AIRWAY HEIGHTS, Wash. — Iran shot down a United States F-15 fighter jet today, sparking a rescue mission to find one of the two crew members who remains missing.
The incident highlights specialized survival training that military personnel receive for these situations. SERE training — Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape — prepares service members who find themselves behind enemy lines.
“How do I get rescued? How do I get back into U.S. hands? And so there is intensive training that nobody wants to go through, but it prepares them,” said Cal Coblentz, a retired Air Force SERE specialist.
Fairchild Air Force Base has one of the largest SERE training facilities. The program teaches airmen emergency parachuting, day and night navigation, camouflage, finding and preparing food, and communicating with rescue crews.
Training covers every environment. “Every circumstance, urban, rural, desert, Arctic, jungle, oceans, temperate,” Coblentz said.
Coblentz has worked with personnel who survived real combat situations.
“I’ve talked to and I’ve trained people that have been shot down behind enemy lines and talked to them afterwards and they’ve said the training just comes back, the muscle memory of what to do just floods back through,” he said.
This training gives Coblentz confidence in the current rescue operation.
“We have a high probability of anybody being alive behind enemy lines. We have a very high probability of getting them back, even before they get captured,” he said.
The rescue mission faced challenges. An A-10 Warthog attack jet and two Black Hawk helicopters involved in the operation were struck by Iranian fire. The A-10 crashed and crews aboard the Black Hawks were injured, but all personnel are accounted for.
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