Date: 95-06-08 19:32:48 EDT

(8 Jun 95) To all my Viper buds and other Shit Hot Fighter Gods on the net - It was a good day at Aviano! As you guys have no doubt heard, we rescued Scott "Zulu" O'Grady today after 6 days of E&Eing in the Bosnian countryside. We had an idea that he was still out there but hadn't had positive radio contact until about 0000Z this morning when Capt T.O. Hanford had some extra gas so he stayed in his CAP a little longer and tried to reach Zulu on the SAR A (PRC-112) freq from the day of the shoot
down. After about 40 minutes of calls in the blind, T.O. started getting some suspect clicks on the mike. Finally, Zulu came up voice. T.O. didn't have all the info
from Zulu's ISOPREP so he came up with a quick way to verify it was indeed Zulu, although it sounded like Zulu recognized T.O.'s voice and called him by name (although the comm was weak since T.O. (Basher 11) was about 70 miles away). The comm went something like this.

"Basher 52 this is Basher 11" click

"Basher 52, this is Basher 11, are you up on this freq"

"This is Basher 52"

"Say again, understand this is Basher 52"

"This is Basher 52...I'm alive"

"Say again, Basher 52, you are weak and unreadable, this is Basher 11"

"This is Basher 52!" pause

"Basher 52, what squadron were you in at Kunsan?"

"Juvats! Juvats! I'm alive!"

"Copy that, you're alive! Basher 52, sit tight and come back up at 15  past the hour"

T.O. then started coordinating with Magic to pass words to the Deny Flight CAOC (command center) that he had positive radio contact with Basher 52. They replied that T.O. should pass the word "manana" to Basher 52. When he did, Zulu replied "I want to get picked up tonight!" (imagine that).

So T.O. passed that to the CAOC and the decision was made to press with a rescue. We were 2 hours before sunrise so it would be daylight but there was concern (rightly so) that word would get out to the press and every SA-6 in the AOR would be mobile and spiking us and the rest of the rescue package. So they went ASAP.

T.O. stayed airborne (now at about the 4 hour point in his sortie - one note here: T.O. got high marks for wingman consideration for advising his wingman that it was a good time to take a piss on the way to the tanker! That video clip probably won't make CNN ) and the 510 FS Buzzards scrambled our alert guys (I was #2). Unfortunately, Vaughn "Slot" Littlejohn and I had just gone from 60 minute alert to 180 minute alert and I had headed home to get some sleep. The phone rang at about 0255L (after about 10 minutes of sleep) telling me to get in there ASAP. I was back at the SQ in 15
minutes.

Before I was even in the door, our ADO, Phil "Psycho" Sever told me we had positive radio contact, get dressed, step, crank, and taxi ASAP - I would meet SLOT in EOR whenever he made it in. We were in the air at about 0400L (1+05 from a dead sleep at
home) loaded with 2xGBU-12s, 2 slammers, 2 9Ms, a 131 pod, and 2 tanks (Standard DF SCL). We swapped out with T.O. manning the cap and staying in touch with Zulu every 15 minutes. A SEAD package was getting airborne as T.O. started his RTB. We had a plan with the F-18Ds (Harm shooters (kind of), with NVGs and a WSO), EFs, and EA-6Bs to try to establish contact. But since we already had contact, the F-18s just did a recce run to get a good fix on him and to check the weather.

Meanwhile, Zobe the hero, callsign Rock 42, was hanging on Slot's wing 70 miles away listening to the whole thing, ensuring my tape was on. I can't wait to tell my grandkids about the day I put all my Weapons School training to use - "No shit, kids, there I was - tape on, tape off, tape on, tape off. The pressure was incredible!" Seriously, although I didn't do shit, it was shit hot to listen to the entire mission unfolding. The helos were inbound, authenticating Zulu (they asked him what he was called in high school when he got drunk!) With a good ID they moved in, had Zulu pop some smoke, and picked him up. The whole thing from the authentication to the pick-up was about 10 minutes (seemed like an eternity). To hear comm like, "Basher 52, got you in sight", was pretty moving, especially after thinking for most of
the week that Zulu was a mort ("Wilbur" Wright didn't see a chute, no radio contact, etc.)

I've never been choked up in the jet before, but I was this morning. Unfortunately, they weren't out of danger yet. We hit the tanker and when we came back up to Magic freq the helos were about 13 miles from feet wet. Then I heard the escort chopper, c/s Bull, say, "Bud, impacts underneath you. SAMS IN THE AIR! SAMS IN THE AIR!" FUCK!! Luckily, they missed, although they took some small arms fire and apparently the gunner from Bull silenced that. About 10 minutes later, we heard the call that they were feet wet, then shortly after that that they had "mother in sight" (the ship), two more bits of comm that I will never forget.

So we got one of our own back. What a day. I wish we could have done more in the rescue but it was almost entirely a Navy and Marine show (we and the mud-eagles were in the cap) and they kicked ass. So don't bad mouth the squids and jarheads too loudly - they put on a good act today and we've got a Viper driver back because of it.
I thought you might enjoy hearing the story straight from the CSAR Commander of VTR Ops! Hope it wasn't too mushy, but after all, I did cry when I watched Old Yeller. That's just the emotional type of guy I am! Hope all is well with you guys at your various bases. Drop me a line and let me know what's up. Fly safe, check six, and pray for the UN leadership to get a clue and let us blow these bastards back into the stone age!

Zobe

"Basher 52, Got You in Sight"

[From Air & Space / Smithsonian, Oct-Nov 1995]

While Marine Corps helicopters fluttered in to snatch Scott O'Grady from the Bosnian countryside, a flight of F-16 Vipers prowled overhead, to provide weaponry if the rescue went bad. In their cockpits were the downed pilot's buddies from Aviano, an American airbase in Italy near Venice and the newly balkanized Yugoslavia.

Zulu (as O'Grady was called in tribute to his difficulty with Zulu or Greenwich time, used as a reference for sailors and the military) had been on the run for a week. He'd be hungry and scared, and perhaps a bit off his head. And there was a chance that his radio calls had been faked by the Bosnian Serbs, hoping to lure yet another plane into range of their SAM surface-to-air missiles. What with one thing and another, the emotions in those F-16 cockpits were running high.

One of the Viper pilots was Scott Zobrist. Back at Aviano when the rescue was triumphantly concluded, Zobe did what a few years ago would have been unimaginable: sat down at his computer, composed an email account, and sent it to 13 buddies around the world. His dispatch was a classic--joyful, foul-mouthed, jargon-heavy, and throbbing with adrenalin. A lightly-edited sample:

"The helos were inbound, authenticating Zulu. (They asked him what he was called in high school when he got drunk!) With a good ID they moved in, had Zulu pop some smoke, and picked him up. The whole thing from the authentication to the pick-up was about 10 minutes (seemed like an eternity). To hear comm [radio traffic] like `Basher 52, got you in sight' was pretty moving, especially after thinking for most of the week that Zulu was a mort [dead man]. . . . I've never been choked up in the jet before, but I was this morning."

CompuServe processed the message at 7:33 p.m. eastern time. At 3:57 a.m., one of the recipients used America Online to forward the dispatch to 14 of his buddies.

And so it went, from captain to captain ("Let's hear it for the good guys!"), and from captain to colonel ("Sir, FYI"), around the world and back again. In a very few days, the dispatch had turned up on hundreds if not thousands of electronic mailboxes, on an Internet newsgroup for military aviation buffs, and on America Online with its theoretical audience of 3 million.

Predictably, the Air Force wasn't pleased with Captain Zobrist's fling at creative writing. A Pentagon official grumbled that the dispatch "was more detailed and more in-depth than what intelligence sources were providing under classified covers." Well . . . perhaps. I've read it a dozen times, and asked people to point out the security breaches, and my guess is what really bugged the Pentagon was Zobe's salty language. ("Then I heard the escort chopper . . . say, `Bud, impacts underneath you. SAMs in the air! SAMs in the air!' Fuck!") To a connoisseur of military prose, of course, that's precisely what makes it such a grand read.

In the end, Scott Zobrist got off without a reprimand and with no detectable damage to his career. It seems that the Pentagon doesn't really have a rule against disseminating sensitive information by email--an oversight that presumably will be rectified.

As for Scott O'Grady, he got a book contract from Doubleday. Zulu will have a ghost writer, and he'll certainly enjoy more oversight from the Air Force than Zobe got. I look forward to reading the book, but I suspect that the best piece of writing about the rescue has already been published, in cyberspace.