The commander, whose identity cannot be revealed, told Arab News that he is unsure how they “got the word about the POW,” adding the media suggested it was an informant, “but I don’t have any personal knowledge of that.”

Regarding the operation itself, the colonel said he was given about 12 hours notice before executing the mission. To prepare, he sent one of his pilots into Iraq to meet with the mission planning team.

“My job is to transport the soldiers,” said the colonel. “I was the commander of the group, but not the commander of the mission. My pilot called back to say how many people we would be transporting. We then put together the lift package (the number of helicopters), which comprised CH-46s (Sea Knights) and CH-53s (Super Stallions).

“We launched that day at about 8:30 p.m. from a ship to go ashore. We rendezvoused with our planners and all the forces and launched our mission. Shortly afterward, they landed “in the zone” near the Saddam Hospital at Nassiriyah.

It was President Bush at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina, who gave the details of who the colonel’s team was carrying, when he said: “The Marines flew in Special Operations forces (the US Army Rangers and Navy Seals).”

“Our aim was to fly in quickly while everyone was sleeping, and while they were still trying to fathom the commotion caused by the helicopters landing, we were already gone. The idea was to be so quick that we would get out before they could figure out what was going on. We offloaded our troops who, from there, basically went off and did their thing.”

The colonel said his crews left and returned to their staging area, in a safety zone. From there, they followed the news on the ground as it progressed. “About three hours later, we were sent back in to get them, it was about 4 a.m.”

It is now known that Lynch’s rescue operation involved almost a dozen helicopters and several hundred soldiers. Broad support on the ground was also organized, which included tactical diversions and Air Force support.

Asked to comment on this, the sanguine colonel said: “There were many things going on there, including trying to rescue a POW. The area was still considered hostile territory, so they were still trying to take it. A lot of people were used in this whole evolution to save one life,” said the colonel.

When asked why he went out with his crew, this hands-on commander made it clear he doesn’t believe in commanding from behind.

He said he signed up for the mission because he knew dangers involved, and felt he couldn’t ask his men to risk their lives while he stayed behind in his stateroom.

“I wanted them to know that they have a commander who will be out there with them when things get tough.”

As for Jessica Lynch’s dramatic rescue, the colonel said it went just as planned: She was located at the hospital, put on a stretcher, and taken out to one of the waiting helicopters.

Lynch was loaded onto an H-60 and whisked onto a C-130 transport plane that flew her directly to Germany, where immediate attention could be given to her injuries. On board the USNS Comfort, the hospital auxiliary ship in the region, a 24-hour communication clampdown was imposed just in case Lynch would be brought on board before being flown to Germany.

“The level of effort used to get her, was incredible. It is heartwarming that so many Americans would risk their lives to retrieve one POW. To my knowledge, I don’t know of any mission where we actually snatched a POW from across the border,” he said.

“The chance of failure is incredibly high when dealing with a lot of unknowns,” said the colonel. “Even though you think you know almost everything about the operation, you just have to hope that the intelligence you received is correct.”

The colonel scoffed when asked if this huge rescue operation was launched because Jessica Lynch is a woman and the American public is not ready to stomach the possible consequences of having a woman POW in the hands of Iraqi troops.

“That’s absolutely false. In fact, when we first learned about the mission, we didn’t know she was a woman, her race or her service in the military. We only knew we were going in after a POW.”

The colonel said it is possible that “some people who feel that way, but it had nothing to do with the mission.”

He then asked: “If you have the possibility of saving someone from a horrible death, why wouldn’t you do it? It just doesn’t matter who they are.”

Returning to the mission, less than 36 hours before this interview with Arab News, he said: “I know the probability for success in these kinds of missions. You know there’s a high probability that you may not succeed. So you feel pretty good when it goes perfectly.”

Looking back, the colonel says that the best part was that no lives were lost in the rescue mission. “I was worried that people would be lost in the process of the rescue mission, but no one was injured, no one was killed, and we recovered the person we went in after. I don’t even think we had a sprained ankle,” he said.

But it took him some time before he learned the outcome of the mission.

“As we were the ones flying this combat mission, we didn’t know the outcome until I was able to ask our commander, ‘How did we do?’. He told me ‘We got her’”.

“Alive, I hope,” I said.

“Absolutely,” he said.

“That just made our day, to know that you could do this, and make a difference to someone’s life. Hopefully, it allows one of your servicemen to live a long and happy life when it most definitely could have been cut short. That’s the best part.”

The biggest setback, said the colonel, was the fact that they located 11 bodies at the hospital. Lynch, from Palestine, West Virginia, was among 15 members of the 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company ambushed by the Iraqi military after they got lost near Nassiriyah.

“In the course of the recovery, 11 additional bodies were discovered. Truthfully, I don’t know if they are all Americans. But that’s our pledge — we will go to extraordinary lengths to recover our comrades in arms — dead or alive.”

It was a sobering note that dimmed the celebration: “I went to shake the hand of a sergeant, and he told me not to, because he had just retrieved a body with his bare hands.”

And there were a few pinpricks during the mission: One helicopter hit a wire as it was going into the rescue zone, but the wire snapped before it could bring down the helicopter.

“Flying at night poses problems. We had been informed of towers in our flight path, for example, but we were given the wrong height of the buildings and some helicopters almost flew into a large antenna atop one of the towers.”

Also, the landing zone near the hospital was full of trash and garbage. “I almost landed on a wrecked car,” said the colonel.

And, although bullets were flying, the colonel said he “did not get the impression that anyone was shooting at us.” But it was the colonel who may have endured the biggest “pinprick” of the entire mission: When the helicopters were called back to for the “recovery”, his CH-46 would not start.

“I was a little upset, but that’s the breaks,” he said, in what may have been the major understatement of the interview. “The ‘APU’ (auxiliary power unit) wouldn’t start, so it couldn’t jump start the aircraft engines.

The colonel said they always bring extra helicopters in just for that reason, and his team made the lift in. He said he counted the helicopters as they returned back to safety.

“It was interesting” to see how fast the media picked up on their mission, he said.

“It was already in the news when I returned back to my base; we were being congratulated and I didn’t know for what.

“I wasn’t sure they were going to say how it had taken place, but then I heard it was mentioned during the daily briefing at Qatar.”

Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks announced the rescue at a predawn briefing at US Central Command in Qatar.