General Kenneth McKenzie, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, said in a television interview that “the only thing I can say is that Gd’s hand protects us. God was with us in the Iranian attack. “
Five days after Qassam Suleimani was assassinated on January 3, a U.S. military base in Iraq was attacked by 16 Iranian ballistic missiles. The missiles missed, and 11 hit the target.
Recently, during an interview given by General Mackenzie to the network’s 60 Minutes program CBS, He revealed some of the miracles that caused the United States not to go to war against Iran in the end.
Half of the base was evacuated before the missiles were launched, but the other half remained to man the base, with some of the soldiers even stationed above ground in case of an infantry attack.
“We had a plan to respond if Americans were dead. I think if we had not evacuated from the base, we would have lost 20 or 30 planes and we would have lost between 100 and 150 soldiers,” Mackenzie said.
Alan Johnson, one of 29 soldiers who were awarded the Purple Heart Decoration for their courage during the attack, sent a farewell message to his son shortly before the bombing began. According to a report in the Daily Mail, in a video the officer sent to his son, he said these words, a kind of will: “Hey buddy if you see this video, then bad things happened to Dad last night, so I need you to be strong, okay, Mom, “And just always know in your heart that I love you, okay. Bye friend.”
After the attack, Johnson described the missiles flying overhead “like a freight train” before crashing to the ground when about 40 soldiers crowded into bunkers designed for only ten people, and were built to stand in front of explosive devices weighing only 100 kilograms.
“We thought we were going to be burned to death,” Johnson described the moments of horror as he and other soldiers ran to the distance of a football field to take cover in tiny bunkers that were already filled to capacity. “The only thing I can say is that Gd’s hand is protecting us,” he said. “Because really no one was supposed to survive it.”
Mackenzie noted that the U.S. understood that Iran would respond to Suleimani’s assassination. Intelligence information informed them that Iran was preparing 27 medium-range ballistic missiles to fire at the base manned by 2,000 U.S. troops. An intelligence officer reported to top military chiefs before the attack.
1,000 soldiers were evacuated from the base carefully so that the Iranians would not see the soldiers leaving and would have time to adjust their attack plan. Despite the Iranians’ plan to kill 2,000 Americans that day, most had left the base earlier, and others had taken refuge. However, there were many soldiers who faced the formidable chance of staying above the ground during the bombing in case a ground attack followed.
One of the soldiers who was standing inside a guard post when the missiles hit is the soldier Kimo Keltz. “We went down and defended our vital organs, on our heads, and waited. One of the missiles that hit directly next to us lifted my body about two inches off the ground,” he told the program 60 Minutes, adding that “from the first to the last launch 80 minutes passed and somehow no one died.”