Missing for 48 hours: Pentagon details Army sergeant’s final moments in Niger
No figure in the ambush in Niger has commanded more attention than U.S. Army Sgt. La David T. Johnson, who fell off the military’s radar for nearly two days during a hectic search and whose widow accused President Trump of stumbling over her late husband’s name during a condolence call.
How the 25-year-old trained Army mechanic from Florida went from being deemed “missing” by the U.S. military to “killed in action” became a central question in the months after the incident, which also killed three other U.S. soldiers and marked the single deadliest military operation for U.S. forces in Africa since the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu.
An official version of events released Thursday by the Pentagon described a harrowing scene in which Johnson and two of his partner soldiers from Niger were attempting to get back in their vehicle to flee enemy fire, only to end up running into the brush as Islamic State fighters blocked them from escaping and pursued them to their deaths.
The 11 American soldiers in Johnson’s unit were traveling with a larger group of Nigerien partner forces when they were ambushed on the way out of a meeting with local leaders in the village of Tongo Tongo. Islamic State affiliates were known to operate in the region, but U.S. forces were unaccustomed to having direct contact with them, let alone with an organized group including about 100 combatants.
“They had never seen anything in this magnitude — numbers, mobility and training,” Marine Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser, commander of U.S. Africa Command, said in a briefing at the Pentagon on Thursday. “It was a total tactical surprise in how that took place.”
[Military investigation of Niger disaster finds numerous failures in planning]
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