facing with. what it is that you're doing. That's all that I would ask. Agreed. All right. Can you go to the,

can you go to the next one, please? Okay. Yeah, and Marjorjit here. What happens here, what we're inching closer to is the Dan Schilling video, you know, with the 21 million views, has a new ending.

Okay? Okay. He takes some of these over here on the far right and moves them over and creates on the YouTube video an alternate ending. Do you mean he places them out of the order with which they happen? Correct. That is correct.

Correct. And so he takes a piece from 618 a.m. and it becomes the new 614 or so ending. Okay. Can you bring up the PowerPoint? I think that's the next thing in our... Yeah. So while that's coming up, let's talk about, you know, to make it very clear what you can already see. and what you begin to discover if you're looking at what we're looking at. For those who said they saw the whole video,

whether they understand how much it's been manipulated or what's been moved, they don't. And this would be the first time that they're hearing that. Do they even have the ability to see the 149 video, an hour, 409 minute video? Not yet. Not yet. They will. And we intend to make that available to the public at the right time.

When you say I've seen the video, you've seen the video, but is that tantamount and it's not to having seen the full video? And do you have a sense when you're saying, hey, bro, I've seen it. I know what I've seen. You missed 10 and a half orbits. Yeah. So that's a gunship on the right. That's right.

Let's talk about what's happening there. So not only do we have the hour 49 from the predator, we have. have over an hour from Grimm from a AC130 gunship. How did you guys get the hour 49? We could talk about that later. We got anonymously. We did. No, no. We know, we, remember we said we were engaged in this story since 2015-16? You know, we were starting to knock on doors, and we were gifted this footage. Our belief is that someone who said no said yes in a different way. Okay. Okay. So how do you know that what you guys have received that? way that it's authentic.

We're going to talk about that in a second with the CST. All right. Just check it. I mean, how do you know that video you got wasn't edited or modified? Right. So now what we have for context, we have in a whole other layer, a whole other story unfolding. You have gunship. And can you hit play on this?

And then the third layer we have is. Coms. Coms. Holy shit. So now you're seeing the insert. from a completely different platform. And you got to key in on the right screen here because that helicopter is there.

Watch. Hit pause for a sec. Now that's your call. Pause for a sec. Where is that helicopter in relationship to the gun camps? You're going to get in a second. Okay. So they're not currently looking at it.

Did you see that little flash that happened down here in this corner of the screen? I did not. That's not taken an RPG. Okay, I did not. This is what I was asking. Yeah. Again, this is tough. Sometimes the sensor operator is looking slightly adjacent to where it is.

Yeah. All right. Keep going. Move up back up in a little bit. There. What is that there? That's that helicopter here. Okay, got you.

Watch. They lived off at the same time. These are now synced. Yep. Okay. That's the team. So, pause, please? So what this now does,

you have the full video from the predator from Q1. So you went from A-52 to 149. Now you're going from- To another angle. Yes, good. That's astute of you. Now you have, now you have the gunship and now you have the comms. And the comms are invaluable

because it tells its own story of what people are seeing in real time, not what they determined they were seeing 20 years later. This is the real story of what's happening on this mountain right now, what they knew or didn't know. So this goes a long way beyond the eight minute and 52 seconds video that, you know, so many people have seen.

So where we are now is what we did with the Ground Truth Project was to look at, let's go back to that question. Eight minutes and 52 seconds, I've seen the video, bro. Now we've indicated, and we can look at this all even more closely. But in the last few minutes, we've shown that that video was highly edited and manipulated and limited. So we go from 852, out of sequence, out of order, compressed, sped up, cropped, contrast, music, narration. We go from that to an hour and 49. We add an hour of gunship or more, plus it's hour or more of comms. And when you put all this together, now you're just beginning to get a chance to evaluate,

for those who haven't seen this, which is almost everybody, but it gives us a chance through this project, through the documentary, and in our own time, because we're obsessed and interested in this, with analyzing and evaluating this video in a comprehensive, full look at the whole thing. So when we, you know, a lot of people will throw that terminology around. Mitch mentioned it before. He's not throwing it around. We're not.

We're trying to write and cash the check of first principle. So let's go back to the beginning. And the beginning is there's a whole lot more to see. and you haven't seen it. So when you're told exactly what is happening in the video, who it is, where they are, what they're thinking and feeling, when they're dead or alive,

who's an enemy and who isn't, you're getting an impression or an interpretation or a build or a construct of something, maybe it turns out to be true, but it's not, and that's the problem. So if these exhibits... Dan Schilling, you said as the author, right? Do you believe that he had access

to this footage when he wrote his book? We have emails. We'll show in a bit that they were officially collaborating. So I think the answer is yes. We don't know for sure. Okay. But here's a story. Pete Blaber, who we mentioned, AFO Commander, wrote a book, The Mission Men and Me,

and has gone on some podcasts that I think we even talked about. In around 2017, Pete told us this, I'm sorry, Pete told us this story that happened around 2017 when Dan was writing the book. Dan goes to Pete with a video recorder, a video player, sorry, a video player. sorry, a video player, and shows him that, you know, a working copy of that eight-minute, nine-minute video. Pete sees the video and says... Who has seen the video before?

That's key to making this story work. Pete has seen the video. I mean, he was there for this. You know, he saw some of the... In fact, he saw some video that even we don't have, which is stuff that probably exists in the world, which is what happened to Neil. We don't have that. but put that aside for a second.

Pete's story to us was that Dan Shelling came to him for some support. I want to show you what I've made here. Shows him that video or work and copy that video. At the end of that, Pete says, where's the rest of it? Where's the part where the enemy are moving? And says that Dan quickly closed this thing. He said, you know, still working on it and nothing to see here kind of thing. And so to answer your question,

can't prove it, but I believe Dan had more than the nine minutes. What was he referencing where the enemy are moving? Remember that middle portion of the story? Yeah. Well, there's a lot happening on this. You're going to hear comms here in a bit that says, when the gunships are over the top saying, hey, there's eight to ten enemy, eight to ten enemy up there,

and they're going to walk right into this, right? So there's at least eight to ten people that they're seeing, and probably more that they're not seeing. Yeah. And, you know, we went, there and we watch how these people run up this mountain so when they know that there's something happening at the top of talk or gar people are scurring up this mountain to get in you know get in on it you guys went to the talker gar yes um we'll get to that too okay um okay uh what's what do we

what do we have next let's bring up the powerpoint and slide 19 please hmm no we think we got to go back to that because we want to make a point on something and then we'll do the stabilization. What do you want to look at here? You want to look at PowerPoint and go to the, yeah. There's a, there's a serious problem that I think we want to demonstrate here. Yep. While he's looking that up, what was the first piece of information you guys looked at when you decided to dig into this project? Where'd you start? That's a great question. It's been a long time since we thought about that. We interviewed Slav. We needed a baseline. And again, I mentioned to you, like it wasn't it was it was slightly guarded you know what's happening here what can we

believe what you know what can we confirm you know uh so yeah we started with slap okay he was number one of 70 something people just coming up there we go all right 19 sound down yeah turn the sound down please this is a work in in progress and we're gonna we're going to talk about who is on task here helping us with this because we did not do this ourselves. Okay. Paint the picture. What are we looking at here?

Okay. You are looking at the bottom there is local time. Again, these videos are synced up. So it is 612 local. Gotcha, okay. What you're seeing here, is there a... Yeah, hit play, please.

And go to 617 local time in the video. And uncut. Shilling. Obviously picture and picture. Can you move forward to 618? How is, hit pause, how is he having a picture and picture on the right hand one? But the raw image on the left doesn't show. It's his, you know, that's, that's an after effect he did.

But what, so hold on is, are we looking at raw feed on the left? Because if the person in the picture and picture doesn't appear in the raw feed, where is he getting that from? He's blowing up what you're seeing. He's blowing up the, the, the, the guy by the. Okay, yeah, yeah. And any, this is great that you're asking these questions because they're simple questions, but they're important for everybody to understand because they lead to exactly what we're about to talk about. Okay.

What's, uh, we need to scrub forward just around 618. Great barracks building at the Bud's compound. Right. Keep going. Keep going. More, more, more, more, more, more. You're looking at the, at the, at the ranger. insert now. Just getting.

Oh yeah, you could see the two guys. Okay, go back. Go back. Now we're too far. Damn it, George. Okay. The narration here, actually, I need you to turn the volume up, please. Yeah, I just wanted to make sure we got to the spot. Go back. Go back about a minute, minute and a half and turn the volume up. The minute and a half we're talking about is the minute and a half in a local time. This is super critical, so we're going to take the time to do this.

Volume? Okay. Crank that thing all the way, so these mics will pick it up, too. Back a minute. we'll get there there you go give me 30 more seconds and then we need the volume up I'm concerned about the volume

I'm not hearing what I think I should be here yeah George that other setting that you did so not that one leave that where it is just hit the spaceboard deposit there you go God we're learning things about computer technology you remember the other volume adjustment

you made the cleared hot one yeah hit the volume on the keyboard no wonder you're having a hard time over there you're standing holding a track pad in his hand. He is just creating difficult ways to work here. Squinting through some readers. Okay, I'm going to tell you what's happening here. We'll hit the spacebar. Let's see if we got volume. We do not. Okay. This is, again, we didn't alter this. This is just taken from the Dan Schilling video. Yeah, we mentioned before

that there are two sections and you began, you asked an important question. You said, so it looks like there are two sections from sort of the outside right on the timeline that are part of the ending. Correct. These sections are now happening at 619 or so local. Okay. About what we're seeing in the- Yeah. So everyone agrees in the story on the Air Force side that John Chapman made his last stand on the Ranger QRF insert. That happened at 614. Okay. Okay. So John is claiming, you know, he right there, if you would hear the audio, you would hear something like John is making his last stand, right? Saving the lives. There we go. There you go. Do about the 18?

So, yeah, please go to not. Please go back to. Yeah, with a little bit of room. Yeah, go to like 1745 or something. Nice mic's mic. That's good. Back, back, back. Back more. There, here we go. Look at that. We're doing it. Okay, here we go. Let her, let a rip. There may not be any audio in the sections that aren't highlighted in yellow. You know, there's, yeah, when it comes back online, we should hear audio. Oh, yeah, you'll get it when it, what you're saying is right.

When we reach the places where we're back in the Dan Schilling video, we got sound. So they paused for a sec. You were saying, well, that actually, just let's keep playing until we get a picture. All right. We can talk. So what you're saying is that the Air Force says at 614 in the morning is when John expired. That was his last push. Yes, that he died saving the lives of the Ranger QRF.

So he would be dead at this point by 540. four minutes. Well, again, good catch. And we're going to explain as soon as this video comes back online. So this new ending to the Dan Schilling video takes a moment from 618 and then listen to the narration. He's describing what they claimed happened at 614. It didn't happen, but that's their claim. That'll happen to our audio, Michael. I'm not sure. When is it present on? Tell me. Okay. I think we should have audio by now. You can see there's also a second RPG now hitting Ranger helicopter, which is crashed.

You can also see the two signatures in the area known as Bunker 1. You can see that it's now 6.19 a.m. I think we should have audio by now. You can see the Rangers are on the ground. You can see there are a lot of things we can identify about this video. Yeah. Let's explain this and if the audio comes on, great. at this point in the video at around 618,

the Dan Schilling video is claiming this John is making his last stand. The Air Force Public Affairs video that we saw in that middle section and the Dan Schilling video itself claim that, you know, he's making his last stand at 614 upon the Ranger QRF. So he took an ending at 618 and bolted it on to the end of his video. Why? I think because he needed a moving human form in that place when there was not one. But again, I can't get into his mind.

I just know that this piece right here is taken from after everyone agreed that John was already dead. So what this means is that the Rangers have been on the ground for approximately five minutes. And those last bars that you're seeing in the Dan Schilling video indicate, according to Dan Schilling that John is making his last stand at 619, which means... They've been fighting each other for five. John and the Rangers have been in a fire fight. Quite possibly even shooting each other for five minutes, which didn't happen. Why would he do that? He needed an ending.

Again, I can't get into his head. I don't know exactly, but it has to be something like he needed the right ending. I think there's another way to look at it and there'll be more of this coming up here, which is obviously that's the question. It's difficult to answer, but let's zoom out and answer a little bit for a second. how much of this is a narrative, how much of this, and we've seen that a bunch of this has been compressed and constructed, how much of this and for what reason is there some fiction involved here,

or an attempt to control the story and to exhibit it in a way that is favorable to the narrative? In your guys' research, not to jump ahead here. did John move from the place that Slablas saw him? No. He never moved again. He went down at three and a half or so minutes and never moved again. Let's talk about CST. This is a great place to get into it,

but I don't want to stop what you, if you had something hot off the press there. What the Air Force video, the PAO video and the Dan Schilling video never account for in that middle section because they claim in the narration, John's fighting for his life for an hour. Yeah.

They never show or account for, well, when did he get back up? We see him go down. We literally see him go down in the first three and a half minutes. And they skip that whole middle section to where if he would have, you know, regain consciousness and continued to fight, well, show us that part. It doesn't exist. Can you still visibly see his body laying where it was? Yeah.

And we're going to get into that. So let's do CST and then let's do orbits. Yeah. Let's talk about who's working with us. Okay. We watched a documentary, I think it was about a year ago now. Called The Stringer. And it was the story of, if you remember the famous Vietnam picture called Napalm girl?

Yes. It's a young woman. It's a young girl. I think she's 12 or something like that. And she's running down the street. I think she has a sister. And she's running from a village. It was just bombed by Napalm.

I forget the journalist's name. But that picture was one of probably four iconic photos from Vietnam. the supposed author of that picture got a Pulitzer. This documentary pursued this story and determined that he wasn't the, he didn't take that picture. He wasn't the photographer of note. That in fact, it was one of his assistants, one of his Vietnamese assistants. And for reasons we won't get into, they gave credit to the American journalist. and in this documentary they had this company called Index

Recreate the scene digitally And we watched it like that's pretty interesting I wonder if there's something to do like that for us Right and recreating it digitally just to give this 30 more seconds of color is They didn't do it like stenographers right They took they took photographs they took film from the time They took the actual topography the actual road and they rebuilt it in a way

where they had the opportunity to begin to track and trace where was said photographer, where were the other photographers, what are the distances, what are the lenses being used? And they came to the conclusion that they decided that

the photograph that we've seen was taken by another person due to the fact that the recreation indicated where they were what their minute of angle was on all of this and they couldn't have possibly taken the photo. The Valley of Death.

So, hit pause, please. It is hit Spacebar. Describe the place. Where between 1941 and 1943, Can you scrub ahead to like, I think, what do we say a minute or so? Or massacred by Nazi forces. Once, a massive geologically formed ravine

on the outskirts of Kiev, such as maps, photographs and videos, historic reports and witness testimony. What are you trying to do, George? We used old topographic maps to reconstruct 3D versions of the Babinjar landscape during different... So let's just see with this for another 20 seconds in it all.

Here you can see the landscape of Baboniar in 1924. It is overlaid with a photograph taken from a German plane in 1943. Using this method, we can analyze the distinct terrain element. present in the photos. Okay. I think we're good here. For instance, can be identified. All right, it's explaining what they can do with.

So, yeah. So this is the Center for Spatial Technologies. The Center for Spatial Technology, we were introduced to them through one of the filmmakers. Actually, we were introduced to them through index. Yeah, we wanted to work with the guys

that did the Stringer. And the Stringer documentary said, you know, we have a full plate right now, but let us introduce you to CST. So, um... Did they ever ask you? to talk into the microphone? They did not.

And so we called up this, you know, Maxim, who runs this show. Go rid of this. Go for it. And started unfolding what we were hoping to accomplish. We wanted to recreate the mountain. We had footage because, like we talked about,

we were there. We had SSE photos from two weeks after the battle. We had all kinds of stuff that we could use with the predator footage. And so what they did was did their own version of this for us. So let's... Did you mention that they used the Afghanistan trip footage?

Yes, they did. They did. And it was key. And so they were able to use key landmarks, rocks that didn't move. Some of the trees and stuff were hit by hellfires and changed over time. But key terrain features, big-ass boulders, didn't move. And so they were able to use those as anchors. And can you skip through some of their work for us?

Again, work in progress. While we're pulling that up, I'm still a little bit stuck here as to how, if you can see Chapman's body still in the same place that it was when it went down and it didn't move, what is the explanation for that? They don't have one. Have they ever been asked? Yeah. We have. Well, because when they're asked that question, they say, well, you can see it move and it moves and he's doing all these heroic things, but they've never exhibited it. They only use that tiny little piece that you've seen.

So what we did was we wanted to know. skews out after all of those actions have still taken place, is the body still in the same location? Yes. Yeah. Never moves. But you have to watch the whole thing and you have to have to have a keen eye and understand what's happening and listen to the cons and have the full picture before you can say that with some confidence. And since the world, again, going back to the predator footage, not necessarily Dan Schillings anymore. I think we've seen that there are some limitations there, and that's putting it mildly. But we looked at the hour and 49 and all the other, call them assets that Mitch just

mentioned. And what these guys were able to do was they were able to take the predator footage where the actions on over the 11 orbits, over the hour and 49 minutes are happening. Hit play. And map that over the existing terrain. Okay. Okay. And the other thing, this is all part of the same video, yeah?

notice what's happening here. Hit pause, please. Or actually, just let it go. In the original video, you noticed it was jumping around a lot. There was times it was very hard to track. So what these guys did was they picked an anchor point. They used Bunker 1 and they stabilized it.

So we can at least not have to have our eyes jumping around the screen trying to figure out what's going on. This is very common post effect type stuff. Yep. Yes. Can you scrub forward, please? Keep going, keep going, keep going. So they stabilized it for us so we can do an easier analysis.

Also stabilized it completely. We didn't just stabilize eight minutes and 52 seconds. Brian, go ahead and speak to this. Yeah. And, you know, Andy, you're a pilot. So this should already be speaking volumes to you as you look at it. The video is still running, by the way. If you guys want to pause, hit space bar.

No, it's good. Yeah, no, it's good. Because what you're seeing is you're seeing, one, two, three, four, five. You're seeing 11 plus orbits. Yep. You'll periodically see the white dot represent. the Predator drone. What you'll periodically see is the white dot will disappear.

That's because the area of interest in the center, those are times when its sensor is slewing or panning away from the center, right, from the target area. So they analyzed all of these orbits with the camera. So again, when you think you've seen the entire video, you've seen a piece of one orbit, we've now seen, and Center for Spatial Technologies has looked at and analyzed 11 orbits an hour and 49 minutes. And what they did was they took each orbit and they stabilized each orbit. So every time...

Looks around the same anchor point as well. Yes. And the, I think it might be called the angle of depression or the look angle remains relatively stable as well. And now you're able to understand not only what happened in the areas that we've all seen before, but much more importantly,

you're able to understand what's happening for the hour and 40 minutes you haven't seen. Okay, and here's another key point. That predator is in an orbit. It's doing a 360-degree orbit above this target 11 or so times. Remember the Dan Schilling video. It's taken from one angle.

It never moves. So it's also deceptive in the sense that there's like 300 more degrees to look at and see different, you know, see the same place from a different angle. So you were only getting a slice of the pie, if you will, and you were only getting a piece of sort of one pie. So this is the full picture of 11 pies all the way around. So we, what does it show in that, we'll call it the missing hour, that hour in between in these 11 orbits?

It shows enemy movement. It shows the gunship unloading on top of the mountain here and there. It shows, and you hear confusion as to who's who, who the friendlies are, who the enemy are. There's loads of, and we'll play this here in a minute, there's loads of discussion, bickering, arguing, frustration um

very rarely clarity um but again remember we talked about the grace like this is about as complex the situation as we could you know

come up with so and understandable the guys in the AC130 were probably on their first combat pump as well the guys in AC130 were involved in the friendly fire incident the day before yeah fuck same guys

same crew can you go back to that orbit where is John's body in these orbits there okay so basically at the anchor point he's the one of as that one you're pointing at on the left yeah he's the heat signature on the left you know what this is Neil Roberts no that's a donkey like an actual donkey an actual donkey okay it's how we got up there part of how we got up there when we're looking at now is not what I'm sorry which one the one you just pointed at with the that but let it let it play it sometimes

out of context without moving. It's challenging. You're looking at one look handle here. It's tough to see the dog to mark this week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There it is.

There he is. Hey, pause. Where is he? John? Yes. Yeah, right there. The over the three other heat signatures, those are enemy moving at that point?

No, there's the operators. Okay. So this is still earlier on. Well, hold on. I'm not even sure what time this is. That one is. that's the thing is that the orbits are now laid next to each other. So that you can look at the same position of the orbit the next time around.

Okay. That's one of many ways to analyze this. Yeah. This may be very confusing for, you know, we're not asking in the documentary here for people to read all of this. And I think it's right for you to ask what's happening in all of them. I think the takeaway at this point before we begin to give you a best of, better picture of what you're actually seeing when and where is that you haven't seen the full picture and we have the full picture. And again, that might, you might feel like, okay, I get that.

I've heard that for a half hour. The problem is for the last six years, anyone who's paid attention to this has heard the opposite, that they've already seen the full picture. So I think it's important to make sure that that's marquee here. Yeah. I think we can kind of encapsulate this by saying, and Brian just did a pretty decent job at it, but the original video, the thing that people reference all the time is incomplete. That is without question. It's missing angles. It's missing 90-something percent of the entire story.

It's missing the gunship footage that, you know, in some cases corroborates or is in contrast to what's happening with the predator. and you can't have an accurate assessment of the store. You can't even begin until you have all of it. This is something else that CST is doing. Again, they used our trip back, and they used horizon points. They used rocks,

and they have digitally recreated the mountaintop. This is something that's still a work in progress. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, they've digitally created the mountaintop. It's fully navigable, but they've also digitally created the positions of Mako-30, including John Chapman, Fritz-Labinsky, and the rest of the team, and how and where they're moving and when,

so that it, again, is mapped against the Predator drone footage. They took some photogrammetry of some real-world Google Earth-like mapping, but not Google Earth specifically, then map that to photographs, to the AC-130, and to the Predator drone, wrapped it back over the mountain, went back to the original footage, marked the terrain features, as you can see here in yellow, the ones that didn't move, right,

the rocks and other things that are permanent. They used that same target point of John Chapman, and then they took the Predator drone video, and this is the most miraculous part, and they made the Predator drone video 3D accurately down to less than an inch. Good God. This is also fully navigable. Eventually, again, still work in progress. We're going to put this on our site or someplace so the people can come and interact with it and come to their own conclusions,

which also might be dangerous. But nevertheless, we don't think a real conversation can happen until all this stuff is out there. So let's talk a little bit more about CST because this is a time when I think it's necessary to say we did not partner with this group of people. The idea was to bring in scientists, to bring in forensic technology.

This was part of testing what we had learned through the trip to Afghanistan, what we had learned through the interviews, what we'd learned through the comms documents, what we had learned from looking at the flat 2D version of the hour and 49 minutes. But we didn't tell them what we found.

We gave them a list of, what, Mitch, 10 or so. I think it was eight primary questions. Yeah, that we wanted answered. And they're the questions that everybody's wondering, but they really boil down to the one question you're asking the whole time, which is, did John ever get up from this spot? We all agree he went down here.

And if he did get up, where did he get up? When did he get up? And when did he go down again permanently? But it still keeps mapping to that same thing. If he got up again, then the rest falls apart. And you don't need to answer the rest of the questions, except for human interest. Right?

Yeah, this is fascinating. You know, we keep asking them, where are we, you know, where are we weak? What else should we be looking at? Trying to keep them pure. They've never seen the documentary. No. They've never seen any of our interviews.

They didn't want to. Yeah. If John never got up, what was Dan Schilling using as the movie? Enemies. Enemies. Remember that middle section of the video, there's still a story. The mountain still exists. The story's still happening.

Yeah. And that huge gap in coverage in the Air Force Public Affairs video on the Dan Schilling video, there's all kinds of shit happening up. here. Trackable, clear things happening. Enemy movement and I don't know if we want to take this moment to get into this whole thing and break it wide open and describe this. I don't think we do. No, not yet. Not yet. Because it's too much to preempt into this thing. But there is, I think it's important to say we will tell you here and eventually get into the reality of what's happening. And I also want to say, once you see it, it doesn't take forensic technology to see it.

What's really telling about this whole thing, and again, we'll talk more about all this, is that the forensic technology people helped us go deeper, look more closely, magnify, amplify, stabilize, look at the complete picture, build it, make it navigable. But the fact is, honestly, if you look at the hour and 49 minutes, you can see for yourself, what's happening. It does not take your level of experience or my level of experience or it takes a few even questions, even if you didn't know who they were, you might begin to see that there are some enemies moving from one place to another place who begin to occupy some other places

where there are some downed soldiers and you will see their confusion, the fact that they're de-conflicted with one another in the darkness, in the distance from the place, in the fact that there are five languages on this mountain, Uzbek, Tajik, Chechen, Pashto, Arabic. Oh, with different customs, different ideologies. One common enemy in us. Yeah. But, you know, they were up there disagreeing and having major issues, and that's caught on SIGA. People will tell you that you're looking at one fight, one force. How could there be any chance that these guys would not know, that the enemies would not know exactly who each other are and exactly what their targets are and exist in a completely de-conflicted environment. That's just not the case. Well, they didn't have our technological advantages.

And even with ours, we had already in the story, we had two friendly fire insies. Okay. I think there's something I want to say here, which is I can already hear it in the comment section in the next podcast that some of our detractors go on. They're going to say they did this. they could say yeah we did the same thing in 2016 when we were making the case for john chapman they did not they absolutely did not and if they did show it it's a good place to talk about and how did they do it let let's i mean i'd like to get back to unless you feel really differently Mitch i'd like to get back to pixel tracking for a moment's do it yeah i think you know when we say that they might say they've done this right when you read that new york times article new york times article new york

Times article tells you that the Air Force Laboratory built a piece of technology that was able to assign a kind of pixel DNA to each one of these pieces of what you may know as blobology in these videos. That's not a made-up word either. Yeah. The P3 sensor operators affectionately calls those black blobs. They're like, yeah, it's blobology. Like they're moving, shifting, nebulous little blobs that don't have a human form necessarily

all the time. Sometimes they do. But even they, these experts with these sensors, they call it blobology. The claim would be that the pixel tracking is turning the blobology into science. Is there a place in that video that Dan used where the movement of John started where they found his body? Or does it just pick up with him already in movement? Yeah, it takes up with him in movement. It picks up with him in movement.

But there's a, there's like a sub-yeye. in there, which makes it even more telling, which is that that movement is picking up in the place and taking place in relatively the same position that John was in. So again, just looking at that one, you know, the problem with cutting this apart and the reason it's cut apart is not just that it has been cut apart, it's that it begins to, and I'm not saying this was the plan because we don't know, but it offers you the opportunity to have to ask that question in the first place, that am I looking at movement over the spot that John was in? The answer is yes.

Well, there's an easier way to get to that. And that is, if you use the narrative of Dan's video where he was fighting up and towards the enemies, his body should have been found in a different location from where the movement originated from. Where was his body found? Same place. He never moved. Well, that's what I'm saying.

But in the video, it shows him, right, fighting and moving. That's an enemy. Right. I see what you're saying. You're saying if he's fighting, he's moving. His body would not have been found in the same location that he went down in. It's very unlikely that he would have died in the same position. He would have had this gunfight like he was on a tripod. No, the video shows him maneuvering. Right. That's what I'm saying. And so if he maneuvered, how do they explain that his body was found in the same place that he went down? They don't. They don't even try. And if you were being generous, you could say he moved back to the exact same position because that was the one that offered him.

And we're going to get into this in a way that you won't believe offered him the most, uh, potential cover and concealment. And maybe that's why he gravitated back toward the best fighting. That would be a legitimate. Yeah. Do you know what we're looking for? I went there. Yeah.

So in this article, it names pixel tracking technology. The imagery technology still being refined in the Air Force lab, enabled the service to assign each person in the blurry videos a pixel signature based on his size, his clothing and the weapons he carried. Hard stop there. Were they looking at some video? that we are not because I don't know how you determine any of that with the resolution of the video that we're looking at. No, they weren't. And Andy, you're not, that's not just hearsay because we didn't

only, it didn't only take the Center for Spatial Technologies to help us understand that and to have to build toward the ability to do something like that. We spoke to Hanifurid, and that was an incredible conversation. Well, before we get to Hanifariad, there's a gentleman mentioned here, David Kriegman. Right. So when I read this article in 2016, again, no medals of honor, just the first public outward-facing article from the New York Times on the cover. Like, oh, this is interesting. I remember this story, right? And I read this, David Kriegman, a computer science professor at the University of California, San Diego. Like, that's in my backyard. Internet, phone number. Hey, man, can you talk? And so we had a conversation with him. It's in our doc,

but I'll just kind of reference it. He basically says, I don't even know why I'm referencing this article. he goes, we asked them the most important question. Which, did you, did you see the video in the first place? Forget about the technology. Did they show you the video?

Because you just said, would that even be possible with this level of resolution if any of this existed? His answer was very disturbing. No, I didn't have a chance. They didn't give me anything to look at. I've never seen the video to this day.

And he said, so then he, so then you see his response here in the article. And so we're like, well, he's like, He goes, Mitch, I don't even know why they referenced me. He goes, I didn't see the video. And I just was basically telling you, like, what might be possible.

So they used this professor to sound, I don't know, more, sound smarter and make this seem more airtight. Well, technically it's on them to answer why they did, right? When we interviewed Sean Naylor, he threw his writing partner, Christopher Drew, who's at the top of this article under the bus. He said something like, and this is in our doc, you know, well, Christopher, I worked the technology piece. We were moving fast and just trying to figure things out.

Right, and that Naler worked more of the military piece. But it's like, well, in the end, somebody published this article and we read it. So both of your names are on it. What's the answer to the question? Is there pixel tracking technology? Did you see it demonstrated? Give us more information. But it all started to fall apart when Kregman said that he didn't see the technology,

he didn't see the video. And he wasn't, the takeaway for us is, and you can interpret. this a lot of different ways, but we're here to interpret it our way. And I think it's pretty obvious to see if people feel differently. Go ahead, fire away. But knowing what you wouldn't know if you read this article that he didn't see it and that he didn't see the technology demonstrated, this article leads you to believe not only that there is technology, but that this person who's an expert is evaluating it and endorsing it in some way. And none of those things are true. none of them.

So remember we talked about this picture tracking probably an hour ago now? It was kind of the key to this next chapter in the story because now we, according to their claim, now we can truly understand what was happening there. So for instance, if five people all run under all these blobs run under a bush or disappear under the tree and then they all come out in different directions, we can still say that's that person and that's that person. Or the camera, the, the camera salutes. Yeah, sluze off comes back.

They can reacquire the signals. They know exactly who everyone is at all times. And, Andy, this technology doesn't exist. This is completely made up. I spoke to the Air Force investigator on the side who was kind of leading the campaign or investigation or research, whatever you want to call it. In fact, he was cooperating with us.

He sent us a bunch of files. it was very helpful. And I was at a racetrack. I think, you know, I race motorcycles. It was a windy day, and I get this call. And I'm like, I got to take this. This is Mike Wendellkin, who's now, or just recently was,

the 24th STS commander. And we had this nice conversation. He tells me he's going to send me a bunch of files. I say thank you. He comes through and does that. He does over a gigabyte of very helpful things. And then at the end of the conversation, I'm about to hang up. I said, wait, wait, hold on, Mike.

I have one question. I said, pixel tracking. What is it? Like, what does it actually do? Because it's referenced here. It's a reference in the Newsweek article. We've already had the Creedman conversation. So we're skeptical, not just because we're being skeptical.

We're skeptical because nobody's explained to us, what's the software, what's the hardware, what's the code, what's the scripting? How does it run? What are the outputs? What are the outputs? What are you getting? When you're finished and you hit enter, what comes out? I mean, these are obvious questions.

And he tells me this. He goes, Mitch, you know, this picture tracking was never supposed to be what it turned into. It was designed to be a briefing tool, not a deciding tool. And I said, no, no, no, but what is it? And he goes, it's kind of stumbling for the words. He goes, it's this editing software. And I'm kind of getting the sense like off the shelf. And I said, you mean like final cut pro or something?

He's like, yes, exactly. And he goes, all I did was put a green dot and what we knew to be Chapman when they get off the helicopter, because that is true. Like you can. You can faithfully track him for a certain amount of time. That's not in question.

And he goes, all I did was, I followed my own green dot frame by frame by frame. And when the camera moved off, I took an educated guest as to this is probably still John Chapman. And I said, Mike, That's not technology. That's elbow grease. That's tedious, terrible work frame by frame by frame at 30 frames a second.

So pixel tracking is not real. If it is real, someone at this point needs to tell us what it is, how it works, what the outputs are, all those things. If pixel tracking were real, why hasn't it been used since it was developed by the Air Force Research Lab in 2016? By the way, the pixel tracking... To solve crimes and other military... It's never been used again. It's never even referenced again. But for those who would jump in here and say, well, it exists now.

We're not talking about now. We're talking about taking footage from 2002, and we're talking about technology from the Air Force Lab, supposedly from 2015, 16, 17, somewhere around the time that this is all being analyzed. So this is unfortunate. it. This actually oddly makes me angry. What we're going to show you next. So picture, the entire case in the beginning hinged on this pixel tracking, letting him have a new

understanding of the story. It's being evangelized in the New York Times. And it's what leads to the Dan Schilling video, although he doesn't mention it himself, but those annotations are the annotations. Those might not be exactly when Delkins, they may be a combination. Don't have the answer to that. Some of them are. Actually, some of them are. You watch the whole Dan Sailing video. Right. That green dot is the green dot he told me about. The issue is they have a little more video and there are more annotations on Wendellkin's videos.

But it's some mashup of the Air Force package and some work that Dan and his team did, whoever they are. We do not know who they are. So I think it's a fair assessment to say that without pixel tracking in these early days, the rest of the story probably doesn't happen. Remember the new information, getting back to the metals for a moment, just take everybody back to where we were quite some time ago, the video has been around and the package has not been approved a number of times.

So what's new about the package is the pixel tracking technology gives you the chance to magnify, sign this DNA, and now definitively walk away with a report that tells you this is indeed, in fact, John, Chapman and these are his actions and these are when they're happening and we can do it faithfully and dependably. No, we're not going to show it here, but since, before we hit play here, numerous times over in recent years, you will hear Dan himself, I forget who else, maybe we could put links to these on the show notes as well, begin to distance themselves from pixel tracking. Why?

Again, I'm not in their mind. I don't know. But they say things, and I think when he was doing a book review or something, he's like, you know, we don't even need the pixel tracking to know what we now know. But then they needed it. And this is the post Medal of Honor ceremony for John Chapman, the press conference. That is his surviving spouse, Valerie. And I believe that is his former commander on the far left.

Go ahead to play. what we saw at the time was that there were, we said, again, as I said before, we suspected that other things happened. We said, did John live beyond his initial wounding? We had several things that pointed in that direction, but we couldn't conclusively prove it. And that's why we didn't think, we weren't able to go forward with a metal of honor at that time. No assets student, new. It was only just not due, but it's other data that you thought on. It was only discovered actually in the last several years.

And that coupled with new techniques to be able to analyze video. And literally we had very dedicated professionals go through hundreds of hours of video, frame by frame with digital techniques that can label individual. guys on the ground and were able to discern exactly that John had done these. Do you have her comments? That we I'm going to comment there. Yeah. Couldn't prove. So he's he's stumbling through that trying to explain you know what it is that brought this new chapter in the story.

Yeah, when I listen to that I'm reminded that we've even been generous to his presentation. Yeah. I want to hear where is uh... Valerie. She's getting ready to talk now. You can hope. Jeff Schold, Kasten Burbis. Can you talk about what are your thoughts and feelings now after 17 years that your husband is being awarded, the nation's highest military award for Valor? It's finally a validation for what he had done in the mountain, and we were lucky enough to have their technology to help us prove what happened there. And it's just an amazing one.

It's been a long road coming. But it doesn't change anything. far as with pride, I've always, we've always been proud of him and this doesn't make us any more proud of him that just validates what he's done that amount on that day and that night. Okay. Now, I actually, probably, probably was really bothered showing this because she's the pawning this. Okay. She's reciting something that's untrue that she was told, citing this newer technology, she said at the beginning of that. She is the least, well, other than, I don't know who the woman is sitting next to her, but she is the least steeped in the technology and the culture of anybody there.

You know what I mean? She's just speaking from emotion as a spout. I don't hold that against her. Agreed. No, I'm not saying nothing. Yeah, we're not holding anything against her. Nothing against her. But she's repeating something that's untrue that she was told. That's where I'm bothered by it. What I'm saying is there's no way she could have know that.

Correct. Correct. And that's unfair and that's problematic. And that's a big part of this. You know, again, we've been, we've looked at some things really closely as we've been talking here. Let's back up a little bit. The problem is, not that his widow or surviving spouse doesn't have the ability to discern the difference between

whether there's pixel tracking technology. Does it work? Where is it and ask these questions? Nobody does for the most part. In other words, there's a handful of people that could come to the table and say, hey, wait a minute, let me get my hands on that and use it and figure it and analyze it. this is part of the excitement and fervor in believing this story is hearing not just that it happened,

not just being told what to look at and what to watch and having this narrated, annotated video, but it's doing a little bit of reading and hearing that technology led to these conclusions and not having the ability to discern whether there is such a thing. So that's part of, and that's not unique to this story, but it's a big, it's a factor in supporting the current narrative. narrative. In the one of the first videos we watched, yeah, we'll take a hard stop here in a second. One of the first videos we watched when Dan is narrating, it says this is when he earned the first Medal of Honor. What did you call the separation between those two? Material Finding 1 and

material finding 2. So material finding 2 seems to be heavily based off the pixel tracking. When they first had put him in for the Medal of Honor, was it denied on Material Finding 1? And then he was awarded the Medal of Honor for Material Finding 2, or was it a combination of the both? Why did it give? it rejected when it was... We don't know. Okay. We did not dive into those, you know, I don't know if sure when they happened. I think it was around 2010 or so.

We didn't dive into that part of the story. We dove into the part that, you know, that actually netted then the Medal of Honor. So the answers, I don't know. I'd love to hear the story, you know, but... Today's episode is brought to you by Element, sometimes said just LMNT, or you can say element, it doesn't really matter, shooters choice. Do you like feeling dehydrated? Do you like not having enough electrolytes? Yeah, me neither. And they have new products. Lemonade plus ice tea that's slightly caffeinated, 50 milligrams of caffeine, but it still has the 1,000 milligrams of

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50? 250. Yeah. Michael, my close, 240 something? Yeah, 24. Yep. I need to take a bathroom break. Yeah. We get to break for lunch. Yeah. You boys ready? Yeah. Ready. Good lunch. Good lunch. We do want to clean up one or two things that we were discussing over lunch. I believe I misspoke when I talked about one of the Razor crews. Okay. It was Razor 1. The helicopter that was on the screen earlier. Razor 1 was piloted by Chuck Gant and...

What do you say? Forick? I said Razor 4. Yeah. So minor detail, but we just don't want anyone coming back around us. Go ahead. What do you got? You were right.

It was Razor 4. But it was Spock and fail. Yeah. Oh, right. Okay. I'm sorry. So, yeah. I got our pilot.

or helicopter is mixed up, but point taken. And then I think you had something in mind as well. Yeah. We indexed, and I think this is all, stand behind it, and this is a way to explain it. We indexed hard on, so far on pixel tracking. There are some who, with the medals of honor in their rear view, have backed off of pixel tracking as being an important part of this.

And I think it's important. to remind an audience that may have that in mind or may have seen some of that on other podcasts and other places, this backing off of the import of pixel tracking technology, that the pixel tracking was part and parcel to the metal. And whether it was necessary for it, whether it would have happened without it, that's not provable. That's not something we can look at. It happened with it. It's associated directly with it. It was supported by that, certainly. in the public outward facing campaign for it. And we'll talk more about it being a campaign in a little while.

But I think it's necessary to say that backing off of it now doesn't change what happened then. And that's a factor. Yeah. That's fair. Okay. Let's talk about what we're going to call the plan. And this is the plan to reinsert an attempt to recover or rescue Neil. One of the things that we've noticed in the years of reading about this, talking about it and other things is that, you know, as people have zeroed in on this piece of footage, it starts to take on a little bit of a brooder problem where if you only look at those eight seconds or only look at this eight minutes and 52, and let's say it's all we had.

That's not where the story starts. That's where your visibility and the signals intelligence starts. So we have to separate those two things, and this is part of that. There was a plan for the first insert. Didn't work out. Went pear-shaped. There was a plan for the second insert, which was the rescue. And that's what we want to talk about here.

So you have a better sense of what was supposed to happen and what actually unfolded. Yeah, you have to, I say you have to be very careful commenting like people have until you know what the intent was. So here we go. As we talked about Niels there, he's there for about two hours by himself. They finally get a bird to go back in. We told you that one guy opted out, but John Chapman, Slabinsky, and the other five guys on the Mako team are going for it, right?

And they realize what's at stake. They realize that their enemy are there waiting for them for this go-around. And so they put in place a plan to mitigate that. And that is the following. They have about 10 minutes of gas in this aircraft. So once they get inserted, they've got whatever they're going to do for their plan, they have about 10 minutes or so. So they don't have an abundance of time. They are requesting the gunships, Grand 3-2 in this case, to provide pre-assault fires.

Again, if they know what they're going into. Scatter these people, get their heads down so we can at least get in clean. After that, the plan is the gunship, again, now this is the second part of the gunship. is going to burn all over the mountain and try to find Neil, whatever signature they believe is Neil, whether that's someone not moving, whether that's someone talking about people. Is it necessary to explain to the audience a little bit about burn, rope, IR?

Is there a quick 30-second tutorial? An incredibly high-powered IR flashlight from the sky that can enhance the resolution of the sensors because it's pushing out more of what the sensors can read back from an illumination perspective. Right. And so the guys, the team on Night Vision, we're going to follow this burn. And if they keep burning this thing, do that in comms.

They're going to say, go over here. And we think that's him. They're going to go try to grab Neil and get the hell out of there. Anything I missed? I'd like to sum it up. It's supposed to, by doing that, it's going to provide situational awareness to the team. So they can find where the bad guys are, where some safer spots are. And most importantly, can they locate Neil?

Is there a way to get to him? How did they determine where they wanted the pre-assault fires, not knowing where Neil's body was? great question of course they didn't they didn't know so there's a there's a point in the comms here where you'll hear

um actually that actually the scatter was later um two bright most videos top of bottom let's listen yeah yeah so but before we listen some of this

will answer your question the other fourth layer we have so we have two videos you know comprising the rest of the 90 something percent we have the comms we also have jococons we also have jocon logs. So this is, you know what a jock log is? It's basically a script. So as radio comms come

into your tactical operation center or joint operation center, some poor petty officer or sergeant or someone's writing all this down, it's the diary of the events. And so we have those as well to, you know, provide color. So the initial plan of the jock log, um, razor's about to go in at this time. They will put the guys on the ground, move off and refuel. Ground team will assess and work the problem Blackhawks and QRF are standing by and then the next entry Grim will burn the LZ and give

SA once team is on the ground so let's listen to these videos and I think it's time to talk about you know John's role you know what's supposed to happen here okay so everyone needs to you know these are some

sketchy comms at points you know we have to listen kind of closely we didn't doctor the comms although it was tempting to just so people could understand it better, but we're just to leave it. Doctor, meaning for clarity, not changing them in any way. Just enhance them so that they could be understood better. Yeah. But go ahead and let's start with this first video. And that's local time. So 447 AM. Okay. What's dude? Crucial there. Okay, first of all, let's explain who's talking. That is a Marine by the name of Chris Naylor.

He's the fire control officer out of Messera. You're going to hear his voice throughout the next hour and a half or so. He is orchestrating to the best of visibility this fight. And sometimes it's not going very well. I think you have to layer on top of that. It's hard enough to put together an extremist plan in person when you are knowing what you're going back into. Trying to do that remotely.

It didn't sound like SACOM. That sounded more like a UHF. It could have been SAT. But trying to coordinate that over the radio is a burden in and of itself. I mean, I'm used to listening to these type of radio calls. I'm sitting there closing my eyes trying to listen to what they're saying. a little bit of over-talking.

That is an absolute nightmare. Well, it's going to get more interesting. So he's in Massira. The blue talk, the TF-11 talk, the Seagall Team 6 talk of Red Squadron, is in Bogram. And then you have other talks also in Bogram. So everyone's somewhat disparate. And that's, again, as you were just pointing out, a problem.

This had to have been sack on them. That's the only way that that would have come through. Okay. Okay. Okay, so we know what the plan is. We're starting to hear the plan to take some kind of shape from Chris Naylor. Let's go to the second video. Oh, I'm sorry, before you do that, what's now cemented that went over the net for everyone to hear is that the QRF is on the go.

Right? There was a tail end there. The QRF is on the move. This is important for a host of reasons. We'll get into some of them, but it's also just important because it's part of the plan. Gotcha. Yep. Okay.

H-10 bad guys at least that they can see. There's a lot going on there. Let's talk about some of the pieces of it that really kind of matter here. Before we do, I think it's important to emphasize that to people who have not heard radio traffic or what is going on there, those are people doing the absolute best they can with the tools they have available. That might sound like a galactic shit show because the technical definition of what that is is a galactic shit show. But those are people that care that are doing the best that they can. And you can hear it. Yeah.

Like they got clear to engage and they're like, hey. We don't know what friendly is. We friendly, right? And so, and for the listeners, they're saying to burn, they're saying, that IR, oftentimes people will wear on their helmet. It looks like an American flag. You can see it has the little hexagonal infrared reflective tape essentially turned into an American flag. If the burn crosses over that, you're not going to confuse it for anything else. It sparkles back at you. So what they were saying is take that IR illuminator and sweep it over all of those things

to see if you can get a splash back because they're trying to find the missing person. Great. Yes. Did you have other thoughts on it? No, that because you ended up saying a couple of the important things, which are, you know, they do not know where the friendly is. They did know at some point and they've lost that signal. No. Another key point here is so you can hear Naylor saying, you know, get a burn, find a new LZ. So the implication there is. He knows that they don't want them to go back into that same spot.

They already lost helicopter. Now you would think, because this is important here too, I think, you would think that all of this, because the intention here is for this to be relayed to, let's say, all of the stakeholders involved here. But especially Razor 4, who's inbound. And that wouldn't mean only Razor 4 as an air crew. That would mean the cargo in this case, the guys from ACO-3-0. Because if there's some disparate element to this or something that the ground force

commander in this case slab or chapman because he would be he's the cc t so he would be picking up comms in a connection with this group right this is his job he could potentially be plugged into the helicopter but they they can manage or monitor a variety of nets and his ICS may not have been plugged into that i believe the helicopters can get set on but that doesn't mean that the guys in the back are hearing that transmission it's a big part of the story So what I'm pointing out is not that they did. I'm pointing out that there's... The problem here is that most of this information

that we're hearing here now, the guys who are about to be on the ground... Who are expecting pre-assault fires because they know what they're getting into. What was their plan in the bird? Stuff it right back where we were and just get out as quickly as possible? Find us a new spot.

Get out of there and we'll get into that in a second in detail. And again, roll the burn, find something that looks like it might be an American, walk us to it, grab them, get the bird back in, get out. Okay. That's the basic plan. But the pre-assault fires, this key component is so they can get in clean, get the heads

down, get these guys scattered in some way. And you're hearing the debate, like, wait, where is this friendly? Neil Roberts. You can hear that they didn't want to shoot unless they knew where the American was. Right. Right. So let's go to the third video. So pause for a second.

Just to be clear, even maybe for you, that you're hearing internal cons of the gunship. Yeah, you can hear him talking. And you're hearing Naylor coming in underneath. Yeah. Right? So they're having their own conversation, responding to things he's saying. It gets kind of frustrating at times. Anything you want to point out there?

There's a fair, I'm sure you're clear on this at this point, but just to paint it for the audience and we do this in the project and the documentary. Well, let's just talk about what we've got in this stack so far just to understand what's going on. Because we have, we have the predator. We have Grim 3-2. We also have Grim 3-3. Grims are the AC130. They're looking outward 3-3.

3-2 is looking over this target area and the predator is doing its orbits. You have another aircraft it's called Toolbox that is a P3 with all its sensors

top of this and then it's escaping me right now boss man and you have boss man being I think it's an A-Wax. So you have this stack of all these assets, now all in and around this mountain, attempting to help,

monitoring in different ways in various ways, all trying to contribute, but also contributing to the mess this ends up being. Who is the man, again, on the Sackham? What's his name? Chris Naylor, the Marine, the fire control officer. Yes. What information did he receive that changed his mind

from your clear to engage on pre-assault fires to he may not have glint on, no pre-assault fires. Don't know what my theory would be the gunship saying, hey, we don't know where these guys are. Now, you know, granted, you can see our time hacks there. Like, we're not trying to, this is not continuous. We're cherry-picking what we think is important here.

Again, all this will be posted in its entirety at some point. Yeah. And as you point out, there must be some kind of evolution of the information between 448 and 453. It may not even be that. It may be the uncertainty of making that call without having definitive knowledge. It may be a reconsideration of the original.

It might have been own personal doubt. I just was curious if there was something that had changed, if he had talked to, I don't know, somebody in the element, because it's, I mean, those are diametrically opposed orders, essentially. Okay, let's go to the next video. So that, you know, there's the plan. It was written in a jock log. There's them repeating the plan.

Yep. So, you know, we're not making this up. And then let's go to the last video, unless you have something, Brian, anything? I have a question, but we can. save it. Okay. That plan made sense, right? So the burn from above, and they used to do this all the time, they could illuminate either a building or an HLZ. So the pilot flies right to that. And what they're saying is the is lit is a handheld device, which somebody on the ground can then

illuminate or point in the direction of enemy combatants. And then you're going to be good to go to release fires. Just for people listening, so they have an understanding of what they make. But there's a, there's something, there's something horrible missing here. All these people were talking about the plan and the changes to the plan, people in the back of the bird aren't hearing all these changes. All right. And this one, I think you and I are going to have an interesting conversation here. So let's play this last one.

Okay. First of all, at least Slab or the MAKO team did not change their mind. So whoever they're calling ground party or ground commander, sorry, that was not Slav. Slab is expecting pre-assault fires. My assessment would be is they were talking. talking about the guy on sackoff. Nailer changes. Yeah.

Right. Heads up. To me, there's a very heads up call. Fine, we don't know where the friendly is, but we can still contribute in some way, shape, or form, which is start eating around the edges, right? Like just get their heads down and get their attention so this thinking can land, get the packs off, and get out of the clean. And now that's not even going to happen.

And so there's a story. You'll see this here probably in the next 20 minutes or so where Slab describes this moment. and it's not good. Okay. I think we should go back to the Dan Schilling video as you disagree and go to the part where they describe Chapman making this move and what he's doing

and I think we need to talk about some tactics. Yeah, and while we're pulling that up, I think we should talk about the part that you haven't seen, which is, you know, we've talked about, we've seen this plan that's being communicated through these various talks and jocks and through this to the AC130 to grim 3-2 and grim 3-3 which you haven't seen the helo pilots sorry to interrupt you but it's as you were talking about that communication were the helicopter pilots tracking this at least were the people in the front of the metaphorical

school bus up on the current plan or were they flying in their blind i believe they were flying in their blind but i'm not 100% certain on that u.s air force combat control so let's go to, I don't know, somewhere around a minute, minute 10. So now we're back to the dance healing video that we've already discussed in which some way shape or form. I think before you hit play,

we really haven't discussed, and I 'd like to do that, unless you see it differently, Mitch, is what was the discussion as we've learned it through interviews and other things between Slab,

John Chapman, and the team, in terms of what they were going to do when they got on the ground. Because we've heard this outside bird's eye view of this conversation. We've talked about how that hasn't been passed to them. But they've talked to us about what they planned to do. Okay. Right? Let's, we're getting into it now.

And so I want to just reiterate that we're going to arm sure quarterback. We're going to critique people's actions. We are going to critique John's actions. I hope it's coming off that we're doing this matter of fact. We're not spiking the football here. This is an entertainment for us, but we're going to call balls and strikes here. So what is, I'm going to ask you a question. What's the role of the combat controller or the J-TAC in any element?

It depends on. But there's a seal element or a, you know. Largely by doctrine, it would be controlling the overhead assets. However, comma, if you are presented with a near-term threat and that as an existential threat to your life or those, that you were with, you're probably better off addressing that threat than talking on the radio first. Okay. I agree with that. The plan was, and, you know, for John, when they got off this bird, was to find some defalade

and get on comms with the gunship to execute the plan we just talked about. He's the guy that's going to be talking to him. Where is it? Roll the burn. Is that, are you saying that's Neil? Should we go that way? Should we go east, west, whatever? he's the person

assigned to do that. I'm jumping ahead here. I'm going to hint to something here, but if they needed another shooter or two more shooters, they were just pulled from Red Squadron and give us some more shooters. They needed a J-TAC for a specific reason.

He's attached to that element for a specific reason. But your point is taken. You know, if something is right in your face, you got to deal with it. But all this talk about situational awareness, it seems to me, outside looking in and now inside looking out, it's supposed to be passed

to this team, and the point of contact for this situational awareness is supposed to be John Chapman. Yes. What do you mean by that? In terms of the AC130 talking them on and off of targets, heat signatures,

potentially Neil Roberts. That's assuming he has access or ability to communicate with them. Well, he does or he did, because what is confirmed is that he's talking to this gunship when they crashed landed in the valley over there. Okay. So it's established this evening.

When he was in the helicopter or out of it? Out of the helicopter. What I'm saying is he may have had no ability to communicate with them while they were on the right in. Yeah, sure. Yeah, we're talking about that. But once they get on the ground, we're talking about once they get on the ground.

You need to start jatking again. Unless you're being ambushed and you're going to get killed before you can establish the radio connection. But generally speaking, unless that is happening, the combat controller should be combat controlling. So the role of the 24th, we can just talk about this. It's a tier one enabling unit. They provide PJ CCTV.

PJ, I'm going to call them the only dudes you want around when hydraulic fluid starts leaking. If there is an 18 delta and a PJ there, somebody kick the 18 delta out of the way, no disrespect. PJs are the tits when that comes to that. And also 18 deltas are amazing as well. That's what they do. JTACs the same thing. Sorry, combat controllers. I was a JTAC for a long time.

But I was a J-TAC when I was at Gold Squadron. I never once did any controls because I didn't need to because that person's role is filled by the combat controller. And they are there to do that to allow the assaulter to focus on the assactor type things. And also it's their core competency and specialty. So, yes, what you're saying is it is 100% their job. However, comma, you have to be alive to do your job. And so there might be times where you're going to have to fight your way out of a situation. so you can reach up to hire.

Because if you reach up to hire without fighting your way out of it, you might get killed in the process of doing so. And if you don't have another J-TAC with you, you might be in trouble. Yep. Okay. So let's watch this. Now we know the plan.

So now we can actually see this movement with some, I think, some fresh eyes and maybe understand what was happening versus what was supposed to happen. And more context. In more context. So hit play, listen to the narration, or don't listen to the narration.

Just watch what's happening with the people. And just to just just and we'll call out who this is as, uh, as it matures. John's the second individual to exit and immediately moves in the direction of the. Do we lose volume? Pause it. Yeah, he hit the, team is taking heavy fire. All right, pause. Pause. Okay. We have five guys huddled up in some type of pretty, looks like a pretty tight perimeter, actually. T tighter than we would ever be tight. Right. If we're going to call balls, If we're going to call balls and strikes, hey boys, get some distance between you. However, maybe that was the only deflade that was there and they were diving into that to save their life.

That's a part of it. And interviews and other reports would indicate that you're right. So let's call it a hasty 360. Right. So what we have developing right now, and we'll let this mature again, but that is John. He's starting to push up the hill away from his team. Now, let's talk some more specific tactics. These arrows, and I'll even say these arrows are pretty accurate.

accurate. They're getting fire from everywhere. Yeah. What has not been said is that Razor 4, the helicopter that just left, the giant bus. The giant black helicopter, even at night, drew fire. Oh, yeah. Right? It was the bullet sponge for the time it was landing, getting the guys off, and then getting out of there. What every guy reports, and this is in our dock as well, is that it went quiet once the bird left. Why?

because they didn't know that these guys got off the bird. Anybody doesn't have night vision. They're up over kind of a lip so for them to like expose themselves to look down this hill to see if anything's there. And it's nighttime

they probably can't see anyway. Every one of them reports it got quiet for this moment here. So you're saying with the arrows and the description of being inside of 360 ambush? Yeah, no, no. But the arrows were the helicopter.

Okay. The part of the arrows that's false is right now. Okay. Because the helicopter is gone. The shooting stopped. The helicopter's gone. It drew fire. You can imagine they followed it.

And then the helicopter's gone. They're like, okay, did it just touch and go? Did it learn his lesson from last time? Did it drop people off? Nobody knows right now. Hit play. Forcing his way up slope and knee and thighs off snow. What you just saw there and you might have to back up is you saw rounds ejecting out

of John Chapman's gun. Yeah, you can see. Right there. You see it coming out of the side. So now he's shooting. To every guy we interview, they said, as soon as that, that happened, the mountain opened up. Now they know people are there and they're like game on. I guess they did drop some people off. And so now you have, let's talk some nitty gritty tactics

here. You have one person, doesn't even matter who this person, what this person's name is. In this case, it is John. Now, no one can shoot up the mountain, right? Because at least these back guys can't. Or they're going to take very precise shots. You have a tight right flank for sure. Exactly. So by going forward, whatever the rationale was, whatever his reasoning was, and we'll never know, because he's gone and we never got to talk to him afterwards, of course. But I'm calling that a tactical error, not just because of his role as a combat controller, but because he's now cutting off fields of fire. And he got them into a gunfight that they weren't prepared to have. They're supposed to be looking for Neil, watching the burn, sneaking around, trying to find things, and they were just drawn into a gunfight. And again, I don't say that trying to spike the football here, but that is what happened.

I would say it could potentially be a tactical error, depending on what he saw. And what caused him? What was his motivation to make that move? But Andy, and we can agree to disagree or we can continue to talk about this, he could have taken that same shot from 20 feet back. Unless he couldn't see what he was looking at from 20 feet back. Possible. But nevertheless, you have one guy away from five feet back. guys. Yep. And that is beginning to funnel this plan. Again, I'm not saying that this is, I mean, this is not what a textbook fire maneuver would look like. And I'm all about calling balls and

strikes. What I'm saying is it's, it's really hard to determine why somebody would put themselves in that position without having seen their motivation or what drew them to take those actions. And again, we'll never know. It could have been the whole my beer moment. It could have been a mistake. It could have been a misunderstanding on what was going to happen. Like all these are possible. I'm just throwing that out there. Is that picture perfect? No. Could you make that work?

Yes. The other thing is not happening here. Right. The other thing is not happening is the actual plan. Nobody is talking to the gunship right now, which is just this plan hinges on that thing, having them find Neil for them. So John has kicked off a gunfight for whatever reason. Nobody's talking to the gunship.

This is a wrecky element that went back in. just to see if they could save the day. They're not outfitted for this. They certainly weren't outfitted for the gunfight that are now in. But now they have no choice. So almost immediately, the plan to get Neil is out the window.

Now it's game on. And they have this? Elemless surprise. I mean, we've touched on it. They did have the element of surprise. I'm not going to go that far because they school bus with very large children. No, no.

You're saying, you're saying, He had the end of the surprise of people on the ground. Yes. Yeah. That also would have been exposed had John gotten on the radio and started coordinating the stack overhead. It depends on a lot of his talking. No. Yeah.

Is it very distinct on a mountaintop, depending if you have the wind on your back and the vocal traveling, 100%. And it's worth saying John did have a suppressed M4. Yeah. But that's not. You and I both know that, yes. Right. Right. I wish I could say those were like the movies.

Right. So planners out the window. now they're in a gunfight and well let's just hit play and see where this goes he is constantly under fire as he does this Chapman's team leader begins to close on Chapman following his trail

through the snow the dark nass above Chapman is a fortified bunker containing two enemy fighters each armed with AK-47s who are firing down on the team in the darkness this It will come to be now I'll ask you to be down

Okay Let's call tactical balls and strikes Have you talked with Slab About what was in his mind During this moment What did he say He is wondering why John is going Is moving away from the rest of the element

Did he know that John was shooting? Yeah Then why would he line up directly behind him Effectively removing any of his ability To support John? Great question Don't know Because that

could also be construed as a tactical error. He has no field of fire. Right. Now, I would assume he's probably following the trail that is leading John. Yes, because what's not evident here, this is the kind of deceptive thing of this entire picture, this TV picture, is this is a steep uphill. Correct. And it looks as if Slab maneuvered over to find the path of least resistance, which I totally get.

But in doing so tactically, he reduced his field of fire to zero. Sure. What he told us in numerous interviews is he's basically trying to close the gap on Chapman to see what he has. And he gets up to him and he says something like, what do you got? Did they not have a radio? They did have a radio. I don't know. I don't know why I didn't get on the radio. But probably something of not letting your shooting buddy.

get too far away from you, probably something like that. Again, I don't know. We can probably ask them. But this plan is falling apart, or has fallen apart. Okay. Were you going to say something about, I saw you about to say something? No, we can get into it. You know, what he said to him was, you know, what do you got? And John says, I don't know.

Okay. Keep going. Number one. To the left of the tree and bunker one is another great mass. this is a rock outcropping that came to be called the Boulder. Between Bunker 1 and this Boulder can be seen the body of slain seal, Neil Roberts. We agree with that. Chapman and the others are attempting to recover. Hey, pause.

Yeah, so you've been told. So, so I don't think we've talked about this part of the story. Neil's dead. Neal's already dead. There's a moment, and this is in the series, where when they were in Gardez, the safe house there figuring out the plan and trying to get back, you know, get her right back there. That information was already partially known. They knew a person fell out of a helicopter.

They knew that person was already dead. They had already watched the predator feed. At the Gardez safe house, that person didn't understand it was one of their own. They thought a ranger or somebody else fell out in some other part of Afghanistan and they were just receiving that traffic. They didn't realize this is our guys. So had they known that, had they known that Neil was already dead, of course, this would have slowed down. Yeah. They would have, this would have been a recovery, not a attempted rescue. But Neil's been dead for a couple hours. Neil was executed. Neil was. I was going to say, did he die there or was he moved there? Or I guess it could be both. We don't, we don't have that footage. We have a piece of footage that indicates that he was moving in

that direction. Okay. But that's where his. came to rest. Okay. And I'm just going to say it. Neil was disfigured. Yeah. They executed him. Okay?

I'll just leave it at that. He's no longer in his gear. And he no longer looks like the Neil Roberts they saw a couple hours ago. His pants are removed. Other people pilfered him. His gun's gone. His helmet and everything are down by the, you know, about 100 meters away on that.

rocky outcropping. Okay. So they all found Neal, you know, two hours ago, killed Neal, and they took his stuff and split his stuff up. Okay. Okay. So Neil does not look like Neal anymore. So you've been told here in this video that there is a fortified bunker.

Those are the words that you've heard. Yeah. You've heard that there are enemies in this bunker with AK-47s, and they are shooting in ostensibly John and the team's direction at this point. And those are two important things. And let's analyze them and look at them closely. Okay. Keep going.

Chapman, still alone and closest to the enemy, pauses to engage targets as his team leader follows him, but never actually catches up with him. Chapman, he falls on his own, now makes the decision to... This is just for the audio-only audience. It is hard to describe the closeness of proximity of this. If you are just listening to this,

I'm going to say this is within 30 yards. And maybe even closer to... Maybe I'm trying to be... Like the size of the... Yeah. I'm trying to be conservative and error on too far, but this is very close. Yes. And uphill.

Okay. Sorry. I just wanted to point that out if anybody's audio only. Keep going. Charge directly into the enemy bunker despite withering point blank fire. Chapman now literally on top of the enemy engages the two combatants and kills them, saving the lives of the remaining seals. He does this from a distance.

of no more than 10 feet. These actions by themselves earned him his first medal of honor. Okay, let's stop it. He then climbs in two. Oh, keep going. I'm sorry, keep going. And takes control of the bunker.

Can you back up? Can you back up? He's scared of the immediate threat. Chapman is then joined by his team with distance of no more than 10 feet. These actions by themselves earned him his first medal of honor. He then climbs into and takes control the bunker.

Okay, stop it. So he climbs into and takes control. of the bunker. I think this is the moment you were about to get into you. Yeah. Before we get into bunker, what you're hearing is that John killed two enemies in this bunker. Before we talk about what in and out is and what bunker is and what fortified

bunker is and the implications of that, I'd love to ask you a question. What do you think when you hear fortified bunker? I mean, the term bunker is relatively descriptive. If somebody had said fortified fighting position, then the imagination would go a little bit wilder, I suppose, whether it's just stack rocks, sandbags, trench,

whatever it is. But at bunker, I mean, I'm not that this is the correct timeline to associate it to, you're thinking back to like World War II type bunker-ish with shooting ports, protection from external threat, that type of stuff. Man made. Yeah, stop. Let's hone in on the language.

It said into a bunker. So that means you're getting, it sounds like there's something to get into, right? Therefore, there'd be something to get out of. Based off of the description, yes. Right. You described some kind of structure that has some kind of concealment and cover.

A man-made structure. When I hear the term bunker, that's what I think of. Okay. This is key to their story because without this so-called bunker, a lot of the logic falls apart in the story later on. So can you pull up the pictures of what the Air Force presented as this bunker, please?

Okay, what you're about to see is a video and then some work we got from our friends at... We'll probably end up pausing this halfway through and having a quick discussion. Okay, before we get into this. please stop it there you go so everyone has used this term bunker um

even we call it a bunker just for consistency's pointed everyone in the books and all these conversations and podcasts everyone keeps calling bunker one bunker two uh the you know rock one so even we have adopted

this language especially in the case of bunker one but we're going to talk about this here and show something in this video you're about to see an animation. You'll see the Air Force's name on that animation. We did not make this animation. We do not know exactly who did.

This was both, as we understand it, an inward facing and outward facing animation that was released to and shown on several news outlets when these actions were being discussed around 2018. Let's take a look at it and see if, because it plays right into, your perception of what you think you understand a bunker to be, this video will pause it and will also lead to what the Center for Spatial Technology found

was actually there at the time. Okay. And let's see if there's some space between those two things. Volume? No, there's no audio. Oh, that's right. Yeah, this is for us to discuss. So this is the bunker one area.

U.S. Air Force animation. You can see that they would agree with you here, Andy, their version of this bunker. bunker is there's stone, there's logs lashed together. There's something to get into. And this is where he was supposed

to have killed a couple enemy, just a few moments ago. This has some kind of a roof. It provides cover. It stops bullets, probably, in some cases. I would say both cover and concealment. And this concept of

a bunker is clearly being communicated very clearly here, right? There's no question now that the Air Force is telling you that you're dealing with a fortified building of some kind, a man-made structure. Again, we didn't make this video. This video was

on television. You can see that there are stone supports. Yep. Pause it? Okay. So not just the Air Force. but this is out of that Newsweek cover article and this is a picture also showing that there was something like a bunker to be in or shoot into and get into and get out of. Okay.

Right. So they are, so if this is a, these are facts or this is a narrative, this is being perpetuated and continued and Newsweek is drawing a version of this bunker and that's ostensibly John shooting into the bunker, killing the enemies inside. And if you correlate the two together, and this is not our correlation, it's theirs. This is that bunker. This is the area known as bunker one. Keep going.

So Center for Spatial Technology did some work here. This is a work in progress, but this is a little of their photogrammetry, one of the existing. There's the tree, some called the bonsai tree and some of the rocks and some of the things that stayed and didn't change and some of the other things that did. Pause. Can you go back just one second even? Yeah, before it's snowy. Again, this is a work in progress.

What's going to be in the final product is going to be obviously much more polished. But this is worth discussing. Just go back one second. Let's pause it on the SSE picture. Yeah. And stop. Okay. Is that a picture from the day?

That's a picture from about a week or two after. So there was a... Are there any pictures from the day when the sun came up? No. No. So... But there is our 3D modeling of it. They, you know, there's a lot that happens up here that we're going to get into a hellfire missile strikes this position.

Post operation? No, during. Okay. Where the ranges are here. They destroy the helicopter, you know, that was left behind in the days after they destroy it. And then some weeks go, you know, a week or two go by before, everyone gets back up there, too. to begin an investigation as to what happened in the Battle of Robert's Ridge. Slab ends up going back there. People Aberga ends up going back there.

A bunch of guys are up there taking pictures a lot like these. We have all the pictures. This is one, a bunker one. There's the bonsai tree. Now, there's a heap of dirt. There's a mound there. A berm? A berm even.

But there is not evidence in any of the pictures. This is just one that indicate the thing that we do. just saw in the animation. Therefore, there's not something to get into. There's not something to hunker down in for over an hour and maybe survive a long engagement that we're going to get into here in a second. You know, we're kind of looking into the future. So the thing that is called Bunker 1 is not a bunker.

It's a cooking station. That's what it was. I've been there. I've walked that. Not to say it hadn't changed in 20 years, but it's just a kind of scalloped out area. There's no hole in the ground. You can see no evidence of the rocks or the logs. Is the importance of calling this a bunker matter for later on in the story?

Or are we talking about him? Because we'll give a little hint here. Later on this story, John is supposed to have survived for an hour by himself at this range with 8 to 10 or 14, whatever the number is you believe. Because remember, we just heard the audio, they said 8 to 10. And then Chris Naylor said something like 10 to 14. but in order to believe that, he's not standing in the open. He's already shot twice. And in order to really believe that and put any logic towards it,

he needs to be in something and there's nothing to be in. In or behind? I mean, what they're saying in. It's their claim in, not our claim. Does it matter? The reason I think, I mean... I only ask because cover. is cover, whether it's in a bunker, if you have the ability, that's all, I'm just asking.

But if I have eight to 14 people, again, you pick the number you believe, all moving around this, I'm shot twice in the torso, I'm pretty fucked up. It's just, and again, we'll get to this, just becomes much more implausible that he's just kind of hanging out somewhat in the open. And I would ask. Maybe behind a burn, maybe behind a rock, but not in a fortified bunker like they're claiming. And that is, that helps their story become much more believable

if you buy into the bunker idea. Because I would ask the question back, asking us if it matters is maybe a good question and we're doing our best to answer it. Well, it's like it's a vernacular hang up. Well, it's not. It's not.

Because they, in releasing that animation and that not being, and no evidence of that being remotely true, we didn't make that animation. The Air Force made that animation. I'm not saying the animation. is accurate. I'm saying that there still remains a possibility that he could have found cover.

It becomes much more unlikely. Unlikely and impossible are two very different things. Yeah, it also, it also... That's why I'm saying it seems like a little bit of a vernacular hang-up. I would agree with you, but for the pictures they made. If we didn't see those pictures in the animation and we were calling it a bunker and I didn't know what they were picturing as a bunker in their mind. Let's talk about the likelihood of how that picture was created. Somebody was tasked with doing that. That's right. That probably had no situational awareness. or understanding of what this even looked like. This was well down the chain of command more than likely

and somebody was requested to produce a product and they did. Even that's an assumption. Do we know the date on that animation? If you find out, let us know. Yeah. I would offer something here. Booker 2 you could see right there. It said you stood there, Mitch.

Where's Bunker 2? The next tree. Gotcha. Second one, got you. From the base of Bunker 2, which of course, base of this tree, which is where the bunts out, the natural bunker was, to the place where John was laying, there is, it's maybe zero cover.

Zero cover. Zero. We went there and I put him up there and I stood where John went down. He was next to that tree two years ago. And there's nothing between, you know. You'll see all that in the documentary as well. But any, I asked the same question that you're asking us. we would have loved to have asked the Air Force that question

because as you say, this might have been what you're describing as a middle management situation or lower in terms of somebody tasks somebody with making this, somebody approved it and somebody put their name on it and somebody propagated it and disseminated it to other people. We didn't do any of those things. Correct. And I'm not saying it's accurate. I can see in a world where every person

and every step of that along the way that you just mentioned had no actual idea of what this even looked like. Well, the problem with that... Especially if it was yours later, which doesn't... I'm not making an excuse for it. I'm just saying I have an understanding of how stuff like this is created in the military. Me too. I understand. I just want to say once and for all what this actually was.

This thing called Bunker 1 was actually a cooking station. That's where they came down. It had a little scow up again. I think I've already said that. This is where they went to cook. The donkey was tied to that tree. This was not a bunker in any way, shape, or form like... we just watched and was depicted in those in those videos.

Okay. And we'll get in, we'll probably do this dance one more time and a little bit. No, I understand what you're getting at, especially as it ties into the end of the story. But to me, cover is cover. Like the vernacular, I get how that could be used to make it seem like it's something that it's not. Mm-hmm. But that doesn't reduce the heroism or the necessity or whatever drove John to drive forward towards those two individuals.

That action still happened. Okay. Bunker or not. Well, let's talk about the two individuals then. Sure. They weren't there. They were never there. That is not a fact.

That is completely manufactured. There were never two enemy in this. And in all those orbits you see, 11 orbits over that hour, you never see two signatures. You don't see them alive and you don't see them... You don't see them dead? You don't see them dead.

You don't see them at all. What was he shooting at? Please don't say a donkey. Don't know. We don't know. So that heat signature you see popping out the left-hand side was the donkey? One of them was Neil, the other one was a donkey.

Neil is no longer moving. The donkey still has... Neal lolling off. I was going to say, how long had Neil been dead? He was cooling off, two hours. That was a pretty hot heat signature. But he's also prone. He's also prone.

Yeah, but he was putting off the same amount of heat signature as the assaulters. I think, I don't know that we actually know that. Like, enough to sort of show a signature. Yeah. But I think we'd be out of our depth here if we started saying... You're also looking at the higher contrast version. Yeah. And looking at theirs.

It looks a little different in the... Okay. Would you like to go back and look at that video again and see if you find those? No, because the only heat signature that I saw was the one that popped out as it was rotating through. And maybe it didn't pop out. It was as the predator was in that orbit, maybe perhaps it exposed based on the field of view. Okay. So you're saying that there was nothing that compelled John to actually do that.

They weren't taken to them. Yeah. I would put it differently. I don't know what compelled John to do that and we're not here to say that. What we can say is they're telling you in that video that there are two AK-47 enemies inside a bunker. and that he is closing on them, he kills them, and then steps into the bunker. When you put together some of the fiction that you've seen here, the animation, when you understand that, again, we've talked about, we said this a little bit earlier,

that we had people build a more faithful version of how we could look at this. Let's go back to first principle and look at it without the rebuild. Let's look at the video we just saw, a 2D flat version of this. You are also now saying that you only see two signatures. We've identified one of them as a donkey and the other as Neil. We're also telling you that there are no other, there is no other angle of the orbits that reveal either these individuals alive or dead at any point. So the problem is somebody is telling you that for a reason.

I don't know what the reason is, but I know what the reason led to. It led to an understanding that John killed the enemies in that bunker. So that's not our claim. Our claim is not what the bunker looked like. anything else. Our job here is to gather the facts based on the given information and determine whether or not any of that is true. And that's what we're offering to the audience here.

And I'm not seeing it. No bunker. No enemy in that exact location. Now, at bunker two, there is a, there are enemy. They have a P-Cam machine gun. Did he see, I don't, I think it would be hard having been there for him to see at that position where he started shooting? up and over the rise to Bunker 2, I think it would be almost impossible.

But maybe he did see something. But all we're saying is it wasn't there. It was not at what has been called Bunker 1 that is not a bunker. Okay, so question for you. When was he initially wounded? Within three and a half minutes of the gunfight. Was he wounded before he?

No. Okay. It was wounded after. After this event that we've been talking about for the last few minutes. Okay. Correct. Yeah.

Okay. Shortly after. Like we're talking, about a minute and a half more, John gets shot twice in the torso. I think most people agree with that. No one disagrees with that. Him not being wounded leading up to that point

goes towards what you guys are actually saying that there was no enemy in that position. That's why I asked, because if he had been wounded before that, we would have another question to answer it, and that would be where did it come from? Good point. That's a great question.

Did you have something that you... Wounded, no, injured, very likely in the helicopter crash, First one. As it happens. Yeah. And for those of you who couldn't hear that, it was saying very likely injured

in the helicopter crash afterwards, that's kind of how helicopter crashes go. Yeah. Everyone in that crew, again, backing up in our story when they crash landed over here. Although Alan Mack is amazing. Some of the guys, some of the crew members

needed medical attention when they got back to Gardez. Yeah. And that was one of the reasons that they had to offload, and that's the reason that they lost another hour or so in this. Yeah. Understood. Okay. Okay.

Are we ready to move on to anything, gunship? Or is there something more to say about the plan and, you know, John's actions? Well, there's something more to say about all of it. But what were the other guys doing at this time? I mean, we can watch the video. They're there. They are maneuvering. Some of them maneuvered even past where slab had been, it seems like.

What was going on in their mind? They are getting shot at, like those arrows, showed. Just the timing of those arrows were a little bit off. But they were getting shot at from the rocky outcropping. Can you go back to the overall picture of the mountaintop?

As, let's say, John's recon by fire, if you want to call it that and led to the mountain opening up. The interviews with those guys to a man say that that's what happened.

At that point, the sort of the fact that they're in a that they're surrounded by fire so the enemies

you know it's not just fire coming from the bunker yeah we talked about the rocky outcropping people don't really know what that is

remember that middle hour that's missing from all the air force videos there's enemy down here shooting this way the big black again this is not the helicopter

yeah this is the third helicopter in our story same type of helicopter though but about the same location there's enemy here There's enemy over here.

So those white arrows that we saw, again, those are correct. Just the timing of them didn't start until John started shooting. So the bad guys are beginning to pop up. Their weapons have us, you know, our guys have night vision, you know, that better than I do. So there are now targets revealing themselves all around them. Okay. Okay. Again, I think to recap here, no one's talking to the gunship.

right now. Nobody. Now they're in, they're over their heads in a gunfight at distances we've already described at super close proximity with a little cover uphill. It's not a good situation. So I think we move on to the gunship. I mean there's there's a story here and I would just say wait for wait for our series and you can hear about the the details of that battle but within 11 minutes when three and a half minutes John goes down Within 11 and a half minutes, again, the end of material finding one, they go over the side. And here comes the QRF, as we described. And you'll hear from the Rangers later today.

Let them tell that part of the story. I want to tell you that as a, not only working on this project, but the part of me that remembers the guy that came to the project, the civilian in me. I'm, and maybe this is, and I must represent some cohort of the audience. if I'm thinking this, there must be somebody else who does as well. I hope there is. Happy to be alone in it, but that would be odd. That when I see that bunker video and know that it was viewed by hundreds of thousands or millions, that's bothersome to me that that would be put out as a piece of truth.

And I feel that it anchors a piece of this narrative that makes the rest of the narrative seem more plausible and possible. Okay. And I don't know where the question. I don't know where it becomes complete fiction, where it becomes a narrative, but it's literally, I think we can all agree, somebody constructed that for a reason. It might be downstream of, it also might not be.

Agreed. But somewhere down the flagpole and not at the bottom of it because it made it to the news. The news didn't uncover it. It was given to them. I find that disappointing on some level. And I asked myself questions

that we would have loved to have answered, and we're not here to answer them, which is, who made that, why did they make it? But it certainly indicates a kind of fiction. And what starts to happen to me as I'm working on this project, is I start to look at the entire portfolio of the information that comes from them

and start asking myself, where are there other constructed elements to it? And I think that was our job, and that's been part of what's moved us and driven us through this process. And what we're trying to clear up is what's been constructed, what's been created, Where is the fiction and where are the facts?

When I look at that, it's not a fact, and that troubles me. When I hear as a civilian, as a storyteller, just as a person out in the world, that there were two people in the bunker with AK-47s that John killed and no one can find the signatures, but yet that was perpetrated in that video for everybody, and nobody's asked this question or identified that. You identified it yourself.

You said, I saw two, but now you know what they are. That's troublesome to me and it's troublesome to us in terms of working on the project because I'm looking at what are supposed to be dependable sources that lead to immortalizing somebody. This is not about the actions or whether or not John was a hero, whether he agreed to go or anything else. In fact, part of this is not about John. John didn't make the video.

John didn't tell you, tell us who he killed. John had nothing to do with anything. Yeah. Yeah, so that's, so the reason I'm saying this in this moment is for anybody who confuses what's happened over the last few minutes here about believes that we're in some way dishonoring John, that's, that's a troublesome position to be in in order to look at this story more closely. But again, John did not make these videos. Somebody else did. So make sure whether you believe what you're hearing, whether it's news to you or whether you want to look more closely at it, whether you're looking forward to our project, or whether you want to avoid it completely. This part of the story happens to have John in it, and that's very important.

But the claims are coming from somewhere else, and that's what we're looking at here. Who recovered John and Neil's body? Rangers. In doing so, they would have had to been very close to that. Did they see any enemy combatants near the bodies? At that point. You got to define near, but yes, near, but not next to you. In the structure known as the book.

Hold on. But this is, that time frame is not the time frame of material finding one or two. That time frame is two hours later. Okay. That time frame is after. So they certainly could have maneuvered their situation changed. Yeah. Positions of people changed.

People died in other positions. It's actually five hours. later. Yeah. So, you know, at least for us, I'm not looking there to get my information on what I'm being told is happening in real time. It is possible that somebody can take what happened five hours later and begin to I'm just thinking out loud.

Yeah, me too. Yeah. I want to just bring up one more thing. I think we need to go to the gunship part of the story. But in Not a Good Day to Die, Sean Newellers book that came out in, what is it, 05, or 6. Oh, yeah. Shortly after. there's an idea planted in the book.

I have it at the page marked. I can read it. But the idea goes something like this. That when they left, when MAKO-30 dumped over the side and Brett McGahnie shot and Turbo gets shot in the leg ends up losing his leg later on, that, well, maybe they mistook Neal for John.

And that's why they left. I have heard that, actually. Okay. So let's talk about that. Nailer's actually written that since then a number of times. He's written that... The real problem is, after we said what we're about to say to you,

he then just doubled down on it in another podcast. And so here's the problem with that idea. We already hinted, or actually told you, that Neil didn't look like Neil anymore. Neil was cut open, partially beheaded. His tan DCU Gortex pants were on another enemy now. his mountain hardware jacket on another enemy helmet off gone

saw somewhere else Neil probably well okay I'll say for sure Neil did not look like the guy that they saw two hours ago he might have looked with his big red beard something more like a Chechen again that's we don't know that for sure but we know that Neil didn't look like Neil other Rangers have reported that he looked like

a Chechen now John in this 11 minutes, you know, if I'm slab here and you're John, let's just say you're a little bit further away, get your helmet on, your antlers, your night vision down, there's a specific silhouette.

You have big black gaiters on. You're wearing the clothes that you, you know, you're still wearing the clothes when we leave and pass by you that you were minutes ago. Yeah. It is ludicrous to think that I just mistook Neil who

you know is now not looking like Neil for John I would agree with that completely it's and it's and after we sat with Sean Naylor and interviewed him and had a conversation about this to have him going on yet another podcast and just double down in that idea again and at least

not say fine mention it again but also say you know I just had an interesting conversation with these these two guys that are doing this project and they raised a good point at least do something like that. Well, was it his idea that that's what had happened? Was he the originator of that idea? It's in his book.

I don't know where he got it. Okay. I mean, Night Vision goggles for somebody who's never looked through them. At a couple hundred yards, yeah, it gets a little bit iffy. But at the range, as you're talking about, it's crystal clear. Yeah. There's no chance that Slab mistook, mistook Neil for John.

Especially if he had been removed of all of his equipment, that was 100% visually American. and under night vision goggles you can identify. And it was just a few minutes. It's not like hours have gone by since John, you know, and they left and came back and left to came back. It's like this is the guy that's like 15, 20 feet from me. I haven't lost visual custody of him.

No one ran up to him and pilfered him while I was looking this way. Yeah. In this, you know, crazy gunfight. So it's just a ridiculous idea. And I just think it's in bad taste to keep repeating that. Well, people can be responsible for the things that they say. Okay. If it doesn't age well, then that's on.

him. You know, that's, I mean, that's all you can do. I think the reason we talk about it is not necessarily to point out his mistake. It's to help enlighten the audience. Because if he and he does, has a kind of apparent command or dominion over some of this information and has been, has written some of the records of note in those articles and books, it's important to at least

we think to help the audience understand because they could think oh that's possible and let's see where we can disabuse them of things that are not possible

or at least very likely okay okay let's do the gunship part of the story I think to do this right we just need to kind of back up remind

the audience you know what's happened with the gunships remember less than 24 hours ago there was a friendly fire incident on this night just a couple hours ago there was a near friendly fire incident

from a different Grim, Grim 3-3 we actually have the comms from them they are cleared hot to open up on this supposed mortar team and they themselves catch it you can hear in the comms like this doesn't sound right so can you pull up

begin the our gunship montage and this the gunship story here it's just this it's pretty fascinating this cascading effect

you know one problem leads to the next problem which the next problem and you know I'll just get to the punch line the gunship grim 3-2 specifically the crew on grim grim 3-2 is a large part of the problem here a large part of the problem of what happened,

how this unfolded once things got going on Robbins Ridge. Okay. And this will become clear here shortly. They probably should not imply. That's a good point. So, and I'm curious what you know about INS or internal navigation systems. I have a suspect you might know something. I'd be very interested to hear this.

In Sean Naylor's book, there is a very long-winded explanation. that I think covers a few pages of the book. Attempting to make sense of this warrant officer Harriman friendly fire incident that happened just 24 hours earlier. They basically say something like, we thought we entered a different valley,

we were having problems with our INS. Why were they flying using the INS instead of GPS? Well, hold on. We're going to get to that. I spoke to a gunship pilot. He was about 10 years after these guys, but knows the platform very well. Yeah.

inside these aircraft and say, for instance, the P3, because I confirm this with the P3 guys that are over top too. I'm like, tell me how the INS-GPS relationship works. Like if one INS seems to be malfunctioning, what's the protocol? This is what I was told. If one of your, if your INS, two INS isn't jiving, you go to your GPS for the tiebreaker, right? Okay. So in this case, let's assume they're not lying, assuming that one of their INS is malfunctioning. they go to their GPS and now they at least have a sense of where they are.

Like they know which INS is malfunctioning and whatever their protocols are to fix that. I don't know. But the fact is they had a problem with one of their navigation systems and they opened up anyway. Because what they saw beneath them, whatever and their pattern recognition, again, we don't know what's going through their head. We just know the final result was bad. I know as a ground operator, if I don't know what I'm shooting at, I should probably hold or let the situation develop and figure out what it is before I yank on the trigger.

So it's just hard to imagine any justification why they opened up on the convoy, you know, General Zia's force. But then here's the bigger question. Why were they up in the air the next night? Do that seem... You're asking me for an answer? Well, does it... To me, again, I don't know their protocols.

I know if I shot one of my teammates the night before. I like to think I would have been benched, possibly forever, but at least for a night until we figure out what the hell just happened. I mean, why Mitch just shot... Before I could answer that, I'd have way more questions. Like how many AC130s were in theater? How many did they have access to? Was it a matter if they had no other people to pull on?

And I bet you some of that's true. I bet you... I bet you they, Operation Anaconda, the biggest operation since Vietnam is underway. We don't have time for this. Guys get back out there and I don't know. We don't know. So, I mean, the aircraft that I have flown, I can't think of a situation where the INS and the, I am not used to seeing those pieces and looking at them. You're looking at a screen or a data set where that information is combined.

That is upstream and I'm not seeing it on my actual display. The internal navigation system of the aircraft is for the aircraft. When they're slewing the gun, that's not attached. I guess it could be, it should be able to menstruate the grid coordinate of what they are putting their gun on. So I'm seeing a disconnect between the navigation of the aircraft via the INS and the gun spitting out the correct 10-digit grid that they went hot on. I will very quickly admit that I'm out of my depth beyond what this pilot told me. Yeah. What I will say is that I did talk to the ground force.

Yeah. You want to know who one of these people is. They were another big operation with you. Yep. And they were marked. Their vehicles, that convoy was marked. Oh. So, and there will be some people that would tell you it wasn't marked.

Let's tell people what marked is. Exactly that. Because it's come up. It is overt. Well, Mark is short for having marking on your cell for your vehicles. And so when that burn rolls over this... Marking so you would know that it was friendly. Is this convoy friendly or enemy? And when they roll a burn over it, we just got a splash.

And that's probably not an enemy convoy anymore. Also, from my understanding, through the optics of those weapon systems, you are looking at a grid coordinate of what it is you are aiming at as well. So if that isn't correct, or somebody is calling for fire and you look and those things don't match up, that begs more questions before you pull the trigger. Right. So we did that little dance here because I would love to get the question answered. Why were they up in the air?

Maybe it is what you said. Maybe it is they were just so short on gunships and the largest operation since Vietnam is underway. And, man, get out there. But I don't know. We don't know. The fact that they are up there, I mean, I can only hypothesize the headspace. They were aware they were involved in a blue and blue. Of course.

Yeah. Can you imagine how, A, horrible you would feel about that and B, how gun shy that you would be getting back up in the air and have something like this. Yes. So you arrived at the... Remember I said how there's a chain reaction here. Yeah. And that's, that has to be true. Again, I know if I shot one of my teammates and for some reason they said, get back out there.

how could you eradicate, how could you erase that out of your mind in 24 hours, if ever? So whether they should have been or shouldn't, and even if we built an exact profile on why they were? They were, bottom line. Right, they were. And it would seem, and this is not being critical of them, this is what you're saying,

that these guys went through something and it would seem that gun shy is an aspect of this, and whatever caused that, you want to make damn sure you're not doing it ever again. It's an assumption on my part, but I think it's a valid one. I think it's reasonable. Yeah. And we're going to explain why this rears the suck.

Look out again here shortly. So let's listen to what, you know, the gunship's thinking. And again, this is, no one's ever seen this before. Like, no one's ever heard this before. All this, the gunship story in this book is just Sean Naylor interpreting. There are some quotes that we're going to get to here in a minute. I'm going to read right out of the book. But let's go.

And this is just a montage, right? Yeah. These are just, this is just to give up. feel for what's happening. A sense, a little bit of a super cut of some of the ideas, some of the energy, some of the communication. Before you hit Flay, how did you guys get the footage? We already answered that.

Oh, same Easter Bunny. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. All of this. I thought that was just the ISR footage. No. Which I guess this is a different platform.

Yeah. There's no way to talk to you guys. We need a frequency for the QRF. We need a frequency for the ground parties and we have a needle one right now. Oh, yeah. We're in a stroke, down, we can't do it all their really troll-free. Yes.

Okay, since this is happening in the grim-fitting's area, we need them to step up. Pause. Is that the stroke? Pause, that's grim-three-three. Pause it? That's grim. Did you hear that we need them to step up?

Yeah. That's grim-3-3 referring to grim-3-2. Like, guys, let's go. They're asking all the right questions, too. Yeah. All right. Keep going. there's going to be a pretty serious choice

if we shoot them so we've got to know which one to pause for a second pause at the laser corners on the rifle sites okay that's did you just hear what you said

uh no because I was waiting for the pause we'll go back what what are we watching here is this when the recovery team is on the ground at what phase of this operation are we watching this is this is that 11 minutes this is the gun fight

um I was going to say Clearly there was some IRA stuff. Go back. Go back 15 seconds or so because there's something really important that's being said here. Corner, back with it. Whatever I don't want to assume that I'm the one for the laser corner. That's a fifth.

That's a true thing. That only got it. He's still here. This guy is still screwed up. Take a little around with a other target. Thank you. Okay. Again.

We constructed that. That is not continuous. Yep. Let me just make sure that no one thinks that, you know, we're going to call out when we do our own edits. To me, the most important thing in that entire video is when someone says, I think the friendlies are the guys with the lasers. Unless they had picked up his saw and turned the laser on, which would be it.

No, but there's a bunch of, unless they picked up all their guns. Yep. So to me, that's one of these moments where it's like, are they really having that discussion if you listen to this in its entirety, they are struggling to figure out who is who. And finally, someone smart says, I think our guys are the ones with the lasers, which means the opposite.

The bad guys probably don't have peck fives or hip-pills on their guns. It's to me kind of a, they should have already known that. They should have known almost instantly like, our guys are the ones with the lasers. We don't think the Uzbeks and the Chechens have, you know,

peck fives on their guns. I agree. In 2002. That would suck, though, if there was just a guy who either had a failure with his peck two or didn't have it on. Sure. But again, they're trying to get some clarity on what's happening here so that they can potentially support.

Yeah. And they're having a very basic conversation. They're struggling. And I'm being generous when I say basic. They're struggling. Yes. They should understand the capabilities for sure. Let's go to the next one.

There's anything that you wanted to highlight there? No, I wanted to see what struck you about that. I mean, part of this is playing this and listening to the two of you. The other thing that's wrong with this, you know, we've been tracking this story for far too long now, and we mentioned all those podcasts that came out over the last few years. There is one gentleman named Rob Harrison, and he was in the aircraft.

if you listen to his podcasts and he will he's on a lot of them he presents like he was one of the sensor operators he was there to listen I'll just say that he was not on the TVs he was not looking at this he might have been looking at this but his role

was to listen and pick up some sigint again he presents differently when he goes on these podcasts but he will in various podcasts and if anyone wants to be entertained, go for it and find all these things. But he presents that they have in some case a bird's eye view, that they know exactly what they're looking at, that they see glint. The story that he tells is not what you just heard.

It's there. They were very sure about who people were, where they were, and it's just untrue. And that's just one clip. In fact, the claim is made somewhere where he says, they knew exactly where Neil Roberts was as well. He might know that now. In hindsight.

We all do now. They didn't even know Neil was dead. But what would be... What's problematic is you've now heard many minutes of these comms, not just what we just heard, right? So you put this story together cumulatively. MAKO-30 is looking for Neil Roberts. They're on a rescue mission.

There's a lot of conversations about where good guys are, bad guys are, or shots on target and other things. What's sorely missing from that if somebody knew where Neil Roberts was, was the guy you're looking for, we know where he is. 50 meters to the east.

Was that ever mentioned in any of... No. No. But he will say in some of these podcasts now that they knew exactly where Neil was. He went on Seth Tatina's podcast and said they knew exactly where he was because the enemy propped him up. It's okay that he didn't know where he was. Like the problem is saying that you did.

Where did he get the idea that they propped him up from. No idea. No idea. What are we looking at here? I mean, there's so many of these. I almost hesitate to even play on one of them. You could drop a pinpoint on a map and you could show the point of view from any place on that

mountain, whether the individual was laying, kneeling, standing up, variation of height, you gave it. So when you're looking at that from the bird's eye view, you really don't have. true appreciation for the amount of terrain variation that's up there. It's very, very jagged up there. There's only a couple of places that are suitable to land that helicopter, and the rest of it is, you know, think of it. It's a mountaintop, and it's like a jungle gym.

You know, like you've got to climb. It's not easy terrain. And then what's key about that is that you can't see everything from every point of view while you're there on the ground. So when I think of it, about it, show them back to the Dan Chilling clip, the thing that sticks out to me is after the initial engagement and they throw the smoke grenades to cover their egress and reposition off the top of the mountain, that initial call for fire comes in from Britt Slavinsky,

and he's using the call sign Naco-30, not 30-Charlie. So we know it's not the controller that's on the radio. And I learned later in life that that is Britt Slavinsky that's on the radio. But he says, he says, Grim, we're no longer

on top of the mountain, got troops down, got possible KIA, need fire on tops now. And so we're thinking... Okay, I don't think that was what we were looking for. Hold on.

What's this delineation he's trying to make about the Charlie associated with that? Let's see your shirt. So... J-Tax. J-Tax get an in-the-th or a call sign that is not associated with the element that they are with.

And that's how they can identify themselves. They have a specific, they have to test for it often. Yeah, but I don't think that was in 2002. I don't know. I don't recall that in 2002. 2010, that was the case. John's, I think what's, what everyone agrees on is John's call sign was MAKO-3-0 Charlie. Okay.

I don't think that's in debate. Interesting. I wonder why they would have it like that. No. we'll lob this into the conversation. I don't think I want to go down this, but it is a fact. Once they went over the side, and there are joc logs to support what I'm saying,

so this isn't a trust-me-brough moment. Yeah. Other people in that seal element adopted the MAKO-3-0-Charlie moniker. Can you guess why? Okay, I'm just going to tell you. to get things done. Well, I was going to say... To get them moving, to get the aircraft paying attention.

That's what I was going to say, and that's, I think, why they probably shifted to J-TACs having a different call sign, a theater call sign. Yep. Especially when it came to call for fire, they wanted to make sure that they were talking to the right person. So what I was thinking in my mind was that they were, even though they hadn't shifted to that,

trying to fill it towards that role, to emphasize whether true or untrue, that's what they were trying to get to happen. Yeah. Yeah, so here's an example. On the rights, it's 0512. Also, there's another potential option. And that is that they had heard him talking on the radio, John, saying Charlie,

and just used the call sign that they had heard. I don't think I'm tracking. Meaning, if they had heard Chapman talking on the radio at any other time, and every time he was talking overhead, it was Maco 3 Charlie. They just assume that that was the call sign for their element. But is this local time? 0 512? Zulu.

That's Zulu? Okay. So this is like four and a half hours later. This is like 9 o'clock. In fact, it's 942 because it's a four and a half hour time difference between Zulu and local. There's a joclug entry. Again, it's just a snippet. We have the whole thing.

but there is MAKO-30 Charlie requires immediate medevac. Now, everyone agrees that John died sometime around, well, not everyone. We're saying he died at like five in the morning. The Air Force is saying he died at 6.14 in the morning, but everyone agrees he's already dead by now. So who is saying MAKO-30 Charlie?

So the point is the MAKO-30-Charlie moniker was being used for whatever reasons after John was dead. adopted his Charlie moniker to get things moving, to get the gunship's attention so that they'd maybe perk up a little bit more. This factors into the story in some weird ways and testimony and statements 15, 14 years later. What are we looking at here? There's the claim. As the pre-dawn twilight crept over Afghanistan Mountainside and Air Force Command, commander named Jay.

This is Jay Hill, huddled in the snow, listening to a distressed voice crackle over his radio, then fade away. Moments later, he says the voice came again, breaking through the static a little more, and then anguished whisper. This is Mako-30 Charlie. This is Mako-30 Charlie. The same six words over and over,

each time dissipating before Jay could, I don't know how it finishes, but this was in, this was 14 years later, once the Air Force started digging in, creating this new narrative, starting the campaign for John's Medal. Never before was this, There's no documented evidence of Jay Hill coming up to anyone in this, you know, in 2002 saying,

hey, I heard his voice somehow. Where's that grid coordinate? I know it's a six-digit grid, but where does that? I didn't know. We never looked it up. I mean, we can, we can guess that this is the Maco-3-0 team over the, we can plot it. Well, that's what I'm saying. If it's not coming from the hilltop, then it's clearly not John Chapman.

If that's a great coordinate that is anything other than the hilltop, then even if that person did hear that. Well, that's, we know that's not, John. John. Everyone agrees. Some people say it's 5 a.m. or so. Some people say it's 614, but everyone agrees John's dead when this call is made and this entry is made at 942. So this, again, I don't want to spend too much time in this. This is hearsay. This is someone in that Air Force campaign contributing something convenient for the story. It's not substantiated. No one else heard it. We're going to get into a little bit more why this doesn't make much sense here. But Just remember there's a claim from one J-TAT, from one combat controller on another mountain that says, I heard John in the radio. Okay. Okay.

Let's go back to some gunship clips to paint a more clear picture. Okay. I don't want to spend too much time in this. There's a little project that happened here. You know, we took claims or statements from the, from not a good, day to die. Again, the thing that kind of kicked this whole story off and started putting it in a certain direction versus

what's actual. I think it's pretty self-evident here. Can you, George, play just the top left video here? This is where they're saying. They're turning off the radio, yeah. contact email

on 20. They are ordering as opposition. We're standing by. And it's been shut up. Roger.

We're looking at now. Roger. Okay. Ultra Zero 1. The other voice in there is Pete Blaber.

AFO commander. And what you're hearing is the beginnings of Grim 3-2 making the case for them

to depart. Their excuses change over time, but for the most part, they're leaning on the idea that the sun is coming up soon, sunrise, and that they have to get out of there. And I think most of us remember the, was it the spirit aircraft that was shot down because it stayed too long. So we're not arguing whether it's a valid threat or not. It is their SOP. Basically, when the sun comes up, they depart. Their exceptions to every rule. But they are beginning around 5 a.m., making the case that they're going to have to leave soon. Okay, why does this matter? The QRF's inbound. Mako's over the side, and now Mako is trying to figure out when and where this QRF that's hopefully going to come help them

because they're shot up is going to arrive. And we won't play all the comms, but there is no shortage of deliberation as to how and when the QRF is going to show up. at a certain point you know again sunrise is 619 is

at a certain point the Grimm starts making the case that they have to leave Grim 3 3 I think is already off station Pete Blaber is making the case for them to stay saying hey the QRF is inbound you need to cover their infill

all right I think I'm going to read something out of this book. This is, you know, out of Sean Nailer's book, there's the Neil for John note, there's the inside the bunker note, where is this thing? Reheers, sorry.

Okay. There's some quotes in this book, and I'm just going to read them. Again, they're not... Closer to the mic. They are... There's Pete Blabor. I'm ordering you to remain on station and support these guys. You're going to be fire support when the QRF comes in. They make cases like

they're running out of fuel. They make some other claims that there's surface to air threat. All of those are debunked. They're not true. Wait, let me find. Okay, here we go. Had the men on board, Grim 3-2, known that the two Chinooks were only 10 minutes out, when they made the decision to leave,

they would have stayed. In quotes. If we had known they were coming in, there is zero question in my mind we would have stayed there, Turner said. That is what we train for, and that is the bond we have with those guys. We trained with the Rangers daily for that kind of thing. We disobeyed orders,

disobey our orders for an hour. Another 15 minutes wasn't going to get me in any less hot water. The AC130 had less than 30 minutes of fuel left in the tank. Beyond that, was required to get to K2. So they're saying that they had defied orders

for some time. What's another 15 minutes? Well, we'll tell you what that, what happens in the next 15 minutes. The Ranger QRF shows up without any support because these guys take off. That book also claims that they didn't know the status of the QRF, right?

It said, if we had known, right? Can you play the 559 clip? Britt? Yeah, 407. If we have a video around, pause it. Pause it? Pause it and go back.

The helicopter you just saw is Razor 1, that's the QRF. Almost on final. And what's interesting and tragic about that is the way they're capturing that, they've already departed. Oh, they're looking back. They're flying over at watching the Ranger QRF come in, having made a case, I don't think a good one, as to why they couldn't stay.

In the book, they're quoted as saying, had we known, they were coming in, and we're going to show you a couple clips saying all kinds of conversations, hey, they're one, one minutes out. There are four minutes out. So the claim that they didn't know what the status of the QRF was or whether they were close or not is just completely false. They left prematurely. They didn't cover their insert. Technically, they left before. They left to 559. Sunrises until 619.

All right. There's some others. you heard a time hack there it was kind of muddled four minutes out and the guy clearly said just let him know that we're did that was that truncated

no that it was one we watched before he just went okay well let's let's hear the finish of that because that's a pretty impactful we have knocked that halo out of the sky so that's Pete saying they're saying we have to go and then they're and Pete's saying

hey we're going to talk to your bosses now there's a other, again, there's a lot of layers to this part of the story. It really starts at like 5 a.m. When there's a piece of comms that we have that will be in the dock, it's a woman saying, starting to make the case, like, hey, let's start getting approvals for these guys to stay as long as they need, which never happens. And to your point, and to the point we were making earlier, because of that friendly fire incident the night before, if you listen to the entire hour or So I'll make the claim that they are rationalizing getting the hell out of there.

They're starting to say things like planting Cs, like, we're going to have to leave soon. Hey, we are running a low on fuel. And you could also make the case if you're on their side that it's all true. But the way they're saying it, how many times they're saying it, and considering what's being said to them, if you can just stay 10 more minutes, can you find the clip that's the kind of icing on the cake from Pete? Do you know where it is? How many rounds had that C-130 fired at that point?

Were they going hot on the terrain, like farther out? Yes, they were. Okay. And I don't only ask because I'm just trying to think about the impact it could potentially have had while that QRF was coming in to land. It took, from the time they went over to the side, now Slab is assuming the role of, you know, the combat controller. Now he is finally tuned in. Now that he's over the side and not being shot at consistently.

probably switches dial to the fires net and now he's talking to the gunship, it still takes them 11 minutes as they're falling down in the mountain getting down to the bottom of this thing. It still takes some 11 minutes to get first rounds on target, which that's slow. That's slow.

Have you found it? I think what, you know, for someone who maybe has had trouble understanding what they've been hearing for somebody who is trying to figure out why does this matter? What we're really looking at here is

the QRF was coming in, Grimpreto was leaving, and the claim that was made in Sean Naylor's book was that if they knew the QRF was coming in, they would have stayed. And it seems clear in listening to the comms we've heard so far, it doesn't seem like they didn't know they were coming in.

It'd be hard to make the case. Yeah. let him know that we're out of the extension. Okay. Is that underneath there? Underneath there, there was a female voice saying they were trying

to work the extension. Okay. This is, what time is this? This is 049 at 4 hours. That's like five, that's five something, early fives. So, for 40 minutes, these guys are already planning their exit. Talking about all the reasons why they have

leave. I don't know why we don't we're not in their heads. It just seems like too much effort was placed on leaving and not supporting. And we know it's true. We know it's, you know, you and I know, especially that it's SOP for them to leave. But again, they're exceptions to every rule. They have people underneath them right now that really need their help and they have people coming in that will really need their help. And they have the most situational awareness. So even if, because you asked, are they putting rounds down? This hasn't been an effective close air, support mission in terms of putting rounds down. But they do have the most essay on who's here and what's here. And although we've shown a lot of confusion and everything else, they're the closest

conduit between what is known. So it's frustrating that, you know, we talked about this earlier and we'll talk about it again when the Rangers sit with us here. QRF is coming in and they don't know what they're getting into, well, one of the assets that can help them understand what they're getting into is leaving and also not communicating with them. And it doesn't appear as if they're attempting to and they're saying someone needs to let them know. And I think we're running out of someone's. They are that someone. Yeah. And if you also noticed, so they didn't have columns with the ground party 11 minutes ago when their combat controller probably should have been on the radio executing the plan they had put in place.

And now they're saying they don't have columns with the inbound QRF. Whose fault is that? We don't know. But it just seems tragic. Early GWAT. Early day. It just seems tragic. Do you have, are you able to find it?

You want the, uh, Pete Blader. Yeah, I don't think it's on here. We got the, um, oh, is it part of the, it's part of the ultimate piece. So we can. Okay, let's do it. Can you pull up the piece from our interview? it's in the folder we had last night. So this is,

this is the, this is the, this is the topper, unfortunately. This was from an interview we did, what, three years ago now? Part of it is, it's a, it's a piece that's close to, it's like an abbreviated piece from something that's in the documentary,

one of the episodes where we're looking closely at this section where the, where the QRF is inbound and where the AC-130 is leaving and you'll hear some of

Slabs sense of what's happening and how he feels about it. Okay. The standard operating procedures at the time for this aircraft is that it only flies at night. The orders are to this aircraft to return to base.

I can't get to anything. The AFO commander is on the radio tell them, do not leave them. I'm ordering you not to leave. We have a QRF helicopter to them inbound with a force, and they need you or close air support coverage with their infill. If you leave, we're going to have another. I remember leaning out from behind my cover, watching the aircraft, leave its orbit, and head out.

of command. They've got no one. I'll tell you the way I look at it, right, that aircraft was a commander, right? He is aircraft commander entitled, and he could have made his decision to stay. I am going to disobey orders, whether you're going to court martial

or not. There are Americans in trouble on the ground right there, and I have the means of the combat power to do something about it. He should have stayed. I'll tell you straight to your camps right there. It's cowardice of that aircraft of the two left. Cowardous. straight up

abandoned us on the ground don't cut it out either I'm unsure what he was saying I think it's pretty clear oh man I can understand Brett feeling that way I can understand that the aircraft commander though also had other things

to consider as well to include the life of everybody in that airship yes so I there is some residual feelings that I believe Brett is feeling, which he probably will have for his remaining days. And I totally, totally understand that. I might feel exactly the same way.

Is it potentially cowardice? Sure. Are there other potential explanations? Yes. Well, I just want to remind us of what's the quotes here. Yeah, we're not. adjudicating cowardice. Had the men on board Grim 3-2 known that the two Chinooks were only 10 minutes out,

they would have made the decision. When they made the decision to leave, they would have stayed. In quotes, if we had known they were coming in, there was zero question in my mind we would have stayed there. That is what we trained for, and that is the bond we have with those guys. We had dissipated orders for an hour. Another 15 minutes wasn't going to get me in any less hot water. How much fuel did they actually have left?

Don't know. We got comms on now. Yeah, there are some comms. in it, that will be in the dock, but enough to stay. Enough to stay. It's a tough choice. Now, you know, this is slab. I think we can intuit... By the way, that was slab. That was Pete Blaber and that was hanging back. Speaking from his own perspective, but I think he's also speaking for the Rangers because what's about to happen is maybe the worst part of this story. So, you know, This is the saving private Ryan on top of the snowy mountain scene we described.

Right. So up to this point for people who don't know as much as we know, which is almost everybody, Migo-30 spilled over the side and made some progress with their injured and expectant at this point. He's not had a great experience with using this tool in the sky effectively. So what you say Mitch is important to kind of double down on here is he's watching them leave, but he is not lamenting over them leaving him. The story that we've been telling to make it clear over the past 15 or 20 minutes,

whether we've done it well or not, I hope we've done it reasonably well and showed some of our receipts here. The point is the quick reaction force was coming in and they might have benefited from the situational awareness or the close air support or some combination of both. Unfortunately, they got neither. Well, again, what's just called balls and strikes here?

Had the gunship state, they'd already been firing on top of the mountains, So there's no more excuse not to fire. Do you believe it would have affected the insert of the quick reaction force in a positive way? It depends on what they were willing to fire on. Again, if you watch the entire video, they're lighting up the top of the mountain at this point. But are they shooting at individuals? Because they can't determine who the American is.

They're shooting indiscriminately at this point. Then I think it would have made a difference. it's hard to imagine it wouldn't have. Yes. At least get their heads down. Again, we saw how it, we saw that even just because of darkness, a team can get in pretty clean.

Yeah. It's just hard to imagine. I mean, had this gunship stayed for 10 or 12 more minutes that in some way, shape, or form, it would have positively affected the Ranger QRF. I don't see how it could have been negative. I'll put it that way.

I mean, even if, and the reason I asked about what they were willing to shoot at is that that goes. to those weapons platforms where people who are not familiar, pretty damn precise. There's 105 millimeter, you know, howitzer sticking out the left-hand side of that thing. And even if they weren't comfortable shooting directly at somebody, put that thing danger close to something that you're uncertain of. Obviously, not the people getting off the helicopter, but it's heads down for sure, disorientating. You know what I mean? Yeah.

I can't see it. Get their attention diverted, looking this way, what's going on over here and get that burden. But if they were willing to fire on people that were maneuvering, then I think it would have had an even greater. impact because they could have targeted them directly. They were also, the situation got so bad that the protocols that surround, as we understand this, the daylight versus nighttime operation, they were given permission to go back about an hour, hour and a half later, which at that point, the damage is done. Yeah.

Yeah, that's not going to protect the cure us at that point. Yep. Oh, man. I think this is a good place for us to think about the fact that since the Rangers are coming in, and we've got some other guys coming to talk to, unless anybody sees it differently, I think this is a good place to start thinking about what's next and who can help us tell that story accurately.

I think it's a good place to put a pin in it and start with the Ranger story from there. Okay. Again, I keep saying this. You know, none of us take pleasure in presenting this, revealing it. Seven people died up there. You know, four are about,

to die in the next few minutes. I can also say he's not here and eventually he'll speak for himself and he speaks for himself in the project. You know, you were affected by hearing what Slab said. I could see that, you know, visibly affected by it. We were too. That's why we brought it. This was a reluctant project for everybody involved.

There is not a single person, including us every day and here now that showed up and went, great, more of this. It's fascinating and it's interesting. and it's interesting and it's important. There's a lot of different degrees of sincerity, tragedy, heroism, and confidence in looking at this from different sides. But there is no place where anybody's taking any joy in this. It is not exciting that the Rangers are coming next.

It's not exciting that the next piece of this story. This is not an action movie. We all know that. You guys certainly know that. So I want to make sure anybody in the audience who's wondering what happens next and is interested to hear what happens next is here for the right reasons.

Because there are some problems. We're looking closely. We're gathering information. We're analyzing information. We're trying to separate truth from fact. And there are opinion and choice spaces and all this. And we've looked at some of them over the last hour. But this is a reluctant project for Slab.

And he says as much several times as we've sat down with him. It's not simple. It's not exciting. Yeah. And I go back to myself as a civilian and a storyteller. These things are interesting. They're also very difficult for me to listen to and try to figure out how these things could have happened.

And it's been driving us through this process. It's just trying to get it right. Yeah. What's that? Okay. Let's put the seal story down for a bit, and we'll pick it up with the Rangers. Okay.

Cool. Great.