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    US military reveals dramatic rescue of injured airman stranded inside Iran

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    The US military released dramatic new video on Tuesday showing parts of one of the largest combat search-and-rescue operations in its history, including the moment elite Air Force pararescue operators reached a badly injured American airman stranded deep inside Iran.

    The footage documents portions of the massive April operation to rescue the two-man crew of an F-15E Strike Eagle, call sign Dude 44, after the fighter was shot down by an Iranian shoulder-fired missile.
    The New York Post is your source for breaking news, news about New York, sports, business, entertainment, opinion, real estate, culture, fashion, and more.

    #iran #rescue #usmilitary

    New military video dropped this week. The creed is older than the footage.

    THEY CAME FOR HIM
    How America Spent 50 Hours Proving We Never Leave a Man Behind

    By Whatfinger News

    Every soldier knows the line. Some units print it on walls. Rangers live it. Pararescue lives it. Military police live the ugly end of it when the convoy is hit and somebody is still in the vehicle. It is not poetry. It is a bill the United States keeps agreeing to pay.

    This week the U.S. military released declassified combat video of one of the largest search-and-rescue operations in American history: the April recovery of Dude 44 Bravo, the weapons systems officer of an F-15E Strike Eagle shot down deep inside Iran. Combined with Bravo’s first public account on CBS’s 60 Minutes, the record is no longer rumor. It is doctrine on tape.

    The creed held.

    The jet went down. The promise did not.

    On the night of April 2 into April 3, Dude 44 was striking industrial sites tied to Iran’s missile and drone program in the mountains south of Isfahan. A shoulder-fired missile hit the Strike Eagle. Bravo later said it felt like “getting hit by a freight train.” The crew tried to save the jet. They could not. Pilot Dude 44 Alpha punched them both out. Bravo has said he will be thankful to his dying day that Alpha did.

    They came down about five miles apart. Alpha’s chute worked. Bravo’s did not. The missile had damaged it. He looked up, saw no canopy, and prayed: “Lord, your will be done. But if I’m getting through this, I need help.” Specialists later estimated he hit the ground at 70 to 100 miles an hour. Broken back. Broken arm. Broken shoulder. Sprained ankle. Face and head cut. He lived. He called it a miracle and a testament to the airmen who packed the seat.

    Then he started walking.

    “Never let a lack of motivation put you on Iranian TV.”

    That is Bravo’s line, and every NCO who ever ran a SERE brief will recognize it. Iranian forces were already sweeping the valley. There was a bounty. They got within a few hundred meters. Bravo did not sit on the landing site and wait for a camera crew. He climbed toward a 7,000-foot ridgeline with bones that should have kept him on the ground, hid in a crevice, and delayed the radio until he had distance. When he finally transmitted, one of the messages was simple: “God is good.” Another: he was hurt, and he was moving.

    Alpha was pulled out first — a daylight combat search-and-rescue into a gunfight. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth later put it without varnish: “It was a gunfight all the way in and all the way out. But they got Alpha back.” Bravo watched part of that recovery from the mountain. He later called it the proudest dad moment of his life, with apologies to his kids. It told him the country was coming.

    Hegseth’s other line matters more than the highlight reel: “Whether they’re alive or not, we’re going to go get them.”

    That is the difference between a slogan and a military.

    The bill for one man

    Finding Bravo was, in President Trump’s phrase, “like finding a needle in a haystack.” The United States answered with an air armada and a ground package that had not set foot in Iran in 46 years. Trump said 155 aircraft took part — fighters, four bombers, tankers, rescue birds, jammers. CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper said about 92 Americans went onto Iranian soil. Several hundred more worked the problem from the air. Three thousand to five thousand more supported the mission. The CIA ran a deception campaign to shove Iranian searchers toward the wrong dirt. We like when CIA actually does operations like this OUTSIDE the U.S. – sort of what they were supposed to be doing from the start. Not messing with our free and fair elections and not killing presidents who dare to oppose them. But I digress,,,  Bombers and drones hit IRGC elements closing on the ridge. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine said the Iranian ground force had “clear intent” to find both men.

    They still waited for dark, authenticated the man on the mountain so they were not walking into a trap, and then they went.

    Two large rescue aircraft put down on a makeshift desert strip. Little Birds ran the ridge. Two Air Force pararescuemen — PJs, the people whose entire job is this sentence — reached Bravo on April 5. He has called that moment one of the greatest of his life. What he said to them was not a speech.

    “Let’s go.”

    They blew their own airplanes rather than leave gear

    The creed did not end when the PJs put hands on him. The big rescue birds sank into the sand. Suddenly Bravo and more than 90 operators were stranded inside Iran with the man they had come to collect. A clandestine Air Force unit came in to pull the whole package. The United States then bombed the stuck aircraft and the Little Birds — airframes reported at roughly $100 million apiece — so the technology would not sit in Iranian hands. About 50 hours after Dude 44 went down, Bravo was out. Easter Sunday. Sunrise. He called his wife.

    No Americans on the rescue force were killed. Both aviators came home.

    That is not a small thing. Anyone who has planned a personnel recovery knows the math can turn in one mechanical failure. They accepted the second problem and paid the second bill.

    Why soldiers love this country for this

    I am a former military policeman. Every MP, every grunt, every crew dog, every PJ knows what “leave no man behind” costs when it is not a movie. It costs aircraft. It costs a CIA lie to buy a colonel one more night on a ridge. It costs a Secretary of Defense looking at a Situation Room clock and saying “roll 24” — leave him out there another day so the deception can work and the force can go in clean. Hegseth called that a tough decision. It was. The alternative was worse: a prisoner, a propaganda trial, and a message to every pilot in the stack that the promise was conditional.

    Bravo never doubted they were coming. “Never a doubt. It’s what we do,” he told Norah O’Donnell. He also refused to make the story about himself:

    “This is not a story about what I went through. Instead, it’s a story of the teamwork, of the training, of the faith, of the decisions and the leadership to do something that will live in history as an example of what America is willing to do in order to uphold our promise and leave no man behind.”

    That is the whole article. The video this week is proof, not advertising. A $30 million jet was dropped by a cheap missile. A colonel free-fell onto a mountain and crawled up it on a broken back. The United States answered with first boots on Iranian ground since 1980, a deception campaign, an air package big enough to darken a sector, and the willingness to destroy its own aircraft rather than hand the enemy a trophy.

    Other nations calculate the exchange rate and leave the man. We do not. That is why men and women still volunteer to sit in the back seat of an F-15E. They know that if the chute fails and the ridge is the only cover left, the country will spend 50 hours, 92 operators, and a fortune in aluminum to bring them home.

    Never leave a man behind is not a motto on a barracks board. It is a rescue force on a ridgeline at dawn, a PJ saying get up, and a wounded weapons officer answering the only sentence that matters. Back when I was in the military as an MP, we always had complete faith in our forces always doing all they could if it were ever needed.

    Let’s go.

    — The Whatfinger News Team: Sgt Pat, Sgt K, Grok on Edits and graphics

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