Reader's Digest Soldier Stories

by Reader's Digest

  April was the month that Chris was supposed to end his six months’ combat duty and take a desk job. But his Vietnamese counterpart asked him to remain. As you trained me, Dad, there was only one decision. My duty was to remain. So Chris stayed on. He had a fungus infection on his hands, intestinal disorders and dysentery. His blond hair had turned gray, and he’d dropped from 186 to 156 pounds.

  • • •

  On Easter weekend in Washington at a gigantic “Get Out of Vietnam” rally, one speaker compared a Vietcong terrorist with Jesus Christ. And the crowd cheered. “It’s a strange thing,” Bill O’Sullivan told Anna. “Isn’t there any cheering for our soldiers who are helping hold off the communists?”

  Two days later, on April 19, a ferocious Vietcong force struck the 39th Battalion. For two hours, under murderous fire, Captain O’Sullivan darted from one gun position to another to direct a counter-barrage. He hit 15 Vietcong and saved 75 of his own men trapped by the enemy. His six-foot-two frame was so often out in the open that shouts of “Shoot the American!” could be heard above the roar of battle. From that day on, the Vietcong put up a $500 reward for O’Sullivan’s head.

  In America, at college and university campuses across the land, the fad for denouncing the war in Vietnam mounted. Was the war merely a maneuver to reach a meaningless settlement? Bill O’Sullivan studied again an oft-read special letter:

  I firmly believe in the fight. No solution is so damning as to allow the communists to seize more men, women and children here. Those Vietnamese who care don’t want a neutral slavery. They want the free choice of their future. And this can occur only if you and I see a purpose for the fighting—to help these people live and grow free.

  This country, like our own in 1776, must receive help.

  • • •

  As May 1965 drew to a close, Captain O’Sullivan at last was ordered to Saigon and rest. On his way he checked into Quang Ngai. But on Saturday the 29th, a hundred Vietnamese and three Americans were trapped by the Vietcong in a nearby hamlet. All were believed lost. One was Lt. Donald Robison, who had served with Chris virtually the entire time he had been in Vietnam.

  Sick with worry, Chris waited at the small Quang Ngai airport for word on Robison. Late that night he wrote a letter to Eleanor, and next morning he led a ranger counterattack. Suddenly his 300-man force was in grave trouble. More than 800 Vietcong sprang from hidden jungle tunnels. In a field of death, Chris helped carry off the wounded and, by radio, directed air strikes. He warned that ammunition was running dangerously low.

  Then it happened.

  Charging up a hill with Sgt. Willie D. Tyrone, he was hit by shrapnel. The sergeant carried him to the hilltop and radioed back news of his death. When helicopter relief arrived, they also found Tyrone’s riddled body. Around them lay more than a hundred South Vietnamese rangers, all disemboweled. They had fought to the last man.

  • • •

  It was Memorial Day in America. Bill and Anna had taken Eleanor and the children to the Catskills. On Monday they returned to Astoria and dropped Eleanor and the boys off at their home. Only minutes later Eleanor was at the candy store running up the stairs clutching the telegram. Her red eyes told the old detective: his son was gone.

  Tuesday morning the tragedy was a squib in the New York papers. At Eleanor’s home the phone rang with condolences. One voice, however, was unfamiliar:

  “Is this Mrs. O’Sullivan? I’d just like to say how glad I am your husband is dead. He got what he deserved. He shouldn’t have been in Vietnam. He should have died in a worse way.” A sharp click.

  Eleanor O’Sullivan stared at the phone, then crumpled to the floor, unconscious.

  Next morning the phone carried another gloating taunt. “It was a good thing he was killed,” a different voice told Eleanor.

  On Wednesday afternoon Maj. Reginald Grier, who had served with Chris in Hawaii, came by. Once more the phone rang, and Major Grier grabbed at the receiver.

  “I just called to tell Mrs. O’Sullivan how happy I am that her husband was killed in Vietnam.” It was a man’s voice, well modulated, controlled, almost as if the caller were reading professionally from a script. “I want you to know this: the communists will eventually win in Vietnam.” Then he hung up.I

  Thursday morning a final letter arrived in Chris’s handwriting:

  Dearest Eleanor: Tonight my heart is sadder than it has ever been. Tomorrow we are going to look for Don and his two sergeants. I can only ask your forgiveness because in this operation I am going to do all that is necessary to find Don or his body.

  I promised you I would be overly cautious now that I am “rotating” so soon. I cannot keep that promise. Don has a young wife and a three-year-old daughter. If he was looking for me, you would want him to do the best job he could. By the time you receive this letter, it will be all over one way or another. Tonight I pray it will be for the best. God have mercy on both of us. Love, Chris.

  • • •

  June 9 dawned clear in New York. Christopher O’Sullivan had come home . . . to be buried. An Army honor guard formed a corridor as the flag-draped coffin was carried 50 feet along Ditmars Boulevard, through the overflow crowd, from funeral home to the packed Immaculate Conception Church for solemn requiem Mass. Prowl cars cruised a two-block area, and riot vans parked nearby. New York Police Commissioner Vincent Broderick personally commanded a 30-man security force on the scene. For it was feared the services might be turned into a demonstration against the U.S. role in Vietnam.

  At sunset August 11 on a parade ground at Governors Island, across from Manhattan, Eleanor O’Sullivan, her children by her side, stepped forward. In behalf of her husband she accepted six medals, including the Distinguished Service Cross for “extraordinary heroism” last April 19, the Silver Star for “gallantry in action” on May 30, the Purple Heart for his mortal wounds. Bill and Anna stood by.

  A cannon boomed. The clear notes of taps echoed across the field. As the First Army Band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Stevie and Michael saluted with the soldiers. And Bill could almost hear Chris speaking the words he had written in a recent letter:

  Here is a country—Vietnam—with people like you and me, with families like ours, fighting for the right to determine its existence. As long as you and I believe we should be free, we must treat that feeling in others as important. So if God wills I die here, there is no finer cause today for which a man must die than the cause of these people.

  * * *

  I. In at least five other cases, the wives and relatives of soldiers killed in Vietnam have reported similar calls—apparently not crank calls but ideologically motivated harassment. The family of one dead soldier got a postcard demanding that his insurance money be donated to the Vietcong.

  THE BOSNIAN WAR

  Pilot Down: The Rescue of Scott O’Grady

  BY MALCOLM McCONNELL

  Air Force Capt. Scott O’Grady eased his F-16C fighter close beside the one piloted by his flight leader, Capt. Bob Wright. Through breaks in the clouds, they saw the green mountains of Bosnia far below. Their mission that afternoon of June 2, 1995, was a routine combat air patrol policing a NATO “No Fly Zone.” For months no Bosnian Serb plane had challenged NATO fighters in this sector, and intelligence had reported the zone free of surface-to-air missiles (SAMs).

  Suddenly O’Grady and Wright were jarred by the buzz and amber flash of their cockpit missile-warning instruments. “Missile in the air!” Wright called urgently.

  Two supersonic SA-6 SAMs, hidden by the overcast, were streaking toward the F-16s. Seconds later the missiles ripped through the clouds, exhaust plumes trailing. Wright and O’Grady threw their aircraft into evasive maneuvers. One missile slashed harmlessly past Wright’s plane. The other scored a direct hit on the belly of O’Grady’s fighter. Horrified, Wright watched the wings crumple and an orange fireball blossom around the cockpit. Then O’Grady’s jet, canopy intact, disappeared into the clouds.

  “Basher 52 took a dir
ect hit—he’s down,” Wright radioed.

  “Any parachute?”

  “Negative.”

  • • •

  Flames seared O’Grady’s neck and licked under his helmet visor, singeing his eyebrows, as his F-16 tore through the cloud bank. The 29-year-old pilot could smell his hair burning. Eject! O’Grady’s left hand groped for the yellow ejection-seat handle between his knees. Let it work, he prayed.

  The jet’s Plexiglas canopy detached, and the seat’s rocket charge fired. Seconds later, O’Grady heard the reassuring twang of his opening chute. He felt his heart pounding as he floated into clear sky. I can’t believe I’m alive. Hanging beneath him on a tether, his survival pack whipped in the wind.

  O’Grady was relieved to see that the winds were pushing him toward a brushy field and away from the orange-tiled roofs of the town of Bosanski Petrovac, a Bosnian Serb stronghold. He noticed hills rising to a green plateau about two miles to the southeast.

  Then his stomach wrenched as he saw men in uniform pointing at him from a military truck parked along a highway. When he hit a clearing near the road, O’Grady jumped up, unsnapped his parachute and shucked off his helmet. He needed a hiding place now.

  Snatching his survival pack, O’Grady stumbled through the brush and, like a rabbit, burrowed into thick foliage, forcing himself deeper with his knees and elbows until he was completely covered.

  He heard men calling to each other. They know I’m here. On his stomach, face thrust into the dirt, O’Grady tried to conceal his neck and ears with his green flight gloves. He heard boots thumping close by. O’Grady lay absolutely still, breathing shallowly. At least they don’t have dogs, he thought. At least Wright saw me eject.

  • • •

  More than five thousand miles away in Skokie, Illinois, Stacy O’Grady stood on a ladder, helping decorate the gym of the school where she taught eighth grade. “Ms. O’Grady,” a student interrupted, “your mother’s on the phone.”

  Why would Mom call from Seattle? she wondered. Scott! Stacy scrambled down the ladder and raced to the teacher’s lounge. Her mother confirmed her fears: Scott’s plane had been hit by a missile; no one knew where Stacy’s brother was, and no further contact had been made since the incident.

  Stacy left school immediately and packed a bag to join her father, Dr. Bill O’Grady, a radiologist, at his home in Alexandria, Virginia. All she could think of was the time she and her mother had proudly pinned gold lieutenant bars on Scott. He had been so happy that day. It capped a youth devoted to adventure: sky diving, gliding, bobsledding. Stacy couldn’t believe that Scott had not survived.

  • • •

  Aboard the amphibious-helicopter ship USS Kearsarge, 20 miles off the Balkan coast in the northern Adriatic, Col. Martin Berndt assembled members of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, who were specially trained in combat search and rescue. Intelligence reports now confirmed that the ambush of the two F-16s had been a clever deception. The Bosnian Serbs knew that if the SA-6 mobile missiles had tried to track O’Grady and Wright directly, the cockpit instruments in the F-16s would have detected the radar immediately.

  Instead, they had relied on civilian radars across the border in the Serb Republic. The data were processed at an air-defense center in Belgrade, then transmitted by landline to three mobile SA-6 missile vehicles in the mountains near Bihac. Only at the last instant did SA-6 operators launch the missiles and then turn on their radar—giving the young pilots virtually no warning.

  Berndt tapped the large tactical wall map of northern Bosnia. Normally helicopter rescues were conducted under cover of darkness, with the pilots wearing night-vision goggles. But goggles couldn’t detect power lines that snaked across the valleys. To avoid the SAMs, the rescue team might have to risk flying in daylight, threading their way along valleys, but that would expose them to anti-aircraft guns and shoulder-fired missiles.

  Berndt looked at Maj. Bill Tarbutton, 43, who would command the rescue aircraft, and Lt. Col. Chris Gunther, also 43, who would lead the rescue team on the ground. “Right now,” he told them, “the big questions are: Is O’Grady alive, and if so, where is he?”

  • • •

  Rifle fire cracked near O’Grady’s hiding place, and bullets whipped through nearby brush. Instinctively, he thrust his face deeper into the dirt. They were shooting to kill. O’Grady prayed, trying to focus all of his concentration on the familiar words Our Father, who art in heaven . . .

  Out of the corner of his eye, O’Grady could see shadows six feet away. Weapons rattled against branches as the soldiers made their way through the brush, using their rifle muzzles as probes. The men with the guns seemed to be circling him, toying with him. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners . . . Soon the voices faded, and the rifles cracked from farther away.

  Finally the sun passed below the western mountains. O’Grady heard the irritating, high-pitched whine of gnats and mosquitoes as they hovered about him. But he forced himself to continue lying motionless, his mouth dry from terror and thirst. When darkness fell, he could risk moving. He was determined to reach that plateau away from the highway and the town—the best place for pickup by a rescue helicopter.

  • • •

  For two days the Marines aboard the Kearsarge had been on one-hour alert—but there was still no word on O’Grady’s fate. Bosnian Serb TV had shown the wreckage of O’Grady’s plane and announced that he had been captured. Major Tarbutton was skeptical. “If the Serbs had O’Grady,” he said, “they’d show him on TV.”

  Colonel Berndt agreed. Later, an intelligence intercept reached him: Bosnian Serb soldiers had found a parachute, but not the pilot.

  • • •

  O’Grady estimated that he had covered less than a mile in three nights. But he’d worked by the book, moving only at night and finding secure hiding places well before dawn.

  He thought about his survival equipment. In his vest, the evasion map, radio, and smoke and signal flares were vital, and so was the Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver. This palm-size set processed signals from navigation satellites, giving him an accurate ground position and providing exact coordinates for rescue forces.

  A separate survival pack contained a spare radio and batteries, a first-aid kit and more flares. He also had a green foil thermal blanket, camouflage netting, face paint to help conceal him, and plastic bags and a sponge to catch and store rain for drinking water.

  So far, hunger hadn’t been a problem—but thirst was. That afternoon O’Grady had drunk the last of his eight four-ounce pouches of water. His evasion map showed the nearest stream was on the other side of Bosanski Petrovac, in the other direction from where he was headed.

  Now, as dawn approached, O’Grady found another secure hiding place, spread his map as a ground sheet, pulled his thermal blanket across his shoulders and draped a camouflage net over his body. He then turned on his survival radio and sent a brief coded signal. As sunrise filled the valley, he tried to get some sleep. They’re not going to capture me, he vowed.

  • • •

  Television sets in Bill O’Grady’s home were left on around the clock. Sitting on a living-room couch, Stacy O’Grady slipped into a shell of emotional numbness, mindlessly clicking the television remote, flipping through the channels, searching in vain for any sign of hope.

  Stacy, Scott and their younger brother Paul had grown up in Spokane, Washington. From childhood experiences, Stacy knew that beneath his easy smile and soft-spoken charm, Scott had a tough core.

  Stacy chuckled involuntarily, remembering the day when she was in sixth grade and a bully on the school bus was twisting her coat collar, choking her. Scott was smaller and lighter, but he seized the larger kid with a ferocious grip and glared so fiercely that the bully fled in panic.

  Stacy was three years younger, but she and Scott shared the same birthday in October; they had always been close. She could picture the delicate silver crucifix she had given Scott before he left to fly fighters o
verseas. The thought that he was wearing it gave her comfort as she nodded off to sleep.

  • • •

  It was the afternoon of June 6, four days into his ordeal. Half dozing, O’Grady felt the snout of a cow nuzzling between his boots. After the animal left, O’Grady snatched a handful of grass to gnaw. If cows can live on it, so can I. But by now his mouth was almost swollen shut from thirst, and he could swallow only a few blades. His eyes hurt, and his skin was badly wrinkled. He knew his dehydration was severe.

  Later that night thunder cracked, followed by a downpour. He opened two plastic bags to catch the water. He also took the sponge from his survival kit to soak up the water pooling in his plastic survival pack. O’Grady drank greedily.

  After the rain, the night grew colder. He shivered, his soaked flight suit a chilling weight on his body. When it started raining again, he packed his survival equipment. Since there was not much chance anyone would be out on a night like this, he’d risk moving faster toward the high ground.

  O’Grady reached the plateau before dawn. A stone fence separated the pastures of the valley from the scrub brush to the south. He found a secure holding point, then set out to locate a landing zone for a rescue helicopter. The only open spot nearby was rocky, narrow and sloping, with a crude fence blocking the far end. He read the display of his GPS set and noted his position on the map.

  O’Grady hid again when daylight came but managed to sleep only fitfully. Hunger was nagging him. He noticed brown ants moving through the weeds near his elbow. He tried to scoop a handful, but snagged only a few. They crunched in his mouth with a lemony tang—not much nourishment, but they moistened his tongue.

  After sunset, his thirst returned with a vengeance. O’Grady had finished the rainwater, so he pulled off his wet boots and squeezed a few drops of water from his wool socks into a plastic bag. It was rancid, but drinkable. He dozed off in the hours of early darkness.