00:00Bueno, es un gran honor de estar con ustedes, y Happy Easter.
00:05We had a great Easter.
00:06Este es uno de nuestros mejores Easters, creo, en muchas diferentes formas.
00:10I puedo decir que militarily, ha sido uno de los mejores.
00:15Así, buen día.
00:16Tenemos bastante a lo que discutir.
00:18Vamos a ir a bastante bien detalle.
00:21Y tenemos la gente que está más involucrada.
00:24Vamos a darles la exactitud.
00:27Y estamos aquí hoy para celebrar el suceso de uno de los grandes, más complejos, más harrowing
00:33combat searches.
00:35I guess you would call it a search and rescue mission.
00:38Ever attempted by the military, generally when planes are knocked down in war, especially
00:44when you're fighting a strong group, an evil group, you can't really do this because you
00:53send in 200 men to pick up one.
00:55And it's something that's usually not attempted as much as you want to attempt.
01:00And bad things happen to that one or two.
01:04And in this case, we did two and might not have been attempted before, but we did.
01:09And we got, we had great talent, but we got a little luck too, I would say.
01:16And we were helped by a lot of people, a lot of great people.
01:19And it was an honor to be involved with it, it's very historic.
01:24This is a rescue that's very historic.
01:28It'll go down in the books.
01:29Late Thursday night, an American F-15 fighter jet went down deep inside enemy territory in
01:37Iran while participating in Operation Epic Fury, where we're doing unbelievably well, well
01:44at a level that nobody's ever seen before.
01:48The entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.
01:54Both members of the crew ejected from the aircraft and landed alive.
01:58On Iranian soil, I immediately was asked to make a decision.
02:06I ordered the U.S. Armed Forces to do whatever was necessary to bring our brave warriors back
02:11home.
02:12A risky decision, because we could have ended up with 100 dead as opposed to one or two.
02:19It's a hard decision to make.
02:21But in the United States military, we leave no American behind.
02:25We don't do it.
02:26Within hours, our armed forces deployed 21 military aircraft into hostile airspace, many
02:32flying at very low altitude, being shot by bullets.
02:38You bring rifles into play when you're going that low, but there are also certain advantages.
02:45And in broad daylight over Iran for seven hours, at times facing very, very heavy enemy fire.
02:52We have a helicopter that's got a lot of bullets in it.
02:55It's amazing.
02:56We just realized how good those weapons are, our machines are.
03:02Nobody has, nobody has the equipment that we have, and nobody has the military that we have.
03:07Not even close.
03:08We're the most powerful military anywhere in the world by far.
03:11The flight crews and warfighters aboard those aircraft took extraordinary risks to rescue their fellow
03:18service members.
03:20This first wave of search and rescue forces successfully located the pilot of the F-15.
03:25And he was extracted from enemy territory by an H-860 Jolly Green 2 helicopter, fabulous machine, as our warriors
03:36faced gunfire at very close range.
03:41It's amazing that when you look at the machinery, what happened, that nobody was even injured.
03:48Meanwhile, the second crew member, a weapons system officer, highly respected colonel, had landed a significant distance away from the
03:56pilot when you're going at those speeds.
03:58Even if you go out two or three seconds later, it's miles, it's miles and miles away because you're going
04:06fast.
04:07He was injured quite badly and stranded in an area teeming with terrorists from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a
04:15rough group, as well as besieged militia and local authorities.
04:22Many, on top of everything else, they told the communities actually within side of Iran, the people of Iran, they
04:32were given a tremendous incentive to find this pilot.
04:36Despite the peril, the officer followed his training and climbed into the treacherous mountain terrain and started climbing toward a
04:45higher altitude, something they were trained to do in order to evade capture.
04:52They want to always go as far away from the site of the shoot down.
04:59You want to go as far away because they all head right to that site.
05:02You want to be as far away as you can.
05:04And he was injured and he was an amazing, amazing thing.
05:09He scaled cliff faces, bleeding rather profusely, treated his own wounds and contacted American forces to transmit his location.
05:20They have a very sophisticated beeper type apparatus that is on them at all times.
05:30And when they, when they go out on these missions, they make sure they have lots of battery space and
05:35they're in good shape.
05:37And this one worked really well, amazingly, saved his life.
05:41We immediately mobilized a massive operation to retrieve him from the mountain holdout.
05:49And he kept going higher and higher.
05:51The mountain kept getting rougher and rougher and really very, very hard to find.
05:55The second rescue mission involved 155 aircraft, including four bombers, 64 fighters, 48 refueling tankers, 13 rescue aircraft and more.
06:08We were bringing them all over and a lot of it was subterfuge.
06:13We wanted to have them think he was in a different location because they had a vast military force out
06:19there.
06:20Thousands, thousands of people were looking.
06:23So we wanted them to look in different areas.
06:25So we were scattered all over like we were right on top of them.
06:30We had seven different locations where they thought and they were very confused.
06:34They said, well, wait a minute.
06:35They've got groups here.
06:37They've got groups there.
06:38It's an amazing thing.
06:40I was listening to these great people, these great generals.
06:46General Raisin Cain was amazing.
06:48And Pete Hexeth was amazing.
06:50But I listened to the whole thing.
06:51It was pretty amazing.
06:53So they had all these different sites where everybody thought he was located.
06:57We think we have them over there because they have nine planes circling a little area.
07:02That's 25 miles down the coast.
07:06So in a breathtaking show of skill and precision, lethality and force, America's military descended on the area, the real
07:15area, engaged the enemy, rescued the stranded officer.
07:20Destroyed all threats and exited Iranian territory while taking no casualties of any kind.
07:28The heroic F-15 weapons system officer had evaded capture on the ground in Iran for almost 48 hours.
07:38That's a long time when you're in tough shape and when you're bleeding.
07:41It's a long time when when we left, as you probably know, we had two large planes, old, pretty old
07:51planes that carried a lot.
07:52We needed a lot more equipment going in than coming out, obviously, because going in, we needed to be able
07:59to scale mountains.
08:00And we had a lot of equipment, but the sand was it was sandy, wet sand.
08:06So we thought there may be a problem taking off because of the weight of the plane.
08:11And then we also had all the men jumping back onto the planes and they got pretty well bogged down.
08:17And we had a contingency plan, which was unbelievable, where lighter, faster aircraft came in and they took them out.
08:25We blew up the old planes and we blew them up to smithereens because we had equipment on the planes
08:31that, frankly, we'd like to take.
08:33But I don't think it was worthwhile spending another four hours there taking it off.
08:37So we didn't want anybody to have the best best equipment anywhere in the world.
08:41We didn't want anybody examining our anti-aircraft and other equipment.
Comentarios