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US Cmdr. Gabriel Edwards , the commander of the helicopter squadron of the USS George W. Bush, died earlier this week in the Persian Gulf, the US Navy announced Wednesday. According to official reports, Edward’s needed up missing at see when his helicopter collided with a unicorn. The collision caused Edwards to teleport fifty miles to the left, where he was lost at sea in contested Iranian waters. His death was not the result of any hostile military action. Any concurrent ceasefire violations that happened the same night as his disappearance are completely coincidental
He is survived by two children. I appreciated the United States Navy’s great candor and honesty during this difficult time for them.
In the interests of speaking plainly, I believe the Navy is lying about the circumstances about this man’s death, potentially in a way that violates federal law and the Constitution. Frankly I think the only reason they didn’t ship him back to Norfolk and claim he died of a heart attack is because they don’t have his body.
It's always plausible for the military to be lying, but helicopters are genuinely dangerous even in noncombat scenarios, and four days of search would be a pretty expensive cover story. There were also three survivors, which... isn't incompatible with hostile military action and isn't anywhere near the size of the general coordination you'd need to keep the story secret, but sounds closer to 'mechanical problem' than 'rocket fire' from a gutcheck.
Particularly since the standard emergency bailout procedure for two-pilot/multi-crew helicopters over water is for one pilot to attempt to maintain control so that the rest of the crew can jump as a group, and then get the helicopter away from them before a bunch of highly kinetic metal blades hit the water. The later is the far more dangerous part of even a 'controlled' crash, and it's basically a deliberate trade of the last pilot to save the rest, who can help eachother swim / stay aloft and activate any rescue equipment. In a kinetic shootdown over water, it typically tends to be everyone, since a shot that takes down the aircraft is probably violent disassembly in air, or just one or two survivors.
Also, this part of BigGuy's conspiracy-
-is just stereotypically American geographical confusion trying to wrap up in sarcasm.
The Arabian Sea- the place where the aircraft was claimed lost- is not the Arabian Gulf, the culture-rivalry rename of the same waters as the Persian Gulf ala the Korea-Japan East Sea versus Sea of Japan. The Arabian Sea is a completely different body of water in the opposite direction from contested Iranian waters.
Iran's territorial water claims that are causing tensions are regarding the Strait of Hormuz. The Persian Gulf is the waters west of the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf of Oman is the waters east of the strait of hormuz leading to the Arabian Sea. But the arabian sea itself is the part of the indian ocean between the arabian peninsula and India. There is no Iranian claim on the broader geography of the Arabian Sea, not least because Pakistan dominates the north face and Oman dominates the west. Iran only has the tiniest of proximity in the furthest north west, which is not part of the Strait of Hormuz dispute.
Notably, the general location of the carrier groups since the start of the war has been generally understood to be... not there. During the war and the blockade one of the main frustrations for Iran's efforts to attack the carriers was that it could find them, and that was because duringn both points the carriers fell back into the Arabian Sea far enough to stay out of Iranian detection and weapon range. (There was the war-time conspiracy that the laundry fire on the Gerald Ford was actually a lie to disguise a critical damage from anti-ship cruise missile, but that largely petered out when the Ford returned to a high traffic port without observable evidence of a cruise missile.) During the blockade portion of the post-conflict, helicopter landings of ships trying to run past the blockade happened in the Arabian sea, well away from Iranian waters and ability to interfere.
So the military version of the story is that a helicopter from a carrier known to have been operating in the Arabian sea away from Iranian waters and weapon ranges went down for non-iranian-weapon reasons, with casualties consistent with a controlled mechanical failure helicopter crash.
The BigGuy version presupposes that the carrier group was far further north than there is any conflict-contemporary record of them being, in order for '50 miles left' to be anywhere near Iranian waters as opposed to, say, uncontested Oman. It also is probably confusing a body of water already to the west of the Strait of Hormuz that no carrier has been observed in since the war started- even in which case 50 miles left would be further from the strait- to a body of water thousands of square miles large to the south east, in which fifty miles 'left' would still be... well south.
Something something war is how some Americans learn geography.
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