Code Over Country

PROLOGUE

May 24, 2018—The White House

Britt Slabinski entered trailing a step behind President Donald J. Trump as a four-piece brass band made its way through a cheerless “Hail to the Chief.” The retired Navy SEAL master chief petty officer strode past a collection of family and colleagues standing in the audience, across the room’s parquet floors and wool rugs, to a small podium. The ceremony took place in the East Room. This is where Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Gerald Ford took their oaths of office and where Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy lay in repose after their assassinations. This place holds a distinct significance for members of the military: it is where the commander in chief presents the highest award for battlefield valor, the Medal of Honor. That was the occasion that brought Master Chief Slabinski to the East Room that day. But as he took his place on the dais, standing between portraits of George Washington and Martha Washington, his expression didn’t register whether he was there for a coronation or a funeral.

Slabinski stood off to the side of the president and faced the now seated audience. The forty-eight-year-old was still boyishly handsome with placid blue eyes, the only evidence of his age the slight receding of his brown hair combed to one side. Six feet tall and lean, Slabinski wore a pressed, all-white Navy dress uniform with a stiff tunic collar, closed and adorned with two brass pins indicating his rank as a noncommissioned officer. His left breast displayed twenty-five different military service ribbons, including a Navy Cross; just beneath his collarbone his treasured gold Navy SEAL Trident remained pinned in place, as it had when he passed the group’s brutal BUD/S training program twenty-eight years earlier. For the son of a retired Navy “frogman”—the precursor to the SEALs—and a former Eagle Scout from central Massachusetts who enlisted in the Navy after graduating from high school, the White House ceremony must have been awe-inspiring. Yet, as he stood in front of senior Pentagon officials, Navy admirals both active and retired, and several living Medal of Honor recipients, Slabinski appeared humble. He smiled sheepishly as President Trump introduced him and his family, including his son, who sat just across from him in the first row. Slabinski looked every part the American hero.

Slabinski’s distinguished career in the SEALs came to an end four years earlier, when he retired as a command master chief, a rank of E-9. He spent much of his career with the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, called DEVGRU and known by everyone as SEAL Team 6, where he’d been a sniper, before rising to become a senior leader. In that time, he completed fifteen combat tours and took home five Bronze Stars with a “V” device for valor, denoting heroism on the battlefield. He was a charismatic leader whose stature at SEAL Team 6 and the broader SEAL community led to his helping write the SEAL ethos that codified the Navy SEAL culture. His email signature read, “Strength and Honor.”

“Today we pay tribute to Britt’s heroic service,” President Trump said, “and proudly present him with our nation’s highest military honor. I would go so far and say our nation’s highest honor.”

The Medal of Honor is, in fact, the highest award for military service. Initially established by the Navy during the Civil War, the award was quickly adopted by the Army to honor the battlefield bravery of enlisted and volunteer soldiers who fought for the Union. Signed into law by President Lincoln, the Medal of Honor could be awarded to officers as well. More than 40 percent of the almost thirty-five hundred awards come from the Civil War, and more than half of the awards since World War II have gone to service members who died on a battlefield. Some view awards with skepticism in the military—as imperfect artifacts of a culture that does not know how to value their labor. But when it comes to the Medal of Honor, most Americans have reached something of a consensus: the recipients are the closest thing our society has to heroes.

President Trump continued his remarks, addressing Slabinski and his surviving teammates, some of whom looked on from the audience.

“You waged a fierce fight against the enemies,” the president said. “Through your actions, you demonstrated that there is no love more pure and no courage more great than the love and courage that burns in the hearts of American patriots. We are free because warriors like you are willing to give their sweat, their blood, and if they have to, their lives for our great nation.”

Slabinski stood silently in front of a framed Medal of Honor flag, blue with thirteen white stars; the president spoke for him. “Britt wants the country to know that for him the recognition he is about to receive is an honor that falls on the whole team, on every American warrior who fought the forces of terror on that snowy Afghan ridge. Each of them has entered the eternal chronicle of American valor and American bravery.

“Britt, we salute you, we thank you, we thank God for making you a United States SEAL, we love our Navy SEALs.”1

Slabinski looked out at the audience, his blue eyes frequently coming back to his son just in front of him. A military aide to the president read the citation aloud. It credited Slabinski for “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty” while serving in Afghanistan.

“In the early morning of 4 March 2002,” the citation reads, Slabinski led a SEAL Team 6 reconnaissance element “to its assigned area atop a 10,000-foot snow-covered mountain. Their insertion helicopter was suddenly riddled with rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire from previously undetected enemy positions. The crippled helicopter lurched violently and ejected one teammate onto the mountain before the pilots were forced to crash land in the valley far below.”

Slabinski then led his remaining team on a rescue mission for their missing teammate back on top of the mountain. Despite facing more enemy fire as the group exited their helicopter, one teammate jumped off the aircraft, charging uphill toward enemy fire.

Slabinski, known as Slab by his SEAL Team 6 teammates, looked unsteady as the citation retold the events in 2002. His head nodded slightly, and his eyes appeared to water.

“Without regard for his own safety,” the citation read, Slabinski charged uphill in thigh-high snow to join one of his teammates. Together, they assaulted and cleared the first of three bunkers. Machine-gun fire from another hardened position poured out from twenty meters away at the two Americans. Slabinski “repeatedly exposed himself to deadly fire” to attack the second bunker as his teammate was struck down by enemy fire. Slabinski and team were too close to the enemy to call in air support, and after three casualties, “the situation became untenable.” Slabinski moved his team into a better defensive position and called in air strikes as well as reinforcements. The enemy forced Slabinski and his other wounded teammates down the mountainside with mortar fire. Slabinski led his team down an almost sheer, snow-covered mountainside, where they were finally rescued fourteen hours later.

“By his undaunted courage, bold initiative, leadership, and devotion to duty, Senior Chief Slabinski reflected great credit upon himself and upheld the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.”2

After the announcer completed the citation, Trump placed the light-blue silk ribbon around Slabinski’s neck, the medal hanging near his Trident.

For Slabinski, the award secured his integrity and honor. For the crowd gathered, it was a solemn, proud moment. For a few men who knew Slabinski well, it was a disgrace.

March 4, 2002—Takur Ghar, Eastern Afghanistan

Slabinski charged off the Chinook’s rear ramp first as machine-gun fire crackled all around him. His first steps landed in heavy snow and he quickly fell over. His five teammates, including John Chapman, an Air Force combat controller known as Chappy, followed, fanning out in practiced formations. Enemy fire rattled from three positions above the men, forcing them to scramble for cover. The SEAL Team 6 reconnaissance element had lost the one tactical advantage they valued most: the element of surprise.

The team had tried to land on the 10,200-foot mountaintop three hours earlier to establish an observation post. As their helicopter began to set down, they flew directly into an ambush. A force of foreign al Qaeda fighters had successfully hidden their position before the mission started, and the moment the Chinook entered the kill zone, the fighters opened up. As the helicopter shook and rattled from RPGs and small arms fire, one of the SEALs, Neil Roberts, slipped off the open ramp and tumbled ten feet into the snow. The helicopter continued its descent to two thousand feet beneath the summit where it was forced to make an emergency landing, to wait for rescue by another helicopter and evacuation back to the SEALs’ base.

When the rescue helicopter arrived, Slabinski ordered the Chinook pilot to bring his team of six remaining SEALs back up to the top of the mountain, where entrenched fighters would be waiting, in the hope of recovering Roberts. They would have to fight uphill against an enemy force that was mostly hidden, and whose strength was unknown.

The team was, by design, part of the most elite fighting force in the US military. SEAL Team 6 was a small unit of so-called Tier 1 operators trained as a counterterrorism and hostage rescue force. If any group of US servicemen was going to jump out of the back of a helicopter at an altitude of ten thousand feet, at night, in the snow, and fight uphill to recover a teammate, Slabinski and his men were the ones you would want on the job.

Even so, few at the command had seen combat. There had been missions and small deployments, and a few older members remembered the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia ten years earlier. The 9/11 attacks had galvanized and motivated the unit to take down Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the Taliban, but few would enter Afghanistan with any experience fighting terrorists and insurgents. The firefight unfolding on the mountaintop that night finally gave them that opportunity.

As Chapman ran uphill to try to establish radio communications with air support, Slabinski picked himself up and followed. The two other teams of two quickly sought cover behind a cropping of small boulders, but they were all downhill and at a severe tactical disadvantage. Automatic-weapons fire cracked through the trees and ricocheted off the boulders. Chapman fired a three-round burst from his M4 into a hidden bunker, suppressing one of the three sources of enemy attack.

Within minutes of exiting the helicopter, Chapman was hit by enemy fire. Slabinski was closest to him when it happened. He could see Chapman through night-vision goggles on the ground, silent and still, but breathing. Slabinski kept firing while trying to direct the other two teams to the nearest enemy bunker. Shortly after Slabinski led a failed assault of the bunker, two more of the SEALs fell wounded, including one whose leg had been nearly severed by gunfire.

With half of his force unable to fight, Slabinski had few choices to continue the assault. The team was effectively pinned down under descending fire. He scanned the mountaintop and looked for the best exit route. To get out of his position, Slabinski would later claim he passed closely over Chapman’s body, looked at him, and saw no visual signs of life, and that his only choice to save the rest of his team was to retreat. Slabinski had lost one teammate, and now another in an attempt to save the first. Two others were injured, one critically. The only rational decision was to escape down the mountainside and keep his remaining men alive. Slabinski continued past Chapman without checking his pulse or confirming that his fellow operator had died.

But the day’s losses were only beginning. The battle lasted for another fourteen hours. Two other quick reaction forces had landed on the mountaintop as well, calling in air strikes as they made their retreat, and another five US servicemen were killed in action.

By the time Slabinski and his team landed back at the SEAL Team 6 headquarters at Bagram Air Base, outside the Afghan capital of Kabul, several hours later, a fuller picture of what had occurred on the top of Takur Ghar emerged. A drone flying above the mountain captured the unfolding chaos. After the initial failed helicopter assault, Roberts was discovered quickly by an al Qaeda fighter. The video showed the enemy fighter firing a round through Roberts’s head; the fighter then taking out a knife, bending down over Roberts’s body, and attempting to behead the dead SEAL. The fighter was unable to finish the job; he gave up and dragged the body toward the bunkers. Although there was no way for his teammates to know at the time, Roberts had died more than thirty minutes before the SEALs returned to attempt a rescue.

The video also captured the team’s thwarted attempt to take the mountaintop. More than eleven hundred miles away in Masirah, Oman, a group of officers from the Joint Special Operations Command, known as JSOC, watched live, real-time video of Slabinski’s firefight from a drone high above Takur Ghar. The drone’s video revealed a strange scene after Slabinski’s team egressed off the mountaintop. The footage appeared to show a single man maneuvering and firing toward positions held by enemy fighters for almost an hour. For the JSOC commanders far removed from the battlefield, it wasn’t quite clear yet who was fighting. There was no communication from the mountaintop to the operations center. Had an internal battle broken out between the al Qaeda fighters? Or could the enemy forces have mistaken their own forces for the Americans? The JSOC officers didn’t know, for example, that an Air Force combat controller in Gardez heard John Chapman calling on an emergency radio frequency using a unique call-sign identifier. Nor did the video at the time clearly show the same lone fighter exposing himself, coming out of one of the bunkers to lay down suppressing fire as the first of the rescue helicopters landed nearby.

Only years later, when an Air Force intelligence analyst began reviewing the video footage with technology that didn’t exist in 2002, did it become clear who that fighter was. It was Chapman; he had survived. After his team retreated, he regained consciousness and resumed fighting, alone and badly outnumbered, for nearly an hour. Moments after the Army Rangers exited their Chinooks to come save him and Neil Roberts, Chapman was killed. The video memorialized an unthinkable act: SEALs had left a man for dead behind enemy lines.

But Slabinski would never fully accept that. Nor would SEAL Team 6 admit that on a day filled with heroism, tragedy, and sacrifice, the man leading the mission violated one of special operations’ most fundamental codes: never leave a man behind. Facing an unwinnable scenario, Slabinski made a decision to preserve the lives of his remaining teammates. But SEAL Team 6 did not fashion its reputation based on tactical retreats. After the events of Takur Ghar, Slabinski and the command had created a template that members of SEAL Team 6 would follow in the decades of fighting to come. When faced with a mistake or transgression that brought dishonor to the team, and thus dishonor to the country, the best path was to disregard the truth and sell a myth of heroism.

The Battle of Roberts Ridge, as it came to be known, had a devastating, though unspoken, effect on SEAL Team 6—akin to a dark family secret. And, like any painful secret, it created its own unique pathologies. The events of that day would set off a cascade of extraordinary violence. Roberts’s mutilation and Chapman’s abandonment and heroics became two separate features of the psychology within the team. These events haunted America’s most elite military unit and set off a culture of rogue violence and cover-ups, a corrupt culture that is still active today.

The legend of SEAL Team 6 grew as the War on Terror expanded beyond Afghanistan to Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen. And with it, the team’s rogue culture continued to spread, operating outside the Navy’s established mechanisms for command and investigation. A segment of SEAL Team 6 began acting with an air of impunity that disturbed observers within the command. Some senior members of SEAL Team 6 believed the pattern of brutality was not only illegal but rose to the level of war crimes.

“To understand the violence, you have to begin at Roberts Ridge,” a SEAL Team 6 operator who deployed several times to Afghanistan told me. “When you see your friend killed, recover his body, and find that the enemy mutilated him? It’s a schoolyard mentality. ‘You guys want to play with those rules? OK.’” Although this former SEAL acknowledged that war crimes are wrong, he understood how they happen. “You ask me to go living with the pigs, but I can’t go live with pigs and then not get dirty.”

Whether by intent or neglect, Slabinski’s award served to rewrite SEAL Team 6’s troubled post-9/11 history, including the corruption, cover-ups, and crimes, all of which originated at Roberts Ridge, to not just claim honor that had been lost but to insulate the unit from accountability. By putting the Medal of Honor silk ribbon around Slabinski’s neck, Trump ignored SEAL Team 6’s dark secrets.

“By giving Slab the award, you close the door on our criminal history,” a former SEAL Team 6 officer told me. “The cover-up wins. You’ve closed this ugly part of our command’s history, and everyone gets away with it. What everyone learns from this is that cover-ups work. ‘Don’t say anything bad about your teammates, keep quiet and we’ll get through it.’ It’s disgraceful.”

Slabinski’s conduct wasn’t an aberration at SEAL Team 6; the unit’s moral collapse was not his responsibility, even if he contributed to it. He was not an officer, and just one of many SEALs. In fact, in the East Room audience were current and retired SEAL Team 6 admirals who’d enabled this. Together, these senior officers helped build the myth of SEAL Team 6 and the Navy SEALs. Among themselves, these Naval Academy graduates would encourage fellow SEAL officers to “protect the brand.” The leadership made a Faustian bargain: they could champion enemy kills and ride their SEALs’ successes to promotions and post-retirement wealth in exchange for allowing the enlisted inside the unit to establish their own rules—and a code that sought to protect the command at all costs.

The myth of SEAL Team 6 had secured the unit’s place in America’s imagination as the unambiguous heroes of the War on Terror—silent, deadly, professional. Still, Slabinski’s medal served to whitewash the image of the unit well-known within its ranks, which had been defined by two decades of failed leadership, shameless propaganda, criminal activity, cover-ups, and war crimes. That day the nation’s highest military honor served as a coda for the tragedy that became SEAL Team 6 after 9/11. It hid the consequences for the men who served in the unit, men who had experienced an unprecedented amount of war. Indeed, during no previous American conflict had the military faced as much battlefield exposure as the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. As first described by journalist Dexter Filkins, these have indeed been Forever Wars. At twenty years and counting, the wars have tallied scores of tactical successes but delivered no strategic victories.

The Navy SEAL Ethos, which Slabinski helped write, states, in part:

“I serve with honor on and off the battlefield. The ability to control my emotions and my actions, regardless of circumstance, sets me apart from others. Uncompromising integrity is my standard. My character and honor are steadfast. My word is my bond.”

For many at SEAL Team 6, little of that is true. Their Ethos is indeed noble, but the SEALs were not, in fact, built to live up to it. From the first days of the frogmen and combat swimmers of World War II, the Navy sought men to do a job that was necessary, but which few wanted. What the service never reckoned with is that the qualities that draw men to be SEALs are the same qualities that undermine their effectiveness.

There’s an inherent challenge that comes with writing a book about the Navy SEALs and, in particular, SEAL Team 6. It isn’t that SEALs are unwilling to share stories. In fact, there’s an industry built around this. A cursory glance at the military section of your local bookstore will feature any number of bestsellers authored by the quiet professionals of the SEALs. But the stories these select SEALs are willing to share are too often embellished and fabricated for a purpose: to enhance the author’s profile and burnish the SEAL myth.

This book serves a different purpose. It focuses on the stories that the SEALs have not been willing to share—at least until now. Many of these stories testify to the bravery and the singular capabilities of these men, but also identify failings—and the consequences that follow from them. That is the project of this book: to investigate the history of the military’s most elite—and secretive—fighting force. And to do so without fear or favor. With this in mind, the reader should note two considerations about what follows.

First, much of the reporting in the book will be denied and denounced by the Department of Defense and the US government. This is not because the facts in this book are not true, but because the government is not yet required to acknowledge their truth. Many of the people, places, and events covered in these pages remain classified as Top Secret by the US government. The military has been consistent in responding to the stream of accusations against SEAL Team 6, saying that allegations are either unsubstantiated or there is no record of the events described. Both are dishonest. This book details these crimes—and the cover-ups that followed—to offer substantiation and to create a record that cannot be so glibly denied.

Second, few sources have gone on the record or chosen to be named in these pages. This reflects the reporting environment: the classified world of national security and tribal culture of the very few chosen and trained by the government to conduct clandestine war. There is rigor behind this anonymity. I have conducted hundreds of interviews with dozens of current or former Navy SEALs, most of whom served in SEAL Team 6. I understand their biases and have challenged them when appropriate to ensure the information reflects the closest proximity to an authoritative rendering. Where possible, I have also relied on documents. For the reader’s ease, I have placed all attribution details about the sourcing in the endnotes.

Most reporting about covert operations conducted by the United States examines events and facts that the government has gone to great lengths to conceal—and resists mightily any effort by journalists to make public. Journalists must rely, then, on those who are willing to come forward. As the distance in time from the events grows, more people will appear with more facts, and newer details about these events will emerge. All of history is a work in progress. But Code Over Country presents the closest public accounting of the events to date. I hope the reporting and history here will lead to more public accountability about the wars this country fights, and the heroes we claim.

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