A STORYBOOK RESCUE

ToSen. Jesse Helms, awed like many others bytoday's rescue of downed F-16 pilot Scott O'Grady, it was "something out of a storybook." The Air Force captain, shot down over Bosnia last week, had evaded capture for six days in hostile Bosnian Serb territory, living on rainwater and a small supply of survival rations. He traveled by night and hid during the day, trying to reveal his position to U.S. officials without giving it away to enemy soldiers. At dawn on Thursday, a small group of U.S. Marines dodged missiles and gunfire to retrieve O'Grady in a forest several miles from the crash site. As the Marines were touching down in the wooded area, military sources reported, O'Grady came running out of the forest, his pistol drawn, and hopped aboard the rescue craft. When President Clinton called O'Grady aboard the U.S.S. Kearsarge in the Adriatic Sea to praise him as an American hero, O'Grady begged to differ: "The rescuers were the real heroes," he told his commander-in-chief.