An interesting perspective I see all over X and reddit is calling these people heroes, but only once the rescue happened. The more tame responses simply state that they are happy everyone was rescued and no military was harmed. Why? Those pilots were flying over Iran illegally, presumably to inflict fatal harm on whichever targets.
Perhaps the most interesting phenomenon I see, on X and elsewhere, is that there are many people who are actively rooting for Americans to die. It has been very revealing in a "see who your real friends are" kind of way. It's quite different from the GWOT, where a sort of cold indifference was common. This time there's europeans and even some Americans who are anxious to see Americans shot down and killed. This is probably the logical end state of believing that the other team is "literally hitler" for so long, amplified by the newsfeed algorithm.