Basher Five-Two (13 page)

From my hiding place near the clearing, I watched the clouds begin to break up, showing a clear patch of blue. The ground fog had mostly peeled away, but some fog still hovered in the field below. I was on the edge of the mist … shrouded from anyone approaching by foot, but visible to my rescuers. I couldn’t have asked for better weather conditions. Suddenly, I heard the welcome roar of a pair of F/A-18 Hornets overhead. It was a little after 6:00
A.M
. One of the U.S. Marine pilots radioed and asked me to give him a mark. I let him know exactly where I was. His jet streaked off, but not before he promised that the rescue choppers would be there within thirty minutes.

That half hour was one of the longest of my life. In my head I went over the search-and-rescue procedure fifty times. I could have recited it in my sleep. When I finally heard the sound of helicopter blades beating the air, I jumped into the clearing. Trying to control myself, I called in to my radio to tell the pilots my exact position in relation to the Cobras. I could see the Cobra attack helicopters through a hole in the mist, but I didn’t know if they could see me. The pilot of the first chopper radioed for me to “pop smoke.”

I was ready with my flares and pulled the cap off the first one. Its red phosphorus smoke spiraled up through
the fog, marking my position. Within twenty seconds, by the time the flare had faded, I could see the first Cobra direcdy overhead.

“We see you!” the pilot confirmed over my radio.

The floppy orange hat that I had wanted to throw away because I couldn’t imagine a use for it was now on top of my head. I wanted to make myself as visible as possible. I popped a second flare, just in case, and waited for one of the Cobras to land or someone inside to toss me a safety line.

But the Cobras remained hovering in the air. It took me a few seconds to realize that they were only the advance ships. Their job was to make sure it was safe for the Super Stallions to land. One of the Cobras dropped some yellow smoke on a field about 200 yards to the south. Suddenly, two huge Super Stallions came into view behind a forest of trees. I watched them land just to the south of me. One of the Cobra pilots radioed and ordered me to run toward the Stallions.

Pistol in my right hand and radio in my left, I began zigzagging through the woods. My survival vest was flopping with my used flares and my compass. Just before I reached the field where the idling Stallions stood ready, I tripped and sprawled onto all fours. The Cobra pilot, still on my frequency, urged me to keep running.

“I’m going,” I said as I picked myself up, “as fast as I can.”

Breaking through the tree line, I found the two Stallions parked on a sloping, rock-strewn field. The area was filled with tree and brush stumps—hardly the perfect landing zone. The two Cobras floated above us, guns at the ready for any hostile encounter. And above the Cobras were the pair of Harrier jump jets. I didn’t see any Bosnian Serbs, but if they showed up, I felt I was on the side of superior firepower.

U.S. Marines had jumped out of one of the Stallions and fanned out across the hilltop to form a defense perimeter. Either standing or kneeling, they had their M-16s pointed in all directions. I knew they were waiting on me, but for a few moments I just stood there. I didn’t know which helicopter I was supposed to board. It was a strange feeling as I looked around and waited for someone to give me permission to move forward. After six long days of waiting, these last few moments were the longest yet. Finally, a burly young sergeant standing outside the gunner’s hatch of the closest chopper began waving me in.

I ducked my head, fearful of the Stallion’s rotor blades, and made a beeline for the open door. I had my Beretta waving in my hand, thinking I might still have to use it if the Serbs surprised us. To make sure the Beretta didn’t accidentally go off, the sergeant kindly hit my wrist before I entered the chopper. The gun dropped to the ground and the sergeant picked it up for me. My floppy
orange hat flew off my head, a souvenir Fd gladly leave for the Serbs. I no longer needed it.

We waited another minute for everyone to reboard the helicopters. I was shivering badly. Colonel Berndt slipped his jacket over me, and I was asked if I wanted to see a medic. I shook my head, but I took someone’s canteen and polished off a quart of water in record time. Someone else served me a prepackaged meal of cold chicken stew. I couldn’t believe all the attention I was getting, the number of men and aircraft that had been sent to rescue me. When I looked into the faces of the thirty U.S. Marines surrounding me, I was struck by how young they were—their average age, I would learn later, was nineteen. They had done their job with precision and perfection; I felt incredibly proud of them. More than that, I owed them my life.

At 6:48
A.M.,
six minutes after the two Super Stallions had landed, they lifted off the rock-strewn field and soared over a ridgeline, heading west to the Adriatic. I knew we were still not out of danger. A sergeant next to me said something about “taking fire,” and I said yes, I’d taken fire in the last six days. It was so loud in the chopper that I hadn’t heard him clearly. What the sergeant was really saying was that the
helicopter
was taking fire,
now.

As the ground fog burned off and the Super Stallion glided over the Croatian landscape, Krajanian Serb antiaircraft
artillery had opened up like the Fourth of July. Maybe their radar had picked up the Stallions coming over, and now that I was on board and there was no fog to hide us, they wanted badly to shoot us down. At seventy feet in length and able to travel at only 200 miles per hour, the Stallion was a fat and juicy target.

One round tore through our main rotor, while a second damaged the tail blade. A third punctured the cabin and, on the rebound, ended up meshed in a sergeant’s canteen. Then, as if from out of nowhere, came the corkscrew white plumes of shoulder-launched SAMs. At least two or three were fired—and one passed just below us.

Please, God,
I prayed,
let none of these good men get hurt. Let us all make it home again.

Our door gunner returned Serbian fire. Others sat silently and grimly. Trying to evade the enemy, the pilot took the Stallion low to the ground, once more skimming over barn and house roofs. After five minutes, the antiaircraft fire came to an abrupt halt. At 7:15
A.M
., we were clear of Bosnian airspace.

Relieved smiles and sighs broke out in the cabin. No one had been hurt. The Stallion, despite damage from the antiartillery guns, was on course for the USS
Kearsarge,
while the calm, blue waters of the Adriatic sparkled below.
That
was one of the most beautiful sights in the world.

B
y the time Basher One-One had made contact with me in the wee hours of Thursday morning, it was still Wednesday evening in the States. Everyone in the O’Grady household in Alexandria, Virginia, and my mom and her husband, Joe, in Seattle, Washington, were dazed and tired. My dad had shed eighteen pounds in the last five days, and Stacy and Paul didn’t know what to say to him, or to each other, anymore. Hopes had been raised and then dashed too many times. When talking, they stubbornly refused to refer to me in the past tense, but secretly each was trying to adjust to the fact that I might be dead. This waiting couldn’t go on forever. They had to continue with their everyday lives. Dad had his medical practice. Paul was due to start a job in North Carolina. Stacy was through with teaching for the summer, but she wanted to be with our mom in Seattle. That evening the three played a game of Parcheesi and had dinner, and Paul and Stacy turned in for the night. My dad, who was getting used to a sleepless routine, drifted up to bed and stared at the walls.

In Seattle, my mother spent Wednesday evening much the way she had the previous four nights, waiting for
news of her son and trying to hold on to whatever hope she could. She had gotten into the habit of opening a world atlas to the page of the former Yugoslavia—now Bosnia and Croatia and Serbia—and running her finger over the page, over the roads and rivers and tiny towns. She thought of all the people who lived there. Maybe someone would be there to help her son. My mom basically believed in the goodness of people. Not everybody in Bosnia was the enemy. She would imagine I was somewhere on that page, among decent people, and the thought comforted her. But nights were hard. She didn’t like to go to sleep. She felt she was somehow abandoning me if she took a break and went to bed, as if I were a sick kid who might need her for something.

At 12:48
A.M
., Thursday morning, Eastern Time, the phone rang on my fathers bedside table. He suspected it was his brother with another rumor about my whereabouts in Bosnia. The caller identified himself as Colonel Wald, my wing commander of the Thirty-first Fighter Wing, who had been in touch with my family since the shootdown. Tonight, Colonel Wald said, he had a different kind of news. Good news. Unbelievable news. He told my dad that I had been found, apparently safe and sound, and at this very moment I was being picked up by a rescue team.

Screaming that I was alive, Dad ran into Stacy’s room and woke her with the joyous news, and then they both
barged into Paul’s room and began jumping up and down on his bed like a couple of kids. It was like Christmas and V-J Day rolled into one.

My mother and Joe got their phone call around 10:00
P.M
. Wednesday night, Pacific Time, with the same news from Colonel Wald. My mom collapsed on the floor and sobbed wildly. It was as if, she said later, she had been holding everything in for so long, and now she just fell apart.

Like me, she would need a little time to readjust to a normal routine.

A
s the Super Stallions approached and hovered over the deck of the USS
Kearsarge,
ready to land, it didn’t seem as if my adventure could really be over. It was 7:29
A.M
., the eighth of June. After six days of danger, fear, and desperation, of testing myself and my faith, I was back home. After the giant helicopters set down, I walked into a crowded sea of smiling faces and clicking cameras. The whole scene was very unreal. I pushed ahead through the throng of admirers and touched a few of the hands that eagerly stretched out to me. I listened to their congratulations and realized that these people considered me a hero.

The thought amazed me. I was a survivor, a U.S. Air Force officer who had done his duty under somewhat extreme conditions, and I had returned with honor. I had done exactly what I was supposed to do. Never once during my ordeal did I consider my efforts to stay alive and avoid capture heroic. I had simply used my wits and my skills to survive. In my eyes, after “T.O.” Hanford and his wingman, the real heroes of the day were the sixty-one U.S. Marines on the four helicopters who had braved daylight, uncertainty, and
the Serbs’ heavy artillery to pluck one man out of the wilderness. The same was true for everyone connected with the rescue effort. They were all heroes because, in my book, a hero is someone who does something to help somebody else.

Once I was through the crowd of well-wishers, I turned over my tired and battered body to a team of U.S. Navy doctors. They scrubbed me down and started poking and probing me with needles. That included hooking me up to an IV to get fluids into my body and giving me a shot in each thigh to stop any infection from parasites. My temperature, I learned, had dropped to 95.2 degrees Fahrenheit, so doctors laid a large rubber heating blanket over me.

The doctors told me I also had second-degree burns on my cheeks and neck but fortunately no infection there. There were multiple scrapes and bruises on my hands and knees. I had mild dehydration as well as hypothermia and an elevated blood pressure and pulse rate. My most serious problem was a case of trench foot. This was a swelling of the feet caused by extended exposure to cold, damp, and frost. But with rest and warmth, I was told, my health would return to normal. Considering the stress of the six days, doctors pronounced me in pretty decent shape, if a little underweight. After eating only grass, leaves, and ants for six days, I’d shed twenty-five pounds. The SCOTT O’GRADY Escape and Evasion Diet had been a
resounding success, but I didn’t think I could recommend it to friends.

I felt starved now, but the doctors didn’t want me to eat until I finished with my IVs. I put on a bathrobe and, around 5:00
P.M
., was visited by the U.S. Marines’ intel officers. The wanted to debrief me—evaluate the entire rescue effort and find out if I’d observed anything about the Serb army. As I told them everything I knew, I realized how clever the Bosnian Serbs had been. In the year and a half before I was shot down, the cap routes of NATO aircraft had become very predictable. Because we were flying in the same place almost all the time, the Serbs had taken a chance and launched their missiles blind, without radar, at Wilbur and me. My F-16’s normal radar-jamming abilities had nothing to jam. Only when the missile had come within seconds of my plane had the Serbs finally activated their radar. By then, as the missile came right at me through the clouds below, it was too late for me to do anything.

After a long, hot shower, I received a parade of visitors: the pilots and the men who had risked their lives to bring me back; my wing and squadron commanders, who flew in from Aviano; and the unsung heroes on the
Kearsarge
who had assisted with the rescue effort. Many brought gifts. One was a shoulder patch of Snoopy, the comicstrip character, in his World War I flying outfit complete with his famous scarf. Below Snoopy were the words
BE
HUMBLE
. The patch was normally given to sailors and marines who had rescued downed crew. I was receiving it because, technically, I had rescued myself, walking onto the Super Stallion without any assistance. I didn’t think I deserved the patch—it was I who should be giving the sailors and marines gifts—but in the end it was the message that proved irresistible. When the chaplain finally came to visit, I prayed with him, and then I wept. I had truly been humbled during my ordeal; it was God who had kept me alive the last six days.