Lieutenant Colonel Mitchell Utterback is retired now, but for years he was a high-ranking officer in the United States Special Forces. Tuesday, he was interviewed on a popular FOX News program with host Shepard Smith to discuss the Pentagon’s announcement earlier in the morning that they’ll deploy more of his brethren to Iraq (and eventually Syria?) to aid the Iraqi military in fighting ISIS (something that Wednesday the Iraqi Prime Minister said publicly he didn’t want or need). In the discussion, he starts to explain why it’s precisely what the elite soldiers were trained for (“really perfect” were his words), then drops a very bold line and proclaims that there has never been a U.S. Special Forces “guy” captured and “there’ll probably never be because we’re going to go die fighting to the death, or our buddies are going to make sure that never happens.”

See the video of Utterback opining in the tweet below:

It sounds nice, but it simply isn’t true.

There have been U.S. Special Forces that’ve been captured. It is extraordinary. But it’s occurred.

Hasn’t Utterback heard of Floyd James Thompson? The longest-held POW in the history of the United States? 

Thompson, a Green Beret, was held for nine years after his observation aircraft was downed by small arms fire over Viet Cong territory on March 26, 1964.

It’s a great dishonor to just gloss over the history of such American warriors. Brave soldiers who suffered through so much in defense of the red, white and blue.