Medal of Honor recipient recalls deadly ambush
"I have never seen the like."
That is what a helicopter pilot who had watched a 21-year-old Marine stave off a Taliban ambush that threatened to overrun his unit told "60 Minutes."
The Marine was Dakota Meyer a Kentucky farm boy who just this past Thursday received the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest award, from President Obama at the White House. Meyer was on a mission in the Ganjgal Valley of Afghanistan, where he repeatedly ran a gauntlet of enemy fire in a desperate effort to save his fellow Marines.
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Dakota Meyer repeatedly ran into enemy fire to save fellow soldiers and was awarded the Medal of Honor, but don't call him a hero
Dakota Meyer tells correspondent David Martin his story, but there is much more to it than his almost insane bravery. This was an operation which went terribly wrong, so wrong that two Army officers were issued career-ending letters of reprimand.
It's a story as old as combat. When a warrior's leaders let him down, he has nothing to fall back on but his own courage. Dakota Meyer will tell you he was just doing his job, but when you see and hear what he did, you too may say, "I have never seen the like."
Dakota Meyer grew up shooting game on a farm in Greensburg, Kentucky and can hit a squirrel at 750 yards. But it wasn't his marksmanship that earned him the Medal of Honor. It was his astonishing courage.
"Did you think you were going to die?" Martin asked.
"I didn't think I was going to die. I knew I was," Meyer said.
"You knew you were," Martin said.
"I knew I was going to die," Meyer repeated.
The battle took place in a remote valley deep in enemy territory in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Meyer ran a gauntlet of fire not once but five times with insurgents shooting down on him from three sides.
When asked why he went in, Meyer said, "There [were] U.S. troops getting shot at and those are your brothers."
Four Marines were trapped in the village of Ganjgal after a patrol of nine Americans - both Marines and Army soldiers - and 45 Afghan military was ambushed.
Afterwards, the Army's Center for Lessons Learned produced an animated recreation of what happened. The reenactment shows that the patrol set out for what was supposed to be a friendly meeting with village elders. Rocky terrain forced them to get out of their armored vehicles and move in on foot, toward the village.
Meyer explained to Martin what happened next. He said that, starting at daylight, Taliban forces opened fire on the patrol.
"The enemy starts, starts raining down. They had mortars, rockets, rocket propelled grenades and small arms fire," Meyer said.
"They were waiting for you," Martin said.
"They were," Meyer said.
"This was an ambush," Martin said.
"Oh, it was. We were set up," Meyer said.
With an estimated 100-150 enemy fighters dug in on the high ground above them, the Marines called for artillery fire from a nearby base. The first rounds missed so First Lt. Michael Johnson, one of the four Marines trapped inside the village, radioed new coordinates of the enemy positions. But the commanders in the operations center, back at the base, refused to fire.
"They denied it. The Army denied it and told him it was, it was too close the village. . . And he said, 'Too close to the village?' And the last words I heard him say was, 'If you don't give me these rounds right now I'm going to die,'" Meyer said.
"Did he get the artillery fire?" Martin asked.
"No, he didn't. The response was basically, 'Try your best,'" Meyer said.
Mary Walsh is the producer.
An investigation conducted after the battle determined that two Army officers making those decisions in the operations center that day "were clearly negligent." "The actions of key leaders" in the command center, the report said, "were inadequate and ineffective, contributing directly to the loss of life which ensued." Because of what the report calls "poor performance" and "an atmosphere of complacency," the operations center just did not realize how bad the situation was until it was too late.
"You can't sugarcoat it," said now retired Colonel Richard Hooker, who conducted the investigation.
"The two principal officers that were named in the investigation failed to discharge their duties in a responsible way - in a way that the army and the country [have] a right to expect them to behave," Hooker said.
Among the findings: two Kiowa helicopters armed with rockets and machine guns were minutes away from Ganjgal, but never made it into the battle.
"They were on another mission, but...they were close at hand," Hooker said.
"How far away? In terms of minutes?" Martin asked.
"I estimate five to ten minutes flying time," Hooker said.
Those helicopters actually broke away from their other mission and headed toward Ganjgal, but were recalled because the request had not gone through proper channels. The troops under fire didn't know that. They were told the helicopters would be there in 15 minutes.
"And up to this point it's been 15 minutes and no air support yet. So they request it again, and they said 15 more minutes," Meyer said.
Meyer said that after a half hour, he started "hearing the radio traffic and...now it's starting to get worse. Gunny Kenefick, I believe it was, come across the radio and said, "I can't shoot back because I'm pinned down. They're shooting at me from the house and it's so close."
Gunnery Sergeant Aaron Kenefick was one of the four trapped Marines.
"Those 15 minutes are starting to add up," Martin said.
"They are, yeah. We're almost 45 minutes and no air support. . . I believe that the enemy started seeing, well, they're not getting what they need. . . Let's take advantage of this opportunity," Meyer said.
Dakota Meyer, one of the youngest, lowest ranking Marines on the battlefield, took charge. "We had to do something," Meyer said.
After several requests to bring a truck in were refused, Meyer said, "I looked at Staff Sgt. Rodriguez-Chavez and I said, 'We're going in.'"
Staff Sergeant Juan Rodriguez-Chavez, who would receive the Navy Cross - the nation's second highest honor - drove an armored truck toward the village while Meyer manned the gun turret.
"It felt like the whole valley turned on this truck," Meyer said. "It was like we're it, like here comes a big target."
"The enemy was just, they were running right at you, you know at the truck," Meyer continued.
"So this is not just raining fire down. Now they're trying to swarm the truck," Martin said.
"It's just like a killing fest for 'em [sic], I think," Meyer said.
"How close are the rounds coming to you when you were doing this?" Martin asked.
"The rounds were hitting the turret," Meyer said. "And I just kept moving back left and right, left and right.
"There was so much fire it sounded like static over top of your head," he added. "I was just waiting for one of those rounds to hit me in the face."
"How close is the enemy getting to you?" Martin asked.
"15-20 meters," Meyer said.
As depicted in the Army animation, dead and wounded Afghan soldiers who had been part of the patrol lay scattered along the valley floor.
"I would run and try to assist as many Afghans as I could," Meyer said.
"So you get out of the truck," Martin said.
"I'm out...I'm out of the truck on foot," Meyer said.
"So you're out in the open in the killing zone," Martin said.
"I am," Meyer said.
Meyer and Rodriguez-Chavez would drive the dead and wounded out of the valley and come back to run the gauntlet of fire again and again, still trying to get to the four Marines trapped in the village.
"You either get them out alive or you die trying. If you didn't die trying, you didn't try hard enough," Meyer said.
When the Marines' radios fell silent, Army Captain Will Swenson, who was pinned down just outside the village, took up the call for fire.
"Captain Swenson probably made 9 or 10 different calls for fire before he probably gave up in frustration," Hooker said.
"Does he say, 'Look, I'm not kidding, I really need this fire?" Martin asked.
"Yeah, the evidence says he...was very, very insistent in his calls for help. No question about that," Hooker said.
"How long after the battle begins do the first helicopters show up?" Martin asked.
"It was probably an hour and 45 minutes before the first helicopters come on station," Hooker said.
Helicopters were finally overhead as Dakota Meyer tried to blast his way through the valley to the stranded Marines.
"We interviewed a number of pilots who where there that day and several of them stopped in mid-sentence unable to ...finish their descriptions of Meyer's actions that day," Hooker said. "They just didn't have the words to describe it."
"When the helicopters showed up, did that put an end to the ambush?" Martin asked.
"No. It didn't solve the problem, but it certainly was a great help to the soldiers and Marines and Afghans that were fighting on the ground. It enabled them to move about the battlefield a little better," Hooker said.
With Marine Lt. Ademola Fabayo - who would also receive the Navy Cross - manning the machine gun, Swenson and Meyer drove deeper into the valley.
"Me and Captain Swenson kept driving this unarmored truck through this valley and rounds are going everywhere through it," Meyer said.
"They're going through?" Martin asked.
"Both windows were down, you could hear 'em coming, whizzing through," Meyer said.
A helicopter finally spotted the four Marines but there was too much gunfire to land.
"They started trying to land but they couldn't. They were going to get shot down," Meyer said.
"I just took off running and it was probably the longest run of my life. I felt like I couldn't move fast enough because it's wide open. Rounds are hitting everywhere around me," Meyer continued. "I jumped into this, trench and when I did, I landed on Gunnery Sgt. Johnson."
"And he was," Martin began.
"He was dead," Meyer said.
They were all dead - First Lt. Michael Johnson, Sgt. Edwin Johnson, Sgt. Aaron Kenefick and Corpsman James "Doc" Layton. It was now 6 hours into the battle that would also take the lives of eight Afghan soldiers.
"If we'd gotten supporting aviation on station early in the fight we...wouldn't be sitting here having this conversation. That's my firm belief," Hooker said.
"Would those Americans be alive today?" Martin asked.
"You can't say with any certainty, but the chances are in... my opinion that yes, they would have been," Hooker said.
Meyer told Martin that he did not feel like anything but a failure because he could not save his fellow Marines.
"Do you realize what you did was extraordinary?" Martin asked.
"No, I don't. It would have been extraordinary if I'd brought them out alive. That would have been extraordinary," Meyer said.
Susan Price is the mother of Aaron Kenefick. Several months after she buried her son - whose body was retrieved by Meyer - she received a copy of Hooker's investigation, known in military parlance as a 15-6.
"When I read the 15-6 for the very first time, it actually put me in the hospital for a week," Price said.
Price and Charlene Westbrook whose husband was grievously wounded on another part of the battlefield have spent thousands of dollars of their own money campaigning to draw attention to what happened at Ganjgal.
"We both lost a huge part of our hearts to this mission that was clearly caused by negligence," Westbrook said.
Sgt. Kenneth Westbrook died at Walter Reed hospital, but lived long enough to tell his wife what happened.
"He told me that, 'We were surrounded, we were ambushed and we called for help. No one came. They kept telling us 15 minutes, 15 minutes and no one showed and we were just sitting ducks," Westbrook said.
As recommended by the investigation, letters of reprimand were issued to the captain who was in charge of the watch in the operations center and to the major who was absent from the center at critical points. The Army has not released their names.
"How do you equate a piece of paper, a reprimand, to human life?" Price asked.
"These letters of reprimand are just clearly slaps on the wrists. These officers need to be court-martialed," Westbrook said.
"What would you say to that?" Martin asked former Col. Hooker.
"I think to be the object of an official investigation which results in a General Officer letter of reprimand and ends your career for most professional officers is about the most profound kind of thing that can happen to you. It means professional disgrace and ruin," Hooker said.
"Susan Price and Charlene Westbrook were not at the White House on Thursday to see the President award Dakota Meyer the Medal of Honor. Will Swenson, who quit the Army, was.
He, too, was recommended for the Medal of Honor, but as if there weren't enough negligence to tarnish this battle the paperwork got lost and had to be started all over again. As for Ganjgal, it still belongs to the Taliban.
"It's been two years since that operation and it's still not safe to go into Ganjgal," Martin said.
"It's not," Meyer said.
"For all that loss of life, for all your courage, what was gained?" Martin asked.
"Nothing, nothing," Meyer said. "But at the end of the day, we still did our job. We, you know, we were still fighting."