US airman rescued in 'MISSION OF A LIFETIME'

And our next guest led search and rescue high-risk missions on the front lines of America's most dangerous combat zones. Steve Nisman is a retired US Air Force Master Sergeant and a lead para-rescue man. He joins us now. You know, Steve, what do you have to say about these PJs

and the whole complex operation?

Well, first, thank you for having me. And it's a true pleasure and a true miracle, true Eastern miracle that all of this took place. But to what I can say about my PJs, PJ brother on the ground out there is the entire United States is extremely proud of you all. Couldn't be more proud to wear that maroon beret.

Extremely happy that the way that this turned out, this was a mission of a lifetime. This is what, when PJs or pararescuemen, when they train and they go out and they execute or plan to go execute a mission, this is a mission, we never wish it will upon anybody, but if something bad were to take place, we want to be the ones to go do it.

This is that mission to go out there and go do. So good job out there, super proud of you all. Can you go just a little bit more granular because your training, PJs have skill sets that likely were utilized here with your ability to go into crevices and mountainous areas, rock climbing skills if you will, because the details we're learning is that

this colonel had to climb some 7,000 feet into a crevice. This would have been a difficult location to find this guy. It's been described as a needle in a haystack.

Yeah, precisely, and it's a great point. We are specifically trained to go in every single environment, all right? So just taking a look back at our training itself, it takes about two and a half years to produce a pararescuement, all right?

And that's at the very basic level, all right? And then once you go beyond that and you get to the teams, it's about another year of training before you're deployable, all right? And what does that mean? That means there's a lot of things that go into being a tactician or a technical pararescueman. So mountain rescue is one of those things, one of those things that it's a perishable

skill so we train in it all of the time. For this pilot or this weapon system officer to get up into the mountains, he knows it's a very inconvenient place to go. And he knows that there's individuals out there that are uniquely trained with a skill set to go out there and get them. So for us to be able to rappel down or land on the mountainside and set up a rope systems

and put them in a tactical litter if need, that's what we're there for. These are the specialists that do this for a living.

Okay, Steve, I'm going to ask you questions from somebody who's very ignorant of how all this works. So I'm going to ask you some pretty basic stuff. So it was clear from Trey's report, the military, the president, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, all of them were in contact, according to Trey and the reports, with this pilot at all times. So how is it that they can be in contact with him and somehow the enemy isn't also able to track him.

And then part two is, how many rescuers would you imagine had to get on the ground in order to get this guy out?

Certainly, it's a good question. And first off, because we're the United States military and we got that technology, and we have the ultimate air power. Right? So, but we can see and we have unique devices that are embedded and implanted onto those ejection seats.

The pilots, they carry those things with them, whether it's beacons and encrypted beacons, encrypted communication devices. So those are things that only us, only we can use, right? And those things are authenticated specifically by specific aircraft to make sure that we're picking up the right person, right?

And then looking at the stack above or the aircraft above, we have anywhere about 30 to 40 different aircraft doing a lot of different things. And one of them is ISR, intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, right? So they could have been having cameras on those things,

sensors on that individual the entire time. All right, so the...

Oh, we lost him.

Lost him, he was in the middle of it. Because really quick, that makes me think that if those things are in the seats, right? Whatever this tracking, this high tech tracking, you better take the guy and the seat with you. Is that right?

Well, the airman would have had beacons in technology.

It's on his body.

On his body.

On his person.

But also, he says it's in the equipment or in the seat that ejects. You don't want to leave any of that behind, I imagine.

And that's a good point. Actually, what happens fairly often is you will have an after action where they'll go in and they'll try to, if they can't extract that material, they'll destroy it. But there are going to be some technologies that unfortunately this is what happens in war

There are simply gonna be left behind on the battlefield now What is good though in this circumstance is you're talking about I mean you could talk about getting frosty These guys are down there by the hundreds in some cases They are making sure that they're not just searching for and rescuing and recovering this particular individual. They have to keep other arms and other snipers and other people who may be attempting again to try to kidnap this particular

individual. They have to keep them at bay. And so what's really fascinating about what happened in this circumstance is they not only got in there, got on the ground, plucked this person out of there safely, nobody was injured, which I thought was such a great point that Griff made. But also, you will try to extract any and all material that you can that is of value. Now, some of it's going to be too big. I just saw a drone was shot down the other day. You know, too bad. That's going to

be out there. And they can try to reverse engineer that or you can try to destroy it, especially if it's obviously been damaged in a particular accident. But ultimately, you take what you can, you leave what you must, and you keep it moving because it doesn't matter if you have it if you don't know what to do with it.

And you know, the other part about the ejection seat that we see there and being left behind, that in some cases, look, technology, as great as it is, doesn't always work. And so if a beacon on the airman wasn't working, they can begin to triangulate,

and they at least know they got the beacon on the seat, so they have a starting point to figure out where to work from. And sometimes that allows them, if they get another hit, or if the signal's weak on the airmen they can then try and figure out what where he went and that I

saw that Steve Nisbet the Air Force pair jumper that was just talking to us about is how you build the case to locate him because again it's not like a GPS we plug into our phone in

the car and you get the exact There is some actual work to find the specific spot. In this case the stakes are so high, you're possibly under fire.

He's in this crevice. It's hard to believe that this technology even works in the mountains. I'm just so fascinated by it. It's amazing and it is the Easter miracle.

I'm Steve Doocy. I'm Brian Kilmeade. I'm Steve Doocy. I'm Brian Kilmeade.

And I'm Ainsley Earhart. And click here to subscribe to the Fox News YouTube page to catch our hottest interviews and most compelling analysis.