This is awesome. A big hat tip to Will for putting this one up on his site. In this photo below, it shows Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Vice President Joe Biden and on the far right, Secretary of State John Kerry, which back then they were all Senators. The back story of this photo is that all three of these men were in a helicopter in Afghanistan during winter. During the flight, the snow got really bad and the helicopters were forced to land on some mountain top in Afghanistan.
They put out a distress call and the military was not in a position to rescue them. So security contractors or what I assume were WPS folks were called in, and they came over land to rescue them. Here is the quote in the article.
With the rapidly worsening weather, there was no way to evacuate the senators to safety by air. The U.S. military didn’t have the necessary people and vehicles nearby to rescue the senators via ground transport before the storm hit.
So the U.S. Embassy asked the men of Blackwater USA to go in by land and evacuate them to Bagram. They did the job, and the senators knew who came to their rescue mountainside when the military could not.
One of the points of Will’s post is that none of these men would acknowledge that they were rescued by contractors, or they outright lied and said it was American troops that rescued them. Here is what then Senator Kerry had to say.
“After several hours, the senators were evacuated by American troops and returned overland to Bagram Air Base, and left for their next scheduled stop in Ankara, Turkey,” a statement from Kerry’s office said. “Sen. Kerry thanks the American troops, who were terrific as always and who continue to do an incredible job in Afghanistan.”
Nope, you were not rescued by American troops– you were rescued by civilians or security contractors…..
Oh well, but at least I can help to correct the record on this blog and give it some more attention. This is just one example of many, where security contractors were the ‘cavalry’ and yet their actions were ignored or barely given a mention. If folks have any photos of the convoy that rolled up to rescue them, I would gladly make the edit and add it to this post. Good job to that team for making this rescue! –Matt
Edit: 09/24/2014–If you check out the comments below, you will see that there was a military convoy that went up to rescue these folks, but there were also contractors in vehicles that went with this convoy. So to clarify, both military and contractors were involved in this rescue operation. At the time of writing this post, I was only going with the information that was available or what was coming in via comments and email. I wasn’t there. I also said I would make an edit if new information came in, so hopefully this helps. Keep checking the comments and the full story will present itself. Thanks to all for correcting the record and contributing to the story.
Edit: 08/27/2021–In light of current events, this story is getting traction again. Erik Prince has brought up this mission in recent discussions and I have also found a link to an after action report, written by the Hammer 5 SL. The men you see in this photo below, to include our current President Joe Biden, owe their lives to the efforts of Blackwater and of the military units that came to their rescue that day in Afghanistan. Not to mention the work of BW guys to protect this group on the rest of their trip in Afghanistan.
