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Good to Go: The Rescue of Capt. Scott O'Grady, USAF, from Bosnia
Good to Go: The Rescue of Capt. Scott O'Grady, USAF, from Bosnia
Good to Go: The Rescue of Capt. Scott O'Grady, USAF, from Bosnia
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Good to Go: The Rescue of Capt. Scott O'Grady, USAF, from Bosnia

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Just five hours after radio contact was first made with Basher 52—O’Grady’s call sign—the Air Force captain was safely on board the USS Kearsarge. The downed F-16 fighter pilot’s rescue from a Bosnian mountainside by Col. Martin Berndt’s 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit electrified the nation in June 1995 and renewed many Americans’ faith in the military. To get the inside account, Mary Pat Kelly traveled to U.S. ships and bases and UN posts in Croatia and Bosnia where participants were stationed to conduct more than one hundred interviews. Adm. Leighton W. Smith Jr., commander in chief of U.S. naval forces in Europe and head of NATO forces in the Southern European theater, provides a day-to-day commentary on the efforts to find Captain O’Grady. This edition contains an interview with Brig. Gen. Selmo Cikotíc, former Minister of Defense of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who discusses the dangerous conditions on the ground during the rescue and the impact the success of the mission had on NATO expansion in the area.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 15, 2015
ISBN9781612518176
Good to Go: The Rescue of Capt. Scott O'Grady, USAF, from Bosnia
Author

Mary Pat Kelly

Mary Pat Kelly is the author of Of Irish Blood, as well as the bestselling novel Galway Bay and Special Intentions. She has worked as a screenwriter for Paramount and Columbia Pictures, and as an associate producer with Good Morning America and Saturday Night Live. She also wrote and directed the dramatic feature film Proud, starring Ossie Davis and Stephen Rea, and three award-winning PBS documentaries: To Live for Ireland, Home Away from Home: The Yanks in Ireland, and Proudly We Served: The Men of the U.S.S. Mason, the last two based on her books. Kelly's other books include two about the film director Martin Scorsese and Good to Go: The Rescue of Scott O'Grady from Bosnia. A graduate of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College, she received her PhD. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center, New York. Born and raised in Chicago, she lives on New York's Upper West Side with her husband app developer Martin Sheerin from County Tyrone, Ireland.

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    Good to Go - Mary Pat Kelly

    Prologue

    JUNE 2, 1995

    Capt. Scott O’Grady roars off the runway of the U.S. Air Force base at Aviano, Italy, and points his F-16 fighter toward Bosnia.

    Any chance of a settlement there has been crushed by the latest Serb offensives. The United Nations’s safe havens are falling. Mass executions are common. Rape has become an accepted instrument of war. Might makes right in Bosnia, and attempts to intervene seem to trigger revenge on the innocent. The best NATO can offer is the Deny Flight missions, which keep the combatants from bombing each other’s cities and villages from the air. Destruction must be wreaked the old-fashioned way, one piece of ground at a time.

    Deny Flight is what Scott O’Grady and his fellow pilots contribute: they keep the bad guys out of the sky. Now the twenty-nine-year-old captain watches the green mountains fall away as he climbs above the clouds. He hopes to explore the Italian countryside he admires but has not had any time to really see. There’s a young woman he’s just taken to lunch who might want to join him on trips to the hill towns above the base. His brother, Paul, is coming out for a two-week vacation to see the house he has rented from an Italian family and to do some traveling. Maybe they can get their sister, Stacy, over.

    But now he puts away all such thoughts, and Capt. Scott O’Grady, call sign Zulu, follows his lead, Capt. Bob Wright, Wilbur, into their Combat Air Patrol—the CAP—twenty thousand feet above Bosnia.

    Somewhere down there a Serb missile waits to destroy O’Grady and repudiate all he represents. The Bosnian Serb leader, Gen. Ratko Mladic, has just declared war on the United Nations and, by extension, on NATO and the United States. How glorious to begin it by shooting down one of America’s most sophisticated aircraft. How satisfying to prove Serbian invincibility by making a trophy of a U.S. Air Force pilot, or of his body. This will shake up American public opinion and end any thought of further U.S. involvement.

    Except that Capt. Scott O’Grady will survive death, and elude capture.

    The U.S. Marines, supported by the sailors of the USS Kearsarge and backed by Air Force, Navy, and NATO pilots, will snatch their comrade from the heart of Bosnian Serb territory and carry him home in the face of enemy fire. This mission will change the way NATO operates. The gloves will come off. A combination of air strikes and ground attacks will force first a truce, then negotiations, and finally an accord. The killing will stop.

    U.S. Army troops will join with forces from a dozen other nations—including Russia—in Operation Joint Endeavor, to ensure that all sides comply with the agreement. But the incident that will help give peace a chance in Bosnia begins with terrible violence.

    Capt. Scott O’Grady: I never saw the missiles. Wilbur did. He called out that he saw missiles in the air. I never heard it. There were so many things going on, I never heard it. The missile hit. I knew exactly what it was. I felt the hit come up from the middle of the airplane, from the belly. The missile smacked it from underneath. There was a huge up-heave, and then a violent pitch down, because the cockpit broke off. I was engulfed in flames immediately.

    In the cockpit there’s an ejection handle between your legs. There are times when you can’t even pull it. It depends on whether your arms get pinned. If you start to tumble or get thrown into excessive G-forces, then you can’t reach the handle. Your arms can get thrown away. My right hand was still on the stick. I just grabbed with my left hand and pulled. Things are going through your mind so fast. The first thing was, Dear God, don’t let me die from this. The next one is, Let me get out of this airplane, because from the damage, you don’t know if the seat’s going to leave the airplane. The canopy could be twisted or there could be damage because of the airplane blowing up. The warhead itself, hitting, and then the expanding rods that come out of the warhead and the shrapnel from the explosion, the fire around you. You don’t know if the ejection seat is going to work. Please, let the ejection seat work!

    I was not ready to die. I thought: This is not the time to die. Please, don’t let it happen, because I’ve got too many things I want to do. I heard a pop and felt a rush of air. I’m seeing debris all around me, coming out of the cockpit. With that, I’m now thinking, Please let the ejection seat function; let me get a chute. I don’t know if the chute’s been damaged. Now I’m falling out, over twenty-some-odd-thousand feet, to my death. I was in a hole in the clouds, and I could see the ground below me. I said to myself, Jiminy Cricket!

    All of this is happening within seconds. Your mind is functioning at a higher level than your reactions. I went ahead. I didn’t wait. I wanted to see if the chute was going to function. I deployed the parachute. I was very relieved to have a chute over my head. I could tell because of the deceleration. I’d done ten jumps before, so I’d been underneath a chute before, which is good, because the first time is total panic. It’s a total shocker to your system. It’s not like I was comfortable, but I was very relieved to know that I had a parachute and I was still alive.

    Normally, you get hurt in an ejection, especially when it’s uncontrolled and you don’t have time to get your body in the right position. I was fully expecting to feel something hurting me, like a broken leg or a dislocated shoulder. More importantly, I was thinking about my back and my neck because I don’t know what position I was in for that ejection. And it was . . . nothing. Nothing. The only thing I felt was the pain in my face from being burned when the airplane blew up. An airplane is a flying gas tank when it gets hit. Now I’m out of the flying gas tank. I realize I’m burned, but I don’t know the extent of the burns. I’ve ripped my helmet and mask off because that’s where the burns were, on my face and on my neck. And so that’s it. That’s the only thing that got hurt.

    I came down from a pretty high altitude. That’s something I can’t understand: I never felt cold; I didn’t hyperventilate; I wasn’t out of breath; I never felt hypoxic from lack of oxygen; I never felt cold. I was easily at least twenty thousand feet up when I ejected. We’ve roughly estimated that it took about twenty-five minutes from the time I ejected for me to hit solid ground. It was a long, long ride. It lasted forever. Forever. I was thinking, Geez, let’s get this done, because it was really windy. I knew that sooner or later I had to hit the ground and start that episode of being in a hostile territory, trying to survive and evade, and hopefully get rescued.

    For me it was a lot of: Okay, this is real. Get your act together. You’d better not make any mistakes, because the next mistake might be your last. I was preparing for what I needed to get me through the ordeal ahead.

    1Deny Flight

    MAY 5, 1995

    Too bad they didn’t play a twist, said Adm. Leighton W. Smith Jr., commander in chief, U.S. Naval Forces Europe, an area that extends from Norway to South Africa and incorporates waters adjacent to all that area, as well as all the Mediterranean. Admiral Smith also wears a NATO hat. He is in charge of Allied Forces Southern Europe, so he oversees all NATO operations in Bosnia, as well as missions in Macedonia and Croatia. It is the Balkans—where, as he says, major wars have a way of getting started—that demand much of his attention. But he has traveled from his Naples headquarters to this small community center in Bangor, County Down, to take part in ceremonies commemorating World War II.

    Tonight, the people of the North of Ireland are hosting a big-band dance, complete with costumed couples, to celebrate the approaching VE-Day fiftieth anniversary. Among those waltzing under the mirrored ball are U.S. Navy veterans who were stationed here during World War II. Some escorted convoys across the North Atlantic. Others served on the great battleships that left Bangor Bay for Normandy on D-Day. All remember these Irish ports of call fondly and were delighted at the invitation to return to their wartime home away from home. They find the welcome is as warm now as it was in 1942. In fact, old friends find each other on the dance floor and the pace of celebration quickens.

    Now, present-day sailors from the USS Aubrey Fitch, on hand for the formal ceremonies the next day, take the floor with local girls. The Yanks really are back, the locals say to each other, and smile. But it is the presence of Admiral Smith that they find most gratifying: to have a serving U.S. admiral here, the man who probably has the most crucial command in Europe, and to have him be so pleasant, his wife so gracious . . . Strike up the band!

    I just cannot waltz, I say to Admiral Smith’s wife, Dottie, after spending a very long ten minutes on the floor stepping all over the shiny toes of one of the admiral’s aides. She nods in sympathy, and it’s then that Admiral Smith says, Too bad they didn’t play a twist.

    A twist? I think to myself. The admiral twists? I realized, yes, this admiral would have twisted; he would have done the jerk and then gone off to fight the war that still haunts the nation. He is the bridge between the veterans of the good war and these young sailors who take on this new role as peacekeepers in a post-Cold War world.

    The next morning Admiral Smith stands in front of an array of flags that represents the Allies in World War II. He is dedicating a statue of The Lone Sailor, a gift from the U.S. Navy Memorial, which has organized the veterans’ visit. He thanks those in attendance and speaks of the continued commitment of the United States to peace in Europe. Those listening approve both the sentiment and the speaker.

    Now there’s a real American, the locals say, citing his southern cadences, his easy manner, his good looks. That’s just how they were when they came here during the war: movie stars, stepping right off the screen into our lives. And, indeed, Admiral Smith is an American original, right down to his aviator’s call sign, Snuffy.

    Adm. Leighton W. Smith Jr.: My roots are in Mobile, Alabama. For a period of time we lived on a farm in a little tiny place called Union Church, Alabama. When my parents, my three sisters, and I moved there, we doubled the population. I always liked the outside, the outdoors. Most of the jobs I had growing up got me outside and doing things that were fun. I love to hunt and fish, and all my friends hunted and fished when I was in high school.

    Then I went from Murphy High School—where the graduation class was one—to Mobile County High School in Mobile, and my graduating class was around 750 or 800. But my family is an old Mobile family. My uncle was in the Navy. He was the commander in chief, U.S. Naval Forces Europe, in 1962.

    I thought it would be a great idea to go to the Naval Academy. It looked wonderful, those sharp-looking guys, that beautiful place. But the fact is I never dreamed I’d survive up there. I went to the University of Alabama, but my dad was anxious for me to go to the academy because we didn’t have very much money. He said: I’ll eat beans and rice to get you through college. That’s important. But he said he had seen Congressman Frank Boykin’s executive assistant, and had found out the congressman was going to make his determination on who he gave his appointment to the Naval Academy. In those days it was not competitive other than politically competitive. I said: There’s no way in heck I’m going to get that appointment. I mean, he’s going to do it in February. Dad said, Well, you never know unless you try.

    So I applied. During the Christmas break I went around to almost everybody I knew and I asked them if they would write a letter of recommendation to Congressman Boykin for me to go to the Naval Academy. I ended up getting sixty-two, which sort of says something about our friends in Mobile. I’ve never forgotten that. Boykin called up my dad. He said: Jesus Christ, Smith, my preacher’s told me, my doctor’s told me, my banker’s told me, my old school teachers’ve told me. I don’t have any choice, I’ve got to give your son the appointment.

    So I went to the Naval Academy. I got there in July of ’58. The commandant at the Naval Academy was Capt. Bush Bringle. I was not doing very well. In fact, I was failing two subjects, and I had a D in the other three subjects, and you only took five. One day Captain Bringle called me down to his office. That was one thing you didn’t want to do—go to the commandant’s office. I walked into that office, and he had a desk about an acre big and the flags were behind that desk. He was in his service dress blue uniform, and he had absolutely stark white hair that stood straight up. He had a big chest full of ribbons, with the Navy Cross sitting right on top, and he looked at me with these steel-blue eyes and he said, Midshipman Smith, why are you failing two subjects and you have a D in the other one?

    I started to say the standard answer, No excuse, sir. I said, No excuse. He said: No, I don’t want that kind of stuff. I want to know why. Are you having a problem around here that I don’t understand and I need to know about? No, sir. Is there any special help you need? No, sir. This went on for a few more minutes and then he said: "Okay, Midshipman Smith, I’ve given you the opportunity to tell me if you have any problems. Now I’m going to tell you: You have ten days, ten days, to become sat [satisfactory] in all five of your subjects. I walked out of that office thinking, I don’t ever want to see that man under those circumstances again."

    I had talked my way through high school. I never worried too much about grades; I just didn’t have any study habits. I’d given up on myself. In those ten days I studied my butt off. I began to understand that I could pass and I did pass. I graduated in the middle of my class and I got into flight school.

    I went to Pensacola, then I went to Whiting Field. When I finished up Whiting Field there was not a seat available in jets, no matter what grade point you had. A friend by the name of Pete Russell—Pete’s dead now, he was killed in Vietnam—and I teamed up flying T-28s. Russell and I wanted SPADs. For that you had to go to Texas. I called Dottie from Pensacola and said, Honey, we’re going to go to Texas. We packed up our stuff in a U-Haul trailer, took off in my little Corvair, and we drove to Texas.

    At Naval Aviation School you’re supposed to show up at eight o’clock, which I did. I was the first one there. I was sitting in this chair kind of slouched down because I was tired, and this commander came in. He said, What are you doing here? I stood up and I said, Sir, I’m here because I just came in from Pensacola last night and I’m coming here for the selection process.

    He said: Oh. Why are you here so early? I said, Well, sir, I didn’t have anything else to do, and I was awake, and I figured the early bird gets the worm. He said, Well, what do you want to do? I said, Sir, I want to fly SPADs at least for one tour, and then I’d like to transition to the A-4. He said: Well, son, my advice to you is that if you want jets you’d better take them right now. A bird in the hand’s worth two in the bush, and there’s only one jet seat available. I said, There’s only one available? He said, That’s correct, and it’s in Kingsville, Texas. I said, I’ll take it. Okay. You’re the first one here, you got it.

    I went to Dottie. She said, Well, what’d you find out? I said, We’re going to Kingsville. She said: Kingsville? That’s jet training!

    So there we were, driving to Kingsville. We were about halfway down. I remember it was hot. Dottie said, Are you sure you want to fly jets? I said, I don’t know, but I’m willing to give it a try.

    Now, marrying Dottie is the smartest day’s work I’ve ever done. She was a big support, because those jets scared the hell out of me. Big ol’ things making all kinds of racket. I got my wings in January of ’64, and we went to Glencoe, Georgia. Only 10 percent of the people getting their wings were getting fleet seats at the time.

    My uncle’s former aide was the XO of an F-4 squadron out of Key West, Florida. The F-4 was brand-new in those days. He sent an F-4 up to Glencoe for an air show, and I saw this thing. It was sleek. It took off and pulled straight up. The executive officer invited me to join the F-4 squadron. He said, I’d like to invite you to come down here to the reg, go through the F-4s, and then go on with me to my F-4 squadron. He was doing this because of his relationship with my uncle. I cogitated over that letter for a long time, and then I finally wrote him back and I said: I really appreciate your invitation. I just saw the F-4—it’s quite a machine. But if I come to your squadron I will be Admiral Smith’s nephew. So I think I’m going to go A-4s where I will be Leighton Smith. He understood perfectly.

    I made two cruises in Vietnam, ’66 and ’67–’68. I got a third cruise in ’72. In Vietnam I saw a lot of people who thought that what they were doing was right, and other people who were doing it because they were told to do it. Both types were getting killed. Dottie sat there in Lemoore, California, for two years and watched that black car come out, never knowing whose house it was going to stop at. A lot of guys went down over there. Those were the days when flying was altogether different, though. I remember three of us joined a squadron in 1965 for a Mediterranean cruise. I remember our XO brought us in and sat us down and said, One of you three guys won’t be coming back from this cruise. The guy next to me was killed two weeks later. He was my roommate. He flew into the water. I think we lost ten pilots on that cruise, in the wing. That’s peacetime, 1965.

    Every aviator’s got to have a call sign. I hate the name Smitty; it just drives me nuts. I was called Smitty during the Naval Academy days because you’ve got your name printed across the front of your jumper. Leighton was a name that most people never remember. My family called me Buddy. So I was looking for something other than Smitty, Leighton, or Buddy as a call sign. In 1968 I was in Dallas flying test hops, and they have some really neat call signs there. I was trying to come up with one.

    Now my father had rented his farm in Union Church to a guy who built a big still on this farm. He got caught. So here’s this newspaper article about the biggest still in the history of south Alabama being raided six miles north of Grand Bay, Alabama, on the property of Leighton W. Smith. Now Barney Google and Snuffy Smith in the comic books were always running from the revenuers. Bang! So I picked up Snuffy as a call sign, and it stuck. There are people that have known me for twenty years and don’t have a clue as to what my real name is. Time magazine refers to me as Leighton W. (Snuffy) Smith. Snuffy’s fine with me. Though Dottie doesn’t call me Leighton, and she doesn’t call me Snuffy. She calls me Hon.

    Later in the day (on May 5, 1995) the admiral takes time to attend a reception hosted by Capt. Craig Knause, captain of the Aubrey Fitch, anchored in Bangor Bay. He greets all the sailors, even climbing down to the galley to thank the mess staff. Quite a guy, say the sailors. No admiral ever shook my hand before. He talks to each veteran, hearing individual stories and greeting each wife. Fair winds and smooth seas, says one, as they wave goodbye to him.

    During the next few weeks Admiral Smith will attend other World War II commemorations, perhaps pondering the irony that the Europe so many paid so dearly to liberate faces destruction from internal divisions that seem impossible to battle through direct military action. Yet soon he will command an operation that will recall the most audacious actions of World War II. The mission will be Good to Go because Admiral Smith vowed in Vietnam never to give up on a fellow pilot. But the story of the shoot-down of Capt. Scott O’Grady begins months before, when NATO took action against the violations of the no-fly zone.

    DENY FLIGHT

    Admiral Smith: We had been watching the Udbina airfield for some time. Udbina is the airfield in a part of Croatia controlled by the Serbs from which some missiles were launched against us in November 1994. I requested permission from Gen. Bertrand DeLaprelle—who was the UN commander at that time—to strike those sites that had fired at our airplanes.

    We went after the site and took out a couple of missile launchers, but we didn’t get the radars associated with them. After another couple of missiles were fired, I asked permission of the United Nations, since this was dual-key, to attack those missile sites. My intent was to attack any missile site that had ever fired at a NATO aircraft. I wanted either to take the dadgum missile sites away from them—because I knew they had very few of them—or to make sure they understood the seriousness of what they were doing and perhaps dissuade them from using those missiles again. I was denied the chance to do so.

    General DeLaprelle basically said that his was a peacekeeping operation. This kind of activity leads down the road to war. He recognized the danger to the pilots, but from his perspective, air strikes would deny him the ability to pursue his peacekeeping mission and the delivery of humanitarian aid. He told us no. I did not agree with that decision.

    I sent my assessment on up the line as I was required to do. I said that if that decision held, then we would obviously have to change the way we operated. And we did. We put into effect a number of operation restrictions. The United Nations took great care to go to the Bosnian Serbs and tell them that under some circumstances, NATO could fire on their missile sites without dual-key. There are some situations that could present themselves where UNPROFOR [United Nations Protective Forces] could not stop me. The message we were trying to get to the Bosnian Serbs was, If you get attacked, it’s your own fault, not the UN’s fault.

    I told DeLaprelle: "Tell them they’ve got the dual-key. If they turn their radar on, I will turn my key on and shoot them. And in fact, the key is already on. So all they’ve got to do is turn theirs on, and they’re going to get shot." So we saw them back down, and we didn’t see any more missile sites radiate.

    Lt. Col. Shawn Tymchuck of Canada is the senior liaison officer with the UN force in Sector South—the area called Krajina by the Serbs who had evicted their neighbors and set up the capital of their ethnically cleansed country in Knin.

    Lt. Col. Shawn Tymchuck: Udbina airfield was what caused us difficulty here, because Udbina is right here in the Krajina, just north of Knin. It was the only air strip that the Serbs were able to operate jet aircraft from. So it was very important to them. When NATO bombed that airfield in November, the Serbs attacked this camp with rocket-propelled grenades. The washroom that I use every morning is a trailer with toilets and showers. It’s riddled with holes where one of these grenades blew up the side. Happily, there was nobody in it, but as you sit in the ablution container or stand there shaving and look at the holes all around you, it makes you just a little apprehensive.

    Admiral Smith: Then, in late May 1995, that airfield became operational again. We’d seen some flight activity out of there, and our aircraft had been tasked to make sure that none of their air forces came out of Udbina and threatened the safe area of Bihac. Over time, Lt. Gen. Mike Ryan, commander, Allied Air Forces/Southern Europe, would come to me and say, I want to decrease our ‘this,’ or Let’s stop doing ‘that’ and start doing this. Essentially, we relaxed a little bit.

    On the twenty-fifth of May we conducted two strikes. The Bosnian Serb Army [BSA] was becoming more and more aggressive toward the UN. They were shelling Sarajevo. They were shooting heavy weapons that were supposedly under the control of the UN and in a weapons control point. They were essentially just thumbing their noses at the United Nations. Gen. Rupert Smith, in Sarajevo, the commander of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Command, and Gen. Bernard Janvier, in Zagreb, the force commander, agreed that air strikes needed to be conducted. The hope was that, unlike in previous strikes where we just thumped a tank or two, we would convince the Serbs that they were now treading on very, very serious ground.

    The target was to be militarily significant to them. The ammo depot at Pale, headquarters of the Bosnian Serbs, was chosen. We hit that on the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth. The BSA’s response was to take more than three hundred hostages from among the peacekeepers. Then the BSA declared war on the UN. They said they were going to reclaim their territory and the airspace above it.

    The next day I wrote a letter to General Janvier. We had seen some radar activities, though we’d never seen a SAM [Surface-to-Air Missile] site that far south. The SAM sites we knew about were up toward Banja Luka, up in the Bihac pocket. They were, we felt, generally being used to try to take on the helicopters or aircraft that might be coming out of Croatia, supporting and supplying the Bosnian government forces in the Bihac pocket. We’d seen that happen before. We thought all of the SAMs were focused up there, so we were pretty much free to fly in other areas of Bosnia.

    In my letter to General Janvier I said, We’ve seen some radar emissions that bother me. On the thirtieth, I think it was, two man-portable missiles were reportedly fired at our aircraft. There had been some triple-A [antiaircraft artillery] fire. We had seen triple-A before, and, frankly, we had seen man-pads before.

    Now, with all of these things put together, I said: Hey, we need to go back there one more time and remind the Bosnian Serb leaders that I’ve got certain things that I’m going to do to protect my pilots, and the United Nations has nothing to do with that. Let’s just remind them of that, because I don’t want to stir this pot. I wanted the UN to be reminded that I could do this because they were still dealing with the hostage problem. It was clear that anything that I did from the air was going to have an impact on that hostage problem. I wanted to alert General Janvier: Look, these guys are looking harder, and I may have to shoot. And believe me, I’m not going to hesitate to shoot. I wanted him to know that, and I wanted the Serbs to know that.

    On two occasions in November 1994 we had been asked not to fly over Bosnia because the UN was afraid the Bosnian Serbs would radiate us and I would authorize our airplanes to shoot. Some sensitive negotiations were going on at the time. Well, obviously, sensitive negotiations are going on when you have hostages. So I wanted to make sure that, again, the UN knew and the Bosnian Serbs knew that I was becoming concerned. What I did not do—and what I probably should have done, in retrospect—was to have reinstituted right away all of the procedures that we had in effect right after the November incidents. That is to say, nobody flies up there without SEAD [Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses] cover. Unfortunately, I didn’t do that. That was a mistake on my part.

    Lt. Gen. Michael E. Mike Ryan commands NATO’s Air South and the U.S. 16th Air Force. He is a third-generation airman. His grandfather flew some of the first combat missions in history as a U.S. Army pilot in World War I. His father was a career Air Force officer who saw action in North Africa and over Nazi-occupied Europe in World War II. In fact, in May 1995 an officer in the Rumanian air corps took General Ryan to visit the spot where his father had survived a crash landing more than half a century ago. General Ryan commands a force that includes military men from the countries his father faced as enemies in World War II combat. Ryan still flies with the wing at Aviano. He’s a man who fills a cockpit, tall and broad shouldered, but he is still able to wear the same size flight suit he wore during his tours in Vietnam.

    Lt. Gen. Michael E. Ryan: I started working directly for Admiral Smith in September 1994. We have never been off the same sheet of music. We are always going in the same direction. We think alike, and that’s helpful.

    All of us who had been in Vietnam were affected by the restrictions in Bosnia. The circumstances under which we had to operate in Bosnia with respect to the surface-to-air defenses reminded me of Vietnam to a fare-thee-well. In Bosnia we were not allowed, or there was no political authority or will, to go after the air defense systems, yet we wanted to make statements by our bombing. You can’t hit the airfields, yet they can take off and shoot at you. You can’t bomb the SAM sites unless they shoot at you. You can’t preemptively take them out. Those kinds of restrictions are wacko. That is a stupid way to run a war. People say, This isn’t war, it’s a peacekeeping operation. It’s a war in the air here, I guarantee you.

    We were shot at in November when we took out the Udbina airfield. We had probably twenty instances of SAMs—both high-arc SAMs and radar SAMs—being shot at our aircraft during that period. This was going on all the time. It was just a matter of time before they got lucky, and got good. In the UN’s mind, we could not go back and do a retrospective strike on a SAM site that shot at us. We had the authority to hit a SAM site only if we did it immediately and it was a smoking gun. But I would argue, if we can go after the immediate SAM site that took us out, why don’t we take them all out? But if we want to go back, having left the area, to regenerate the force and then take out the SAM site, we need the UN’s permission in what’s called dual-key.

    The UN does not want us to go back because they get out-escalated on the ground as soon as we do an air strike. It’s happened over and over again. The BSA takes UN hostages, so the UN has no incentive to retroactively protect our crews. There is no incentive for the BSA not to shoot at us, no deterrent. So it’s a wacko war that goes against every military and emotional synapse that’s built up over that time where you say, I would never put my forces in those kinds of situations, yet I have to.

    I flew in North Vietnam. I faced triple-A, SAMs, MiGs, your classic defensive systems. It was frustrating when we couldn’t take them out. We could have, but that was not politically directed at the time. Same thing here.

    Col. Chuck Wald, like Smith and Ryan a veteran of combat missions in Vietnam, commands the Aviano air base, a sprawling ten-mile-square facility that combines a small American town—complete with Burger King and Baskin-Robbins—with a heavily guarded flight line where the latest and most secret American planes take off, headed over the mountains to Bosnia. The beautiful villages that surround the base become popular ski resorts in winter. The base itself became a reluctant tourist attraction as Italian families on Sunday outings took to parking on the highway that runs along the perimeter so they could watch the jets scream into the sky.

    Colonel Wald understood the frustrations felt by Admiral Smith and General Ryan at the political restrictions imposed. This was déjà vu all over again. Such a diminution of U.S. power bothers Wald.

    Col. Chuck Wald: We were losing air superiority for the first time in my memory. Superiority means, basically, that you can fly wherever you want. The U.S. has always had air supremacy. We could fly at will, wherever we needed to go to do our job. We have a humanitarian right to fly airplanes over Bosnia to deter the use of airplanes to bomb innocent people or to escalate the conflict. That mandate has been given to us by the United Nations, by the world community. But because SAM systems are set up in certain places, we can’t just fly over there with impunity. We can’t go out and fly at will over areas to deny them flying their fixed-wing aircraft, because we’re going to get shot down. A large portion of airspace over Bosnia is denied to us.

    The Serbs say, If you take our SAMs out, we’re going to take hostages. They’ve got that hammer over your head, so that’s the reluctance. No one’s afraid that we’re going to ruin somebody’s infrastructure. They are worried that the people on the ground will be put at unnecessary risk. Admiral Smith and General Ryan have voiced their opinions as clearly as possible. But short of retiring, what can you do? We don’t make NATO policy; they do. We don’t make political policy, and we live with whatever we’re told to do.

    During Desert Storm we had a clear-cut objective. It was a clear-cut threat, it was a clear-cut enemy, and the political leadership let the military leadership—once the decision was made politically—execute, without interference. This situation, however, is not the United States fighting Iraq, with the oil issue. This is the UN, along with NATO, and it’s not as clear as it was. It’s difficult if you’re on the sidelines. But when you’re the decision maker at a political level in a country, the solutions are not quite as simple as they might appear to someone watching from a distance.

    This is the first time we’ve had families at a base that we are flying combat missions from. A pilot leaves his home in the morning and risks being shot down. The families know this. He tells his family: I’m going to fly over Bosnia, and I’ll be back this afternoon. And oh, by the way, I might get shot at. I just thought I’d let you know. No big deal. It’s quite different.

    Usually when we do a mission, we are gone from our families as an organization. We don’t forget them, but we compartmentalize our lives. The pressures are different here. A whole community of people—wives, kids, the Italians—is affected. What kind of comparison can you make? Maybe a policeman. These pilots do this day in and day out. Many of them have dropped bombs out there. Most of them have been shot at, and they handle it well. It builds a bond, creates camaraderie. Most of the pilots want this. This is what they’ve been training for. Except they’d like to have a little more latitude to do their job.

    Among the one hundred or more U.S. pilots—Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force—who serve with squadrons of NATO pilots from England, France, Spain, Holland, and Turkey, aviators with Air Force squadrons 555 and 510 carry a particular responsibility. They fly the 25-million-dollar F-16 fighter plane, the top of the line in U.S. armament.

    General Ryan: We have a very good filtering process in the Air Force training system that selects the kinds of pilots who eventually end up in these kinds of airplanes. You have to do all of the navigation functions yourself in a single seat. It’s a very high-intensity work load. Actually, flying the airplane is almost second nature; using the weapons system is the hard part. Just the flying is like riding a bicycle. Once you’re on it, you’re not

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