![]() They described that account as “Meyer’s narrative of the sequence of events,” which Marine officials said they didn’t vet. Asked to explain the individual discrepancies and embellishments, the Marines drew a distinction between the citation and the account of Meyer’s deeds that the Marines constructed to help tell his story to the nation. In response to McClatchy’s findings, the Marine Corps said it stood by the official citation that was produced by the formal vetting process. One senior Marine official told McClatchy that the service felt that it deserved the decoration after having served in the toughest, most violent areas of Afghanistan and Iraq. The nominating papers - known as a “medal packet” - typically comprise dozens of sworn witness statements, maps, diagrams, a draft citation and a more detailed account of the nominee’s deeds.Īs the Afghan and Iraq wars wind down, senior Marine Corps officials conceded the pressure to award more medals, and to do it quickly. The process for awarding the medal - designed by Navy rules to leave “no margin of doubt or possibility of error” - involves reviews by commanders at every level of the nominee’s chain of command and then by top Pentagon officials. ![]() Meyer is the first living Marine since the Vietnam War to be awarded the honor. Only 10 of the decorations have been awarded since 2001, seven of them posthumously. The approval of Meyer’s medal - in an unusually short time - came as lawmakers and serving and former officers pressed the military services and the Pentagon to award more Medals of Honor because of the relatively few conferred in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They’re marred by errors and inconsistencies, ascribe actions to Meyer that are unverified or didn’t happen and create precise, almost novelistic detail out of the jumbled and contradictory recollections of the Marines, soldiers and pilots engaged in battle. ![]() above and beyond the call of duty.”īut an exhaustive assessment by a McClatchy correspondent who was embedded with the unit and survived the ambush found that the Marines’ official accounts of Meyer’s deeds - retold in a book, countless news reports and on U.S. Kevin Williams, commended him for acts of “conspicuous gallantry at the risk of his life. He suffered a shrapnel wound in one arm and was sent home after the battle with combat-related stress. William Swenson and others to retrieve Afghan casualties and the dead Americans. At least seven witnesses attested to him performing heroic deeds “in the face of almost certain death.”īraving withering fire, he repeatedly returned to the ambush site with Army Capt. Meyer, the 296th Marine to earn the medal, by all accounts deserved his nomination. What’s most striking is that all this probably was unnecessary. Advance wars 2 rom not saving driver#The driver of Meyer’s vehicle attested to seeing “a single enemy go down.” The statements also offer no proof that the 23-year-old Kentucky native “personally killed at least eight Taliban insurgents,” as the account on the Marine Corps website says. ![]() Moreover, it’s unclear from the documents whether Meyer disobeyed orders when he entered the Ganjgal Valley on Sept. service members, leave his vehicle to scoop up 24 Afghans on his first two rescue runs or lead the final push to retrieve the four dead Americans. Sworn statements by Meyer and others who participated in the battle indicate that he didn’t save the lives of 13 U.S. service members as he fought to recover the bodies of four comrades, the president said.īut there’s a problem with this account: Crucial parts that the Marine Corps publicized and Obama described are untrue, unsubstantiated or exaggerated, according to dozens of military documents McClatchy Newspapers examined. He’d killed insurgents at near-point-blank range, twice leapt from his gun turret to rescue two dozen Afghan soldiers and saved the lives of 13 U.S. ![]() 15 that Meyer had driven into the heart of a savage ambush in eastern Afghanistan against orders. Obama told the audience in the White House East Room on Sept. WASHINGTON - With Dakota Meyer standing at attention in his dress uniform, sweat glistening on his forehead under the television lights, President Barack Obama extolled the former Marine corporal for the “extraordinary actions” that had earned him the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers December 14, 2011 ![]()
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