WASHINGTON — With Dakota Meyer standing at attention in his dress uniform, 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.
Obama told the audience in the White House East Room on Sept. 15 that Meyer had driven into the heart of a savage ambush in Afghanistan against orders. 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. service members as he fought to recover the bodies of four comrades, the president said.
But 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.
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, 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.
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.
What’s most striking is that all this probably was unnecessary. Meyer, the 296th Marine to earn the medal, by all accounts deserved his nomination. At least seven witnesses attested to him performing heroic deeds “in the face of almost certain death.” Braving withering fire, he repeatedly returned to the ambush site with others to retrieve Afghan casualties and the dead Americans. He suffered a shrapnel wound and was sent home with combat-related stress.
But 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 were embellished. They’re marred by errors and inconsistencies, ascribe actions to Meyer that are unverified or didn’t happen.
In response to McClatchy’s findings, the Marine Corps said it stood by the official citation that was produced by the formal vetting process. 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. They described that account as “Meyer’s narrative of the sequence of events,” which Marine officials said they didn’t vet.
Hours before this McClatchy report was published, the Marine Corps inserted a disclaimer into its official online account of Meyer’s actions. The Web page now reads that the summary “was compiled in collaboration” with Meyer and Marine Corps Public Affairs.
