Scared Like a Rabbit, Brave Like an Eagle

Capt. Hanford: Say again for Basher One One.

Capt. O’Grady: Basher Five Two reads you loud and clear. I’m alive. Help.

-- Transcript of radio communication over Bosnia, June 8, 1995

Fighter pilots cry too. And they can tell the most incredible stories.

“Naw, I’m not a hero. All I was was a scared little bunny rabbit trying to hide, trying to survive,” Capt. Scott F. O’Grady said Saturday.

At a news conference here, O’Grady broke into tears when the Air Force played a tape of his plea from the Bosnian bush for help. So did his friend and fellow pilot Thomas O. Hanford, who fielded the call in a patrolling F-16 near the spot where O’Grady had been shot down the week before.

Then, the moment of catharsis behind him, O’Grady vividly recounted a saga of grit, faith and luck that enabled him to avoid capture by Bosnian Serbs who repeatedly came within a few feet of him.

O’Grady, the first American shot down while enforcing a U.N. air embargo over Bosnia-Herzegovina, told of parachuting from his burning fighter in full view of Bosnians below.

He told of soldiers firing at what they thought was an American pilot while he prayed nearby, his face thrust firmly in the dirt.

O’Grady spoke of great thirst. He spoke of an orange hat, a yellow sponge, smelly wool socks, red smoke, elusive ants, cows named Alfred and Leroy, a herdsman he called Tinkerbell. And a pistol he should never have loaded.

Scott O’Grady’s ordeal began June 2 in his 1,085th flying hour when a Bosnian Serb SA-6 missile struck his single seat F-16 amidships over northwestern Bosnia.

“No way I could fly this plane. The first thing I saw was the cockpit disintegrating in front of me, fire all around me,” he said. Then his eyes landed on “this beautiful gold handle”--the ejection handle. “It was the most glorious sight I ever saw--God let me see it.”

As the F-16 spun to earth, O’Grady impatiently deployed his parachute manually--and too high. Capt. Robert Wright, flying a second Aviano-based F-16, did not see O’Grady eject, but the parachute was visible to Bosnians below on a cloudy afternoon.

“They were watching me the whole time, waiting for me. I was near a major highway, by a large city. There was a military truck just sitting there waiting for me. . . . Luckily I did land in a mixture of bushes and a grassy area.”

O’Grady slipped from the parachute. He grabbed his escape kit, which included a map, a radio, packets of water, a portable camouflage net and a 9-millimeter pistol. He dove for cover, burrowing his face in the dirt and concealing his ears with hands encased in green gloves.

“I could hear that people were at the parachute, followed by people walking right by me for a couple of hours, maybe six feet away,” O’Grady said. “God protected me. It was not exactly dense vegetation, but I got into the heart of it.”

The 29-year-old Spokane, Wash., native said he allowed his survival training to take over, “trying to find a place to hide, not giving away my position or doing anything during the daytime, trying to use nighttime to decide where to move.”

Hunger was not a problem at first, O’Grady said, although by the third day he was forced to eat leaves and grass. Once he stuck a finger down an ant hole--”when you’re hungry you’ll eat anything”--but the ants proved too fast for him.

Thirst was an enemy. One night it rained in answer to his prayers, O’Grady said, but the rest of the time he made do. Unable to find any water sources, he collected dew with a yellow sponge, carefully storing the drops in little plastic bags.

One night he wrung out his soaked wool socks and drank the liquid, “but I couldn’t get much out of that.”

O’Grady said he suffered bruised hips and small second-degree burns on his face and neck in the ejection, and he is still being treated for trench feet, caused by prolonged exposure to wet and cold.

Changing his hiding position at night, O’Grady estimated that he moved no more than about a mile and a half from where he landed; neither he nor the Air Force is saying where that was.

He said the Bosnian Serbs never stopped looking for him, and they came shooting.

“It wasn’t so much that they were walking around me, because I had somebody walking around me every day, but that they were shooting their rifles. To me, they weren’t just shooting bunny rabbits. I never even saw any bunny rabbits out there. I never even saw a squirrel,” O’Grady said. “I think they thought they saw something that was me and were trying to kill me.”

O’Grady had better luck hiding from the searchers than he did concealing himself from two cows he came to know as Leroy and Alfred. Twice they sauntered over to graze near where he lay, attracting their herdsman behind them.

“I called him Tinkerbell because he had a bell and the cows followed him along,” O’Grady said of the herdsman.

O’Grady, who helped teach survival skills to other pilots in the 555th Fighter Squadron here, said he moved only late at night, and then with great stealth because it seemed to him that even small sounds traveled for miles.

He dozed fitfully, O’Grady said. Once he was jolted awake by a rocket-propelled grenade fired too close for comfort--”the most incredible fright I ever had.”

Two or three times, O’Grady heard aircraft flying overhead. But always by day.

“I didn’t dare do anything during the daytime. I monitored the radio, but I didn’t dare do anything to give up my position,” O’Grady said. Among American searchers, each passing day without word of O’Grady diminished expectations of his survival.

He knew that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was looking for him, O’Grady said, but it was not until early Thursday that he decided--for reasons he didn’t explain--to announce himself by activating a beacon signal on his radio.

“I was hopefully trying to let someone know I was there. I activated the beacon, and I lit up the world,” O’Grady said. “Thank God T. O. [Hanford] was there, and when I heard three clicks my heart started racing and I heard ‘Basher One One.’ I was really scared he wouldn’t hear me.”

To confirm O’Grady’s identity, Hanford asked, “What was your squadron in Korea?”

After hearing O’Grady’s response, an excited Hanford said: “Copy that. You’re alive. . . . Good to hear your voice.”

Hanford’s jubilant confirmation of contact roused a force of U.S. Marines from their bunks aboard the amphibious assault ship Kearsarge in the Adriatic Sea between Italy and Bosnia.

The Marines landed in two Super Stallion helicopters not long after dawn Thursday. O’Grady, hiding in the tree line as ground fog obscured a clearing on a slope, was more than ready.

He popped a red smoke grenade “to help them see me in the fog.”

And he donned an orange hat that he had been saving for just such a special occasion.

“It was orange on one side and green on the other . . . I had it ready because I figured there wouldn’t be anyone out there, Serbian or Muslim, walking around with an orange hat. . . . They’d know anyone with an orange hat would be a stupid American,” O’Grady said.

For nearly six days, O’Grady had kept his pistol close by him without ever chambering a round. “I’m no Rambo,” he said.

As the helicopters came down, the “scared little bunny rabbit” in the orange hat and six-day beard loaded the gun for the first time.

“I had the gun out, running through the bushes through the fog. I broke into the clearing where the [helicopters] set down. What did they see coming out of there but a guy with a huge beard and a huge pistol and an orange hat running at them, going for broke.”

It seems funny to O’Grady. Now.

The Marines, who had arrived not knowing what they’d find, stopped in their tracks.

“I stopped and I didn’t know what to do. Then they waved me on. I just ran.

“The funny thing about it is the one thing they teach you is, in that kind of situation, never never run at a helicopter with a loaded gun,” O’Grady said.

Once Basher Five Two flopped onto the floor of the helicopter, his rescuers quickly relieved him of his gun.

O’Grady is scheduled to leave Italy today for Washington, D.C., where he may meet President Clinton.

The pilot will also spend a few days recounting his ordeal at the Survival Center School at the U.S. Air Force base in Spokane, Wash.