President Trump on Monday revealed amazing new details about the harrowing 36 hours a US colonel known by the code name “Dude Bravo 44” spent behind enemy lines in Iran bleeding “profusely” before rescue.
The shot-down Air Force weapons officer, who was “injured quite seriously,” scaled a cliff more than a mile up and treated his own wounds while hiding in a crevice in an area “teeming with terrorists” — before US forces miraculously flew him to safety even after their aircraft nearly got disastrously stuck in wet sand, Trump said.
“In the United States military, we leave no American behind. We don’t do it,” Trump told reporters at a White House briefing.
The trapped airman’s fortitude and “absolute commitment to surviving” was the stuff of legends, said Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The rescuers then demonstrated “a breath-taking show of skill” in successfully retrieving “the highly respected airman” from the “treacherous mountain terrain,” Trump said.
The pilot of the F-15E jet downed overnight Thursday into Friday had been quickly located and rescued south of Isfahan in Iran. But the colonel had landed a “significant distance” away from the pilot and could not be easily tracked, Trump said.
The seriously wounded airman had to remain alive while the US launched “one of the largest, most complex, most harrowing combat searches … ever attempted by the military,” the president said.
“The heroic F-15 weapons system officer had evaded capture on the ground in Iran for almost 48 hours. That’s a long time when you’re in tough shape and when you’re bleeding,” Trump said.
He “was injured quite badly and stranded in an area teeming with terrorists from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”
Iran used sniffer dogs to try to track down the downed airman, but they were ineffective at tracking him down, according to US military sources.
“They were given a tremendous incentive to find this pilot,” Trump said. “Despite the peril, the officer followed his training and climbed into the treacherous mountain terrain and started climbing toward a higher altitude, something they were trained to do in order to evade capture.
“You want to go as far away because they all head right to that site,” he said of enemy forces. “You want to be as far away as you can.”
In total, 155 military aircraft including four bombers, 64 fighters, 48 refueling tankers and 13 rescue aircraft were deployed for the mission, Trump said
“A lot of it was subterfuge,” the president explained. “We wanted [Iranian forces] to think he was in another location.”
Many of the aircraft had to fly low as part of the mission, leaving them in the potentially deadly line of heavy fire, Trump said.
“We got a helicopter with a lot of bullets in it,’’ he said.
Trump described how military planes landed in an agricultural field and assembled three small helicopters to rescue the injured pilot without a single fatality.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe said his agency participated in the “deception campaign” to buy the airman and his rescuers time.
What to know about the daring rescue of the US airman in Iran:
He said the CIA helped “confuse the Iranians who were desperately hunting for our airman’’ and also “deployed both human assets and exquisite technologies” to find the crew member, likening the search “to hunting for a single same grain of sand in the middle of a desert.
“Our intelligence reflects that the Iranians were embarrassed and ultimately humiliated by the success of this audacious rescue mission,” Ratcliffe claimed.
He described how the rescuers and the colonel they were saving almost didn’t make it out.
There was a problem with the “wet sand” and the “weight” of the aircraft trying to fly back to safety, Trump said.
“We … had all the men jumping back onto the planes, and they got pretty well bogged down. And we had a continued contingency plan which was unbelievable,” he said.
Before the rescue was successful, “I would have said that was impossible,’’ Trump said.
Caine said, “The single most important contributor to a successful rescue operation is the spirit of attack inside the heart of that downed aviator.
“Their will to survive, their will to evade, their will to recover, is everything. In this case, the back seater’s absolute commitment to surviving made much of our efforts possible,” he said.
“Lastly, and most importantly, to Dude Bravo 4-4, welcome home. Job well done,’’ Caine said.
Trump said some military leaders opposed the rescue, fearing hundreds of American troop deaths.
“Not everybody was on board,” Trump said, specifying that G. Caine and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth “were totally on-board.
“There were military people that said, ‘You just don’t do this, you don’t go into the heart of a very powerful military,’ ” the president said. “There were people within the military that said it’s unwise.”
Trump asked Caine to share how many US troops were involved in the rescue, with the general demurring, “I would love to keep that a secret.”
“It was hundreds,” the president said. “Hundreds of people could have been killed, so we had people within the military that said this was not a wise [idea].”
Iran was “embarrassed and humiliated” by the daring rescue, Hegseth said.
“Ultimately, it was an impotent Iranian threat,” he said of the country’s warnings against the US. “And today, as the CIA director mentioned, Iran’s military, and we know this, is embarrassed and humiliated, and they should be.”
The cabinet official noted that the colonel was saved over Easter weekend.
“When he was finally able to activate his emergency transponder, his first message was simple and it was powerful. He sent a message, ‘God is good,’ ” Hegseth recounted.
“In that moment of isolation and danger, his faith and fighting spirit shone through,” he said. “Shot down on a Friday — Good Friday — hidden in a cave, a crevice all of Saturday, and rescued on Sunday. Flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter Sunday, a pilot reborn.”
