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A Daring US Rescue in Iran Highlights a War Going Sideways
The successful rescue of a second downed United States airman from Iranian territory brought to a close a fraught moment in the US-initiated war. There was much at stake.
First and foremost, the well-being of the pilot. Beyond that, the reputation of the US military, and the political standing of the US president facing a war gamble that has spun out of control.
The Iran war is over a month old, shows no signs of abating, and has spread throughout the Middle East; Iran’s resistance is profiting from aid from Russia and China, as well as the support of other elements of the “axis of resistance” including Hezbollah and, more recently, the Houthis in Yemen. Wealthy Gulf states find themselves the targets of Iranian drone and missile strikes. A US war “victory” against Iran seems nowhere in sight. A success was desperately needed.
On the Iranian side, the capture of the pilot would have amounted to a propaganda triumph and created huge leverage in any negotiations to end the war. Even the downing of the US F-15 warplane allowed the Iranian regime to claim that American control of the air was a mere myth and that American strategy had failed.
President Donald Trump announced the rescue on Truth Social on the morning of April 5. Naturally, he celebrated “one of the most daring Search and Rescue Operations in US history.” All CSAR (combat search and rescue) operations are risky and complex. They require intelligence to locate and track the downed aircrew and to keep a watch on any closing in of enemy forces. To effect a rescue, a CSAR mission requires that any enemy air defences or air capabilities be destroyed, so that means putting lots of combat aircraft in the sky. You need helicopters or, in this case, larger specialized transport planes to bring in special forces soldiers, small helicopters, and equipment to secure the area, and you need an ability to evacuate, provide medical assistance, and get to safety quickly. Few armed forces have this multi-layered capability. Canada, fortunately, has never had to engage in a CSAR mission behind enemy lines since 1945.
More details emerged at a press conference from the White House on April 6. The first rescue operation involved twenty-one aircraft operating in daylight. The pilot was quickly evacuated by helicopter. The second rescue mission was much larger in scale, involving no less than 155 combat aircraft, including drones. The second downed airman, the “back seater,” a wounded weapons officer, had been on the run for forty-eight hours in mountainous terrain before he was located and lifted to safety.
Trump confirmed that the US had to leave two damaged Hercules aircraft (he called them old) on the ground at an improvised airstrip inside Iran and that a rescue helicopter that carried the first pilot to safety was hit by Iranian ground fire. A ground-support aircraft, an A-10 (known as a “Warthog”) was also hit and had to be abandoned over the sea by its pilot. The CSAR mission had the hallmarks of a very close-run thing. Trump admitted the US had enjoyed some luck or maybe, he suggested, divine intervention.
But Trump couldn’t restrain himself in this moment of victory. The successful rescue obviously brought huge relief to the president and spared him and his war effort from embarrassment and the untold complications of having to deal with a US hostage in Iranian hands. Riding high, he just couldn’t resist the temptation to distort history and try to make the rescue out as a unique moment, a credit to himself and his team.
He laid down this claim on April 5: “This is the first time in military memory that two US pilots have been rescued, separately, deep in enemy territory.” Who knows what counts for military memory in the mind of Trump or his acolytes. But this is just plain false. The memory of the Vietnam War, for one, remains powerful.
It was during the Vietnam War that the US began to perfect CSAR operations. In the course of the US’ long engagement in the Vietnam war, it flew many combat missions over North Vietnamese– and Viet Cong–controlled territory. While North Vietnam did not have much of an air force, it was well equipped with sophisticated air defences, principally Soviet, radar-guided SAMs (surface-to-air missiles). Regular US air missions combined with the lethality of North Vietnamese air defences meant a mounting toll of shootdowns. One estimate has it that no fewer than 2,780 aircrew lives were saved in rescue operations—but at a cost: seventy-one CSAR aircrew killed and forty-five aircraft lost. Among the principal advances made were the acquisition of long-range search and rescue helicopters (called “Jolly Green Giants”) and more potent ground-attack aircraft.
Arguably the greatest triumph for a rescue operation during the Vietnam war occurred in April 1972. It involved bringing to safety two downed US airmen. The National Museum of the United States Air Force calls it “the largest rescue operation in USAF history.”
The mission was known as “Bat 21,” for the call sign of one of the downed US aircraft, an electronic warfare plane, a twin-engined jet (EB-66C), shot down by a surface-to-air missile. The electronic warfare specialist aboard that plane, Lieutenant Colonel Gene Hambleton, parachuted to earth into the middle of a massive North Vietnamese offensive (known as the “Easter offensive”). He spent most of his time behind enemy lines trying to avoid being seen by a North Vietnamese army on the move that numbered three combat divisions.
Costs in aircraft lost and rescue aircrew killed mounted as the Bat 21 mission proceeded. Those costs included another airman, Mark Clark, forced to eject from an OV-10 plane, a twin-engined turboprop used for air reconnaissance, who also ended up on the ground trying to evade capture.
Clark managed to float downriver to meet his rescuers, a SEAL team mostly comprised of South Vietnamese commandos. A remaining detachment of a US Navy SEAL and a volunteer South Vietnamese commando proceeded to attempt the rescue of Hambleton further upstream. With much luck and some timely air support, they managed to commandeer a sampan and get Hambleton to the safety of a US armoured personnel carrier. Hambleton had successfully evaded capture for eleven and a half days before his rescue by the two-man US Navy SEAL team.
It was an amazing story. The Navy SEAL, Lieutenant Tom Norris, who accomplished the rescue was awarded the Medal of Honour by then President Gerald Ford on April 3, 1976. His South Vietnamese colleague and volunteer, Petty Officer Kiet, became the only Vietnamese of the entire war to be awarded the Navy Cross.
The parallels between 1972 and 2026 are striking. Every rescue operation involves remarkable military capabilities and extraordinary heroism. None deserve to be forgotten or lost to a president’s convenient, politically self-serving “military memory.” Even more boasting about the Iran rescue mission success was the motif of the subsequent White House press conference on April 6, with acolytes John Ratcliffe, the Central Intelligence Agency director, and Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, joining in the unstinting praise of the president.
This is a president desperate to show that he has single-handedly rehabilitated the US military, singularly transformed the exercise of American power abroad, found “wins” that none of his weakling predecessors, especially Barack Hussein Obama, could achieve. The rescue of downed aircrew is rightly to be celebrated—but not at the expense of historical truth and not to serve one man’s increasingly reckless political agenda and his unending, repetitive bombast.
Adapted from as “CSARs: Risky Missions” by Wesley Wark (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.
The post A Daring US Rescue in Iran Highlights a War Going Sideways first appeared on The Walrus.
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