*I honored the request of USSOCOM, for security reasons, that I refrain from using the surnames of the operators in MAKO 30, relying instead on their correct given names or nicknames.
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* Thirty-eight minutes after Slab and his team slipped away under fire, a series of curious, even mysterious, events occurred on Takur Ghar that defied resolution. Such was the fog of war even in the era of the Predator.

As seen through a Predator's murky lens at 0552 local time, an individual, A, presumably an al-Qaeda fighter who had survived the firefight just ended, slowly crawled from a concealed position about 25 yards southeast of the peak and began to cross the open ground beneath bunker #1 where Chapman had been killed; A presumably was trying to flank bunker #1 by surreptitiously maneuvering around and behind the low rock outcrop with the intent to come up behind bunker #1 and kill whoever occupied it. As A continued to make slow progress through the dim new light of day, another individual, B, also presumably an al-Qaeda fighter, emerged from hiding almost directly east of bunker #1 about 25 yards away. B fired an RPG at bunker #1. In response, A began to engage B at 0607 local time with an automatic rifle. An individual in bunker #1 then killed B with rifle fire.

Who was fighting from bunker #1, long after Slab and his team broke contact, and who in bunker #1 did A and B want to kill?

The most likely interpretation described a spasm of enemy fighting enemy after a brutal, close, and extended firefight with MAKO 30. An enemy fighter may have reoccupied bunker #1 after MAKO 30's withdrawal and fired on other enemy forces occupying positions roughly in the same location from which Slab and his team had exited the mountaintop. High-altitude mountain air can distort the location, distance, and direction of gunshot reports. Therefore, the enemy may have mistaken his comrades' gunfire for that of MAKO 30.

Another scenario introduced the Lazarus syndrome, which was hardly new to warfare. Could Roberts have been alive or miraculously come back to life? And could he then have taken the fight to the enemy from bunker #1? That scenario seemed unlikely. Roberts' body did not move from the moment he died of his wounds one hour and twenty-five minutes earlier.

Then could Chapman have been resurrected and slithered into bunker #1 and fought alone? Chapman may have been wounded only in the legs when Slab last saw him; Slab did not have time to check him physically, but a military coroner later reported that Chapman's wounds would have been “immediately fatal.” He could not have survived more than minutes, and certainly not long enough to fight the enemy an hour later.

Viewing the archived Predator feeds, commanders wanted to see what they believed to be true—indeed, what they needed to be true. The SEALs wanted to see Roberts come alive and “take” it to the enemy. At Roberts' funeral service in Virginia Beach, his commander told grieving relatives and teammates, “Neil turns on his beacon and low-crawls to a position under fire. Neil takes the offensive, firing and maneuvering against the enemy, and allegedly storms a machine-gun nest. Neil was shot several times but continued the fight.”

Others resurrected Chapman, because his body was found in bunker #1 at the end of the day, raising the question of how it got there—whether he crawled into it, whether his body was later blown into the bunker by powerful concussive forces, or whether an enemy fighter dragged him into the bunker to search his body for weapons or booty, or to strip him of his clothing.
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