Basher Five-Two
Authors: Scott O'Grady
Praise for
BASHER FIVE-TWO
AN ALA QUICK PICK
“Smartly paced, with care taken over the particulars young readers will want to know …. O’Grady sounds like the big brother everyone would like to have.”
The Horn Book Magazine
“The author effectively communicates not just the details of his miraculous survival, but also how he relied on his love of family and religious faith in dealing with his fear and despair.”
—School Library Journal
“Although it must have been tempting to sensationalize the fascinating events, this title is a model of restraint, and with relevant aspects of O’Grady’s childhood and military training interspersed throughout the book, readers get a clear sense of O’Grady’s strength of character and will to survive. A great hook for reluctant readers.”
—Booklist
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To all those who were part of my rescue,
and to the POWs
and MIAs, past and present, who gave me the
inspiration to survive
I I am an American, fighting in the forces which guard my country and our way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense.
II I will never surrender of my own free will. If in command, I will never surrender the members of my command while they still have the means to resist.
III If I am captured I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.
IV If I become a prisoner of war, I will keep faith with my fellow prisoners. I will give no information or take part in any action which might be harmful to my comrades. If I am senior, I will take command. If not, I will obey the lawful orders of those appointed over me and will back them up in every way.
V When questioned, should I become a prisoner of war, I am required to give name, rank, service number, and date of birth. I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability. I will make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country and its allies or harmful to their cause.
VI I will never forget that I am an American, fighting for freedom, responsible for my actions, and dedicated to the principles which made my country free. I will trust in my God and in the United States of America.
by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace,
Where never lark, or even eagle flew.
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
I
n the early afternoon of June 2, 1995, as I sat in my F-16, ready for takeoff from Aviano Air Base in northeastern Italy, I had no idea what fate had in store for me. I could never have imagined that in the next six days I would have my plane shot out from under me with a missile, run for my life as soldiers hunted me down, eat leaves and ants to survive, make friends with a couple of cows, and be rescued by the United States Marines. And that was only part of my ordeal. Afterward I would call it the adventure of a lifetime. Maybe that’s an understatement. It was the adventure of two lifetimes.
That summer, as a United States Air Force captain, I was one of thirty-five American pilots assigned to the 555th Fighter Squadron, or the “Triple Nickel,” of the Thirty-first Fighter Wing. Our uniforms boasted a Velcro patch of a fierce bald eagle, the insignia of the Triple Nickel, and another patch showing a winged dragon, to identify the Thirty-first Fighter Wing. We were stationed in Italy as part of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air team. To the east of Italy, across the Adriatic Sea, was Bosnia and Herzegovina, part of the Balkans and a country in the midst of a painful civil war.
Our NATO special mission—called Operation Deny Flight—was to try to help end that war.
The Triple Nickel took turns with other NATO pilots—Dutch, Italians, French, and British—in patrolling the skies over Bosnia. Our job was to keep all military aircraft of the fighting factions—the Serbs, the Muslims, and the Croatians—out of the skies so that they couldn’t hurt each other with air strikes. We were not there to take sides, but if necessary, we were to use our weapons to enforce this “no-fly zone.” Neither the Serbs, the Muslims, nor the Croatians wanted us there. They would just as soon have shot
us
out of the air so that they could fight their own war. But NATO had decided we were needed, and all of us in the Triple Nickel took our duty seriously.
That morning of June 2, I showered, shaved, and laid out my olive green flight suit. My spirits couldn’t have been better. Not only did I love flying an F-16, I had lucked out by being stationed in Italy with the Triple Nickel. In my six years in the U.S. Air Force, I had called nine different places home, but no location had been quite as beautiful as northeastern Italy. My apartment was in a quaint village called Montereale Val Cellina. Besides being close to the air base, I was thirty minutes from the beach in one direction and ten minutes from the Italian Alps in another. The locals were friendly, the cafés didn’t serve a bad meal, and my landlords took me in as part of their family.
I slipped into my one-piece flight suit, zipping it from crotch to neck, and grabbed my logbook and wallet. Because my fridge was basically empty, I decided to skip breakfast. Climbing into my Toyota 4Runner, I left for the Aviano Air Base. I didn’t
have
to fly today, but an opening in the flight schedule had come up the day before, and I had a good reason for grabbing it. Too busy with duties on the ground, I hadn’t flown a mission in more than ten days. And I was due shortly to start my vacation, meeting my mom, Mary Lou Scardapane, and her husband, Joseph, to travel through Italy. It had been a long time since I’d been in the air, and an F-16 pilot never wants to get rusty.
I took my time driving to the air base. Over the years I’d become a careful driver, but my early experiences behind the wheel were no shining example for a driver’s ed class. I spent my teenage years in Spokane, Washington, the oldest of three children. One thing my brother, Paul, and I had in common was a love of speed. Starting with my parents’ Chevy Suburban, which I drove off an icy mountain road one afternoon and crashed into a tree, I had had a series of mostly minor car accidents in fourteen years of driving.
The worst had just happened this fall, on the same road to the Aviano base. While stationed in Germany, I had bought a BMW—it took all my money and was the first new car I’d ever owned. Of course, I’d brought it to Italy
when I was transferred to Aviano. While driving around a curve in the predawn darkness, blinded by the headlights of an oncoming car, I jerked my BMW off the road. I ended up in a ditch, upside down. Fortunately, the air bag inflated, saving me from head injuries, and my fastened seat belt kept me from flying out of the car.
Although the BMW was totaled, I crawled out with barely a scratch. I had this lifelong habit of inflicting serious damage on cars, but somehow I also had the luck to escape harm to myself and others. My family, particularly my father, liked to say I had nine lives, like a cat. After the BMW disaster, it was also understood that I had better change my ways—otherwise I might go through those nine lives too quickly. That was when I bought the 4Runner and began taking those curves more slowly.
Entering the main gate of the Aviano Air Base, I passed through several security checkpoints, parked at the squadron building, and signed in at the operations, or “ops,” desk to be briefed about the days flight. From Aviano, we usually flew our sorties—air missions—over Bosnia in pairs but sometimes flew in a formation of four. Today I would be flying the more standard “two-ship” formation, with Bob Wright as the lead pilot. I would be his wingman. I was qualified to fly lead and often did, but on any given sortie you can only play one role, and today’s assignment listed me as a wingman.
This would be my forty-seventh sortie over Bosnia. My call sign, or “handle,” for the days mission was Basher Five-Two. Bob, in the lead plane, would be Basher Five-One.
Bob’s nickname was Wilbur—after one of the famous Wright brothers, who flew the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Bob was a good friend. We had met three years earlier when we were both F-16 pilots at the Kunsan Air Base in South Korea. At thirty-three, Wilbur was still younger than a lot of F-16 pilots, but he was one of the most experienced and capable leaders I knew. Unlike the character Tom Cruise played in
Top Gun,
Wilbur, like every other F-16 pilot with whom I’d had the privilege of flying, was cool, calm, and collected. We were no reckless hotshots. The years of training to qualify to fly an F-16, and the $20 million price tag of each plane, left all pilots with a feeling of enormous responsibility. When we were flying, it wasn’t like driving a car. Sure, there was the element of speed. If I maxed out, I could travel at more than twice the speed of sound. But the F-16 was so complex that it demanded an encyclopedia’s worth of knowledge, split-second reflexes, and absolute, total attention every moment you were airborne. There was always a low level of fear when you were flying, but having Wilbur alongside me took off some of that edge.