Happy Easter
We got our pilot back!
I woke up today to the wonderful news that we’d rescued our pilot. We’ll learn a lot more about what happened in days to come, but I’ll bet there’s already a fierce battle for the film rights already underway.
A lot of what we know so far comes from Trump, so take it with a grain of salt, but this is what The New York Times is reporting:
The rescue followed a life-or-death race between US and Iranian forces that stretched over two days to reach the injured airman, who is a weapons system officer, current and former US officials said. In the end, Navy SEAL Team 6 commandos extracted the officer in a massive operation that involved hundreds of special operations troops and other military personnel.
There were no US casualties among the rescue team, Mr. Trump said. All the commandos and the weapons officer returned safely, a senior US military official said. Rescue planes flew the injured airman to Kuwait for medical treatment.
This report in AeroTimes has more detail. It seems credible, though I’m in no position to know.
I’m so relieved. I’m sure you’ve been thinking what I’ve been thinking since hearing the plane was shot down. The team that rescued him didn’t just save a wounded American airman. They saved us from a hideous propaganda ordeal.
Iranian state television was broadcasting the manhunt live. Initially, a channel in the province where the plane went down instructed viewers to shoot the pilot on sight. The guidance was then revised: Deliver him to us alive. This change did not come about, I presume, because the new Supreme Leader closely consulted the Geneva Conventions and discovered that shooting a downed pilot is considered a breach of protocol.
Had they captured him alive, the consequences would have radiated outward in concentric circles of cruelty. First, there would have been the pilot’s immediate, personal torment—interrogation, coercion, staged confessions on television, medical neglect, the threat of a public execution—even the real thing, God forbid. His family would have been subjected to an even worse torture of uncertainty, rumor, forced public silence, and watching him become an instrument. We would have been subjected to the gruesome theater of hostage politics: proof-of-life videos, ritual humiliation, demands, deadlines, futile diplomacy, an endless cable-news metronome of horror.
The regime was already treating the downing of the plane as a victory, which tells you how valuable a living hostage would have been. Captured airmen are particularly useful for propaganda because they condense so many political emotions into a single figure: vulnerability, honor, vengeance, national embarrassment. He would have been made to stand for American impotence, or Trump’s recklessness, or Iran’s moral and military superiority. It would have been a sustained, God-awful national ordeal, and it would have torn us apart even more than we’re torn already. I’m so glad we’ve been spared that.
I was thinking of that pilot all day yesterday. Somewhere on the ground, alone, in hostile territory, separated during ejection, armed with no more than a sidearm, possibly gravely injured.
Also, I feared what every American old enough to remember this feared:
I remember that day quite well. I was in Paris. My father was a visiting professor at Jussieu that year. I was about eleven years old, which was too young truly to grasp what the loss of those airmen meant as a human tragedy, but not too young to understand the humiliation of it.
I’m so relieved that it seems almost churlish to point out the context, but that context is also too important to leave unremarked. Four American aircraft were hit in a single day; two were destroyed. Multiple service members were wounded. Why, exactly, is Iran newly able to down our planes? Might it be related to the gifts they’ve been recently been receiving from Russia? 1
Recall: About 48 hours before the plane was downed, Trump told us, on prime time television, that Iran “had no anti-aircraft equipment, their radar is “100 percent annihilated. We are unstoppable as a military force.” That this was untrue will pass largely unremarked because we’ve all come to accept, as the normal state of affairs, that nothing the president of the United States says is true, and if you by chance believed something he said and acted accordingly, it’s not his fault, it’s yours for being a fool.
But we can’t get used to this. It is utterly deviant, and it is too damned dangerous for our military to be under the command of a man whose words are immediately discounted, by friend and foe alike, as lies and grandiose fantasies, simply by virtue of the fact that he uttered them.
Trump doesn’t grasp that he’s lying. At the moment he says these things, he believes them. He is giving orders to our military in light of the things he believes to be true at that moment. This is insanity.
Adam Kinzinger wrote a good post about how the military trains for the scenario our pilot confronted:2
… Now let me tell you what it’s like to train for this, because I did. Every combat-coded Air Force pilot goes through SERE school—Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. I won’t describe what happens there in detail. What I will tell you is that by the time you finish, you are not afraid of capture. You are prepared for it. There is a profound difference between those two things. We memorize the Code of Conduct. We practice E&E routes—evasion and escape patterns—on every mission brief. We carry survival gear, signaling equipment, and encrypted communications devices. We know our blood chit. We know how to move at night, how to signal a rescue bird, how to resist interrogation, how to stay alive long enough for the cavalry to arrive. The moment you eject over hostile territory, you are not abandoned. You are the objective. Every available asset pivots toward getting you home.
… I know what those pilots in that C-130 are thinking right now. They are thinking about their checklist. They are thinking about their fuel state, their threat picture, their communication windows. They are not thinking about politics. They are not thinking about headlines. They are thinking: where is he, and how do we get him out.
They deserve a commander-in-chief who’s capable of discerning truth from fantasy—one capable of thinking about something, anything, beyond himself. I don’t want to hear a word about this out of Trump’s yap today. I could vomit when I think of the way he’ll take personal credit for this—with what indecent speed he’ll waddle forth to annex a drama written by other men’s courage and skill. By nightfall, if custom holds, an act of extraordinary military professionalism will be hauled into the circus ring of his ego and made to perform there as a tribute to Donald Trump. The pilot risked torture, the rescuers risked death, the family endured unspeakable dread, and the president—having done none of these things—will emerge to claim the glory. None of it will be permitted to remain solemn, human, or honorable; everything will be fed into the vast and steaming digestive machinery of his vanity and reissued as proof of his magnificence. He can’t stand in the vicinity of honor without befouling it.
He’s becoming crazier by the minute, too. On Easter Sunday, folks:
Yes, it’s real—though I don’t know whether he really wrote it; it’s not quite his prose style. But this certainly was, for real, posted on his Truth Social account. On Easter Sunday. (So much for that Nobel Peace prize.)
Meanwhile, since it is Easter Sunday, and one wouldn’t wish to end on a sour note, here are some memes made, apparently, by Iranians, about what they’d do if they found our pilot:
See:
I remember the failure of America’s rescue mission and how deeply humiliated we felt. It was like the bug-out from Saigon all over again. All that careful planning going for nought. Of course, sand storms happen, but were apparently not figured into the plan.
I am grateful that we have our airman back alive, but profoundly sad about our President’s conduct of this war.
I remember the Iran hostage crisis as another moment when Canada stood with the US. My feelings in this moment are complex. But I'm happy you got your guy out.