MoH footage, the first ever captured

So this popped up on my Youtube feed today, purporting to be the first time a MoH recipient was filmed during the event. John Chapman, an Air Force Combat Controller is filmed during his ultimately mortal rescue attempt, the footage is quite compelling, even though it's not much more than black-hot IR blobs.



Not trying to cheapen that experience, but it certainly puts my Arma escapades into sharp perspective. No reloads or restarts. Must have been quite an intense human experience.

Wow.

What can we say except Salute !!

We owe our freedom and our way of life to brave, selfless men such as him.

wait a minute, they went there to retrieve the body or rescue the seal ? they must have know of the bunkers, since a previous engamente must have taken place, why didnt they call the guns in the air to flak the bunker before going in ?
RIP to a valent soul

I don't know all the details, but some. As far as I know they did not know the hilltop was occupied, as a matter of fact I think a Spectre gunship had checked and gave the all-clear (bunkers prevented thermals from picking anything up?)

So when they attempted to land they were fired on, hit and the SEAL fell out, which in turn sparked the rescue operation as they perhaps couldn't know if he survived the fall? Upon their return perhaps they ruled out any type of suppression with the SEAL still there on the ground. How to take out the bunkers without endangering the possibly still-alive SEAL?

A little bit of MOH trivia:

14 of the 27 MOH awarded to Marines and US Navy personnel for Iwo Jima were posthumous.

The MOH was signed into law as a "permanent decoration" by the Federal US Congress in 1863.

Here is a computer 3D graphical representation of what happened on the ground:

Thank you THX

Hard to believe its been 17 years. Why did Chapman rush the bunker by himself? His Team Leader couldn't even catch up with him, and why did the rest of the team go to the south after debarking away from the target, then eventually sliding down the hill leaving Chapman and the Team leader alone.

Difficult to assess what was going on between people with such abstracted footage, and with no knowledge of what was being communicated between people I guess. Might have been something as obvious as Ramboing it out of desperation to save a colleague, or might have been something as coordinated as the rear guy laying down covering fire so someone else can progress through shouted/radioed communication. The IR nature of the video doesn't do a very good job of letting us know the exact nature of the terrain, how steep the terrain was, levels of micro-cover, how likely it might be that the enemy in the bunker would know who could be where at any given time. It has to be noted that Chapman successfully cleared that bunker during that chaos.

Wow

This is hard to watch. In fact, I've thus far not watched all of it.

As the father of a Marine I can't even begin to imagine what watching this, if they have, must be like for Chapman's family. My prayers go out to them and to families of all the fallen.

+1 F4U