Robert's Ridge/John Chapman

Summary

The Antihero Podcast: Robert's Ridge/John Chapman – Detailed Summary

Release Date: April 7, 2025

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of The Antihero Podcast, host Tyler and co-host Brent Tucker delve deep into the harrowing events of Operation Anaconda, specifically focusing on the mission at Roberts Ridge. Featuring retired Chief Master Sergeant Rob Harrison, a former Air Force Special Operations operator, the episode unpacks the controversial narrative surrounding John Chapman—a hero whose actions have sparked significant debate within military circles.

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Operation Anaconda and Roberts Ridge

Timestamp: [22:00]

Rob Harrison begins by providing a comprehensive overview of Operation Anaconda, a pivotal spring offensive designed to regain control of key high-ground positions held by enemy forces. The operation employed a strategic "Hammer and Anvil" maneuver, integrating special operations forces (SOF) with conventional troops and indigenous allies to encircle and eliminate the adversary.

Key Events:

• Night One Challenges: Despite meticulous planning, enemy forces entrenched in critical high-ground positions led to unexpected intense engagements. A fratricide incident occurred when a miscommunication resulted in friendly fire, tragically killing a fellow operator (Petty Officer Neil Roberts).

  Rob Harrison [00:00]: "It’s absolutely, without a doubt, it's Chapman."

• Rules of Engagement Tightened: The tragic friendly fire incident necessitated stricter rules of engagement (ROE) for subsequent nights, requiring positive identification before engaging targets.

Impact of Night Two Adjustments:

• With enhanced ROE, helicopter gunships like the AC130 Spectre operated with heightened caution, delaying direct engagement unless absolutely certain of the threat.

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The Controversy Surrounding John Chapman

Timestamp: [06:56]

As the discussion progresses, Harrison addresses the heart of the episode—the disputed actions of John Chapman and his recognition for valor. Initially, Chapman was not prominently featured in the Medal of Honor museum in Texas, prompting questions about the integrity of the awarding process.

Rob Harrison [07:33]: "There's a lot of confusion and question about Chapman's actions and recognition, especially in light of the Medal of Honor museum's portrayal."

Discrepancies in Valor Recognition:

• Medal of Honor Museum's Decision: Despite Chapman's significant contributions, including saving his team under extreme conditions, the museum opted not to dedicate a display to him, allegedly citing equitable representation across military services.

  Rob Harrison [12:06]: "The research shows at the end of all of this, the enemy had pilfered the gear off of Petty Officer Roberts."

• Contrasting Narratives: Harrison highlights inconsistencies between official accounts and ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance) footage, which he asserts clearly shows Chapman’s heroic actions extending far beyond initial reports.

  Rob Harrison [52:43]: "Air Force knows we saw the footage. Robert survived his fall, and that contradicts the Navy story."

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Rob Harrison’s Eyewitness Testimony

Timestamp: [22:00]

Harrison recounts his firsthand experience during the mission, detailing the critical moments leading up to and following the mayday call for Roberts. His testimony underscores the chaos and split-second decisions made in combat, emphasizing the importance of accurate and truthful recognition of heroism.

Key Incidents:

• Helicopter Crash and Mayday Call: A Chinook helicopter was hit by enemy fire, resulting in Roberts falling off. The subsequent mayday call triggered a frantic response from Harrison's gunship to provide support.

  Rob Harrison [45:47]: "We saw Roberts on top of the mountain. 30 Charlie tells us they've lost a teammate out of the helicopter at the LZ."

• Engagements and Fire Support: As enemy forces converged, Harrison describes the intense firefight, the confusion caused by multiple strobes indicating potential casualties, and the eventual realization that Chapman might still be alive amidst the chaos.

  Rob Harrison [50:55]: "From the moment you see the enemy, like, he's already too close. There's nothing you're going to be able to do in this case."

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Valuation of Valor and Medal of Honor Criteria

Timestamp: [69:15]

A significant portion of the episode critiques the criteria and process by which the Medal of Honor is awarded. Harrison argues that the award should recognize singular, extraordinary acts of valor rather than the cumulative efforts of a team, especially if some actions contradict the narrative deemed worthy of the honor.

Brent Tucker [143:27]: "You cannot do it next to Audie Murphy. Go look at Audie's citations... you can't do it next to him. They are not the same."

Arguments Presented:

• Totality vs. Singular Acts: Harrison contends that applying the Medal of Honor based on the totality of actions, including routine or less distinguished tasks, dilutes its prestige and obscures true heroism.

• Integrity of Valor Boards: He highlights inconsistencies in Valor board testimonies and the selective acknowledgment of actions, suggesting a possible bias or manipulation to elevate certain narratives over others.

  Rob Harrison [117:56]: "The Navy was on board as long as we stopped at what was known as Main Material Finding One."

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Conflicting Narratives and Institutional Bias

Timestamp: [120:24]

Harrison exposes the internal conflicts between different military branches and intelligence agencies regarding the portrayal of the mission at Roberts Ridge. He alleges that efforts were made to discredit Chapman’s heroism to maintain service-wide integrity in Medal of Honor recognitions.

Key Points:

• Subversion and Counter-Narratives: Emails and interactions between high-ranking officials reveal attempts to promote alternative accounts that undermine Chapman's valor, favoring others like Brit Slavinski instead.

  Rob Harrison [121:43]: "Jeremy Williams tasked his intel guy to research the Air Force's research... This is getting a little on the ludicrous side."

• Impact on Reputation: These discrepancies have led to strained relations and a tarnished reputation for acts of true heroism, as the official narrative may not align with the undeniable evidence presented by eyewitnesses and ISR footage.

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Conclusion: Upholding Truth and Accountability

Timestamp: [147:38]

In the episode’s closing, Harrison emphasizes the importance of truth and accountability within the military, urging listeners and fellow service members to question and rectify discrepancies in valor recognition. He calls for an honest reassessment of Chapman's actions to ensure that Medal of Honor awards remain a true testament to unparalleled bravery.

Rob Harrison [147:12]: "Honour the right hero on the mountain. Let's have the courage to speak, to hold ourselves accountable, and let's commit ourselves to the truth."

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Notable Quotes

• On Speaking Truth to Power:

  Rob Harrison [07:33]: "Enough was enough. And damn it, I'm not going to roll over and watch this happen without speaking truth to power."

• On the Integrity of Valor Awards:

  Brent Tucker [143:27]: "You cannot do it next to Roy Benavidez. Go look at Roy Benavidez and what he did for the Medal of Honor and tell me these two are the same."

• On Military Accountability:

  Rob Harrison [147:12]: "Honor the right hero on the mountain. Let's have the courage to speak, to hold ourselves accountable, and let's commit ourselves to the truth."

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Final Thoughts

This episode of The Antihero Podcast shines a light on the complexities and challenges of recognizing true heroism within military operations. Through Rob Harrison's detailed account and critical analysis, listeners gain an insightful perspective on the events at Roberts Ridge and the systemic issues surrounding valor awards. The conversation underscores the necessity for transparency, integrity, and unwavering commitment to truth in honoring those who serve.

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Note: The episode includes advertisements for Refractive Wolf Apparel, First Responder Cigar Company, Human Performance TRT, and other sponsors. These segments have been excluded from this summary to focus solely on the episode's content.

Transcript

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah. What. What I can tell you definitively is we saw the strobe. You. You see him crawl into the bunker, and the team has broken contact, and Roberts has. Has been killed at this point. And so it. Like, it's absolutely. Without a doubt, it's Chapman. And oh, by the way, the. The research shows at the end of all of this, the enemy had pilfered the gear off of Petty Officer Roberts.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Rob Harrison]

John was found with all of his gear and his weapon.

[Tyler]

Hold on.

[Brent Tucker]

We're not recording.

[Tyler]

Do you want to buy a shirt.

[Brent Tucker]

To support military dance?

[Tyler]

People want to see their sausage get made.

[Brent Tucker]

An appropriate level of inappropriateness. Something happens in my family tonight. The Delta Force isn't coming to rescue my. My family. My kids. Like, it is first responders. Yeah. That are going to save my family.

[Tyler]

They want the culture to be down. They want people to not want to be cops. And the people that do want to be cops are now walking into the job. Sc to do the job.

[Brent Tucker]

I'm gonna try to act like it didn't happen, although we. We all know it did.

[Rob Harrison]

JV team for life, right?

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah. And I. I got a problem with that. You. You do not get a medal of Honor for the totality of. Of your actions. That's not. That's not what a. A valor award is for. A valor award isn't for.

[Rob Harrison]

That's a leadership award. Right?

[Brent Tucker]

That's right. That's a leadership.

[Rob Harrison]

It's the difference between a Bronze Star in the. In the combat zone. Like, yeah, wtf? That doesn't exist for the middle of our.

[Brent Tucker]

In a weird way, it's out. Even argue. It's May. It's. It lands somewhere in between as a somewhat gray area, but it definitely does not fall on. On. On a valor award for valorous actions in combat. Totality and intent mean nothing, dude.

[Rob Harrison]

Like, I know that he went on the objective. I know that he went into harm's way, but that's your job. This is show me the valor. And that's. I followed John after John cleared the bunker and I shot at. At a threat, but I didn't eliminate it. And then I ducked behind the boulder the rest of the time until I popped smoke and I got my team out of there.

[Brent Tucker]

People aren't going to want to hear this. That's your job. Let's. We gave a guy award for doing his job anyway. All right. For the.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah.

[Brent Tucker]

You ready? You ready to kick this thing off?

[Tyler]

Let's do it.

[Brent Tucker]

Drew.

[Rob Harrison]

Yep.

[Tyler]

R. You hit record? I sure do.

[Brent Tucker]

It's on.

[Tyler]

All Right.

[Brent Tucker]

Dang it.

[Rob Harrison]

All right. I've got record going on my end.

[Brent Tucker]

That's about six. I'm not doing that.

[Rob Harrison]

Minimized.

[Brent Tucker]

I wasn't. Well, I wasn't in the. In the video. So we're good. I can't even hear myself right now. It's designed that way.

[Tyler]

All right, welcome back to the anti Hero podcast Bar Delta Force, Part street cop, all truth. I'm Tyler, owner of Refractive Wolf Apparel. Use promo code anti Hero and get yourself 15 off the best and outsider culture. Graphic tees, stickers, hats, flags, hoodies, zip up hoodies and ranger panties and thongs and socks. Yeah, we need them.

[Brent Tucker]

What else you got? You got a whole lineup. I love it.

[Tyler]

Songs and socks.

[Brent Tucker]

And I'm Brent Tucker, owner of frcc. That's first responder cigar company and first responder coffee company. Use FRCC 15, that's FRCC 15. To get 15 off the world's best coffee and cigars.

[Tyler]

And of course this episode brought to you by Human Performance TRT. Go to HPTRT.com and use promo code HERO and get 20 off your TRT. Not only just the first month, but every single month you get 20 off. So go to HPTRT.com, use promo code HERO and let's just say, hey, I. I've already. I'm already with a company or I already went to the VA for this and I'm not happy. If you want to come to hptrt, if you want to come to Human Performance, you upload your recent lab work for your blood on to HPTRT.com and then HPTRT waive the fees as long as it's done within six months. So go to HPTRT.com promo code HERO. Save 20% off every month.

[Brent Tucker]

20% off every month. That's too much.

[Tyler]

That's too much.

[Brent Tucker]

They're leaving. They're leaving money on the table. But good for you guys. You guys get the benefit of their bad business decisions. Don't forget our Thursday night lives. Every Thursday night, 8pm Eastern Standard Time. Go from 8 to 10pm ish. There's a lot of people wishing we went longer. It's a good time if. If you only know us by our recorded episodes. If you haven't checked out our live episodes, you are missing out. It is a completely different show as well. Don't forget our Patreon. Please support us via our Patreon subscription. By becoming a member, you'll get extra discount codes behind the scenes, different forums, direct access to us depending on the the level that you subscribe to. So please consider using us. Consider using us. Consider supporting us. Using our Patreon keeps the lights on.

[Tyler]

Yeah, guys, the. The Patreon's huge for us, and I know a lot of you guys don't ask for anything and then you just want to help, but, you know, we. We do the giveaways, too. Every week we give away to a Patreon member. You know, our friends give us swag bags, and we return the favor.

[Brent Tucker]

So. And ironically enough, usually the giveaways are worth hundreds of dollars and the patrons. Do you remember the two levels?

[Tyler]

5 and 10?

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah. 5 and 10. Yeah. You'll. You'll. You're a Patreon winner. You'll. You'll get your money's worth for months and months and months and months based off that alone. This episode is. We've covered it. We've covered it before to. To some extent, but I'm really looking forward to this one. It's kind of back in the news because of the Medal of Honor museum going up in Texas and them not having Chapman as a main display. We've covered it in the live. It's been.

[Tyler]

It's been highly requested.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, it's been. It's been a huge, huge topic of discussion, the special operations community. So it's great to have our next guest on who. Who was there and. And watched it all and. And so much more. We'll let him get into that and. And tell his side of the story. But with us, we have Rob Harrison. He is a retired chief master sergeant with the Air Force. He was also a direct support operator on Grim 3 2, which was the Spectre gunship flying around that evening on Roberts Ridge. Rob, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on, brother.

[Rob Harrison]

Hey, thanks, guys. I appreciate both of you having me on. It's. I. It seems a bit unfortunate in a way, because most of us typically tend to subscribe to the quiet professional. And. And you. You normally wouldn't even be talking about this sort of stuff unless it's just straight up from a historical standpoint, but I feel like. I feel like there's certain members in the community right now that are kind of preying off of everybody else's quiet professionalism. And unfortunately, that's kind of what brings us to this situation and why I'm sitting before you guys today.

[Brent Tucker]

That's a good way of putting it. That's a good way of putting other. Other people within our community. Community are praying off the quiet professionalism of others and benefiting from it and absolutely I mean, I couldn't have put it any better. And we'll go down the list. Tim Kennedy, Rob O'Neill, Marcus Sutrell, just. Yeah, it's just, it's. And if people don't come out and say something, it's, in a weird way, then they just, they just get away with it. And when I say, like, getting away with it, they just, it's inexcusable because we hold the military at such a high honor. So they want to believe anytime the military or military member comes out and says, this is what happened, you better believe that's what happened. And you better, you better believe if it's not that we will hold ourselves accountable, we have to police our own. Which is, which is part of what you're doing.

[Rob Harrison]

Absolutely. And I, I think. And, you know, if there's a message out there, the majority of us, and I would say, you know, greater than the 90th percentile, like, the majority of us are all exactly what you just described.

[Brent Tucker]

Overwhelming majority.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah, absolutely. Unfortunately, we're dealing with a few bad apples. And, and that's, that's literally why I'm out here speaking out. Enough was enough. And damn it, I'm not going to roll over and watch this happen without speaking truth to power. And, and, you know, that's, that's why I'm here, and that's why this is easy. You can ask me any question. If I can tell you, I, I will. If I know it, I will tell you. If I don't, I will, I will. I will not be able to tell you. Like, it's just this thing frustrates me. But, but at the same time, it's just important to get the truth out there and at. And do it in a manner where I can try to show respect as the best I can to the people that were involved with the mission, but at the same time, hold each other accountable. So be.

[Brent Tucker]

Besides just setting the record straight, did the, did the Medal of Honor museum drama, if you want to call it that, is that part of the reason for coming out or that really has nothing to do with it, this was just a mission that you were on regardless, or was that part of the reasoning?

[Rob Harrison]

I would tell you that that's probably the spark that starts to smoke me out. In January. I learned based off of Lori Chapman's Long France. Lori Chapman longfrit's her post when I saw that, like, my goodness, the museum is actually backtracking and they're not following through on what they had said initially. Those of us that had been involved were loosely tracking that the museum was coming and there was likely to be a display for John. And then all of a sudden, those people that had engaged with Lori a year prior were no longer affiliated with the. With the board on the museum or their process operations, whatever it is. Those people had disappeared. And you look in and like, lo and behold, like, who's risen to the top of the board? And. And so on it, you start to like, really question, all right, well, what are your motives here? Because, like, I know that the team had credited Chappie with saving them, and now all of a sudden, you're not going to do this. And I. I raised hell about it in through letters and reaching out to congressmen and. And so forth. And I got this canned response back from the. From the museum, the CEO, Chris Cassidy.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

And the canned response had stuff about essentially the pro rata, where they had the. The equitable distribution of representation.

[Brent Tucker]

Correct.

[Rob Harrison]

And then they had the word. The word count. You know, that Chappie was In the top 25% of the word count. And I'm like, well, the question was asked, you know, point blank, will there will not be a dedicated display to John? The answer was no. John's part of the permanent display. Will there or will there not be a dedicated display to Slab? Yeah, and it's not just a dedicated display. Like, you walk out the intro door and you can go left or right at the museum, when you go right, following just a clockwise pattern, the whole museum is laid out in a circle. You see the likes of Audie Murphy, Roy Benavidez, and Brit Slavinsky. It's all in the opening 50ft. Like, as soon as you walk into the entryway of the museum.

[Brent Tucker]

Not sure I'd put all of them in the same category, but we will get to that in. In the. In. In the segment. Won't. Don't dive too early on that. I was trying to see. Because if I can't, if I'm wrong and I can't think of it, I will get destroyed. And I hate to say rightfully so, but you being an Air Force guy. You know what? I'm going to put this on you. You should know better, not me. I was an army guy. How many Air Force Medal of Honor winners were there in the global war of terrorism? On the war.

[Rob Harrison]

One. One.

[Brent Tucker]

You're telling John Chapman. You're telling me. I know they were trying to be equitable, and I understand what they were saying by equitable if no one knows what they were. I guess Trying to say they took the total number of awards and in services and made sure there was representation equally. But that just, that just doesn't. And what I mean by that is, if you to put just Chapman in there, right, he would have had 100% representation of Air Force during the G WAT and no one else has that percentage of representation. But it's a crazy number because it's, it's. It's one of one. And so the flip side of that would be to say the Air Force literally had one and only one Medal of Honor winner during the G WAT and he's not even in there. That's crazy. He's one of one. That already makes him special. That already makes it amazing.

[Rob Harrison]

And, oh, by the way, it's all recorded.

[Brent Tucker]

And it's recorded. That's right. That's another great point. And it's the only or the first. The first Medal of Honor that was ever recorded. And now, of course, it was recorded on. On isr. So it's special on several levels. And for them to kind of conveniently leave it out for whatever reason. And I'm not saying, I'm not saying their reasons are wrong. If, if we're being honest, like, what were the reasons? They said they had an equitable share of. Of. So the percentages were equal based on representation for each service. And, and there are other. I don't know this for a fact, but I will say this. There are other variables involved when it comes to making a permanent display. And I'm just, just spitballing here, but I know things like this exist. When you give up a display, usually they're going to ask you. In fact, I actually know this to be true in this scenario as well, they ask you to give up artifacts and memorabilia of your loved one to go on that display. And when there's displays, you know, all. You know, there may not just be this one, there may be one at the. Now, now I'm kind of spitballing, but if you think about it like this, there's one at the Air Force. There's one at the 724. There's one this Medal of Honor Museum. When all these museums are asking for artifacts, at some point you're only going to have so many of his uniforms, so many of his beret, so many of his that the family wants to give up. And at some point, if you don't give up enough memorabilia or artifacts, that does also play into whether, you know whether you get a display or not. And this was discussed with me through we'll just say other people, which is. Was how I know this is actually partly, partially. It's not the whole thing, but applicable to this. But I go back and I say he didn't. His family, even if that's true, didn't have to give up anything. The only thing you have to show is the ISR footage, because it's the only. It was the first Medal of Honor to have. You could just have that in loop. And who says that you have to have his uniform and his kit to, you know, to say, like, this was his. You can make a replica of that. Like, some of the answers I got, which were answers, and I'm not saying they're wrong. They just didn't necessarily sway my. My decision that. That I. That I understand and. And I get it. Yeah.

[Tyler]

Not going to have it.

[Brent Tucker]

Just go ahead. Yeah. Do you want to dive a little bit that Medal of Honor issue? Because. Because since last time we talked about it, I talked to some people a little bit, have a little bit more understanding on it. And I do. I have more understanding on it, but I still don't agree with it.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah. So the family was willing to give up artifacts, and they were initially working with them, but when they had traveled out to visit the museum and see what the plan was, then everything went calm, silent. And as they got closer and closer to the opening, that's when she had re. Engaged with them to figure out, hey, is there something happening or not? Because I haven't heard anything. And then, lo and behold, the person's gone, the plan has changed. And when you look at it and it. You. You want to know why? You know, look. Look at Brit Slavinsky's display. And I'll. It'll. It'll tell you why. Because they. They did their best to disassociate from John Chapman.

[Brent Tucker]

And this is. And I say that again, and this is also. People will say this, and I gotta argue it's not true, but it can be true at the same time. And I think you know what I mean by this when I explain it is people are also very upset because Slabinski is on the board for the Medal of Honor Museum. And so they're like, well, he's on the board and he has a permanent display that looks like he made sure of it. And their answer to me was none of the board members had a say in who gets a permanent display here. And that can be true of sorts, but we can't completely discount and discredit that the board members are there and just Their names and meeting them doesn't have some sort of weight behind who, who they're going to put into, into the, into the displays. I don't see how you can completely. Yeah. Separate the two.

[Rob Harrison]

Well, and, and to be fair, I don't think he's the only board member with a, with a display there. But, but not everybody else had some extenuating circumstances such as, you know, winning a medal of Honor with the, with another person who also won a medal of Honor in the same mud, like.

[Brent Tucker]

Right. Oh, so you would think there's no way you, would you, you as a man would allow your names to ever be separated. You know, I mean ever in history out of respect to a fallen comrade. You both earned your medal of earner on the same night, the same soil. Your names are forever, are, are ever forever together.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Brent Tucker]

And to think that one could have one without the other, that alone just blows my mind.

[Rob Harrison]

So it was the, it was the wildest thing I would have ever imagined because if you were going to do it, I would have imagined that if they're going to honor it, you put both of them out there and you, you share that platform to tell the story. That is the totality of the story. JV team for life.

[Tyler]

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[Brent Tucker]

Nailed it. Nailed it.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah. Nailed it.

[Tyler]

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[Rob Harrison]

JV team for life. Instead you walk over to Brit's, Brit's display and he pays tribute to, to Petty Officer Neil Roberts that they Called Fifi. Fifi's there full name, tells a little bit of story about him. Kind of, you know, an ode to Fifi right there on Brits on Brits display table. And I think that's, that's very honorable. The bad part is that there's literally no tie to John except for one single quote and that is a quote by Brit that says, I wear this award for the seven that were lost. And he names all seven by their first name only.

[Brent Tucker]

Wow. Well, let's, and with, yeah, with, anyway, with, with that intro to, to the, you know, the things that have ensued since this. Let's get in, let's get into the story.

[Rob Harrison]

Absolutely.

[Brent Tucker]

If you don't mind. What, walk us through Operation Anaconda. What, what got us here to, to this fateful night.

[Rob Harrison]

Roger that. So most people are probably familiar with Anaconda, but in the, in the off chance that you got somebody who's not, the basic lowdown is this is the spring offensive. So we're coming out of the winter and, and this is the time in which the theater is about to wake back up and everybody's going to get their, their fight on. Things slow down because of the wintertime snow, the altitude, the mountains, the weather. It just gets harder to, to fight on the ground. And so it just goes into a lull period in the winter. So Operation Anaconda is planned for months in advance. We're basically taking playbook pages out of the playbook from the 80s, understanding what the Soviets and the, and the Mujahideen had gone through. So we understand that they're probably going to fall back to this particular area because it was significant to them in the 80s. And sure enough, that's what they did. So when Anaconda's plan, the plan is essentially called Hammer and Anvil. You have special operations, advanced force operations that are going to man the observation points with special reconnaissance team and they're going to be there to, to basically locate the enemy and, and direct the conventional forces and, and various fire platforms, you know, with, in the form of, you know, Air Force, whether it was B1s, 52s or, or, you know, AC130s, you name it. You know, the assets from the Navy, you name it. So the AFO is going to get their teams into place in the, in the high ground and then there's going to be an infill of conventional forces and there's going to be a backing force of SOF with indigenous forces from the local guy, the local warlord Zia. That's the Essential schema maneuver, everybody's in place. But for night one of Anaconda, it became quickly clear that the enemy already held many of the key high ground positions. So as forces started to move in, we ended up with more troops in contact situations than we had dedicated cas close air support platforms to deliver fires to help them out. So night one ends up not being the greatest success. There's sadly a fratricide event that occurs, actually happened on the aircraft that I was flying on. We had an airborne mission computer failure. Halfway through the mission the crew did everything textbook, did an airborne realignment. When you do that there is the possibility that you can have drift in your navigational system. And as the mission ended we were bingo for fuel, we were headed home and on our way out we happened to spot a convoy and we called in everything and coordinated with the ground force commander and went through the identification of friend and foe. Well the sad part was the location that we reported was not the same place that our sensors were actually looking because of the drift in the system. So when we gave the location to the ground force commander, he says I don't have anybody. We check friend or foe, we get no actual observable return for, you know, marking IDs, that sort of thing. And thank goodness we didn't have any fuel because we would have probably caused a heck of a lot more damage than we actually did. Instead we, we damaged, you know, we heard, chased off some of the, the indigenous forces and we, we killed one of the, our friendly operators. So that actually comes into play the next night because it drives a change in the rules of engagement for night two and on. Instead of having a looser type control for calls for fire, now you were tighter and you needed to have positive two way comms with somebody on the ground who was visual with the target. Okay, I'll pause there.

[Brent Tucker]

The. Do you remember you said the operator that was killed, was that a green Beret with indigenous forces or was it a tier one?

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It, I'm pretty certain that our front end crew had gone in and visited them. Yeah, it was an extremely unfortunate incident. But it, it ends up, you know, the, the research is done into it, you know, they look at why and you know, the crew did everything that they were supposed to. There's a bit of that Murphy's Law that goes on and you know, unfortunately that happened.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, I hate to say it because at the end of the day it's does happen and it sounds horrible, you know, we unnecessarily lost an American Life. But it is a lot easier to digest when hey, at the end of the day, everybody did everything right. At the end of the day, war is risky and not everything goes to plan and everything that happens, you know, we have to learn from it. But you know, the only silver lining on that is that everybody did everything right. It just, it just happens. That's a shitty answer, but it, but it is an answer.

[Rob Harrison]

Absolutely, man. So when, when night two comes for Anaconda, we just, the planners change everything up and we flood the airspace and we have three gunships flying out of the north and three flying out of the south. The ones from the north that I was on are AC130Hs. They're the Spectre, the older variant and they're flying under call sign Grim. The Nails are the U model, the Spooky Gunship, and they're, they're flying under, under the call sign Nail coming out of the south.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay, yeah, I've, I've worked with the, the Nail gunships a lot in, in, in, in my career and man, let me tell you, nothing, nothing. I don't believe there's any air support better than the, than a Spectre gunship. I just don' you know, whether, whether it's the sensors you guys bring, the Varys armaments, you guys are spot on. Almost every, essentially every time that, that I've ever needed you guys, you guys have, have. Gosh, I can't. I don't even know if we could ever truly put a number to the amount of American, American lives that just AC130 gunships have saved in the gwat.

[Tyler]

Probably.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Rob Harrison]

The gunships are, I mean they are a formidable asset. One of my favorite favorite birds to fly on. That was my first platform when I started flying with Air Force Special Operations Command. I got, I got qualified on them in 2001. Then the towers fell and then I immediately crossed over to the Spectre and then found my way on the initial deployment. And so oddly enough, I, I had some really good mentors that had taken me under my wing, under their wing and based on the languages and all that kind of stuff, they tossed me on the very first bird that, that crossed into Afghanistan in 01.

[Brent Tucker]

Now for, for, it'll be different for different teams. Tier one guys obviously kind of get priority on, on a lot of assets and then when it comes to, they don't get all the assets. I mean, Spectre gun chips have protected everyone within special operations, but to get one nsf, you can request it all day, but they'll Take all the requests and they'll rack and stack it and be like, hey these, you know, we believe these guys to be, you know.

[Tyler]

Like pre mission requests.

[Brent Tucker]

Yes, pre mission requests and say like these guys we believe are in the most danger, the highest risk and we're going to push AC130 to these guys. It's not necessarily like who asked for it first. It's kind of like who needs it most. With that being said, prioritization and everyone's kind of fighting for you guys. Does that on, on your side, does that essentially mean are you guys flying essentially at every night on your, on your rotation in Afghanistan for, for one team or another?

[Rob Harrison]

No. So I, that initial five six month deployment I flew my tail off. But, but with, with those birds about once every two, two and a half days from a crew perspective. And it's just, it's just you know, like the crew ratio and the, the utilization rate that you get out of the birds and all that kind of stuff, it can vary. They can turn them faster and you can, you know, you can go heavy with crews or you can go to sustain and it. Anyway, I was probably, I was flying between every one to two or every one to three days.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, all right, that's. I just had that, that random question for my own personal benefit.

[Rob Harrison]

No worries.

[Tyler]

Princeton aircraft.

[Rob Harrison]

The second night, the second night we fled the airspace. Our bird Grim 32 is tasked to be the emergency on call cast platform. So we don't have a dedicated mission. We are, we are taking off, our tanks are full. We're going to transit the airspace from, from Uzbekistan all the way down to Pakistan just to hit a tanker like that is the schedule of events. And then we're just going to orbit and wait for an emergency to pop up should that happen. And then we'll be the responding aircraft.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

While we're transiting the, the airspace, Cal State airfield comes under attack. There's a Nail gunship that's on station and Nail is fragged to support the Razor 03 and 04 infill of the Mako 3 0. It well, the helicopters are delayed and K comes under attack. So nails been in a standoff. You know, they're, they're not on top of the objective because you don't want to highlight your, your positions or any of that kind of stuff. And then I think there's some, some bombing deconfliction in the airspace that prevents them from getting closer as well. So the boss man is the command control element on awacs and Bossman Ends up tasking Nail since since the Razor flight is delayed, they task Neil to go down and respond to the troops in contact situation at Kaust. Okay. We come up on the radio, we're like hey, they've got a dedicated mission. We're the emergency on call cast platform. Should Don't. Are you sure you don't want us to respond to that? We've got plenty of fuel. And they're like no, let's not, let's not mess up the tanker flow. They don't want to mess up the schedule of the, the aerial refueling birds that were in, in Pakistan.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

And so they, they send us on down to, to get on the tanker. We do that. Nail goes to Kaust. While we're on the tanker, the helicopters get well and Razor 03 goes to infill Mako 30 to the top of Takar Gar. They go in there thinking that the LZ is clear.

[Brent Tucker]

Not to interrupt you. I just want to make sure that everyone, that everyone knows, including me what the, some of the call signs that, that, that you're using. So the Razor elements are the Blackhawk birds that are the, the plat or whatever aviation platform that was inserting the teams. Is that correct?

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah, those are the, the MH47S.

[Brent Tucker]

47S. 47S.

[Rob Harrison]

Thank you.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, I actually knew they were 47S. The.

[Rob Harrison]

For people that may or may not be familiar, that's the Razor03 is associated with Alan Mack and he's the pilot on, on that particular bird. But yeah, extremely capable, you know, tandem dual rotor aircraft, heavy lift.

[Brent Tucker]

And the Mako elements are the, are the SEAL Team six elements that AFO elements that, that are being inserted in.

[Rob Harrison]

They, so they weren't originally AFO elements. Okay. They, they got, they got pushed over into, into that particular mission set. They were originally fragged to be the guys that were going after whatever high value targets would, would pop up.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

Essentially they were the people. If you had gotten eyes on Bin Laden or Zawahiri, those were the guys that were going to go after him.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

So AFO is operating out of Gardez. All this stuff is very well documented in a number of books out there. One of one of my favorites was, was from Pete Blaber. He covers this in the, what I consider the right way in the mission, the men and me. In other words, he takes the lessons learned and he just tells you what the lessons are rather than getting into that, that super operational level of detail that, that we all should be avoiding. Right. So anyway, AFO is operating out of there. They are the strategic reconnaissance teams that are at the high ground observation posts and the rest of the teams are trying to get into their positions so that we can execute operation anaconda. Okay.03 infills Mako Mako goes to the top of Tucker Gar thinking that the gunships called it clear. It's my understanding that the, in the standoff orbit the gunships called what they saw and at that distance they didn't see the level of detail. Now hindsight 20 20, I think the, some of the other ops, the observation posts, the teams from afo, I think they knew that this area was, was hot. But when Mako goes in there, that level of coordination never happens. And they go right into essentially what is going to be a hot lz.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

So we're on tanker and all of a sudden you hear mayday, mayday, mayday. Any grim, any nail. This is Mako 30 Charlie. It's, it's clear here that the three zero Charlie, the Charlie suffix is the controller. That's the combat controller. That is John Chapman. He's embedded with the team. He's essentially the, the super high speed jtac, the joint terminal attack controller. The guy who is the expert on getting fires delivered by aviation platforms for whatever ground force needs it. So John's, John's attached to, to Mako 3 0. He goes in on the infill. He's come up on this net because as Razor03 tried to infill to the top of Talker car, they got lit up by small arms and RPGs. So when that happens, the, the way I understand that story, we're not there. We don't see this. I'm recounting from, from various after actions and, and readings on this case, but the bird loses electrics, the inability to return fire. It ruptures hydraulic lines when that happens and that in the jostling of the aircraft as it's being riddled with gunfire and rpg, the tail gunner falls off the end of the ramp. Thank goodness I crewed on helicopters as well. Whenever you're crewing on a helicopter you wear a gunner's belt. So he's tethered. And the story is that Fifi is the guy who goes over to the ramp and is trying to pull him up. Well, Fifi pulls him up and then the bird gets rocked by an RPG and Fifi falls from the helicopter. So that that helicopter is losing flight control ability. Alan Mack is having to fight it and he ends up doing a remarkable job Putting it down in the valley just north of the. The lz. So when we hear this mayday call, that's what's literally just transpired. And so we're here in the mayday, we're on the tanker, and it immediately gets our attention because there's a crash involved. There's coordinates that pop up on some special equipment that I have so I can see the crashed aircraft's location. I relay that location to the front end. The sensors slew to that location, meaning they move their sensors, point the cameras directly at those coordinates, and we do an emergency separation off the tanker and immediately make a beeline to their position.

[Brent Tucker]

I'll tell you, it is cool to hear, you know, when. When things happen on the ground. You know, as a guy on the ground, I hate to say it, you feel like things just. I know we know different, but you don't think about it. It just feels like assets magically show up, you know, I know it sounds horrible to even say that, you know, but they just. But the people start pushing your way, and until you hear stories like this, you know, you don't hear, you know, like, the exacts of it and kind of how cool it can be. Like, these guys are refueling. Like, boys are in trouble. Disconnect, we're gone. You know, no one magically, obviously shows up anywhere. People are making conscience decisions to stop whatever they're doing, to go to go where the boys need them. And I just love hearing that, that, that part of the story.

[Rob Harrison]

If, if you. If you like some of those nuanced details. What's, what's funny, when you're refueling a gunship behind a tanker, you know, you've got ammunition, you got gas on board, you got guns and everything else. It's a heavy C130. So when we start to top off our tanks and we're at max gross weight, the bird gets really, really slow behind. Behind a tanker. And so you have to execute what they call a toboggan. And it's a controlled descent. Like, you're. You're flying down the hill so that you can maintain airspeed with the tanker. And so we're in the middle of that controlled descent, staying plugged in with them, top and off. And then that's when we call the breakaway and immediately do the emergency separation and head to the team.

[Brent Tucker]

How far into the refuel were you guys when you. When you broke away, do you remember, by chance?

[Rob Harrison]

I don't know that. I know that we were good because we. The duration of our mission, that Night was eight and a half hours and we had gas remaining when we left.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

And that came into play because we didn't leave until after sunrise. And that was one of the things that we got in trouble for back at home station. They were mad at us because we had stayed. But as the situation unfolded, the crew didn't want to leave. Anybody that was in trouble.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, and you would know better than me. But what he's talking about is the Spectre gunships work at night, only at night. And I've only seen Spectre gunship work during the day once in my whole career. I'll let you answer this. Why is that? And then. Yeah, go ahead.

[Rob Harrison]

So the, the aircraft, because of the, the munitions that you're employing off the birds back then, you're, you're flying within the threat envelope of whether it be man portable air defense, shoulder, you know, shoulder launch surface to air missiles or, or any other threat for that matter in the form of any aircraft, artillery or surface to air missiles, that sort of thing. Where we were in Afghanistan, the, the threats for us were primarily man portable air defense. You know, the, the smaller, lesser capable, you know, missiles. And then you had the, the various triple A. Most of it there was 23 millimeter.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, I mean like a shoulder fire sticker is essentially useless at night. Like you there has no night vision. It's like, it's like the, it's almost, it's almost as rudimentary as the sights on a, on a, on a pistol. Yeah, I mean you gotta line up the front sight and the rear sight is just. You can only do that during the day when you can see, right?

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah.

[Brent Tucker]

Gonna do what you can see. It could be just specific to the operation I was on. But if I remember correctly, it for that AC gunship to stay on station during the day. Luckily they started this process early enough because they knew it was going to go into daylight hours. And I believe it took a two star level to some command to actually authorize the, the gunship to do that.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah, that checks. It would have taken a higher level of approval in order for us to do that.

[Brent Tucker]

Sort of higher level than what you guys approved, proved yourself at.

[Rob Harrison]

Yes. Which you know, I always, I love that.

[Brent Tucker]

I mean it's the guys making decisions at a, at A, I say safe, you're still flying low. It's never, never completely safe. But the guys there that know how much they're needed and are willing to put their career on the line, if we're being honest for the guys on the Ground, Otherwise, it's. It's a bunch of yes men going by the rules and saying, hey, wish I could help you, but, you know, but I got. But I gotta take off, you know, and that's. So when you hear stories like that, people don't understand people are putting their careers on the line when they make decisions like that. And I love it. That's.

[Rob Harrison]

Here's some ballsy. Here's some background.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Rob Harrison]

So, you know, we don't fly at daylight because you're in the threat envelope and you're a lumbering C130. You're just orbiting overhead. And so you're. You're extremely exposed and vulnerable. For the record, you know, that night we got engaged at least three times that we. Excuse me. That we know of. But the reason why we don't fly in the daytime goes back to the first Gulf War. And there's an aircraft by the call sign of Spirit 03. Spirit 03 responded to some Marines that were in trouble, and they stayed during the daytime. And unfortunately, there was a weapon system in theater that was not believed to be in theater. It engaged the aircraft, and the entire crew perished. So that. That resonates throughout our crew, our. Our community. When you go through initial qualification training on the birds, there's an award called the Spirit 03 Award. So everybody knows the story of that particular aircraft that flies on gunships. So when this is happening, daylight's coming. You know, we've. We've kind of skipped ahead in the story here, but. But we stayed after the beginning of morning nautical twilight, bmnt, when the sun starts to come up and you start to not need your night vision devices and that sort of thing. Like, my pilot was wearing sunglasses by the time we broke station. Like, we were flying back in broad daylight. Well, before we ever even got to that point, there was a deliberate discussion on board the aircraft. And. And my pilot, D.J. turner, one of my favorite, one of the best, that I've ever flown with, he has the entire crew check in nose to tail on call. And call is like that emergency com net on an aircraft. When you key it, it overrides everything, and it goes over a loudspeaker as if you could even hear it on a gunship. But. But anyway, it overrides all com nets. And so we go nose to tail, every single person, and the question is stay or go? And everybody checks in those detail and it's. We're staying.

[Brent Tucker]

Love it. Love it. Now, at this point, when you guys get there on station at night, the Mayday call essentially goes out. And that's because Neil Roberts has fallen off of the Chinook. Correct.

[Rob Harrison]

So the mayday call happens because the helicopter has crashed and there's an emergency. Okay, but, but it start. That emergency starts with them getting shot on infill and Roberts then falling after he was saving the tail gunner.

[Brent Tucker]

So, so when you guys push, are you guys pushing for the crash site or are you guys pushing for the safety of Neil Roberts? Or do you understand or do you, do you know enough at that point to know there's two different things happening?

[Rob Harrison]

It becomes clear as we start to arrive. So we, we are pushing directly because of the crash of the helicopter. We establish an initial orbit over the helicopter and before you're even, you know, in a full revolution, you're already getting the lowdown from Chapman as Three Zero Charlie. He's like, hey, we lost a teammate on, on infill. I need you to put eyes on our landing zone. He relays those coordinates. Sensors immediately slew. He says, I want you to shift your orbit to that location and report what you see. By this time, we've got a sister ship, Grim 33 who has, who showed up at the area. And so 33 maintains an orbit over the downed helicopter and we have slid over to the lz.

[Brent Tucker]

I would imagine when you get that report for the first time that essentially, you know, an American has fallen off the helicopter and is there by himself. Like, you have to be like, did I hear that right? It almost has to be a little bit surreal hearing that. Or do you just hear it? You're like, you're just in a work mode. Like, this is what we got. Okay, go to work.

[Rob Harrison]

There's a. Momentarily like, what the hell? But yeah, you go to work. So the sensors completely, they're spot on. We see Roberts on top of the mountain. 30 Charlie tells us they've lost a teammate out of the helicopter helicopter at the lz. He asked us to put eyes on that location and to slide our orbit. Our sensors do that immediately and we're reporting back what we see. At this point in time, Roberts is just laying still on the mountain and you can see his IR strobe and there's, there's nothing around him except for what, what almost looks like little ant lines like trails. And it's, it turns out that's, that's variations in the heat because we're looking through the infrared sensor. We're in a black hot mode. And so the heat variation is where the foot pads have worn down the snow and you're seeing that darker trail. And if you were to do, if you were to do an exploded view of an ant hill, it's like seeing those little tunnels, that sort of thing. That's kind of the picture that you get. So for those people that, that see the IR footage that's out there and been released, when you see those little dark lines, those are the footpaths.

[Brent Tucker]

Whose footpaths were they.

[Rob Harrison]

The, those trails are based on the enemy presence. And that becomes clear it just moments later where Roberts is laying. Now, all of a sudden, the enemy converges on his position and it's, it's like the ants crawling out of the mound and they, they all converge on him. So we don't know his, his fate at this point from a gunship standpoint. We know, we know that we saw a US service member laying there who turns out to be Roberts from their team. We know that strobe is going off once the enemy converges. Roberts, the strobe is extinguished and ultimately he's moved up against the big rock outcrop that they call the boulder right now. Then the enemy goes back to their fighting positions and takes cover.

[Brent Tucker]

Ask maybe, maybe a silly question, but it's a question I have. Why, why, since you guys were watching this and you knew who the friendly was off off isr, why do you guys open up fire on, on the. Any enemy personnel closing in on them?

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah, that, that's the, that's the stuff that sucks, man. Because ideally that's what you would have, would have wanted to do with the rules of engagement being what they were, and the fratricide event happened the night before and all that kind of stuff. It's one of those where the crew's not going to shoot when you've got a possible survivor. And the reason why you don't is it's not just the fact that, hey, there was a fracture site and the ROE changed. The issue is that you have minimum engagement standards for the weapons employment and where he is and where the enemy is, he's immediately danger close. Okay, so, like, the only way you could have done that, like, by law, would have been for him to be on the radio with you, him pass his initials, him authorize you danger close because, like, from the moment you see the enemy, like, he's, he's already, you know, too close. Yeah, there's, there's nothing, nothing that you're going to be able to do in this case. Yeah, other than, unfortunately, you're watching it unfold.

[Brent Tucker]

I assumed that was the Answer. But you know, obviously wanted to. Wanted to hear. Hear it from you guys. Now you. You already said at the end of the day, it kind of doesn't matter the danger close. Him not being able to pass his. His own coordinates, his. His own initials and approving that. But he hinted at it a little bit. Did. Did the fracture side from the day before also play in on this or. Hey, that just. That just is. Is something that's. That's a dark cloud hanging over us. But in the day, even if that didn't happen, we. We. There's nothing we. We could have done without that now.

[Rob Harrison]

So I. That. That is a valid question. I. Obviously, I can't speak for every member of the crew, but.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Rob Harrison]

I would tell you that the. That the crew's gonna. Gonna press on like you got a mission to do. And you know, that sucked. But let's file that away over here and let's deal with the moment at hand. And it's no different than, I imagine, what an operator might think about on the ground if you. I got shot at or I lost a teammate over here, but I've got a threat over there, so I need to engage.

[Brent Tucker]

Right. Yeah, you said it perfectly. You got to file that away. You put it separately and you continue on.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Brent Tucker]

You guys followed Robert's location. Did he ever move while. While he was on the ground when you had your sensor on him and. And you're looking at his. And while he was strobe was still going on?

[Rob Harrison]

Not while we were. But. But I'll tell you this. Air Force knows we saw the footage. Robert survived his fall. And that's. That contradicts the Navy story. So the. The truth is that Robert survived the fall.

[Brent Tucker]

And just. Just to dig a little deeper into that, how do we know he survived? You said another crew would have. Would have seen that or how do we know he survived?

[Rob Harrison]

We didn't know it from our gunship, but in the. In the collection of information during the Chapman Medal of Honor research, you know, process. Right. The. The footage is out there.

[Brent Tucker]

Do you. Do you know how. How much he moved? Did he ever. Did he just move while lying down? Did he actually move different locations? Do you know to what degree he moved, that we knew he was alive?

[Rob Harrison]

Here, this is what I'll tell you. There's an. So since I spoke out on this, my people that know me that are familiar with this, like, my phone's been blowing up messages out the wazoo. I've gotten nothing but, like, positive feedback on. On speaking out on this because of what, what has gone on. But I'm going to save the, those particular details for that other witness and I'll just, I'll, I'll leave you the, the information that, that Robert survived the fall out of that, that aircraft. And in this, this guy's opinion, the name. You got it wrong. And the real hero of Robert's Ridge, in addition to John Chapman, is Petty Officer Neil Roberts.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay, when you saw him getting carried off, were you guys able to, to assess, you know, his, you know, how he was after being. Were you able to assess, hey, and now he's, he's still alive there, he's no longer with us. Based on the actions that they did to his body, was there anything out of the ordinary by watching them move.

[Rob Harrison]

His body in, in real time, you know, to be, as far as certainty from an air crew standpoint, no, we don't know. You would assume, you'd assume that it was fateful for him that he didn't survive whatever that was. Okay, but you also don't know they could have just, you know, wounded him and then left him there as bait.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Rob Harrison]

Knowing that the Americans are going to come back. So we, we don't know that. It is, with the benefit of hindsight, with all of this research, it is known by other people outside of our aircraft, outside of our comnet, that Robert has already been killed. And had we known that that been relayed to us, we could have treated the whole situation a little bit different. But as, as it stood, we treated that situation as though there was a survivor. And therefore it leads into later on, you know, how we handle the situation.

[Brent Tucker]

Right. And I agree with that. Well, whether, whether that matters or not, you guys made the decision that, that you did made. But, but I agree with that. If you don't know for certain, because I believe what you're, what you're kind of, I don't even want to say insinuating or, or what some people could connect the dots and say, well, if you couldn't, you couldn't protect them if, you know, while he was alive and people were coming on his position because it was danger close and you know, and the, and the protocols that are put in place, but if, you know he's dead now, you can, yeah, you know, go ahead and go weapons free on those guys. And that would have changed everything, you know, going forward about, about Robert's Ridge. But what you're saying is if, if you don't know 100% that he's dead, you have to assume that he's alive and we're not going weapons free and you guys being what, what kills him and not giving him a chance to survive.

[Rob Harrison]

Absolutely. And the weight of that weighs on my aircraft commander. Yeah, my, my aircraft commander owns that decision. And he was 100% correct in, in all of the decisions that he made that night, regardless of the one that, that got him the most professional ass chewing of his career.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah. So moving on, at what point you guys ended up staying on station? Like, I don't know how long you're on station at this point for, but well, you know, well throughout the night. At what point I'm assuming you guys are staying on station and assuming that, you know, there's either there's a rescue or you're staying on station to see what's next.

[Rob Harrison]

So what unfolds Next is Razor04 has infilled the other team to a different location. They're orbiting in a black hole, meaning they're not within line of sight. Their terrain masters mountains between them and the crash site of Razor 03. So the team and, and crew of Razor 03 is in the valley. Razor 04 is looking for a status update on his playmate, his, his sister ship. So we're relaying what's going on that, hey, 04 is looking for you. This is the status of 03. And then we're coordinating the pickup between the air crew, the, the team and the, the air crew of razor 04. So 04 comes in to pick them up, a recovery mission is, is thrown together very quickly and they're going to, they're going to reconstitute the bird and the assault force and they're coming after Roberts.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

To retrieve him.

[Brent Tucker]

And you guys are, and communication, you feel is, is good at this point. You guys understand, all in as much real time as possible what's going on and you guys are prepared for it?

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah, absolutely. Like we're sitting there, we're just like the helicopters have to go and I think they had to go and get some gas at the fart site, then they had to figure out what their plan was and how they were going to come back and assault it. But we know that instead of this being the infill of a special reconnaissance team, this is now a recovery mission.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Rob Harrison]

And so they're coming in for their, their lost teammate, whom we are assuming is potentially alive. So yes, we're in comms with them, we're coordinating, we're, we're not only talking to the air crew of, of Razor04 now.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

We're actually talking to the team who's in the back of it.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Rob Harrison]

And so while we're, while they're flying in, we're coordinating the plan with, with Slab as a team leader. He's using, you know, we know that we're talking to him. I'm pretty certain that he was using 30 on, on that particular transmission. He's asking us for pre assault fires and that's where the, the initial indications are. Like hey, you know, hey, correction, like you want me to, you want me to shoot knowing that we have a potential survivor up here. And then you know, the aircraft is clarifying that no, we're not going to do that. And that was the reason why.

[Brent Tucker]

Right?

[Rob Harrison]

So when they come in, we have identified a spot, we've turned the burn on, we're marking an LZ for them and we've offset them from the original infill site location.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Rob Harrison]

The team makes a tactical decision that they don't think they've got time, you know, if they really want to get, get to Roberts in time to have a chance at saving him, they go right back to the X. And so that causes a bit of confusion on the aircraft because we're burning where we want them to go. They fly right through the, the mark that we've laid down and they're literally infilling right back on the X. And so the sensors see all of this, like we don't miss that. But it does cause a bit of confusion amongst the air crew because not everybody on board is looking at the sensors at the same time. And so when they fly through and they don't go what you thought we, you had just coordinated. It was like surprise. JV team for life.

[Brent Tucker]

Revenge is an act of passion. Vengeance is an act of justice. Injuries are revenged. Crimes are avenged. Almost a century ago big pharmaceutical companies re engineered medical school curriculum and faculty with one goal. Putting profit before progress. Anyone pushing back against the medical matrix they carefully crafted was threatened, silenced, censored, financially ruined or worse. They are the problem. We are the solution. You are clear to engage with weapons.

[Rob Harrison]

You're clear to engage with weapons.

[Tyler]

And of course we got to give a shout out to our boys in 09 holsters. Custom built ruggedized duty gear. Made in the USA for cops by cops. A Leo and veteran owned small business. They do an upgraded solutions for duty gear including cases for portable radios, body cameras, tourniquets and pretty much everything you need to carry on duty. So go to 09holsters com and use promo code ANTIHERO10ZULU9. That's ANTI HERO10Z9 and get yourself 10% off your order.

[Rob Harrison]

JV team for life.

[Brent Tucker]

Such a hard decision. And again like yeah, we, we get the, we get the convenience, you know, listening to a story and, and questioning things in hindsight. So I, you know, I never want to, I don't take that for granted, you know, and the things I say or question, I, I do it. Hopefully people understand with, with, with the right intent. Yeah. Respectful about it. But man, what a decision to make. I mean you, you should, to be honest with you, land where you guys say and not right back to the X. And you guys know you're keeping eyes on, you know, where the bad guys are at, you know, where they're, you know, essentially what they're the range of their small arms fire, what going back to the X would mean and mean for them, but as a rescue force, hoping worse, you know, our best case scenario that he's still alive and you, what they're essentially doing is valiant, valorous, which is, hey, we understand the situation and we're going to put ourselves in danger for the good of Neil Roberts.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah.

[Brent Tucker]

That being said, I don't think it's, I don't think it's out of the, I don't think it's out of bounds to say good intent, you know, doesn't always mean that doesn't carry over into a good plan. And if everybody, and if everybody's shot up and the bird is shot up and the rescue force is shot up, who's saving Neil Roberts and now you have to be saved. Yeah, I mean it's, I don't know the right, I'll go back to say I don't know the right answer and the answer that those guys made on the ground is the answer that is a call they made.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah, he made a call. I can tell you from an air crew perspective on the gunship, our intent was to put them down in a relatively good spot to where we could establish columns and they could use us to gain right advantage.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Rob Harrison]

And that never happened. So when they flew right back to the X that they immediately, I mean it's, it's got to be fast. Right. You know that you just got shot up going in there, you know that it's a hot lz. So they are immediately off, off the aircraft. Slab's the first one off. We know this based on the after action reports and Chappie is right behind him. Well, when Slab hits the ground, we think he gets Shot. But it turns out that based on his own description, he fell over in the deep snow. You know, you assume that it's at one level and actually is deeper what causes him to fall over? And Chapman is a leapfrogging and Chapman's on point and so the team comes off and, and once they get off and the aircraft starts to take fire, all of a sudden like it's realized like what's going on. You know, you got to think it's still dark. These guys, the, our team, the Mako element has, has the benefit of the night vision goggles and so forth. Chappie immediately starts to engage the biggest threat and that is bunker one. The team at this point is being fired at from three different directions and Chappie's on the lead and they're, they're splitting into what is ends up being the two manfire teams. But like I kind of, I kind of expected to see like them fan out and go up towards that bunker since that's where the, the predominant threat was that we could see. But also the bad part is from the moment they hit the ground, like the last comms we have with the team is when they were on the way in on the helicopter for infill. So once they've, once they've infilled and they've exited the aircraft, Nobody is into two way communications between Mako 30 or 30 Charlie and Grim 3 2. We are flat out not in comms and 10 minutes of firefighting unfold around that big boulder and the two, the two big bunkers. And oh by the way, there's fires kind of behind them downslope as well.

[Brent Tucker]

And I'd imagine all, you may name it something different, but all the aviation assets are on the fires net or whatever net you guys called it at the time.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah, this would have been the fires net where we were working with them.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, yeah, the, it's, it is. And I know you do a great job of, of you know, saying what you know and you know, letting the ground guys be the ground guys and your job be your job. But I will say this, I think it's always interesting to, to hear the perspective of them and when you give your, you know, this is why I expected to see, you know, of course a lot of people are going to be like, well the guys with the ground made that decision or the, you know, how do you know how they, how they operate? If someone's, if someone's, you know, for whatever reason thinking that is these guys get to watch us operate from from, from a sky level all the time. Like, they, they, they know how we operate. They, they see it time and time again. They, they kind of. They know what. What, what right looks like. And so when it, when it doesn't transpire, I'm not surprised at all that you're like, I, I expected to see this and, and I didn't because you guys get to see it from, from front row seats all the time.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah. Didn't go down the way. The way we would have expected. But I tell you, you, you want to talk about some, some valorous actions, like on the objective, the team went after it and they did not have the tactical advantage. They might have had some superior equipment and superior skills, but, but the tactical advantage was, was to the, the enemy.

[Brent Tucker]

That was entrenched up there 100%. I've, I said this on the last time we covered it. I don't think we've covered this in depth. And we definitely didn't cover it obviously with someone who was actually there and, and saw it. And you'll. You weren't just there. You were on a. I'm gonna say the wrong word for it, but you were on a board that re. That reviewed this and you know this operation inside and out. You weren't just there. You, you, you reviewed and covered this board for months or years. You tell me. Just want to give people a little more of a background besides. Not, Besides just being there. You're a little bit more than that for me.

[Rob Harrison]

Like, there is an extreme level of familiarity, more so than the average service member because I was there that night. And then fast forward where the research project kicks off. It's, it's driven by. There's a news article. It's out there. It's called what does it take to win the Medal of Honor? The Secretary of the Air Force. The, The SEC def. Like I don't know exactly where it. It all truly started. I think it started at the SEC Def. And then I know it flowed through the service secretaries because the service secretaries were absolutely tracking. But suffice it to say we were told to review our top, top valor awards and their respective services and see if we missed anything.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

You know, was there something. Something that should have. Did we overlook the potential of actual Medal of Honor recipient out there? And the Air Force's number one case was John Chapman. Now, I will. I will tell you that within the Air Force Special Tactics community, within afsoc, there's a handful of cases that could be considered. I hope there's more that Come. Because I know there's a few amazing stories out there.

[Brent Tucker]

Oh, for sure. I mean, fans of special operations and special operations know this, but there are so much valor that happened over 20 years of war. And every special operations team will have one or two Air Force guys with them, you know, as part of the team. And I'm surprised, actually there's only one Medal of Honor Air Force guy in the G. What? Because they did so many amazing things. And I'm sure when this review came up, it was a pretty easy look, so to speak, to be like, hey, let's review Chapman. Because even, even I knew before the upgrade happened, I'd heard that story from guys in the STS's several, several times and knew that it was. That it was something special that Chappie did that night. So going back to this real quick. Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah, I was going to finish your question on the board aspect. So yes, I'm familiar with it. Am I the foremost expert? Absolutely not. Am I the only eyewitness? Absolutely not. Like there are more witnesses out there. So I just happen to be the first one that got irritated enough at what was going on to speak out.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Rob Harrison]

All right. So on the board aspect, I did sit on a couple of Valor board. Excuse me, I did not sit on valor boards. I was eyewitness testimony to the ballot boards. So I went through the process, but I went through it from a presentation standpoint, not from a voting on it standpoint.

[Brent Tucker]

And at this point I will say this because, and I'll preface it with this, that I feel obligated to say it because it's. Because it's true and it's how I feel. But I'll say something different later. And they don't go at odds at each other. They actually. They complement each other. Because one is right now, right now, during this part of the operation. It's no secret there is a lot of hate towards Slabinski. We'll get into that. But as of right now, the guy volunteers to go on a. On a rescue operation. Right or wrong, there's a lot of people out there. In hindsight, anyone in hindsight can, can say what, what, what, what anyone did wrong. In hindsight, he makes the gutsy call to land on the X and I don't. It's not a stretch by any means. There's only one reason he landed on the X and is because he wanted to get Daniel Roberts as fast as possible. They're in a absolute horrible situation and scenario. They're taking gunfire from three different Sides, the enemy has the advantage of an elevated position. They have, they have overwhelming firepower and they're in knee deepest snow. Just the worst, just the worst, just the worst environment imaginable. And everyone at this point are just absolute studs for, just, for being there. And I just want to make that absolutely clear.

[Rob Harrison]

They're at, you know, in excess of 10,000ft.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, that's a good point too. Every breath feeling like it wasn't enough oxygen to, to keep you moving. And your heart rate is through the roof.

[Tyler]

I couldn't imagine moving like that through knee deep snow.

[Brent Tucker]

Oh, gosh. But, but with all this, not all men are, are created equal. And I'll start this and I'll let you finish it. And Chappie is running towards the gunfire. He's, he is, he is moving out. Everyone else is kind of taking a knee and figuring it out. And Chappie's like, I, I know where the threat is and the threat in the day. You can sit there and take this gunfire, but you got two options. Yeah, retreat or move forward. And Chapman being the stud that he is, I'm sure it was only, it wasn't even a question in his mind. It was, I have to move forward. And we're all sitting ducks if someone doesn't step up and start taking it to the enemy and that's what he does.

[Tyler]

What would they have retreated to or.

[Brent Tucker]

Did they have just down the mountain?

[Tyler]

Down the mountain?

[Brent Tucker]

Yep, just down the mountain. And outside of small arms fire and as he's, as he's pushing forward, Rob, back to you. You were, you're the one, you're the one that was there.

[Rob Harrison]

Absolutely. So what once they got off that helicopter, the helicopter's taking fire. There's some indirect and some direct fire. You can see the team kind of get their immediate bearings and then they are on the move. Chapman is just up the hill. So he's headed towards the, the threat which is the, the most immediate, most effective threat for them is bunker one. They're being fired on from three different directions. There's, there's enemy entrenched up above them and then down to the, to the, what would have been their right hand side as they're going up the mountain. So when we talk about being fired on in three different directions, it's coming from that and you know, off to the left up front and you know, to the right and behind him. Okay, so Chappie's on point. He goes up to bunker one, Slab is behind him. They're in their two man teams, Slabs behind him, two guys go around to the left of the, the boulder and then two guys are oriented to cover threats below them. And when, when Chappie runs up the towards bunker one, like slabs behind him in trail like almost directly behind him. But he, he never catches up to him. And it suffice it to say, like, you know, Chavy's putting down the fire on bunker one. Xavi ends up going up to the left. As he's facing that bunker, he runs up to the left of it and then at point blank range, he eliminates the, the two, the two party that are the two enemy that are inside that bunker occupying it. Okay, so he's effectively taken out bunker one, the most formidable threat that would have eventually shredded them had they not, had they not taken it out. Slab, you know, eventually comes up at this point and is closer to Chappie. And Chappie's in and out of the bunker and pops out on the right side of the tree. And now he's, he's worried about the bunker two that is above it. You know, we called the lower bunker Bunker one and the, the upper bunker Bunker two. I forget that I tell this story a lot, so I don't know that everybody is completely and totally oriented. But as they're going up the mountain, you have the big boulder outcrop, you have bunker one, that is, uh, that is to the right of it. And then up, up and behind is bunker two. So Chappies in and out of bunker.

[Brent Tucker]

Do you know roughly the distance between bunker one and bunker two? If you, you had to take a guess at it?

[Rob Harrison]

If I had to take, if I had to take a guess, it's inside of 20 meters.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

It's not, it's not far.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, it's close.

[Rob Harrison]

And I'm just like, I'm, I'm visualizing that based on you like the, the size of, of the, the men. You know, if I'm averaging them at six feet, right. You know, I'd call each one of them two meters and do it like that. But you know, the footage is there. We can measure it and give you, give you exactly the specifics. Right. And, and there's, there's better experts on this who either either a, did the research or, you know, some of those that did the research were actually in the talk that night when this mission went down. So in a, in a roundabout way, those guys are witnesses as well.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, yeah, I know I kind of put you on the spot with that question.

[Rob Harrison]

Was just a no, no sweat. I don't mind.

[Brent Tucker]

Just general question. And so what, what, what would happen next?

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah, so Chabi pops out on the, on the right side of the tree because he started on the left of Bunker One, eliminates the threat, comes out on the right. He's directing fire towards Bunker Two. At this point, Slab has caught up with him. And this is probably, probably the closest that Slab ever actually gets to, to Chapman. And, and I find that significant because that, that doesn't match the variation of stories that I saw based on either statements or interviews or, or what have you with Slab after the fact. But. Okay, either way, both of them are now directing fire on Bunker Two. Bunker Two is now the biggest threat up there. There's a heavy machine gun. It's, it's essentially a fortified, you know, dugout position. It's, it's well structured and, you know, there's, there's enemy fighters up there. The fighters themselves are trying to minimize their movement. You know, like, they know that they, they hear our aircraft overhead, so they're not moving any more than what they need to, but they're moving for the sake of, of, you know, putting fires down on the Americans that are there on the mountain.

[Brent Tucker]

Now at this point, are you guys a little bit on the sideline wanting to, to get involved, like, hoping that there's a request that, that comes up soon? Obviously, they're, they're fighting right now and they're active. I, I get that, yeah. Or at the end of the day, they're still, what they're dealing with is still close enough, and the danger close is, is such a real concern that you may not have been able to be as useful as you would like to have been. What's, what's the reality with you guys going on in the air right now, watching this?

[Rob Harrison]

I spoken like somebody who's done this before, so, yeah, all of the above. When they first went in, you're, you're hoping to God that they're up on the radio immediately getting off because you know that they just went into a place that's hot. When they go back to the X, they're immediately in the fray. We're, we're sitting there trying, trying to raise them on the radio, but there's the fine line between trying to raise them on the radio and becoming a distraction to them.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Rob Harrison]

So you, you have to, I think it comes through, you know, experience in, in those situations and the, the good thing, you know, the crew that I was paired up with throughout this portion of, of Anaconda it was one of the best crews I ever flew with in Afghanistan. So like they were, they were top notch. They were great guys. They knew how to handle this type of situation. Unfortunately, it just wasn't going the way anybody wanted it to.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Rob Harrison]

So we're waiting on, you know, with bated breath for the crew, for the, you know, the ground party to come up on, on the, on the frequency with us. And it's just, they're not on the net. So we're, we're kind of stuck at this point because we can't do anything until we're talking to them.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

And, and even if you wanted to, they're literally right on top of the enemy. Okay. Like there's ways that you could, you could go about it, but you needed two way comms.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay. I mean everything's. Again, in, in hindsight maybe there's, these are things if that you've, you've thought about yourself but, but you know, sending out fire, I know you're going to want two way comms with them, but behind the enemy to at least give some sort of distraction to them. Does anything like that, like have ever cross your mind or possibility or something you guys can do or could have done or at the end of the day you are stuck unless those guys talk to you.

[Rob Harrison]

We, I'm sitting there thinking about it.

[Brent Tucker]

I sometimes call corralling fire, although this isn't necessarily corralling fire for, you know, for, for squirters, but yeah, like the type of tactic that fire. Yeah. I'm kind of calling for like, I know they didn't call for it. You don't want to call them throwing danger close without them talking about it. And again, this is hindsight stuff but you know, to throw out rounds but behind them to at least make the enemy think or have to think about rounds going, you know, dealing with rounds in two different directions at this point.

[Rob Harrison]

So that one, that is a, I like your question. That's a very tactical question. But what I would, what I'm gonna have to tell you is it like what, I'm a threat warning guy and I'm sitting in the booth on the gunship. I am right in between the infrared sensor operator and the TV sensor operator and the electronic warfare officer. Okay, so us four are in that booth.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Rob Harrison]

If I, I would be willing to bet that that conversation actually did happen. But I can't tell you because it would have, it would have gone on, on like an isolated net probably between the, the NAV and the FOCO and the pilot up on the gun deck. But yes. Did that thought go through our head? Absolutely. But you're limited by the, by the, the ROE aspect and not having the two way comms because of what happened the night before.

[Brent Tucker]

Yep, completely get that. Yeah. And that'll frustrate people. But at the end of the day that, that, that, that, that is, that is what it is.

[Rob Harrison]

That, you know, that type of point is, is why, man, it would have been really nice to had a, had the luxury of doing a full up hot wash on this because you could have immediately, you know, like learned everything that you possibly could have and you know, immediately improve tactics and that sort of thing.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, absolutely. Sorry to distract you with sidebar conversation and, and the, in the world of, of what ifs and could have beens. No man, go on with your story.

[Rob Harrison]

So they were engaged in bunker two. You know, there's, there's small arms, there's, there's RPGs, there's grenades. Like the, the RPGs are not coming from our guys, but they're our guys. Had you knew that they were using rp, using the small arms and the, and the grenades and then Bridgs account, he's even using his, his 40 millimeter launcher. You, we're seeing the explosions, we're seeing that the enemy and the friendlies right on top of one another. So it's, it's a hellacious firefight and it all unfolds in a matter of about 10, 11 minutes or so. It was when you look at the clock, that looks like a short time. But when you think about it, like if you had asked me the moment that they broke contact, how long had this been going on? I would have told you we had been there for an hour.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Rob Harrison]

Like it feels like an eternity.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Rob Harrison]

And because we're just, you're intently waiting on them to come up on the comms and I can't even imagine what it feels like for them and their perspective. But anyway, they charge up the mountain, Choppy's on point, Chappie eliminates bunker one, they both engage bunker two, and then Slab ends up coming back behind the boulder. And at this point, Chappie, unbeknownst to us, is up underneath the tree. And so I've got the benefit of hindsight having looked at it now. Okay, but in real time, you, you don't know that he's not in the fight at this moment. So he has been wounded while he's engaging bunker two. And in the, in the forensic pathologist, you know, reports of all of this stuff. His wounds at that point is considered to be a mortal wound, but he's not dead yet.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

All right, so the team's reconstituted back behind the boulder and, and then this is, you know, based on Slabs recounts and so forth, and you can see it in the ISR footage. But he puts one of his, one of his other fire team that's up top with them up on top of the, the boulder. He's engaged in bunker two. And then all of a sudden that, uh, that team member gets hit by a grenade and slides down the boulder and lands right there next to, next to slap it. Shortly, like at about that moment, they're making the decision that, that they need to do a tactical retreat. They end up popping smoke and breaking contact. When they, when they do that, they're, you know, they've got injuries, they're under fire, they're making the retreat, and they've used a smoke grenade to try and mask their cover. Well, or mask their movement while they're, while they're, while they're moving. They're still taking fire through the smoke and, and so forth. So you can see him slide in the, in the ISR footage, you can see him sliding down that slope that they end up coming back. They put terrain between them and those fortified positions, and that gives them a smaller element of safety. But they're strained between them. They're not taking effective fire at the moment. And they finally are able to come up on the radio.

[Brent Tucker]

So real quick, just so I can have a. And the listeners have good visuals going on right now. HE POPS SMOKE which makes me believe it's. The sun is starting to come up and it's a little more daylight right now. Is, is that roughly where they're at, or is this, is this still night time or is it starting to become daybreak at this point?

[Rob Harrison]

No, it's, it's, it's getting to the point of daybreak. Okay, so the sun's not all the way up, but you know how, like, at altitude, you. The light appears earlier than it does down at the surface level. Okay, we're in excess of 10,000ft. It's definitely daylight where we are, you know, at about 10,000 above them. Yeah, so it's your. I have to go back and look at the timestamps on it. But, but you're, you're right around BMNT at this point, beginning morning nautical twilight.

[Brent Tucker]

And when they come up on the net. What is it? What's this? What's. What's the discussion at this point.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah, so it's, it's. Hey Grim, this is Mako three zero. We are no longer on top of the mountain. I've got troops down, possible kia. I need fire on tops now. And you can hear, you can hear the breath. I actually have recordings of some of these clips because as the Medal of Honor upgrade process unfolded and Chappie was eventually awarded his Medal of Honor, the AFSOC PA and the security folks approved me to have it in, in a professional development environment. And I would brief, brief airmen lessons learned and that sort of thing.

[Brent Tucker]

Is that still considered whatever you want to call it, sensitive or whatever, however you can have it. Or is that, or is that a clip we can, we can have and share?

[Rob Harrison]

So it would require permission. I was allowed to have it, you know, at the permission of the pa. I went through the right channels and I have it, but I only, I don't give it to anybody and I only play it for, for people in the, the professional development environment and that sort of thing. So I just haven't. Yeah, it could be obtained. I only have the clips. But like a ton of this information all exists if, if somebody were to, you know, try and you know, formally request it and then, then I would just say, you know, watch out for unnecessary over classification application.

[Tyler]

Okay, short answer.

[Brent Tucker]

No shortage of possibly, but, but probably not. We'll see how long, we'll see how long it, how long it takes. No, probably end up cutting some of this out, but send up that request and depending on like when we want to release this, if we can get it in time.

[Tyler]

I was gonna do it Monday, but if you.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay, yeah, if you're gonna do it Monday then. Which is kind of what I assumed. Yeah, yeah. Because we, we want to get this out while, while, while people still care about the story.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah, yeah, no, I totally understand that.

[Brent Tucker]

So they're asking for, they're asking for, for fires now on, on the enemy. They just got done engaging and I'm assuming at that point you guys start raining down hell on these guys. What, what happens next?

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah, so he says possible ki. And, and he's asking for fire on tops now immediately. So we are ready to start shooting. We go to fire gun five. We, we are assuming that the possible KIA is Neil Roberts.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Rob Harrison]

We think that the team is still all together. Okay. Because they don't. If you know how you go on an objective, if you have an assault force and every single person has their strobe on, like it's, it's bad for Visibility. Right. So, Right. Like not everybody had a strobe on at this point. Right. So you could, you know, where the, where the main part of the team is. But, but we lose, we lose visual with, with Chapman once, once he's wounded and he's up underneath that tree there for a moment. And then as that call comes in, we think that they're talking about Roberts. We go to fire gun five, we have a gun malfunction. We have to switch to gun six. So for the audience, gun five is the 40 millimeter Bofors cannon. Gun six is the 105 howitzer on the AC130 Spectre. So we're, we're trying to, trying to shoot the smaller munition because we know we're going against man sized targets. When that gun goes down, we need to switch to the 105, bigger bullet. And oh, by the way, it's loaded with proximity round rounds. So because, because of the, the possible kia, assuming that he's talking about Roberts, we don't know, we don't want to go sending a prox round that's going to frag, you know, before impact. So we end up having to. The gunners do a, a swap. They put a point detonating round in and then we go hot on gun six.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

So the first rounds off of our aircraft or 105 millimeter and we are shooting in close proximity. We're primarily engaging those upper threats that are, you know, along that trench line by bunker two. But our rounds are impacting, you know, up and around that mountain because you have the elevation changes and, and so forth. There's a little bit of a dance with the, with the gunners kind of walking their rounds in, in on the target sensors. That is. So anyway, we're doing that and in the midst of that, you know, before you go hot on it on a gunship, the number one thing that you do is identify friendly positions so that you can deconflict your fires away from the friendly. So the TV is primary on the friendlies. They're flashing their strobe, we can see their strobe. The IR is primary on the weapon and he's using the heat signature picture and he's chasing enemy that he knows, hey, we just watched this firefight unfold. We know where the fighting positions are. So we're just going to light those things up to the best of our ability. When all of this is going down, the TV sensor is going, he's got the ability to, both of the sensors have the ability to go back and forth to each other's position. And they've just got a hotkey, they can just hit a button and they can auto slew to where their partner sensor is looking. And then while they're on their screen, there's a visual representation as to where the other sensor is actually looking.

[Brent Tucker]

Right?

[Rob Harrison]

So they have this, this cool ability to go back and forth and maintain situational awareness on where each other are, even if it's momentarily taking your eye off of one place or another. So Chris, the TV sensor is going back and forth. He can see where Gordo, the IR sensor is engaging. And he says, hey Foco, I've got another strobe here. But this one doesn't look like the others. And it, it causes a moment of confusion in the aircraft. We're like, wait a minute, what the hell? And so I have this recorded as well. But you can, you can hear the crew is say, okay, tv, go to the friendlies. TV goes to the main body of the friendlies. This is slab and the Mako 30 element. Again, he uses call sign Mako 3 0. Well then we go to where IR is engaging and you hear them saying, I'm shooting here. The friendlings are here. And then they're like, well, here's a second strobe and it's back up close to where exactly. Yeah, and so it's back up where Gordo is shooting. And you don't, like, I will tell you, like, you see, you see the strobe. Like everybody who's visual on the, on the, the sensors on the aircraft saw that second strobe. We talked about that second strobe. You see it, what was, what was cool in the research aspect is once you finally got all of the footage, now you had ISR footage from the Predator, you had the footage from the gunship, you had all of this data that starts to come together. And you can literally see John crawl into the bunker after he's turned on that strobe. So I, the best I can tell you is that a 105 going off next to your position. If you're semi conscious, unconscious, that's one hell of an alarm clock. If you're an experienced controller and you knew that there was a gunship overhead, you're turning on that strobe and you're getting undercover. And his strobe either looked different because of one of two things. And I asked the team this when we had a chance to debrief them all, all of our evidence in September of 2016. I said, hey, did, did y'all carry backup strobes, like a different type of strobe? Nope. We only had what we had. I'm like, okay, well I was asking because I know my life support guys gave me a separate strobe as an emergency. We called them fireflies. You'd stick them on the end of a 9 volt battery.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, exactly.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah. So they're like, no, we didn't have any of those. And, and I'm like, all right, well I wonder. So I'm just thinking to myself, and I didn't say it to them because like we were, this was, it was a sensitive presentation because this was the first time that they were seeing all of the data and the first time that they were officially going to be faced with the, the idea that Chapman was still alive when they broke contact. And so I'm thinking to myself, it's either a firefly or that strobe looks different because he's under the COVID of that bunker and it's. Now the light is not emitting directly. It's being dispersed.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

And so it's not going to have the same look flash wise as the, as the strobe that's unimpeded on the top of somebody's helmet.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, yeah. I'll say this. The, the two four guys, I mean they had usually the same gear we, we had, but he absolutely could have had, you know, that, that strobe or, or a backup strobe, they wouldn't have known everything that, that Chapman had strobe wise, that the 24 show up with all, all, all sorts of gadgets and, and different things for their job that, that the operators don't have.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah. What, what I can tell you definitively is we saw the strobe. You, you see him crawl into the bunker and the team has broken contact and Roberts has, has been killed at this point. And so it, like it's absolutely, without a doubt it's Chapman. And oh, by the way, the, the research shows at the end of all of this the enemy had pilfered the gear off of Petty Officer Roberts.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Rob Harrison]

John was found with all of his gear and his weapon.

[Brent Tucker]

Interesting.

[Rob Harrison]

The. He had. Yeah.

[Brent Tucker]

So you guys in the aircraft at this point knew there was a second strobe that was separate from, from the, from the element that, that had retrograded the. Was that, was that information passed off to the guys in the ground at real time. Do you think that they get that information that hey, there's still a strobe up there and it, and it moved?

[Rob Harrison]

No. So this is, this is another part of it. Right. And why, why you. Why you need to be able to debrief stuff and learn from things, you know, quickly what happens in this case. No sooner do we see the second strobe, have the internal conversation, the team comes under fire and the enemy starts lobbing mortars into the lz. So we're on to the next closest alligator to the boat. Now we've got to protect the team. We got to identify where this mortar comes from. We never communicated that, hey, we had a second strobe up there. So in, in all fairness to the team, we didn't communicate that they didn't know. In all fairness to the air crew, when they broke contact, he says possible kia. We think he's talking about Roberts. We didn't know that Chapman wasn't with him.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Rob Harrison]

So, you know, it's, it's, you know.

[Brent Tucker]

Those are the classic example of the chaos of war, is. Is what it is.

[Rob Harrison]

Exactly. Exactly. And so I, I think that there's, you know, a level of trust and humility when you can say, hey, we were there. This is what happened. I think I made a mistake here. You know, I could have done this better. We could have. We could have, could have, would have, should have. Right? But, but in the end, just, just be open and honest and this is what transpired because that's what makes us better tomorrow.

[Brent Tucker]

Right now, at this point, when you guys were on to the next one and mortars are coming in, at what point were they like, hey, it's, it's just too much. We're, we're off the mountain. We're, we're not, we're not useful. Whatever their, you know, their, their decision matrix was and why they decided that at what point when the water started coming in, where they're like, yeah, we're, we're out.

[Rob Harrison]

The end of that, the end of that transmission as they started taking fire after, after breaking contact and the mortar's coming in, it was. There's a discussion about, hey, grim, is that. Was that last round yours? And that's where we're talking about. This last round here was ours. But that, hey, right now there was a mortar that impacted the lz. Hey, and we're relaying that to the crew. Mortar just impacted the lz. So all of a sudden they start to take effective fire and say, grim, we're going to move further down the mountain. We're taking effective fire. And so we start moving our fires now to cover their movement and where they're where the source of fire from the enemy is that was impacting them. So the guys that were chasing them, we, we start shooting them.

[Brent Tucker]

I can't think of a more chaotic situation though, at the end of the day between you guys in the air, the guys on the ground, it's just, it's just chaos, absolute chaos. How many. How many 105s did you guys get off before you. Before you recognize the. The second.

[Rob Harrison]

Oh, man, if I tried to tell you that, you'd make a liar out of me. I don't know. I don't know. I. It. We, we shot. We, we didn't Winchester that night. You know, they made us, they made us come home. We would have stayed in Winchester. But for your, for your audience that's not familiar with that, that's when you shoot all your bullets and you're, you're all out of gas. You got, you got no more ammo.

[Brent Tucker]

Did you ever find out what was wrong with the.40 mike? Mike JR guys ever get it back?

[Rob Harrison]

Operation yeah, they got it back online.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah, they got it back online. We actually used that to, to cover their movement as well. So, you know, you. This, this particular gunship, it's an older variant at the time, so it wasn't like some of the other ones that have a little bit more enhanced capabilities.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

But we got the 40 online. We used it, used the 105s.

[Brent Tucker]

The. At that point is this. And essentially they end up, you guys either come off station or what's. Where does, where does a source of the story end with you guys? Because I'm a transition into some. Another line of questions. I just want to make sure that you got all the information out that, that you wanted to get out.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah, that's a. As far as actions on the objective, the, the next thing that's going on is like the coordination for the quick reaction force. How far out are the Hilos? You know, it's the, the, the. The evolving ever ten minutes. You know what I mean? Like, hey, ten minutes out. Ten minutes out. Ten minutes out. You know, it's, it's those things. So you're waiting on the qrf. You're trying to make sure that, that like we're being called home. We have, we have literally shut off our home stations. Radio. The, the one that they kept, you know, fussing at us. Our sister ship has, has, you know, left. They left on time. They, they weren't. They didn't break curfew, but they're on the interplane frequency saying, hey, you know, mom is pissed. You guys better come up on the net now.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Rob Harrison]

And so eventually we're like, oh, yeah, yeah, here. We lost comms with you there. It's like, you know, basically get, get your butts home now. So we're doing that. Sun is up, it's broad daylight. I told you we were engaged like three different times. Yeah, between man pads, RPGs, whatever, the, the aircraft, the crew is facilitating a handoff with a two ship of Strike Eagles F15E models that are going to come in. That is call sign Twister 5.1 and 5.2. There's C2 confusion at this point because you had your conventional force and then you had the afo, the soft side of things that was going on. And so there's a debate on the command and control side as we're trying to bring the fighters up on the correct fires net. And, and the discussion is basically, hey, I thought so and so had priority. You're telling me you, you have priority or Mako has priority? And the, the controller's like, who's got priority and who's running the show? And about that time, Ultra Pete Blaber pops up on the radio and he's like, hey, use all fighters for the Mako element. And I can, I can repeat him verbatim. Like I, I know this, that part inside and out. So Blaver redirects, you know, corrects the, the understanding for the command and control element that's in the airplane. Blaber is command and control of the AFO aspect on the ground. The guy who has the best essay of what's going on in the battle space right now is Pete labor, in my opinion.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, and we've, we've talked to Pete about this. In fact, it may seem redundant to some other people, but I want to have Pete on the show to talk about Roberts Ridge again because to me, it's interesting to hear from all perspectives, from the air perspective, from the ground force commander's perspective, because it's just such a chaotic environment that I think everyone's piece of the puzzle will end up painting a very, a better picture of it. So the next thing that I really want to cover that's, that's important and because you did the, the research on this and I'm not, I'm not pitting you against anyone. This is, yeah, this, this is. But in the day when you go on record and you say, hey, this is what happened, if it's just not what happened, it's not what happened, there's there's no, you know, there's no. Some things are black and white, and I'll go first, like, some things are black and white by saying, hey, I went up to Chapman. I personally saw him, basically declared him dead. Because you went up there to him and then, you know, made that decision to take off when you say that. But the reality of the ISR is that you did not go up to him. You. That just. That's just not the reality of the situation. That's not why you made that decision. Those are two very different stories. And that's. That's what. So the ISR story, which is the truth that happened. This is what happened, is that Slabinski did not. Did not go up to Chapman and check on. And make an assessment on whether he was alive or not. Is that correct? Based on what. The reality. And then. And what he said?

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah. So for your point, absolutely, that is correct. He did. He did not check him. The, the imagery analysts that had analyzed all. All of this footage, I think they measured the closest point that he got to him was somewhere in the neighborhood of 12ft, you know, from the point where they were engaged in Bunker Two. And, and he had come back like. And, and, oh, by the way, there's terrain elevation. You know, there's an undulation. Like, nothing up there is flat. Like, it's, it's crazy. You could be. You could be standing here and not be able to see over there because of the, the terrain variation.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Rob Harrison]

So what was cool about the, the level of analysis, not only did they have the footage, but they literally went back and mapped the entire mountain. And it was, it was just such a fidelity that they could turn around and take all three of our specific heights and then punch that into their simulation and tell you what your point of view was anywhere that they had placed you. And, oh, by the way, they could put you prone, they could put you kneeling, they could put you standing, and. And then they could spin you around and show you exactly what you could see. Right?

[Brent Tucker]

Or, yeah, well. Or you couldn't see. That's the biggest one that stands out with. Were there any other variations in his story that. That didn't line up? And I know it's the big one that, that people have a problem with.

[Rob Harrison]

So, you know, this is the piece where I, I, Every time I speak out on this, I, My goal is to. My goal. I'm an air crew guy from, from the gunship. All right? I am, I am not an assaulter. I'm, I'm not a team guy on the ground round. But from, from what I could see and what you could see in the analysis, especially as the rounds are like, visible on those. Like you could see rounds ejecting out of their, out of their rifles.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Rob Harrison]

When you talk about, you know, Slab has a. In a citation, I think it, it speaks to him and a teammate charging the bunker and eliminating the bunker. Bunker. Well, I think, I think there's a little bit of perhaps, you know, a reader can be misled with the way that is worded, because when you, when you look at the footage, the person that charged that bunker and the person that eliminated the fighters in that bunker is John Chapman.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Rob Harrison]

There's. There's no denying that.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah. It's different than saying you and another person cleared the bunker and saying this man cleared the bunker. And I was a great witness. You kind of don't get credit for being a witness.

[Rob Harrison]

What. Without having the footage right in front of me. I think there's a moment and, and there again, there's other people that can come out and speak to this that are even more authoritative. You mentioned the research project. Well, by the time I got called onto the research project, the lion's share of all of this had been done. The reason why I got called into it is because one of the guys who had done the majority of the initial research was actually an NCO in the, in the talk at Bagram this particular night. And fast forward, he's a retired active duty chief who is a civilian intel analyst, and he's combing through all of this based on that tasking and he's personally connected to it because he was literally there that night in the talk and, and he had a feed for the ISR footage that, that we're talking about. We referenced. He saw that transpire in the talk.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Rob Harrison]

So, like there's. It's more than just Rob Harrison that knows the truth on this is my point.

[Brent Tucker]

Here's.

[Rob Harrison]

And yeah, here's where.

[Brent Tucker]

Here's where I'm going to say the, the other view of that were originally I gave what I feel like is. Is. Is all the, all the credit that. Where the credit's due and everything I just said about the guys on the ground is, is. Is true. And people complain me say earlier, well, you weren't there. You know, how. How dare you. How dare you question them? This is the reality of it. The other reality of it. After all the great intentions, the amazing, yes. Valorous decision to go in there, the end of the day, the Medal of Honor is our Most prestigious award. It's our most prestigious word. They are not given out lightly, nor should they ever be right off the bat when there's immediate deception involved into the story where you say you checked on a man, but you were never within 12ft of it. I already have. We already have a slight integrity problem, and we can never have an integrity problem within our Medal of Honor. It has to be absolutely above board. That's one. Go ahead, Rob.

[Rob Harrison]

I got two points real quick before you move on to your next one. There, There is a point. If, if we were to go back and based on the inconsistencies in previous statements and what I think is some misleading wording in the citation, I don't know exactly. Like, I never saw slab's justification package didn't sit on any of those boards. Air Force didn't, Didn't necessarily put up an argument, you know, like, right, it just. What it happened. But there's a moment where, Where John goes off to the left and he's eliminating that. If, if we're being absolutely fair, there's probably a chance where Brit may have been putting down some suppressive fire into that bunker just as John comes up from the left and then pops up, surprises him, and shoots directly down into it point blank.

[Brent Tucker]

And that maybe, maybe, yeah, that's where. But you know what? That doesn't. That I'm. That's great, you know, extra information, but it doesn't take away from the fact that the Medal of Honor is not giving. Is not given to people in a supportive role. While, While. While the main character goes up there and takes out the machine gun position. There are other valor awards, you know, out there for that. And they may not like how I word it, but I, I don't care. I was trying to think of a nicer way to say that, but that's actually what ended up coming out, is we. You left. We don't give the Medal of Honor for an attempted recovery position, losing another team member and retreating off the mountain. Now you can say all day like that, and I'm not even saying those weren't the right calls. I believe the right calls were made, but it should have been absolutely honest and the truth should have been there the whole time. And you can do valorous things, but you do not get the Medal of Honor for retreating from. From, from getting overwhelmed and retreating from the enemy. At the end of the day, that is what happened. And I'm not saying that was not the right call. I have to say it time and time again, because people are going to take that out of context. That was the right call. But that's not what gets you the nation's highest valor Warden combat. And now he's up next to people like Roy Benavidez. Go look at Roy Benavidez and what he did for the Medal of Honor and tell me these two are the same. You can't do it next to him. You already said it. Was it Adi Murphy?

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah.

[Brent Tucker]

Go look at Audie Murphy's citations for his Medal of Honor and his other valise awards and you tell me those are both. Both similar scenarios that. That deserve the Medal of Honor. You cannot do it. And that's my point.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah, well said that you mentioned the deception piece. Let's, let's not forget that the original statement was that he looked and saw the rise and fall and the laser and that sort of thing. And, and if you are, you know, for those of us that were closer to the. The actual, you know, board process and the research that went in, there's an issue there because the guys had provided statements originally that supported when. When before it was known that Chapman survived that initial, you know, fight at Bunker One. It was, it was the assault towards Bunker One that was essentially the basis for each one of their respective service crosses. So you stopped it right there. You had, you had what you had. The guys took out the. The biggest threat and they kind of jointly shared credit with. With a Navy Cross and an Air Force Cross. Well, when all of this comes clear, those statements that were done, hell, they never signed them. And so we tried to. We tried to use those as part of Chapman's Medal of Honor package, and they refused to sign them. And then somewhere in here is where the story migrates from seeing rise and fall in the laser and the. I crawled right over the top of. John, You've, you've probably all seen the clip where he says we left no one behind. Well, like define no one, because I can tell you two, right. It doesn't make sense to me.

[Brent Tucker]

And I think you already said you guys, we were you will you guys look under strictly through thermals or. Or through ir, because if it was through IR, there would have been. And this is just me, like, hearing this kind of thing about this for the first time now. And, and with you. Which means if he said that he would have seen the IR laser, which means it would have been on and constantly on for him to see the. Basically he's saying the gun was across his chest and without the rise and fall of him breathing, he didn't See the IR laser move, which means you guys would have clearly seen an IR laser that's on the whole time. And the first time, you guys would have never really kind of lost track of where Chapman was because you'd have seen his IR laser throughout the, the whole thing. Like, it's hard to miss, it's hard to miss an IR laser through ir.

[Rob Harrison]

I think that's another good question. If so, if you look at all the inconsistencies, the Air Force's research and all of this was purely directed at Chapman and Chapman's actions.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Rob Harrison]

We weren't there, you know, trying to, you know, measure the validity of anybody else from a, from a valor standpoint. We were looking at it from, from our perspective. So this didn't start out as a, you know, a gotcha campaign, an armchair quarterback.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Rob Harrison]

But however, so take like, those are, those are valid points. And I think, you know, I, if people are tracking on, on the, the drama associated with what, like how all this unfolded with the Medal of Honor museum and so on, and the despite to the legacy of John Chapman, while, you know, slab was, you know, significantly elevated. And I think there's a lot of people out there that understand a little bit more the backstory that now severely question. And then when you have the relationship to the board and a number of boards and a number of non profits and, and all of these things now it's like, all right, well, this is, this is getting a little on the ludicrous side. But if, if there's that many consistencies. I know, I know how, how much the Air Force's research was scrutinized like they, they scrutinized their own. You know, is anybody interested in taking a look at this now? Especially now that you know that all that footage is out there. Compare the validity of the statements in the, in the package to the evidence that is out there. You know, no longer are we two guys assaulting a hill and you witnessed my act. Now you have the eye in the sky that saw all of it. And I've got all these statements and all these variations of statements, and now there's, there's question and if there's question within the National Medal of Honor Museum, we got a problem.

[Brent Tucker]

To move on to my next question, I believe you would have kind of essay on this. Is it true? Do you feel like or, or do you know that the Navy actually actively tried to hide this information or keep Chapman from receiving the Medal of Honor?

[Rob Harrison]

They. So the, the best way that I could answer that is that The Navy was on board as long as we stopped at what was known as Main Material Finding One. And Material Finding One was based on the elimination of Bunker One. So they. As long as the Air Force didn't push beyond that, the Navy was fine.

[Brent Tucker]

As long as not too much of the truth was talked about, the Navy was fine with it.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah.

[Brent Tucker]

I'll say it in a different way. Well, it's. I mean, percentage. Same thing, but that's, that's, you know.

[Rob Harrison]

You don't have to be a genius to understand what. What went. What. What went on with this. Yeah, so I, I've explained this on a. On a couple other podcast interviews, but the Navy knows this about Brit Slavinsky, and it's, you know, the credit to Bunker One. You know, whether that, that's actually true. I think the ISR footage refutes some of that. But they know this going in based on the fact that he's already been awarded a Navy Cross. The Air Force knew that about John Chapman. When this research kicked off, we started to know this much more. And so now you know that John survived without a shadow of a doubt.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Rob Harrison]

You see the strobe? He's the only other American up there. He was recovered with all of his gear. And now, like, how. How if we're going to go through and we're gonna, you know, double check and we're gonna look at upgrading somebody, if the Air Force knows this about Chappie and the Navy only knows this about Slab, how are they going to get their guy across the finish line for an upgrade to a Medal of Honor?

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Rob Harrison]

And so that's where the subversion aspect comes in, because they were like, fine, we'll do this. Well, I have an email trail from. From Commander Hartwell. Hartwell is the intel guy for DEV Group. The commander of Dev Group is at the time, Captain Jeremy Williams. The commander of Naval Special Warfare Command is. I think he's Vice Admiral at the time. It's. It's Tim Zamanski. So the Mansky's commander in Naval Special Warfare, Jeremy Williams, is the captain at devgru. And, and the email that I have from Hartwell says I was tasked to research the Air Force's research.

[Brent Tucker]

He was tasked to research the Air Force's research?

[Rob Harrison]

Yes, he was. Yeah.

[Brent Tucker]

He was essentially tasked to be the rebuttal to whatever it is you guys find or to validate what you guys found. Yeah, I don't know if I've ever. I don't know if I've. I've been aware of several investigations. And I don't know if I've ever heard of anything like that ever.

[Rob Harrison]

Mind blown like we were, we were shocked. So from that point. So this becomes clear because In September of 16, the research team travels TDY up to D.C. and we meet with Captain Jeremy Williams and the surviving members of the MOO element. And Commander Hartwell is in the room.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

We present, we present the case. We know like we know what happened. This has been years in the making of research and you have not only the research but like the forensic pathology stuff that actually put the, the time in order. Tyler, you'll get this. The, the first medical examiner that examined John Chapman matches everything from most lethal to least lethal. Nothing about order and sense. Well, during this research process it actually ends up. So in the briefing in September, we have a forensic pathologist consultant who's briefing the case. The person who actually was an army doctor. So when the Air Force goes through all this like we're checking everything and we're getting independent resources and opinions like this is not Air Force just coming in trying to get one for our guy. Like this is, this is no shit reality. Like this, this is what happened. So, so the forensic pathologist, he actually puts the time in order and so they can tell the difference between postmortem and perimortem based on blood pressure and bruising and all those things that happen at a forensic crime scene. They can tell that as they're looking at John. So when they go back and they look at all of the report now they start to take all of those original medical examiners notes and then look at it through a forensic pathologist mind and then they put time and order to it. And so then they even conferred with the original medical doctor who then verified in his own opinion, yes, that's what I thought would have happened. So like, you know, they asked him like what did you think when you examined this man? Like I thought this guy had been in the most hellacious fight for his life of anybody I've ever seen.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Rob Harrison]

That does not happen. And that opinion is not formed if John is killed during the initial assault.

[Brent Tucker]

Right. The, in this finding. And you said, was it 2016?

[Rob Harrison]

You said this briefing is happening in September of 2016 and we're in D.C. it's at, at one of our facilities there, one of those joint type facilities. And, and we're, we're presenting the case. The project officer walks through the, the entire briefing and then all of the, the various analysis, you know, the experts on their respective pieces come Forward.

[Brent Tucker]

Do you believe this is the first time that the team members on the ground are presented with the case that John was alive or had, had, or had they been privy to that, that possible information before this? I don't know.

[Rob Harrison]

I can say it was the first time that, that they were, that they were told by somebody.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Rob Harrison]

Like, you know, so there was when, if reading the room there was a, a reaction like and it, they, they pushed back. I like it was the, that's not what I remember. And you know, I like, you know, hey, John's gun was damaged. There's a, there's a number of things. I'll let you kind of ask the questions. So I'm not just verbally vomiting it all out at once. But anyway, so when we present we have our, our commander is Colonel Mike Martin. @ the time we got a project officer who's still actively serving. So I don't say his name. There's the senior imagery analyst who's involved myself, Dr. Keller is the guy. I, I had to reach out to one of the other research team members to, to recall his name. Sorry about that, Doc Keller. The J. Hill is there. So Jay, Jay actually heard Chappie come up on the radio after the gunship had departed. So we never, we never heard what from. We heard three zero Charlie when. That initial mayday and that initial coordination. We heard 3:0 on the objective up until like when they broke contact and they did the initial call for fire and so forth. We never heard, we never heard 30 Charlie after that. And we definitely didn't hear it on the way home. But Jay was on an adjacent mountain and he is reporting like he knows Chappie. They're in the same unit. He recognizes the voice like he knows his radio etiquette. Like he, he knows it's Chappy on the other end, but he's never able to get positive two way comms. He can hear him call but, but Chappie doesn't hear him respond.

[Brent Tucker]

Do you know what he's calling? What was that rate of communication that Chappie was trying to get out? Do you remember?

[Rob Harrison]

I, I would save that one for Jay. I can tell you that, that I've, I've read it as it was recounted from Jay in, in some books. But, but that, that's his. I. He was calling any station. Any station.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Rob Harrison]

Mako 30 Charlie.

[Brent Tucker]

Wow.

[Rob Harrison]

And it's, it's specifically 30 Charlie. And I, and I tell you that for this because when Jay, when Jay presented that to the team Brit, this This is gonna blow your mind. Every one of them in the room turned around and said, I, I'm pretty sure I use three zero Charlie. I, I. You use three zero Charlie? Yeah, yeah, I think we all use three zero Charlie at some point in the day. We were up there a long time. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That was the rest of our response.

[Brent Tucker]

Never used the JTAX call sign. Nor would I.

[Rob Harrison]

Exactly.

[Brent Tucker]

Never.

[Rob Harrison]

Exactly. So we, we kept a poker face on that one. And, and, you know, so back up, you know, like every time we went into this from a joint standpoint, remember, you know, that this community is all about relationships. If, if Air Force and Army are having, having, you know, a disagreement, if I walk in and I chart as the Air Force start poking one of y'all in the, in the chest. Like, we know that there's a rank and file, you know, within the teams. Right. Like, everybody gets that. The Air Force is usually an element that augments all of these other units.

[Brent Tucker]

Correct.

[Rob Harrison]

The last thing that we're going to do is come in and start poking somebody in the chest. So we came in as, as cordial, as professional, as politely as we possibly could and said fog and friction, we understand, but this is the reality of what actually happened. And we show them the evidence and we tell them all of this, and their response is just, just like, it's out of this world. That's where you get the. I use freezer Charlie. They literally, like three of the team members that were sitting in that room sat there and looked us in the face and said that they all used the call sign three zero Charlie. I'm not kidding you. So I know that that's crap because everybody knows that that doesn't happen. You know, then they, they started talking about the different sounds of gunfire and whether or not they heard, you know, AK47s or, or what. Well, John had a suppressed weapon, so I've shot suppressed. Like it, it doesn't make it whis, like absolutely quiet. There's still a sound, you know, but it's suppressed. And so anyway, they, they were. Then they started talking about the weapon. And then there's. There's been debate about whether or not John's. John's weapon was, was damaged at some point. And there's an interesting story on that one too, but I'm going to save that for another witness that is probably going to come out. So, like, I'm, I am here to speak truth to power. I am here to tell people that. That Jeremy Williams tasked his intel guy to research the Air Force's research. Everything that Hartwell said when we went into a Valor board was the alternative narrative that the Navy was trying to push. And it was all to discredit material finding. Two, that was the fact that John survived after the he assaults. One, he goes after Bunker Two. They disputed that, that John was still alive. Okay. They say, they say that John was dead within three minutes.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

Within three minutes. And they still stick to this. And I know that this is this story because in the emails, that was Hartwell's line where he's trying to convince. He's trying to convince Blaber. So he's telling him the story is that. That John died within three minutes. And we know that this is all crap. Well, he's wrong and he's pushing their narrative. All right, so this gets even more interesting. All right? And I want you to. I want you to connect these dots. So if he's pushing that, there's a guy named Mitch hall out there, and Mitch hall has been working on a documentary. So he's done a bunch of research, he's contacted me, he's contacted a number of people. And when he does his pitch, he sounds very authentic. It sounds like he truly wants to get to the bottom, like a thorough documentary. Like we talked about the value of a debrief and learning and so forth, forth. But where it gets sketchy is when I'm like, all right, you want to talk? Okay, well, let me vet you. You know, so go through Public Affairs. You know, this was years ago. So I'm like, go through Public Affairs. Other Air Force members that he had contacted said the same thing. He, he wouldn't go through Public Affairs. And I have those emails as well. So he, he contacted them, he talked to them, but he wouldn't play ball with them because Public affairs requires you to have distribution rights. Well, he didn't have distribution rights. And then things get a little bit weird because he's talking about everything that he's done is all privately funded. All right, well, it's all privately funded. Now, fast forward to present day. After the podcast that I did with Valhalla shows up, he's contacting people. And now, now they're talking about, absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, the Mitch hall story is through. This is obviously, you know, second, third hand. But what is being relayed to the people that he's talking to that I'm also talking to, he's pushing the three minute narrative that Chapman was killed within the first three minutes. So that puts. That puts me in a Very, very cautious and suspicious state, especially now. But even then I had asked Mitch, I said, hey, does this any of your effort have anything to do with Commander Hartwell? Because I understand that like, Hartwell was the guy who was, who was pushing the counter narrative to all of our research and the Chapman upgrade. And he gets evasive. We've been through various trainings, right. And you can kind of tell when somebody's not giving you a straight answer. And he, he wouldn't give me a straight answer. So I told him, thanks, but no thanks. I'm done dealing. You have no permission to use my information. Obviously, once something's published, he can take whatever he wants. He could take anything that I'm saying now. But when it comes to working with them, I didn't trust him. I still don't trust him. And they're still pushing the three minute narrative. And we have rock solid evidence. Chap has already been upgraded. He's already been approved the Medal of Honor. And the only purpose that any of their, that three minute narrative serves right now is to push a counter narrative and, and try to continue some element of mistruth. And it's just, it's flat out not true.

[Brent Tucker]

Well, I think the, the craziest thing about the Chapman story is, is the level of, of which it's risen. And at the end of the day it's, it has, it isn't like this person versus that person. And usually that happens. It's even within the same command. But it rises to a level really of it's, it's. I don't think it goes outside of the realm of possibilities. Like it's became, it's become a, like an Navy verse. Air Force. Yeah. It's become like a service wide issue.

[Rob Harrison]

It's not Navy. It's not Navy versus Air Force. No, this isn't. No, this is an issue of truth. Period.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I don't, I, I don't, I don't, I don't disagree with that. That's, that's, that's what it boils down to. But people at higher, at much higher levels have taken sides. Yeah. And, and the side, and the side isn't the truth. I mean, really. Because, because they are taking, they're taking storylines. While one side, I believe, is taking the truth, the other side is taking a storyline and it's happening at, not just at the baseline, but at levels. And that's kind of why, why I say it's almost become this, you know, Navy versus Air Force thing. Because, because of that, that's very unique to this particular story. It really is.

[Rob Harrison]

Yeah, well, so it is, it is in this story because flat out, I think any operator worth their salt, any, anybody that sees the totality of the evidence, you know, if you're looking at the ISR footage and you're looking at the citation, there's a beautiful version of the ISR footage narrated by Dan Schilling, who wrote Alone at Dawn with Lori Longfoot Chapman. And it, it explains it plain as day. And you can see it. And it matches what the, what the research team had shown and proven. And so there's, there's absolutely no doubt. And, and even then, the counter narrative was that it was he died within the first three minutes and the rest of all that fighting was red on red. Well, people asked what happened, like how it actually got approved. Well, the story was that like one of our, like, longest experts on the, the case and research had promoted up and become the Air Force Chief of staff's chief of staff. So General Goldfing tasks this expert to be the last person that goes and briefs Secretary Mattis. So Mattis being a war fighter himself, he's a Marine, he looks, he's like. You're telling me that the counter narrative is that it was red on red enemy that was entrenched in broad daylight had been up there for days or weeks. They're up there shooting each other in the face. That'll buy it.

[Brent Tucker]

In the SR footage, you can, you can see what we believe to be Chapman's last moments is that they charge bunker one. They like, they, they straight up charge it. They charge it almost up to hand to hand distances. And you're going to tell me they charged it to. Closer to that. I am to you, Tyler. And still fired on themselves.

[Rob Harrison]

That's the hand to hand portion. Happens somewhere in the midst of that hour and 20 that he's up there.

[Brent Tucker]

Fighting by himself, but still way longer than three minutes. But way longer than three minutes. Yeah, I said it was the final, like, yeah, that's what, yeah, that's where I got that wrong. You're absolutely right. But it definitely didn't happen within the three minutes of, of him dying. So why, why, why would they charge.

[Rob Harrison]

And then all the forensic pathology, like you couple that with the fact that we were there, we had, we had a strobe. You saw him alive after they thought he was dead and we saw him on the footage crawl into that bunker. I don't think that our crew recognized that that's exactly what happened in real time. But the hindsight, you know, being 2020 with the time and the ability to go back and frame by frame look at it, you can see exactly what happened. Exactly what happened.

[Brent Tucker]

Rob, I really appreciate coming out here, you know, putting it's out, we get it. It's not easy to come out here, put, put your face online and put your name out there and stand by the truth, but, you know, believe you're doing it for the right reasons. Is there anything else you wanted to put out there that we haven't covered? Just, just to make sure that I don't, that don't cut you short.

[Rob Harrison]

So I, I say again that this is not, this is not a, an Navy versus Air Force. This is not an, an Air Force versus the SEALs. I'll tell you that. You know, the, the real SEAL hero from, from that night is Petty Officer Roberts. And, and I don't know why someone chose to, to go and elevate, you know, Brit Savinsky. What he did was valorous. I'm not saying that, but based on the inconsistencies, I think it, I think it warrants that a look be had at, at his actual metal citation and package because does it actually match what the ISR footage is? And if they go through and you know, an unbiased, you know, third party looks at it, you know, I would tell you all the way up to Ty goes to the runner, like let that sleeping dog lie. But if that's the case, let's be honest about all of this and then don't throw shade on the legacy of John Chapman with this monument to Brit Sapinski on, on the table when we know that the level of valor, like they came out of the same battle. And I'm telling you, John's was up here and Brits was here. And if you want to, if you, if you want to make this an argument about the totality of, of his actions that night going in, you know, making the decision to go back in a hot LZ into the fray, like I get that, but if you're going to do that, then the same fairness needs to be applied to should they have ever been there at all. So that team was not part of this maneuver. They were not supposed to be there. The infill to that op was turned down by another team who had already been acclimated in the area, who ordered them to go in there. They were first in there by their leadership. And at that point in time, that is Zabansky and Kernan. All right, and who else is also out there that's Jeremy Williams. All right, so these guys, fast forward. Are now in significant levels of command when all this stuff starts to come to light and nobody wants to see, you know. You know, no one wants egg on their face. No one wants to be, you know, turned into the actual mistake maker. Like, the. The reality of this is that that team should have never been there. We all know that. Anybody who's read. Read up on this knows that. That's the truth. They forced their way into the mission. It went against labor who was in command of afo. Like, there's. There's so much that went wrong with all of that, and it. It ultimately resulted in a number of helicopters and seven service members getting killed.

[Brent Tucker]

I agree with that.

[Rob Harrison]

And we have. We have. Now, the team leader on a SEAL team should have been able to push back. A peer team leader did push back and didn't take the mission. Well, SLAB took the mission and they went in there and John fought like hell. All right? And they all fought like hell. But the bottom line is they shouldn't have ever been there. So if you're going to say that it's about the totality of slapped actions, then, okay, you just open that door. If I'm in the court of law now, the totality of it is fair game. What were you doing there? How did this all happen?

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah, Ordered it. There's no Medal of Honor narrative that starts and ends and makes the argument for totality. That's not how valor awards are awarded. They're awarded on action, not totality. So that argument right off the bat is right out.

[Rob Harrison]

That's what leadership awards are for. That's the difference between a. That's the difference between a bronze Star in the. In the zone.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Rob Harrison]

And one with the actual V device, like. Right. Were you taking fire or not? Now we know that. We know that Slab took fire. And I'm not. I'm not taking that away from him.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Rob Harrison]

And his. As far as his actions on the objective, I'm not questioning that. I'm questioning the inconsistencies.

[Brent Tucker]

Yeah.

[Rob Harrison]

So absolutely. There's. There's one other piece here that I'll let. I'll let the viewers connect the dots on this, but when I tell you that that Captain Jeremy Williams was the commander of Debt at the time and Zmanski was the. Was the commander of nsw, there's another individual who's related to all of this and, and he was sitting as the DO of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. And the number one argument against all of the Material finding two really had to do with whether or not John survived. And, and the way that they, they aimed to discredit that was to discredit the, the imagery and the footage and so forth. So I don't know. I don't know. All right, but I'll leave you with a question. If the former Dev Group commander, you know, before, before Jeremy Williams was, was Captain Wyman Howard.

[Brent Tucker]

Right.

[Rob Harrison]

Wouldn't it be interesting to know that. That Wyman Howard is now an admiral when this research piece is kicking off? Wyman Howard's the director of Operations at nga, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. And so, yeah, it. All of these things, that inconsistencies, and I'm only talking about, you know, Robert's Ridge and, and John Chapman and this particular event. But if you've read, if you've read some of the books out there and you have anything, you know, any idea as to whether or not some of that's true or, you know, some of that's true, and you want to, you know, find the intestinal fortitude to speak truth to power, I, I would encourage you. You know, I, I went to school for Senior Enlisted Academy. I went to the Navy Senior Enlisted Academy, and, and I was introduced to the Chief's mess in the Navy. I was, I was explained the meaning behind the USN on their, their anchors that stood for unity, service and navigation. And their anchor wasn't just an anchor. Their anchor is a foul anchor. A foul banker is something that could, you know, paralyze a ship. And only the experience of a Navy chief is entrusted with handling a problem as serious as a foul banker. Well, I'm not, like, I'm not here to bash seals, and I'm not telling you that we have a SEAL problem because most all of them are good, and we covered that.

[Brent Tucker]

Absolutely.

[Rob Harrison]

But right now, there's a leadership problem with a handful of individuals. And, and I think that, you know, if, if I learned anything being introduced to the Chief's mess, if honor, courage, and commitment are their core values, well, honor the right hero on the mountain. Let's have courage to speak to, to hold ourselves accountable, and let's commit ourselves to the truth. Like this is. This is one of those things where I can't sit idle anymore. I can't watch that unfold, and, and attention needs to be brought to it, and people need to realize who's being elevated, where are they being placed and why.

[Brent Tucker]

Well, I think that sums it up beyond that's, that's, that's probably the best way we. That's. Well, it's the second best way we can end this show. The best way we can in the show is there's gonna be a lot of upset people that heard a lot of things, and they should be upset if. If you ask me. So end this episode with a funny story.

[Rob Harrison]

With a funny story.

[Brent Tucker]

Yep. I know it sounds ironic and out of the blue, but that's how we end all. That's how we end all of our episodes and with something. Something ridiculous has to happen. I'm gonna tell you, wherever you're at. Yeah, what you got.

[Rob Harrison]

Okay. All right. So this is a throwback to. To one of my Spectre crews, because I know that I've got a number of people's attention on all of this. Balin Johnson, this one's for you. There was a moment where we were. We were flying, and Kilo Escort is a boring mission from a gunship perspective. Okay, well, we were ferrying some. Some 47s north. They were going up to Tashkent. And we get to the border and we turn around and we proceed to our actual real tasking for the night. And all of a sudden, we get engaged with a man pad. And it's a. Like they tell you when you get engaged with the man Pad, after 10 seconds, you're good. Well, they kept. The scanners had spotted it, and they say it's coming. It's coming. You know, still tracking, still tracking. It wasn't biting off on the flares.

[Brent Tucker]

Okay.

[Rob Harrison]

And we get to 10, and we're still going, but it's still tracking. Well, thank goodness it finally peters out. As soon as that happened, the second shot comes up. And so by that time, my eyes got this big and I threw all my computer equipment to the side. And I'm just bearing down, hanging on to my seat with my. My belt strapped and. And so forth, forth. Fortunately, it doesn't make contact with the. With the aircraft, but it did not bite off on the flares, and it kept coming. So we go through the mission. Balin teased me a little bit right after that. When we get. When we get to land, the crew chief comes on board as they always do, and he's like, hey, hey, chief, you might need to check Harrison's ass for the. The seat sling seat over there. I think he sucked it up that.