US Colonel Hiked 5 Miles, Gained 7,000 Feet Injured — How He Survived 36 Hours in Iran

On Friday, April 3rd, at roughly 7:00 a.m. local time over southwestern Iran, his F-15E Strike Eagle was hit by an Iranian missile. In the seconds that followed, everything he had been trained for his entire career became the only thing keeping him alive. This is the story of what he did next, minute by minute, hour by hour.

For 36 hours behind enemy lines in the mountains of Iran with a $60,000 bounty on his head and the entire might of the IRGC closing in. The ejection happens in fractions of a second. Both the pilot and the WSO ejected successfully after the aircraft was struck. The pilot and weapons systems officer drifted apart after ejecting their parachutes, carrying them to different locations in the rugged terrain of southwestern Iran near the town of Lali in Khuzestan province.

That separation, the moment the wind takes two parachutes in slightly different directions, is what turned a difficult rescue into a 36-hour ordeal. One man comes down in an accessible location. US forces find him within hours. The other comes down further into the terrain, into the mountains, into the dark.

7,000 ft up, cut into rock and wind, a United States Air Force colonel sat alone with a pistol, a radio, and a beacon. He was bleeding. Not catastrophic, but enough to slow him down. Ejection will do that. The spine compresses, limbs take a hit, you walk it off or you don’t. He moved anyway. Seriously wounded, moving anyway, in the mountains of southwestern Iran.

The first thing SERE training tells you after ejection is this: Do not stay at the crash site. The wreckage is a beacon. It marks where you came from. It tells the enemy exactly where to start searching. Heat signatures from burning fuel, smoke visible for miles, debris trail pointing directly to your landing zone.

True to his SERE training, he climbed out of the crash basin, away from the wreckage, away from heat signatures and predictable search patterns. He hiked about 5 miles, gained roughly 7,000 ft of altitude, and went to ground in a hide position, a rock crevice. All the while he was being over-watched by MQ-9 Reaper drones keeping any Iranian pursuers at bay.

5 miles on foot, seriously injured, gaining 7,000 ft of altitude in hostile mountain terrain while bleeding. While IRGC forces were already mobilizing in the valley below with a $60,000 bounty and state television urging civilians to shoot on sight. That is not a story about luck. That is years of training being executed at the absolute limit of physical endurance.

The CSEL device, the technology that kept him tethered to the rescue network without giving away his position. When the F-15E crew ejected over Iran, they did not go silent. They did not vanish. They switched to a device called the Combat Survivor Evader Locator, the CSEL, built by Boeing. Attached to the pilot’s survival vest, it survives the ejection sequence and immediately starts working.

It does not transmit voice. Voice can be intercepted, tracked, triangulated. Instead, it sends short encrypted bursts, location data, status updates, simple coded messages. Injured, enemy nearby, moving. Frequency-hopping signals that look like background noise to Iranian electronic warfare systems.

No voice, no easy signal to track. No triangulation possible. It links to military satellites. It feeds real-time data to rescue teams on the ground and in the air. The colonel’s precise location within meters was being fed to CENTCOM, to the White House, to SEAL Team Six in Kuwait, to every element of the rescue package building at that moment.

He could stay completely silent, completely hidden, and still be fully connected to the entire US military rescue network. The airman activated a personal locator beacon after landing in Iran, alerting the military to his location, but he restricted the use of his beacon because Iranian forces could also detect its signal.

He used it only in short bursts, only when necessary, only when the risk of detection was lower than the cost of staying silent. That is the discipline of SERE training in action, not just knowing how to use the equipment, knowing when not to. Knowing that every second the beacon transmits is a second Iran’s warfare systems have to locate the signal source.

Knowing when the risk tips one way and when it tips the other. Making that calculation alone, injured, in the dark, in a rock crevice at 7,000 ft. The CIA operation running in parallel. While the colonel lay hidden in his crevice, something else was happening entirely. Something that exists in the gap between military operations and intelligence work.

Something that bought him the time he needed. Prior to locating the weapons systems officer, the CIA launched a deception campaign spreading word inside Iran that US forces had already found him and were moving him on the ground in a convoy for exfiltration out of the country. The CIA told Iran’s intelligence network through back channels, through informants, through the layers of human intelligence that operate inside every conflict that the colonel had already been found.

That he was already being moved, that the search was over. Iranian search teams redirected. IRGC units turned toward the route the ground convoy would take. Local informants started looking for movement that did not exist. The entire Iranian search apparatus swung in the wrong direction, buying the colonel hours he desperately needed and giving the rescue package the window to close in on his real location.

Uh a senior official said, “This was the ultimate needle in a haystack, but in this case, it was a brave American soul inside a mountain crevice, invisible but for CIA’s capabilities. Once the airman’s position had been identified, the CIA immediately passed the exact location to the Pentagon, the US military, and the White House.

Invisible but for CIA capabilities, the CSEL was transmitting short bursts. The Reaper drones overhead were watching the terrain. The CIA’s human intelligence network was feeding data. And at some point, at some precise moment in the middle of the night, the location locked in. The colonel’s hiding place was identified, his position confirmed, the order went to the White House.

President Trump ordered an immediate rescue mission. The operation was carried out by a specialized commando unit with high-volume air cover. Now the rescue package moves. A hasty task force was created, Army’s 150th Special Operations Aviation Regiment and the Navy’s DEVGRU SEAL Team Six. The aircraft involved included HH-60W Jolly Green Two helicopters, HC-130J Combat King aircraft, fighter jets providing top cover, and MQ-9 Reaper drones establishing a close protection perimeter around the WSO’s position.

SEAL Team Six into Iran in the dark to extract one man from a mountain crevice while IRGC forces are converging on the area from multiple directions. MQ-9 Reapers established a close protection perimeter around the WSO’s position, engaging targets moving within roughly 3 km of his location. Individual movements identified, cleared, engaged.

All while a recovery element moved to contact and aircraft deconflicted above. Individual movements cleared, engaged. That means the Reapers were killing Iranian soldiers who got too close in real time, in the dark, while the rescue team climbed toward the colonel’s ridge. While he lay in his crevice, injured, listening to the sound of aircraft above and the sound of Iranian forces in the valley below, Iranian convoys attempting to reach the area were struck to keep them away from the extraction zone. Special Operations

Forces established a temporary staging base inside Iran within reach of critical Iranian military and nuclear infrastructure, landing two C-130s to support the mission. A temporary base inside Iran, two C-130s on Iranian soil. Hundreds of special forces personnel operating on Iranian ground.

F-15s and fighters orbiting overhead providing air cover. Reaper drones killing approaching IRGC units. CIA deception operations running simultaneously. All of it for one man in a crevice. Then the extraction. One Little Bird helicopter flew to that mountain top and rescued the WSO, bringing him back to the landing strip. And then the problem started.

The two C-130s nose gears got stuck in the dirt. After a few hours, they had to bring in three AFSOC planes to fly out the rescued WSO and the roughly 100 personnel involved in the operation. The C-130s was stuck in Iranian soil with 100 special forces operators aboard, with the rescued colonel, with Iranian forces that had survived the air strikes still in the area.

With daylight coming, the US Air Force used multiple bombs to blow up the two aircraft that were abandoned. The mission cost approximately $300 million. $300 million, two C-130s destroyed, multiple aircraft losses, helicopter crews wounded, Black Hawks hit, two days of Reaper drone coverage, CIA deception operations. SEAL Team Six on the ground in Iran, fighter jets conducting strikes against Iranian ground units during the extraction window.

Reports emerged of large numbers of dead and wounded IRGC troops and Basij forces being transferred from Black Mountain to Day Dasht Hospital following US Air Force strikes targeting Iranian forces during the rescue. Iran lost people trying to get to him. American forces killed IRGC soldiers to keep them away.

This was not a clean extraction. This was a battle. And through all of it, through 36 hours in a mountain crevice, through the ejection that injured him, through the 5-mile hike gaining 7,000 ft in the dark, through the bounty broadcasts and the IRGC convoys below and the civilians with rifles looking for $60,000, the colonel did what his training told him to do. Stay small. Stay hidden.

Use the beacon in short bursts only. Trust the CSEL to keep you connected without giving you away. Move away from the wreckage. Find high ground. Find cover. Wait. Former F-16 pilot Lieutenant Colonel Dan Rooney said, “As a fighter pilot, the last thing we do before we go fly a combat sortie is we brief up the SERE mission, understanding what will happen if we we to get out of that aircraft.

We are very prepared to escape and evade and set ourselves up in a position to get rescued. Very prepared. Every mission, every sortie, the last brief before you strap in is what you do if it goes wrong. For 5 weeks, the colonel climbed into that jet without needing it. On April 3rd, he needed every word of it.

Air Force Special Warfare Recruiting confirmed the rescue in a statement. Special operators willingly put their lives on the line to rescue the fallen, engaged in a massive firefight at the extraction site uh and fought with all they had so that others may live. So that others may live. That is the entire ethos of combat search and rescue distilled into five words.

The Reaper crews who watched his position for 36 hours, the Jolly Green Two crews who flew into Iranian air defenses that had already shot down an F-15 and an A-10, the SEAL Team Six operators who climbed that ridge in the dark, the CIA officers who ran a deception campaign inside a hostile country, the C-130 crews who landed on Iranian soil and waited.

All of it for one man in a crevice at 7,000 ft. The colonel was evacuated to Kuwait for medical treatment. He is wounded but expected to make a full recovery. He is home, injured but home, and somewhere in the mountains of southwestern Iran, two burning C-130s mark the spot where America reached in and took one of its own back.