Basher Five-Two (6 page)

Except for the burns on my face, I was amazed by the seemingly good shape I was in, considering the catastrophe I’d survived. As I ran, it didn’t seem as though I had any serious injuries. But my legs soon turned stiff and heavy, and I was quickly exhausted. What I failed to grasp was my emotional state. When I had run about a hundred yards from my landing site, I didn’t think I could move another step. I dove into the first grove of trees that I thought could provide decent cover. The fear and stress had caught up with me.

Lying on soft, dark earth, I coiled into a semifetal position, drenched in sweat. I could hear vehicles approach my landing site. The first arrivals spoke in low, controlled voices, and I knew more would be coming for the hunt that lay ahead. My morale had never been lower. I was sure I would be captured. How could trained soldiers or even local villagers fail to find a dazed, exhausted American pilot half scared out of his mind, and
lying only a couple of hundred feet away? I pulled out my radio and made a last-ditch effort on the Guard channel.

“Hey, Wilbur, this is Zulu,” I whispered as clearly as I could, using a nickname that I’d acquired while stationed in Ramstein, Germany, and that Wilbur would know.

I tried Wilbur a second time. There was no reply. As I listened to more vehicles arriving at my landing site, I shut off my radio.

Footsteps began coming my way. My heart sank as I tried to burrow into the dirt, but not before quickly covering my face and ears with my gloves. There was no time to pull out the camouflage paste from my rucksack. The gloves were the same color as my olive drab flight suit, so I hoped I would blend in with the brush.

Within a minute, two men strolled down a path not five feet from my hiding spot. I peeked up warily. One had silver hair; the other looked like his grandson and was no more than eighteen. They were locals, not soldiers, but I knew from intel that many Serb villagers were part of militias and could be just as violent and unpredictable as any uniformed soldier. Hugging the dirt, I was afraid to breathe. Within another minute, two more locals approached my hiding spot—and stopped cold. They were both carrying rifles. About five yards away from me, they traded conversation while their eyes glanced back and forth.

I remembered what one of my survival instructors had taught me. Don’t move, no matter what, he had said. Don’t assume that the enemy sees you just because you see them. I kept waiting for a stick or a rifle muzzle to jab me in the ribs. Instead, mysteriously, the two men continued down the path, leaving me behind.

I wondered what was next. Within minutes I heard the grinding noise of more trucks around my landing site. Soon the woods were alive with search parties, groups of two or three that fanned out in all directions. Staying glued to the ground, for the next hour I twisted up my head to spy through the low-lying branches. I caught glimpses of men, mostly their legs or backs, as they called to each other and poked and prodded the brush. One pair came within ten feet of me. Like my earlier visitors, these men also wore civilian clothes, but one man had a rifle slung over his arm. Was he out hunting rabbits, or was I the prey of the afternoon?

Seconds later, a shot rang out. I don’t know who fired it, but I assumed it was meant for me. Maybe somebody thought they’d spotted me, or they just wanted to flush me out. I closed my eyes, waiting for the next bullet to come my way. I was sure I was facing death. As a young boy, I had attended Catholic schools, had received Communion, and had been confirmed, and I had always felt a close and personal relationship with God. In this dark hour, I began calling on every saint and apostle I knew
for protection. I summoned, too, my grandparents and my godmother in heaven for their help. Mostly, I prayed to God, over and over.

I didn’t want to die alone, in the middle of nowhere, while everyone I loved and was close to back home had no idea of my fate. That was my worst fear, that no one would know how I had died. I could imagine a U.S. Air Force chaplain appearing at my fathers house in Alexandria, Virginia, and delivering the worst news in the world. I could see my father dissolve into tears. My parents were divorced now, but they remained close, and it wasn’t hard to imagine the effect that my death would have. The future would cease to exist. My mother, who lived in Seattle with her husband, Joseph, was supposed to meet me in Italy in a week. In July I was going to rendezvous with my brother and sister in Spain. My father was coming for a visit in October….

All that would never happen now.

I prayed.
Our Father who art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name …

A second shot rang out, followed by the sound of the bullet bouncing off a rock. There were more footsteps, excited voices. I worried about the Ziploc bag that had held my radio and was now stuck under my leg. What if the late afternoon light bounced off it and gave me away?

I was trembling, much too afraid to look up anymore. I was only twenty-nine years old, but I thought I had lived
a very full and satisfying life. I had much to be thankful for—a family that was extremely close, countless friends, a career I loved—yet I wasn’t ready to cash in my chips. I still had other dreams and goals. I wanted to fall in love with someone, get married, and raise a family. I wouldn’t consider my life complete until I’d experienced that happiness. There was so much more I wanted to accomplish.

Thy kingdom come,
I kept praying.
Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven …

More scattered rifle fire. I hunkered down, afraid that my heart would explode in my chest. It was pounding so hard. I kept waiting. Then I began to cry inside. I didn’t think I’d ever make it back to my family and friends.

   Back home, on that same afternoon of June 2, representatives of the U.S. Air Force were, in fact, paying visits to both my parents. They talked to my father first, explaining that I had been on a routine but hazardous mission over Bosnia and that my F-16 had been shot down, apparently by a missile. My fellow pilot, Bob ‘“Wilbur” Wright, had not seen a parachute, nor had he made radio or visual contact with me after the incident. Distraught and overwhelmed, my father picked up the phone and called my mother. He had barely given her the news when a separate U.S. Air Force team, consisting of a chaplain and two other officers, approached her front door. My mother saw them through the window as she talked with my father. She put down the phone and let them in.

After a somber greeting from the officer in charge, my mother was handed an official U.S. Air Force letter outlining the same set of facts given to my dad. My mother refused to finish reading the letter. Choking back tears, she bravely told the officers that I was not dead. She had known from the beginning of my career that flying an F-16 was dangerous. She knew the heartbreaking stories of pilots killed on training missions and the families they’d left behind. She knew I was in Italy to fly sorties over hostile territory. Yet she refused to believe that her older son was dead. She told my father, too, and anyone else she spoke with in the next six days. Her faith was constant. It was almost twice as if she wouldn’t let me die. Buttressed by her own faith in God, a mother’s love for her son is a powerful weapon, more powerful, perhaps, than anything I was up against.

When the air force officers had left my parents’ homes, my mom and dad began calling other members of the family. There were a lot of O’Gradys—maybe fifty or sixty of them scattered across the country—and as close as everybody was, in the next six days their bond grew even stronger.

   That afternoon, pinned down in my hiding place, I flinched every time a rifle went off or someone thrashed
through nearby trees. Minutes crawled by like hours. By nine o’clock, as temperatures began to drop, the area slowly emptied of search parties. I suddenly found myself alone, and I picked up my radio.

“Anyone, Basher Five-Two.”

Behind the static there was no response. My strongest urge was to keep trying—like redialing someone’s phone number when you get a busy signal—but I worried about the life of the radio batteries. When you just monitored your radio, listening to whoever was on the airwaves, it wasn’t that much of a drain on your batteries; but when you transmitted out, speaking into the radio, the batteries took a beating. Altogether, I knew I had about eleven or twelve hours of battery life, and I had no idea how long I would be out there.

I tried to pull my thoughts together—and to make a specific plan for survival—but my mind kept wandering. It was hard not to fantasize about my family or about being back in my apartment for a hot shower and meal or about just sitting around and talking with my pilot buddies. I thought of the transporters on
Star Trek
—maybe Scotty could beam me up. I wondered, too, what I would have been doing right now if I hadn’t volunteered for today’s flight duty.

There were a lot of what-ifs, but none of them mattered. I had to face reality. And reality told me I couldn’t
stay here much longer. In the morning, I was sure, soldiers would be joining the search teams.

Just before nightfall, I flipped from my stomach to my back and opened my Swiss Army knife. A knife blade made a primitive mirror, but it was good enough for me to see the blistering and burns on my cheeks. The cockpit fire had singed my eyebrows and eyelashes as well. At the time of the explosion I’d thought half my face had melted away. I had gotten off lucky.

As the sky slowly darkened, I was about to experience one of the greatest frustrations of my ordeal. I wanted to move as quickly as possible—hoof it all the way to the Adriatic Sea and find a boat back to Italy, if necessary. But because I was surrounded by hostile forces, I knew I had to move in slow motion. One jerky movement, one careless act of littering, one broken twig—any of those could give me away in an instant. I needed to be aware of my every movement, think several steps in advance, then check for errors once Fd made a move.

I knew from my survival training that night was the best time to travel. Even so, my safety wasn’t guaranteed. Maybe the Serbs were stationed around the woods or had night vision goggles. I was particularly nervous about making any unnecessary noise, which can be heard farther away at night than in daytime. If I had to redesign the air force’s survival vest, I would eliminate all Velcro.
No matter how carefully I opened a pocket of my vest, you could hear the sound halfway to China.

The air was cooling rapidly now. With regret I remembered the flight jacket I’d left hanging in my locker. I was getting hungry, too, and wished that lunch had been more than a few bites of pizza. To lift my spirits, I touched the little silver cross around my neck. It was an unusual and beautiful piece of jewelry—a small dove perched in the middle of a cross. My sister, Stacy, had given it to me as a present when I finished pilot training. I considered the cross a symbol of my faith and never took it off my neck. Closing my eyes, I said another prayer, asking God to get me through these difficult times. Somehow, I knew He would. Nothing could have been worse than the last six hours. If He had spared me from harm so far, my faith told me He would continue to keep me safe.

I usually carried a medal of St. Christopher—the patron saint of travelers—in my flight suit pocket, but Fd left that in my locker, too, along with my wallet. I glanced down at the Rolex watch, the present from my father. I knew what would happen if I was captured. The Rolex would be gone in a wink … a nice little war souvenir for somebody. I was determined that would never happen. Nobody was going to capture me.

I began to think of my goals. The first was to survive.
The second was to evade the enemy. The third was to make radio contact and get myself rescued. I knew that survival didn’t always mean evading the enemy. If you were seriously hurt and were going to die without prompt medical attention, it was your duty to turn yourself over to your enemy if that was the only person who could care for you. You owed it to yourself and your nation to survive. When you were healthy again, then you would try to escape.

But I
was
healthy, and I was determined to evade the enemy. I remembered the motto of our Thirty-first Fighter Wing at Aviano. The Thirty-first was a proud group, with a remarkable history of wars and battles to its credit, including many stories of prisoners of war. The motto of the Thirty-first was simple and, in my circumstances, straight to the point. They were the words written on our insignia shield, just under the winged dragon: “Return with Honor.” That was exactly what I intended to do.

Midnight passed before I finally made my move. There was no moon and only a handful of stars. A dark night.
Good for avoiding the enemy,
I thought.
Not so good for navigating.
Slowly and quietly, I slipped out of my harness, and along with the Ziploc bag that had held my radio, I left everything in a pile. The locals would easily find the gear, but by then I would be long gone. This
would be the only time I would leave anything behind, even the smallest piece of trash. I kept on my G suit for the little extra warmth it provided.

I made a mental checklist of what I had left. Then I tried to stand. An act I normally took for granted was suddenly almost impossible. First, I was incredibly stiff from lying so long in the same position. Second, I had to move in superslow motion. It took me five minutes to push up my torso with my right hand, then pivot to a sitting position. Feeling every muscle in my body, and aching in most of them, I advanced to a squat and finally to my feet. Between each movement I stopped and listened for soldiers or civilians. The night was as quiet as a church. Picking up my survival rucksack as though it were a football, I baby-stepped out of the woods and into the grass.

It had taken me almost an entire hour to leave my hiding place. I was feeling weak and light-headed, and after a while I was trembling from the cold. Listening to my own rough breathing, I could see dim shapes eight or ten feet ahead of me. Everything was a fuzzy shade of gray, and I moved with caution.

I tried one direction, hit a dead end of dense trees, then took another route. It was almost like being blindfolded. Heading south from my landing site, I eventually found a narrow path that took me up an incline and into a grassy cove of tall, willowy trees. It was another dead end, but as
good a place as any to hide for the next twenty-four hours. In my state of exhaustion, I was ready to crash. I had been traveling for more than three hours and had probably covered less than half a mile.