“God was watching us” during the historic rescue operation in Iran, President Donald Trump said during a press conference on Monday, detailing the rescue operation.
President Donald Trump kicked off the press conference detailing the elite rescue operation taking place over the weekend behind enemy lines in what has been described as “one of the most challenging and complex” rescue missions in the history of U.S. special operations.”
Trump described the conditions survived by the “heroic F-15 weapon system officer” — one of two crew members in the F-15E Strike Eagle shot down over Iran. Both ejected but were separated by several miles. The pilot was recovered hours later, but the second crew member remained missing, triggering the historic rescue operation.
He had evaded capture on the ground in Iran for almost 48 hours, Trump said, adding, “That’s a long time when you’re in tough shape and when you’re bleeding.”
Despite being injured, the airman “scaled cliff faces bleeding rather profusely, treated his own wounds and contacted American forces to transmit his location,” Trump said.
“They have a very sophisticated beeper type apparatus that is on them at all times… on these missions, they make sure they have lots of battery space and they’re in good shape. And this one worked really well, amazingly. Saved his life,” Trump explained.
“We immediately mobilized a massive operation to retrieve him from the mountain holdout. And he kept going higher and higher. The mountain kept getting rougher and rougher, and really, very, very hard to find. The second rescue mission involved 155 aircraft, including four bombers, 64 fighters, 48 refueling tankers, 13 rescue aircraft, and more,” the president said.
He walked through the contingency plan to save the airman, as the conditions of the sand posed issues with the equipment.
“We thought there may be a problem taking off because of the weight of the plane. And then we also had all the men jumping back onto the planes, and they got pretty bogged down. And we had a contingency plan, which was unbelievable, where lighter, faster aircraft came in, and they took them out. We blew up the old planes. We blew them up to smithereens, because we had equipment on the planes that, frankly, we’d like to take, but I don’t think it was worthwhile spending another four hours there taking it off,” Trump said, explaining they did not want the enemy examining our equipment.
“So these were large planes that were old and pretty old, and we blew them up, and we had faster, lighter planes come in, and they were able to land on the sand. We needed the bigger planes because we had so much equipment that we knew. We took three helicopters over there, which were very strongly used, and couldn’t have lived without them. They did. They performed unbelievably well,” Trump said, thanking the members of the U.S. armed forces involved in the historic operations, which were even trickier in some respects, because they were , essentially, racing Iranian forces and civilians, both of which were scrambling to find the U.S. airman.
Trump said, “They really were historic. It’s just not something that’s done, and you’d understand it, not that they don’t want to do it, but when you’re going into areas, when you look at these helicopters, when you look at the amount of bullets and everything else that they took, when you go into these areas, you don’t come out like we came out.”
“God was watching us,” Trump concluded. “We were in Easter territory, I guess. But God was watching us. Amazing, because when you look at the machinery they took, they took damage.”
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