RESCUING SCOTT O'GRADY: ALL FOR ONE

• Share

So perfectly was the mission executed that it amazed even the men responsible. At 2:08 a.m. Central European time, on June 8, Air Force Captain Scott O'Grady was sitting, as he had for six days, cold, hungry, hunted and alone in the hills of a strange country. Then he made contact with a U.S. plane. By 7:30 he was onboard the U.S.S. Kearsarge, a missing soldier now safely back among his comrades. All the tremendous resources available to the U.S. military-from spy satellites to the Marines-had been marshaled for the purpose of rescuing O'Grady, and they had been deployed with flawless coordination.

No one was hurt; nothing went wrong. O'Grady and the men who saved him are genuine heroes. This vest-pocket Gulf War was in every respect the exact opposite of the conflict that gave rise to it. And for one chimerical moment, the rescue pierced the frustrations of the Bosnian conflict-where clear-cut successes, decisive actions, brilliant displays of military heroism have all been in short supply. In Bosnia, on most days, there is only murk, brutality and death.

"I prayed to God and asked him for a lot of things, and he delivered throughout the entire time," O'Grady told TIME in an interview after he had returned to the Aviano Air Base in Italy. "When I prayed for rain, he gave me rain. One time I prayed, Lord, let me at least have someone know I'm alive and maybe come rescue me. And guess what? That night T.O. [fellow F-16 pilot Thomas O. Hanford] came up on the radio." At that moment, O'Grady knew his ordeal was coming to an end.

It had begun six days before, when his F-16 was targeted by an SA-6 surface-to-air missile fired from a Bosnian-Serb stronghold just south of Bihac. Together with Captain Bob Wright, 33, who was flying another F-16 on his wing, O'Grady was conducting one of the 69,000 sorties that have been flown during Operation Deny Flight to enforce a United Nations-mandated no-fly zone over northern Bosnia.

The location of the missile was the result of a shift in defenses recently undertaken by the Bosnian Serbs that had escaped the notice of NATO intelligence. Because it was launched from directly below, the SA-6 was able to hurtle up on the "blind spot" in the underbelly of the F-16's defensive pod, blasting into O'Grady's aircraft with barely 20 seconds' warning and cutting it in half. "We think this was the first time the Serbs fired an SA-6," said an Air Force official. "They waited until just the right moment, and they ambushed us."

A pilot's worst nightmare, it is said, is not getting shot out of the sky but seeing one's wingman getting shot out of the sky. "When you lose your wingman, part of you goes with him," said Wright, recalling the moment he saw O'Grady's plane cut to pieces by the sam. "It was pretty much a fireball, but out of the fireball, I could see the cockpit." Wright had to suppress his horror in order to concentrate on marking O'Grady's position. The plane plunged into the clouds so swiftly, however, that Wright could not tell if O'Grady had managed to safely eject.