Unfortunately, it would appear that it was. This is a very, very long and exhaustive
report by a member of the media that was actually there, embedded with the troops who were ambushed. It is worth reading and it seems to imply that Marine Corps hierarchy was determined to get a live medal of honor recipient and would not hesitate to seriously exaggerate the facts.
A couple of the many points from the article:
Rodriguez-Chavez said, “We raised Staff Sgt. Valadez on the radio and told him we were going in no matter what was going on; we just needed him to assist us into the valley.” Valadez, he continued, “agreed with the decision taken by Cpl. Meyer and me.”
Valadez recounted: “I told Staff Sgt. Rodriguez-Chavez to go in because we had injured guys in there."
In a telephone interview eight days after the battle — while he recovered in a U.S. military hospital in Germany from a concussion he'd suffered from a rocket-propelled grenade explosion — “Garza recalled that he … called Cpl. Meyer and Staff Sgt. Rodriguez-Chavez forward to start collecting the wounded," according to a memorandum of the interview.
This would seem to be at odds with the account set forth officially that Meyer disobeyed orders by going in. He might have said that he was going to go in against orders but apparently he ultimately did not.
The next embellishment is really about math. Five plus five makes ten, not twenty four...
Rodriguez-Chavez and Meyer then set out in a Humvee on the mile-long drive up toward Ganjgal, running into “a blizzard of fire” — the former behind the wheel, the latter in the turret, according to the accounts read by Obama and posted on the Marine Corps website.
“Coming upon wounded Afghan soldiers, Dakota jumped out and loaded each of the wounded into the Humvee, each time exposing himself to all that enemy fire,” the president said. After driving those casualties to safety, he and Rodriguez-Chavez went "back into the inferno," Meyer again jumping out and loading up more wounded Afghans.
The medal citation read by a military aide after Obama spoke put the number of Afghans rescued on those first two runs at two dozen.
But Rodriguez-Chavez recounted in his statement for Meyer’s medal nomination that the Afghans got into the vehicle themselves on both runs. He said Meyer stayed in the turret, firing a Mark 19 automatic grenade launcher. Rodriguez-Chavez’s marks on an accompanying satellite photograph show both runs ending just short of the ambush zone.
Seeing Afghan National Army troops trying to take cover, Rodriguez-Chavez said, “I drove up to their position, while Cpl. Meyer was providing cover fire. We saw five wounded ANA soldiers and Cpl. Meyer signaling them to get into the truck. Three ANA took the empty seats in the truck, and the other two opened the trunk and climbed into the trunk.”
After dropping off the Afghans about 150 yards back down the track, the pair returned, stopping just before the first location. Four more Afghan soldiers piled into the vehicle.
The official account doesn’t explain how the pair could have evacuated 24 Afghan soldiers given that no more than five people — three inside and two in the trunk — could have fit in the vehicle with Meyer and Rodriguez-Chavez. A senior Marine Corps official acknowledged that the figure was misleading.
The next account is also troubling:
Witness statements agree that it was the long-delayed arrival of U.S. helicopters that allowed Williams’ group to escape. Williams and Norman attested that Rodriguez-Chavez and Meyer arrived in the valley after Kiowa Warrior helicopters had reached the scene.
Not being a military or ex-military person I don't know what to make of all this but it sounds pretty bad.
If the article is too long to read there is a graphic which sort of sums it all up that can be found
here.Anyway, it sure sounds like the Congressional Medal Of Honor award process got politicized or something.
What does everyone else think?
