Monday, September 14, 2026 · Independent editorial

God is good behind enemy lines

He looked up and there was no parachute. That is the moment Dude 44 Bravo described to Norah O’Donnell on 60 Minutes, in Joshua Klein’s account for Breitbart. “So I paused right then. And I prayed, ‘Lord, your will be done. But if I’m getting through this, I need help.’”

Bravo was the weapons officer in the back seat of an F-15E. On April 2 the jet was hit by a shoulder-fired missile on a strike south of Isfahan. The missile damaged his parachute. Experts later figured he hit the desert somewhere between 70 and 100 miles an hour. He broke his back, an arm, and a shoulder. Asked how he lived, he said, “A modern-day miracle.” He was careful about the word. He does not claim God kept him from getting hurt. He says the injuries stopped short of the kind that would have killed him on the ground.

American forces were tracking about 1,500 Iranian personnel within ten miles while he climbed, broken, toward a ridge around 7,000 feet. When he got a radio working he sent three words: “God is good.” His pilot, call sign Alpha, was pulled out first, in daylight, under fire. About 92 Americans went onto Iranian soil for Bravo. Breitbart says that was the first U.S. boots there in 46 years. He reached them as the sun came up on Easter Sunday. President Trump had already called the rescue an Easter miracle back in April.

“I have great faith in my creator,” Bravo said. “And second only to that is my faith in the men and women of the United States military.” He does not want the story to be about how hard his weekend was. He wants it to be about faith, training, and the decision not to leave him there.

The same weekend, vandals in Phoenix scratched “Jesus” and the cross off a sign beside the Charlie Kirk statue at Turning Point headquarters and threw red paint on the statue. That is a different story, and it is an ugly one. It does not cancel what a man said into a radio in the desert. A party can cheer the rescue. The prayer was not theirs. It was his, and it was first.

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