Basher Five-Two (10 page)

Using the Guard channel, twice I called out on my radio. Even though I was now on higher ground, where the transmission should have been better, I got nowhere. Frustrated, I closed my eyes. I didn’t mean to fall asleep, but I did. When I was awakened by the first light of dawn, it took me only seconds to realize I had made the same mistake as two nights ago. In my haste to hide and my inability to see clearly, I had chosen a less than desirable hole-up site. The trees and the undergrowth were too sparse. And the granite ledge behind me made a quick escape difficult.

As the sky flooded with light, I dashed ten yards into a clump of high thistle bushes across the way. I didn’t care if the thistles scratched my face and hands; the important thing was that they were deep enough to cover me. I went through my slow-motion routine of laying down my tarp and covering myself with the camouflage netting, but not before spreading out my gear so that everything was within easy reach. I had a strict and specific place for each
piece of my gear—penlight here, radio there, GPS receiver by my leg. I had come to think of setting up camp as building a nest. It was a step-by-step process, like that of a mother bird bringing in nest material straw by straw. The overall effort, considering how slowly and carefully the nest had to be built, was exhausting. Even stopping to go to the bathroom took ten times longer than normal. At the end of the nest building, my feet once again stuck out of the short netting, my boot heels resting only a few feet from the open field of grass. There was nothing I could do about it. My hole-up site wasn’t perfect, but at least I could see the whole cove and the path leading into it.

Around me birds flitted from one tree branch to another. Earlier I’d seen a black squirrel scamper across the ground. As hungry as I was, there was no way I could catch the squirrel or a bird, much less start a fire to cook them. The distant sound of a jet to the south took my mind off my stomach. My neck arched up, and I scanned the skies eagerly, hoping the plane was one of ours. The clouds were too thick to see anything, but it didn’t matter, I thought. My faith told me the plane
had
to be one of NATO’s. It was now Monday. I had been shot down late Friday afternoon. No one had given up on me.

Fumbling with my radio, I tuned in and tried to monitor both the Guard and the Alpha channel. That’s when I realized that part of my earpiece—the tiny nipple in the
middle—was missing. My hands began desperately to search the ground around me. I couldn’t silently monitor the radio without the entire earpiece. And what if the part had fallen on the path to the cove or in the larger meadow? That was the kind of mistake I had worked so hard to avoid. If a local found it, he or she would be sure to tell the entire world, and I could expect an invasion of soldiers. Twenty minutes later, the crisis was over; I found the missing part inside my tarp.

By the time I fitted in my earpiece, the skies had cleared of any jets. And my radio turned up nothing.

I used my GPS to ring in three satellites for a fresh set of coordinates. It was nice to know some piece of equipment was working. I was also thankful that I wasn’t too far from my destination. I could make my chosen hill in another day—if I managed to stay alert and focused. My growing concern was water. I’d finished my last flexipak of water early that morning. In forty-eight hours I’d consumed a total of one quart, whereas my body had really needed a minimum of a gallon and a half. Every day the skies turned a deep, leaden gray, followed by a late afternoon or evening drizzle. But it was never enough rain to catch in a Ziploc bag. It was only enough to make me cold and damp. My EVC didn’t show any nearby streams or creeks. While I could hear cows mooing in the background and knew they had to have a source of water, I
wasn’t ready to go exploring and risk running into a farmer.

I don’t know how long I spent praying for a cloudburst. It didn’t have to be the size of Noah’s flood, I told God, just enough to help me fill my very dry body. My mind kept drifting, and though I tried to stay alert, I fell asleep.

A sharp, repeated clanging woke me. I had been sleeping for maybe thirty minutes. As I struggled awake, the ground trembled behind me, and I was afraid that I had been discovered. Instead, crashing down around me were not soldiers but a pair of large cows. The clanging came from their handler, a man or woman ringing a loud bell, somewhere behind them and out of sight. I thought of shooing the cows away, but that might draw the attention of their handler. My new friends settled in by the grass next to my thistle patch and began munching away to their heart’s content, scarcely looking up at me.

To amuse myself, I named the two cows Alfred and Leroy, even if those were boys’ names and cows are female. They were the first names that popped into my head. I called their handler Tinker Bell because he or she wouldn’t stop ringing the bell. In one sense I liked the noise. I always knew where Tinker Bell was because of the ringing. But after a while the constant ringing drove me crazy. As the afternoon wore on, Leroy came up to my boots as they peeked through the camouflage netting.
I kept looking over my shoulder, wondering if cows liked leather. But my clothes were of much less interest to Leroy and Alfred than were the strands of juicy grass. After a while my friends had had their fill and wandered back the way they’d come. I never did see Tinker Bell.

During Monday night it rained. Not just another frustrating drizzle, but a hard, merciless thunderstorm that soaked everything around me. At first I just turned on my back and opened my mouth, catching every drop I could. Soon I was using my yellow sponge, frantically running it over the crevices of my rucksack, soaking up the small pools of water. I squeezed out the sponge into a Ziploc bag, overjoyed as I watched the level steadily rise before me. I sponged water off my tarp, my vest, any surface that would cooperate. I didn’t have to worry about making too much noise or jerky movements—because no one else was going to be out in this storm. When the rain stopped an hour later, I’d added another pint of water to my travel pouch and had drunk enough to stop the burning in my throat.

As the storm front passed, the night sky lit up with brilliant clusters of stars. Two meteors streaked across the heavens with a beauty I couldn’t describe. I was reminded of my summers at Camp Reed and the clear skies of northeastern Washington. I thought of my family and friends back home. Were they seeing the same stars I was watching tonight? The nostalgia hit me hard.

When I came out of my daze, I realized that if I was ever to get home, instead of just dreaming about it, I had to try something different from what I had been doing. I pulled out my radio and turned to the Guard channel. Instead of transmitting my voice, which had gotten me nowhere the last three days, I turned on the universal distress beacon. This was a high-pitched alarm, and for a radio operator it was certainly easier to understand than was a garbled human voice. As the alarm went out, I monitored the radio for a response, turning from Guard to Alpha, the channel with the most privacy, and back to Guard. Nothing. If somebody was listening, they didn’t let me know it.

I waited ten minutes and tried the beacon again. At first, moving back and forth between Guard and Alpha, I heard only familiar static. A minute later, on the Guard channel, a faint voice broke through. In English, no less. It was a bigger surprise than making contact with ET, and sweeter than a Garth Brooks melody. My heart was about to explode. I pushed the earpiece snugly into my ear and listened intently.

“Flashman, this is Magic on Guard … heard some beacons … see if you can—”

My mind sped ahead. Who was Flashman? Some pilot, I guessed, maybe on temporary duty at Aviano or some other NATO base in Europe. I knew Magic was NATO’s airborne command post. Maybe Magic had
heard me. A moment later came a second, equally faint voice.

“Basher Five-Two, this is Flashman … hear me.”

I shut my eyes. Flashman was looking for
me.
Before I could respond, the mysterious pilot spoke again. “Basher Five-Two, this is Flashman on Guard, if you hear me.”

I gripped the radio so tightly I thought it might shatter.
“Flashman, this is Basher Five-Two,”
I almost screamed.

“Basher Five-Two, this is Flashman, if you hear me, on Guard.”

He couldn’t hear me! Controlling myself, I gave my call sign slowly and clearly. Again, there was no response. I kept waiting.

“Anybody,”
I finally said.
“Basher Five-Two.”

Flashman had gone. I sat back down on the ground. My emotions were mixed. I was badly disappointed that Flashman hadn’t received my transmission, but I was overjoyed that my radio was working and that NATO was looking for me. I was right, I had not been forgotten. Flashman, or somebody else, would be back. With my radio finally in receiving range of their messages, I knew I would be in contact again.

   My mother, after the visit from the chaplain and other air force officers to her Seattle home, immediately called my sister, Stacy. An eighth-grade public school teacher in
Chicago, Stacy took the news harder than anybody else. Unlike my mom, who refused to believe I was dead, Stacy assumed the worst. She had never really liked my flying an F-16 because she considered it extremely dangerous. Growing up as the older brother, I had always protected her. Once I became a fighter pilot, she thought that somehow she had to protect me. She had given me the cross with the dove—so that I would always know she was thinking of me, she said—and whenever we got together she wanted to be reassured that I was the most safety-conscious pilot in the world. Now, when she received the bad news at her Chicago school, she felt a grief that not even her friends or my mother could assuage.

Sharing the same birth date, Stacy and I also shared a special brother-sister intuition, and she knew I would want her to be with my parents during this terrible time. Stacy talked with my mom, and they agreed that it was my dad, living on the other coast in Virginia, who most needed her support. Stacy flew out the next day to be with him. My brother, Paul, joined them a day later, on Sunday. At Dad’s house they constantly watched news channels and tried to rally each others spirits. As long as the Serbs didn’t report finding my body, there was hope. The same afternoon that Paul arrived, the Serbs reported that they had captured me. The news was greeted with shouts of joy and calls to other relatives across the nation. At least if I had been captured, the theory went, I was
alive. The Serbs wouldn’t dare hurt a NATO peacekeeper, would they?

The Serbs had no evidence to show the world that I was their prisoner. All they had was video footage of the twisted wreckage of my F-16. Shown on Western news channels, the pictures looked grim. Everyone in my family wondered how any pilot could have survived a missile strike. When no fresh news followed about me, hope gave way to despair. Experts on television expressed doubts that the Bosnian Serbs were telling the truth about finding me. Colonel Charles Wald, commander of the Thirty-first Fighter Wing at Aviano, called my dad and mom to tell them that NATO was doing everything possible to find me. Still, he didn’t provide them with any specific plan. My dad hoped that, for military security reasons, Colonel Wald simply wouldn’t reveal that
some
rescue attempt was afoot. By late Sunday night, my family could only sit around and wait and worry—just like me, 12,000 miles away.

On Monday, another colonel called to tell my family that a mysterious beacon signal had been picked up in the area where I’d been shot down and that the U.S. Air Force also had unconfirmed reports of a parachute sighting. My family’s spirits lifted again, until they were warned that without voice communication to back up the beacon, this could all be a trick of the Bosnian Serbs.

On Tuesday the Serbs told Western journalists that I
had never been captured and admitted they had no idea whether I was alive or dead.

My dad clung to the hope that if I had parachuted out of my plane, I was still alive. He knew of all the practice jumps I’d taken at Fort Benning, and like everything else I’d pursued in my life, he knew how much effort Fd put into my training. But Stacy was less optimistic. She would stand in Dad’s backyard and stare blankly at the sky. The only hope she felt came from that special bond between us, the one that we kept in our hearts. She thought of the cross necklace she had given to me as a present. As long as I wore
that,
she told herself, I was going to be okay.

S
omewhere between Monday night and Tuesday morning I was awakened from a combat nap by an explosion that shook the ground around me. Confused and frightened, I was in fear for my life and wanted to dig myself deeper into my hole-up site. The strange explosion was followed by a tomblike silence. A mortar, a hand grenade, an artillery shell, maybe even a sonic boom from a jet—it could have been anything. All I knew for sure was that the hole-up site wasn’t as safe as I’d hoped.

I considered repacking everything in my rucksack and moving instantly, but with the birds already chirping away, I knew it was close to sunrise. I would have to stay low for another eighteen hours, try to get some rest, and under darkness plod on toward the hill I’d chosen for my rescue site.

After the mysterious boom, though exhausted, I was too on edge to sleep. I turned on my radio and kept monitoring it in vain. I wondered if Leroy and Alfred would return, with Tinker Bell in tow. I worried, too, about a condition called hypothermia, in which your core body temperature drops dangerously below the normal temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. If this happens,
your mind becomes confused. I worried that this might influence me to make bad decisions that could lead to my capture. After the last rain, my clothes were still wet, and in addition to the normal damp cold, I was shivering badly. Even though I was wearing my mittens and ski mask to prevent heat loss from my body, I would have given anything to start a roaring bonfire.

My mind was continually reeling in one direction or another. Besides praying to God and trusting that my family hadn’t given up hope, I thought about all my buddies in the air force. I had made so many friends over the years. The deepest friendships had come during my one-year tour with the Eightieth Fighter Squadron, or the Juvats, at Kunsan Air Base in South Korea. There, married officers weren’t allowed to bring their families. Pilots worked and lived together twenty-four hours a day. When we weren’t flying sorties near the border between South and North Korea, we took our meals together, shared thoughts and emotions, and partied hard in our time off. Like a special club or fraternity, we Juvats had our slogans, hand gestures, songs, and traditions. We were forever making toasts and giving speeches, which I kept brief because I wasn’t much for public speaking. And, of course, a Juvat pilot never could forget the Juvat salute—two fists raised high above the head and facing each other.