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Hours later, O'Grady's father, William, a radiologist in Alexandria, Virginia, was handed a typewritten sheet from Air Force chaplain Steven Rich saying that his son was in Bosnia, that he had been shot down, that no one saw him eject and that they had received no signal from him. "That was the hard part," recalled the elder O'Grady. "We never really knew if he was alive."
But miraculously, he was. As his F-16 came apart, O'Grady reached for the ejection lanyard between his knees -- "this beautiful gold handle" he would call it at a press conference on Saturday -- and exploded through the disintegrating cockpit into the skies 26,000 ft. above the Bosnian forests. The ejection seat rocketed O'Grady into the air, its charge searing parts of his neck and face. After punching out of his plane, he opened his parachute manually instead of waiting for it to be released. It was afternoon and visibility from below was all too good. "I was in that parachute for an extremely long time," he said. "Everybody on the ground could see me." His trajectory took him over a main highway, and as he fell, crowds of Bosnian Serbs watched his progress. He recalls floating down, thinking, "They were just sitting there waiting for me."
As he landed in a grassy clearing, O'Grady wasted no time. In seconds, he had shed his parachute and was dashing toward a small clump of bushes. There he quickly dug his face into the dirt and covered his ears with his green gloves so that no bare skin would be visible. Barely in time. Within four minutes, Serbs had swarmed over the area in a furious effort to find him.
Meanwhile, as the Pentagon started reacting, planners were not holding out much hope. "We thought he was dead," admits one Air Force officer. nato strategists initially debated whether to send a Special Forces team to the wreckage site. The idea was swiftly scrapped when it became apparent that O'Grady's plane had crashed in the forests between Banja Luka and Bihac, an area heavily populated with Bosnian Serbs.
O'Grady was learning that too, as he lay concealed at the outset of what would turn into a harrowing six-day game of hide-and-seek. When the Serbs' first search missed him, sometimes passing as close as 3 to 5 ft. from him, O'Grady hugged the earth and remained frozen. Staying concealed when it was light, O'Grady sought safer cover each night with agonizing slowness. In all, he ranged no more than two miles from the spot where he had landed.
"For the most part, my face was in the dirt, and I was just praying they wouldn't see me or hear me," he recalled. At times, his Serb pursuers approached, beating the ground with their rifles in an effort to flush him out. On one occasion, he lay motionless as a cow browsed on blades of grass between his legs. Eventually he nicknamed two cows that were especially fond of his hiding spot "Leroy" and "Alfred"; the old man who herded them he called "Tinkerbell" because of the cowbell he carried. At another point, O'Grady was awakened by the roar of an artillery piece going off right next to him. He says, "It scared the living daylights out of me."