Basher Five-Two Read online

  Praise for

  BASHER FIVE-TWO

  AN ALA QUICK PICK

  “Smartly paced, with care taken over the particulars young readers will want to know …. O’Grady sounds like the big brother everyone would like to have.”

  The Horn Book Magazine

  “The author effectively communicates not just the details of his miraculous survival, but also how he relied on his love of family and religious faith in dealing with his fear and despair.”

  —School Library Journal

  “Although it must have been tempting to sensationalize the fascinating events, this title is a model of restraint, and with relevant aspects of O’Grady’s childhood and military training interspersed throughout the book, readers get a clear sense of O’Grady’s strength of character and will to survive. A great hook for reluctant readers.”

  —Booklist

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  Contents

  Map

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Photo Insert

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  About the Author

  Copyright

  To all those who were part of my rescue,

  and to the POWs

  and MIAs, past and present, who gave me the

  inspiration to survive

  U.S. MILITARY CODE OF CONDUCT

  I I am an American, fighting in the forces which guard my country and our way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense.

  II I will never surrender of my own free will. If in command, I will never surrender the members of my command while they still have the means to resist.

  III If I am captured I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.

  IV If I become a prisoner of war, I will keep faith with my fellow prisoners. I will give no information or take part in any action which might be harmful to my comrades. If I am senior, I will take command. If not, I will obey the lawful orders of those appointed over me and will back them up in every way.

  V When questioned, should I become a prisoner of war, I am required to give name, rank, service number, and date of birth. I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability. I will make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country and its allies or harmful to their cause.

  VI I will never forget that I am an American, fighting for freedom, responsible for my actions, and dedicated to the principles which made my country free. I will trust in my God and in the United States of America.

  HIGH FLIGHT

  by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

  Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth

  And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

  Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

  Of sun-split clouds—and done a hundred things

  You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung

  High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

  I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

  My eager craft through footless halls of air.

  Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

  I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace,

  Where never lark, or even eagle flew.

  And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod

  The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

  Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

  ONE

  In the early afternoon of June 2, 1995, as I sat in my F-16, ready for takeoff from Aviano Air Base in northeastern Italy, I had no idea what fate had in store for me. I could never have imagined that in the next six days I would have my plane shot out from under me with a missile, run for my life as soldiers hunted me down, eat leaves and ants to survive, make friends with a couple of cows, and be rescued by the United States Marines. And that was only part of my ordeal. Afterward I would call it the adventure of a lifetime. Maybe that’s an understatement. It was the adventure of two lifetimes.

  That summer, as a United States Air Force captain, I was one of thirty-five American pilots assigned to the 555th Fighter Squadron, or the “Triple Nickel,” of the Thirty-first Fighter Wing. Our uniforms boasted a Velcro patch of a fierce bald eagle, the insignia of the Triple Nickel, and another patch showing a winged dragon, to identify the Thirty-first Fighter Wing. We were stationed in Italy as part of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air team. To the east of Italy, across the Adriatic Sea, was Bosnia and Herzegovina, part of the Balkans and a country in the midst of a painful civil war. Our NATO special mission—called Operation Deny Flight—was to try to help end that war.

  The Triple Nickel took turns with other NATO pilots—Dutch, Italians, French, and British—in patrolling the skies over Bosnia. Our job was to keep all military aircraft of the fighting factions—the Serbs, the Muslims, and the Croatians—out of the skies so that they couldn’t hurt each other with air strikes. We were not there to take sides, but if necessary, we were to use our weapons to enforce this “no-fly zone.” Neither the Serbs, the Muslims, nor the Croatians wanted us there. They would just as soon have shot us out of the air so that they could fight their own war. But NATO had decided we were needed, and all of us in the Triple Nickel took our duty seriously.

  That morning of June 2, I showered, shaved, and laid out my olive green flight suit. My spirits couldn’t have been better. Not only did I love flying an F-16, I had lucked out by being stationed in Italy with the Triple Nickel. In my six years in the U.S. Air Force, I had called nine different places home, but no location had been quite as beautiful as northeastern Italy. My apartment was in a quaint village called Montereale Val Cellina. Besides being close to the air base, I was thirty minutes from the beach in one direction and ten minutes from the Italian Alps in another. The locals were friendly, the cafés didn’t serve a bad meal, and my landlords took me in as part of their family.

  I slipped into my one-piece flight suit, zipping it from crotch to neck, and grabbed my logbook and wallet. Because my fridge was basically empty, I decided to skip breakfast. Climbing into my Toyota 4Runner, I left for the Aviano Air Base. I didn’t have to fly today, but an opening in the flight schedule had come up the day before, and I had a good reason for grabbing it. Too busy with duties on the ground, I hadn’t flown a mission in more than ten days. And I was due shortly to start my vacation, meeting my mom, Mary Lou Scardapane, and her husband, Joseph, to travel through Italy. It had been a long time since I’d been in the air, and an F-16 pilot never wants to get rusty.

  I took my time driving to the air base. Over the years I’d become a careful driver, but my early experiences behind the wheel were no shining example for a driver’s ed class. I spent my teenage years in Spokane, Washington, the oldest of three children. One thing my brother, Paul, and I had in common was a love of speed. Starting with my parents’ Chevy Suburban, which
I drove off an icy mountain road one afternoon and crashed into a tree, I had had a series of mostly minor car accidents in fourteen years of driving.

  The worst had just happened this fall, on the same road to the Aviano base. While stationed in Germany, I had bought a BMW—it took all my money and was the first new car I’d ever owned. Of course, I’d brought it to Italy when I was transferred to Aviano. While driving around a curve in the predawn darkness, blinded by the headlights of an oncoming car, I jerked my BMW off the road. I ended up in a ditch, upside down. Fortunately, the air bag inflated, saving me from head injuries, and my fastened seat belt kept me from flying out of the car.

  Although the BMW was totaled, I crawled out with barely a scratch. I had this lifelong habit of inflicting serious damage on cars, but somehow I also had the luck to escape harm to myself and others. My family, particularly my father, liked to say I had nine lives, like a cat. After the BMW disaster, it was also understood that I had better change my ways—otherwise I might go through those nine lives too quickly. That was when I bought the 4Runner and began taking those curves more slowly.

  Entering the main gate of the Aviano Air Base, I passed through several security checkpoints, parked at the squadron building, and signed in at the operations, or “ops,” desk to be briefed about the days flight. From Aviano, we usually flew our sorties—air missions—over Bosnia in pairs but sometimes flew in a formation of four. Today I would be flying the more standard “two-ship” formation, with Bob Wright as the lead pilot. I would be his wingman. I was qualified to fly lead and often did, but on any given sortie you can only play one role, and today’s assignment listed me as a wingman.

  This would be my forty-seventh sortie over Bosnia. My call sign, or “handle,” for the days mission was Basher Five-Two. Bob, in the lead plane, would be Basher Five-One.

  Bob’s nickname was Wilbur—after one of the famous Wright brothers, who flew the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Bob was a good friend. We had met three years earlier when we were both F-16 pilots at the Kunsan Air Base in South Korea. At thirty-three, Wilbur was still younger than a lot of F-16 pilots, but he was one of the most experienced and capable leaders I knew. Unlike the character Tom Cruise played in Top Gun, Wilbur, like every other F-16 pilot with whom I’d had the privilege of flying, was cool, calm, and collected. We were no reckless hotshots. The years of training to qualify to fly an F-16, and the $20 million price tag of each plane, left all pilots with a feeling of enormous responsibility. When we were flying, it wasn’t like driving a car. Sure, there was the element of speed. If I maxed out, I could travel at more than twice the speed of sound. But the F-16 was so complex that it demanded an encyclopedia’s worth of knowledge, split-second reflexes, and absolute, total attention every moment you were airborne. There was always a low level of fear when you were flying, but having Wilbur alongside me took off some of that edge.

  We dressed for our mission in a locker room of the squadron building. First we removed the Velcro insignia patches of the winged dragon and bald eagle from our flight suits. If we were captured, we didn’t want the enemy to know the names of our units. According to a famous international treaty called the Geneva Convention, which all nations are supposed to honor, in time of war you don’t have to tell the enemy anything more than your name, date of birth, rank, and serial number. Article Five of the U.S. Military Code of Conduct contains the same rule. Both Article Five and the Geneva Convention are supposed to help prevent the abuse of anyone who is captured. Of course, we all knew that in the history of war, nations had often violated such rules, sometimes using torture to extract information.

  For anyone serving in the military, particularly as a fighter pilot, the risk of being captured was always a reality, but it wasn’t something my fellow pilots and I dwelled on. In the several years that NATO had been flying sorties over Bosnia, only one pilot, a British captain in a Harrier jump jet, had been shot down. He had parachuted safely into Muslim territory, been captured without a struggle, and been returned by the Muslims to NATO forces the next day. I didn’t think there was too much to worry about. On the other hand, I knew from our intelligence, or “intel,” officer that things had been heating up. Intel officers had special information about the enemy that could help a pilot in the sky. We had been told that NATO planes had recently destroyed one of the Bosnian Serbs’ weapons piles. In revenge, the Serbs had rounded up 350 unarmed NATO military observers throughout the country and made them hostages. The Serbs had physically tied the captured men to their other weapons depots, daring NATO planes to attack again.

  In Bosnia, you could never be sure what would happen next. But you knew all the three factions in the civil war could be ruthless.

  After removing my insignia patches, I squirmed into my G suit. This was a special tight-fitting brace or girdle that I wore over my flight suit. It wrapped around my stomach and my legs. The purpose of the G suit was to help me resist the forces of gravity—what pilots call G forces. On earth, normal gravity is one G. On a roller coaster, on a steep plunge, it’s possible to feel three Gs. In an F-16, the rapid acceleration and sharp turns a pilot go through can mean pressure up to nine Gs. If someone weighs 100 pounds normally, with the pressure of 9 Gs it’s as if he weighed 900 pounds. That much pressure naturally causes blood to flow from the head into the rest of the body. When that happens, a pilot can easily black out and have a fatal accident. The tight fit of the G suit, however, makes it harder for the blood to leave your head and flow into your stomach and legs. In addition, as a pilot you are taught to strain or contract your leg and stomach muscles when going into steep turns—extra insurance against blacking out.

  I dropped my Swiss Army knife into a chest pocket and put on my survival vest, which included a two-way radio. I holstered my 9-mm semiautomatic Beretta pistol under my armpit and tucked my Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) receiver into another pocket. Into my G suit’s right shin pocket I shoved an evasion map and a “blood chit.” This was a note from the U.S. government, printed in eleven languages, including Serbian and Serbo-Croatian, that promised to pay money to anyone who hid me from the enemy.

  I buckled my parachute harness over my vest and placed my helmet in a cloth helmet bag, along with a card that listed my mission number, takeoff time, radio call signals, and Alpha frequency for both receiving and sending radio transmissions. I would carry all that onto the plane. I also made sure I had my flashlight and earplugs and checked my life-support gear.

  Just before we had entered the locker room, Wilbur had asked me to verify our search-and-rescue (SAR) plan, in case, he said, one of us had to eject. Because the likelihood of an air accident seemed so small, not all pilots bothered to review their SAR plan in detail before every sortie. It was something you ran through in three minutes. Wilbur, however, was a perfectionist. He insisted that each of us recite the full procedure in detail, starting with the moment we had to parachute to the ground and hide from the enemy. We also reviewed the two radio frequencies for communicating. One was called Guard, the international distress channel, on which the whole world could hear you, including the enemy. The other was Alpha, one of the two SAR channels on our handheld radios, the frequency of which we changed often to give us more privacy than we had on the Guard channel. Wilbur and I agreed on a secret code if we had to radio in our GPS coordinates over Alpha, so that the good guys could find us but not the enemy. Taking the extra time to run through every detail satisfied Wilbur and left the plan fresh in our minds.

  Though I had no idea of it at the time, something else happened that morning that may have helped prepare me for the ordeal ahead. An article entitled “The Will to Survive” was posted in the men’s room, which was near the ops desk. For some reason, I had never read it. This morning, however, I had a few extra minutes, and I found my eyes skimming the article. It told the stories of two similar survival crises with very different outcomes. One story was about a man traveling in the Arizona desert who, injured in an accident,
got lost and went for eight days without water. By the time rescuers found him, he was so dehydrated that everyone concluded he should have been dead. But his will to survive was so incredibly strong, he probably could have gone even longer without water.

  The other story was about a civilian pilot in Alaska whose single-engine plane went down on a frozen lake bed. The man radioed for help but wasn’t sure whether anyone heard his transmission. He wasn’t far from shore, and from his footprints it appeared to rescuers that he had walked toward the shore but had never bothered to build a shelter or start a fire. Instead, he returned to the plane, picked up the gun that was in his survival kit, and killed himself. Rescue helicopters came twenty-four hours later, having heard his radio transmission. Because he had assumed the worst, because he had given up on himself, the man had thrown away his chance to survive.

  For the briefest of seconds I wondered how strong my will was. But the question dissolved into more immediate concerns. The planes were ready, and it was time for our sorties.

  One of the last things Wilbur and I did was chow down on a pizza, which we shared with some enlisted men. Having skipped breakfast, I was hungry and could have eaten a lot more.

  Moving toward the van that would take us to our F-16s, I discovered I’d left my flight jacket back in my locker. I’d never been that forgetful before a mission, but rushing back and wrestling off my vest and other gear so that I could put on my jacket seemed unnecessary. Climate control in the F-16 was perfect. You could turn the heat up or down with a dial. I decided I could live without my jacket for one flight.

  The van driver dropped off Wilbur and me by our planes. We made separate visual inspections of our aircraft before climbing into the cockpit. The 47-foot-long, 30,000-pound (fully loaded with fuel), single-seat, single-jet-engine F-16 was a marvel of engineering. It had been designed and built by General Dynamics back in 1978 and had gone through several updates over the years. The F-16 was small and compact compared with other fighter jets, but it was very popular with air forces around the world. More than half of our own air force’s fighter planes were F-16s. Its weapons and defense systems made it superior to the Soviet MiG, one of its famous competitors for speed and power, and its long-term safety record spoke for its keen performance.