Ground Truth?

A few years back, I did a presentation on my book Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans at a local church. During the Q&A period, a young woman in the back threw out a challenging question: How do you know what you say you know?

This young woman had tattoos and attitude, and some of the audience was taken aback and chagrined, because it came off kinda rude, at least to them. A fart in church, you might say.

But I loved it. Because it’s a 100-percent legit question to ask, especially in dealing with frontier history. And I gave her the most honest answer that I could. I don’t know what I say I know. Not for sure. Frontier history in particular is so entangled with myth and folklore that you can’t ever be sure you’re getting the “real” truth of the matter. Lyman C. Draper’s interviews with frontier folk who lived through one of the most epic chapters of Frontier Partisan history in Revolutionary War Kentucky are a treasure trove, a primary source of “ground truth” — but they were done years after events, and memory is notoriously unreliable. You can end up with multiple versions of the same event. Sometimes they are pretty close and can be reconciled, sometimes not so much.

Once a myth is established, it’s really hard to challenge – and sometimes fraught with conflict. I just got a note from Hugh T. Harrington, whose close examination of the purported kill shot by Tim Murphy on British General Simon Fraser in The Journal of the American Revolution and The Journal of Military History stirred up a shitstorm. That’s a 249-year-old event, and people still feel passionately invested in it.

I’m currently listening to various points of view about the nature of the 17th Century Iroquois “Beaver Wars,” which is fraught even though it’s almost 400-year-old (really obscure) history, because it carries current culture wars baggage.

I find this kind of thing fascinating. It reminds us that history is a constructed story. Constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed. A lie agreed upon is too cynical — most of the time — but it can be that, too. Mostly it’s just a mess, because it’s human, and human-folk are messy. And when an event of recent history that carries significant emotional weight is loaded with two or more competing and mutually incompatible narratives, the results can be explosive.

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The Battle of Takur Ghar, aka Roberts Ridge, March 4, 2002, remains intensely controversial — and it’s blowing up again. A documentary film titled GROUND TRUTH:THE 16 HOUR / 16 YEAR BATTLE FOR ROBERTS RIDGE is currently in post-production for a late-fall/winter release. Promotion has begun, and the fire around it has been hot.

I posted on the battle and a forthcoming Ron Howard feature based around the actions of Combat Controller John Chapman last year. You can catch up to the controversy in that post, but it boils down to this:

Chapman is believed to have been wounded while attempting to take out an enemy bunker, regained consciousness and fought on, while a SEAL Team also engaged in the fight left him for dead.

Chapman was initially awarded the Air Force Cross for his actions, though many believed at the time that his actions merited the Congressional Medal of Honor. The matter became controversial as the Naval Special Warfare Command allegedly actively lobbied against awarding Chapman the MOH. There were competing narratives about what exactly happened on the mountain, and why the SEAL Team left Chapman on the mountain. Recognizing that Chapman had regained consciousness and continued the fight required an acknowledgement that he had been left alone and alive by the SEAL Team — and they will not make such an acknowledgement.

Well, the Ground Truth team has answers for that, and the narrative is utterly different. They posted at great length on Reddit:

John Chapman was killed within the first few minutes of the second insert to recover or rescue Neil Roberts. He never revived. He did not continue to fight. This is an unfortunate fact. We realize this counters most of the books, articles, and podcasts pushing the Chapman Medal of Honor narrative over the last 24 years. Before any of you reflexively and angrily start replying in all caps, consider a few things.

Most of what you’ve read or listened to is one-sided or incomplete. The flurry of podcasts released last year around the Medal of Honor Museum opening were single interviews from one side. That group repeatedly refused to interview or openly engage with anyone opposing their story. They designed an echo chamber. Sean Naylor’s book, Not a Good Day to Die, interviewed a handful of people who shared and shaped the story for everyone else. More people were left uninterviewed than were included. While Sean was in Afghanistan at the time of the battle, he was never on the mountain. This is an important distinction. You cannot understand this battle without walking the battlefield.

For those leaning on Matt Cole’s book, Code Over Country, consider: it’s loaded with unattributable sources. “A senior SEAL leader stated…” Why wouldn’t these people go on record? Unattributable sources are a fact of journalism, but to write an entire book citing unnamed sources throughout raises serious questions.

To the SEAL brand protection claims, or the “SEALs always lie” belief — every service branch does this at times. The Army with Tillman and Jessica Lynch. The Navy embellished Lone Survivor and made it something it was not. The Marine Corps embellished Sgt. Peralta’s actions in 2004. There are many more examples. The question is why…

… To those entrenched and invested in the Chapman MOH narrative: ask yourself why. Did you fight the revision of the Tillman story, still insisting he was killed by enemy fire? Did you resist the collapse of the Lone Survivor narrative? Why this one? What is your connection or interest in this story? How is it serving you?

The Dan Schilling video posted in 2019 was viewed more than 21 million times. It was the public’s largest introduction to this story. It was released the same day as Schilling’s book Alone at Dawn. It was marketing for the book. Go watch it again. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oKMjTqdTYo. It is 8:52 long. Ask yourself a few things. Where is the rest of the video—the other roughly two hours from both the AC-130 Gunship (callsign GRIM 32) and the Wildfire Predator? For the rest of your life, when social media or the news presents a truncated video, the first question you should ask is: “Where is the rest?” Context matters. Where are the radio comms from that night? Why is a narrator telling you what you are seeing? Why is the music what it is? Why is it annotated the way it is?

Why will some of you accuse Ground Truth of bias, but overlook Lori Longfritz Chapman’s bias (John Chapman’s sister), Rob Harrison’s bias (AF Gunship crew), or Dan Schilling’s bias?

Again, watch the Dan Schilling video and imagine how the other nearly 95% of the visual material, paired with the comms, might change your understanding of events. Did the initial ICE shooting videos of Renee Good and Alex Pretti paint a definitive picture of what happened in Minneapolis? Did you feel you had seen everything you needed to see from the first postings, or did those situations become clearer as more footage was released?

Ground Truth spoke to the people who were there—the people who fought in the snow and lost teammates. You’re going to hear it from them. Go tell the Rangers they are wrong. Go tell the medical examiners they are wrong. Tell the drone pilots they are wrong. u/valhallVFT was not there. u/teamhousewas not there. u/Sethhettena has never been to the mountain or spoken to anyone who fought this battle. To continue to listen to those who were not there, and not to those who were, is indefensible.

We need to believe in our heroes—they serve an important role in society. We also need to get to the truth in stories like this so we have a better chance of not repeating them.

We realize there are many questions that need to be answered. The credible ones, asked in good faith, will be addressed in the docuseries. Every single team, unit, and service branch had a hand in losing the reality of this story. For the Navy haters—yes, we are including them in that statement. There are relevant explanations for Jay Hill’s claim of hearing Chapman on the radio. There are relevant explanations for how Roberts was found and the condition of Chapman’s body when he was found. There are relevant explanations for nearly every important aspect of the story. When there wasn’t one, Ground Truth did what others did not—we admitted when things were unknowable.

Dan Schilling, Lori Longfritz-Chapman, Eric Deming, Rob Harrison, Matt Cubbler, Matt Cole—let’s sit down and discuss this battle and pressure-test each other’s arguments. Stop hiding behind uncontested podcast interviews where the interviewer doesn’t know enough to challenge your claims. Pick the time and venue. It can be six versus one if you like.

By 2015, the Air Force had not awarded a Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War. Every other service branch had multiple recipients in this nation’s longest war. When the Secretary of Defense ordered a military-wide review of all Silver Stars and above for potential upgrades, the Air Force saw an opportunity—and manufactured one.

The ability to change one’s mind is a sign of intelligence. The Ground Truth docuseries is not for those who cannot or will not change their minds, no matter what is presented to them. That group should pass on it.

This winter, Ron Howard’s film depicting John Chapman’s Medal of Honor actions will be released. Howard is an excellent director, and at $60 million it will almost certainly be well-produced. For those unable to shift, accept new evidence, and come to a new conclusion, it will be an entertaining film and provide satisfying closure.

A longer trailer is available on their website.

Andy Stumpf, a former Navy SEAL (DEVGRU) and podcaster for whom I have enormous respect, announced a few days ago that he is releasing a multi-part series on Roberts Ridge, totaling some nine hours of conversation this week. The short teasers for the podcast ignited a firestorm all by themselves.

Many people are — understandably — deeply emotionally invested in this story. Or, more properly, stories. If the Navy SEALs left Chapman to die on the mountain, that’s a painful, horrible thing to contemplate — even if the exigencies of the battle gave them no choice. If they were negligent, well… If it is true that Naval Special Warfare attempted to suppress Chapman’s MOH, that is shameful. On the other hand, if the SEALs have had to carry a scarlet letter around because of a legend that isn’t accurate, that, too is a terrible thing.

When two narratives are incompatible, we readily conclude that somebody must be lying. But that oversimplifies — perhaps to the point of being dead wrong — the way people experience stressful, traumatic events, and the way they construct memory and narrative to make sense of what happened, even the way that they interpret what ought to be hard evidence.

Let me be clear: I do not believe in the insidious notion that we all have “our truth” and that “my truth,” however derived, must be held as absolutely valid and even definitive. But I do believe that people acting in good faith can have wildly differing understandings of what the truth is, cleaving to something that feels real and absolute, but is actually amorphous, seen but dimly through the fog of war, impossible to take within a firm grasp and hold fast.

Of course, if there’s actually bad faith, self-interest, and manipulation involved, the fog becomes impenetrable — and toxic.

One of the reasons I so love the pirate show Black Sails and return to it over and over again, is that it is fundamentally about how and why we craft stories. How stories can be wielded to move men and women to action, how they can be woven to justify the unjustifiable, to suppress truth or to illuminate it. As a passionate pursuer of history, I believe deeply in the importance of good faith effort to come as close as we possibly can to identifying truth — while reckoning with the impossibility of anything like perfection in that endeavor, especially in a field where folklore and history grew from the same soil at the same time, born interlocked.

As Richard Slotkin would tell you, our frontier myths and legends, regardless of their factual truth, shaped the nature of our future actions, of our concept of our nation, of our history.

And this forces us to  reckon with Captain Jack Rackham’s assertion that it all may not matter in the end — that Story will always be more powerful than history:

A story is true. A story is untrue. As time extends it matters less and less. The stories we want to believe… Those are the ones that survive, despite upheaval and transition, and progress. Those are the stories that shape history. And then what does it matter if it was true when it was born? It’s found truth in its maturity… Because what’s it all for if it goes unremembered? It’s the art that leaves the mark. But to leave it, it must transcend. It must speak for itself. It must be true.

I would never argue that the truth doesn’t matter (neither is Rackham, you’ll note). The truth of a searing event like the Battle of Roberts Ridge is important. I will take in every story that is to come on this event — Ron Howard’s movie, the Ground Truth docuseries. I’ll be locked in on Stumpf’s Cleared Hot Podcast all this week. I have no dog in any fight here, and I do want to know the truth of what happened on Roberts Ridge. But I suspect that there will remain unknowables, and I suspect that what I will come away from all of it with is a renewed conviction that we must ultimately rely on Story to tell us who and what we are, and that the stories that we want to believe will continue to be the ones that survive.

UPDATE:

The first segment of the Cleared Hot Podcast series on the Battle of Roberts Ridge is now up. I’ll post the others as they come available.