Reader's Digest Soldier Stories Read online

  He was awakened after midnight on June 8 by the blast of heavy anti-aircraft firing nearby. O’Grady took a compass bearing on the sound. Seconds later he heard a low-flying jet. It had to be a NATO reconnaissance plane looking for him. O’Grady stood cautiously, switched his survival radio to beeper, and pressed the transmit button. This’ll light up the world, he mused. Both the NATO search planes and the Bosnian Serbs would hear the transmission. He had to wait to see who would find him first.

  • • •

  Just after 1:30 a.m. on June 8, Capt. T. O. Hanford and his wingman, Capt. Vaughn Litdejohn, were flying high above the dark mountains. After a report of a “possible beeper,” Hanford was trying to contact O’Grady. For the next 40 minutes he called on the rescue channel. But there was no reply. At 2:07 a.m., with fuel low, Hanford tried O’Grady one last time. “Basher 52, this is Basher 11.”

  O’Grady’s heart raced as he heard Hanford’s voice. “Basher 11,” he called. “Help!”

  Hanford had to verify that the weak voice was O’Grady’s. “Basher 52, what was your squadron in Korea?” Hanford asked.

  “Juvats,” O’Grady replied.

  “Copy that,” Hanford said, trying to keep his emotions in check. “You’re alive. Good to hear your voice.” For the next ten minutes Hanford circled as O’Grady used a voice code to reveal his GPS coordinates. Then Hanford told O’Grady he’d be picked up “mañana.”

  “No,” O’Grady replied. “I have to get out tonight.”

  Hanford reported back to his controllers, then to O’Grady. “You will be rescued, but you have to be prepared to signal in visual range.” He added: “If you have an emergency, Basher 52, I will always be monitoring this channel.”

  • • •

  In Virginia, the phone rang at 12:48 a.m. “Another reporter,” Bill O’Grady said, groaning, as he pulled himself awake. It was Scott’s wing commander, Col. Charles F. Wald. “Dr. O’Grady, we’ve contacted him,” Wald said. “He’s alive. And we’re going to go get him.”

  Overcome with emotion, the doctor raced to tell Stacy and Paul.

  • • •

  In the pastel dawn, the flight deck of the Kearsarge throbbed with the beat of the big helicopters’ rotors. From a cockpit jump seat in Dash Two, one of two Super Stallion helicopters, Berndt’s headphones crackled. “Pulling power,” he heard Tarbutton call from the lead helicopter, Dash One, and then Berndt watched it rise.

  There were now four choppers in a trail formation: Dash One and Dash Two, and two smaller Cobra gunships to guard the flanks. Far above them were two Harrier jets, launched from the Kearsarge. Across the northern Adriatic, NATO warplanes were assembling a protective umbrella for the Marine rescue effort. At 5:43 a.m., they received the command to cross the Balkan coast.

  They flew fast and low—no higher than 500 feet—to evade radar. Ahead, the mountains rose in a dark wall, silhouetted by the sunrise. In Dash One, Tarbutton saw that the valleys were choked with ground fog. This would shield them from visual detection, but make navigating tricky.

  “Twenty,” announced an unseen airborne controller, code-named Magic, in a radar plane far above. They were 20 miles from O’Grady.

  “Ten,” Magic called. Now Tarbutton ordered the Cobras to press ahead, positively identify O’Grady and check the landing zone.

  Marine Maj. Scott Mykleby, lead Cobra pilot, flew his gunship toward the coordinates of O’Grady’s position.

  “I can see you,” O’Grady radioed.

  “Talk me on to you, Basher,” Mykleby replied. A moment later, he heard O’Grady’s excited shout. “You’re overhead!”

  “Pop smoke,” Mykleby directed.

  O’Grady pulled the tab on an orange smoke flare. Slowing to a hover, Mykleby searched the slope for the clearing that O’Grady said was nearby. O’Grady’s little smoke flare was almost lost in the fog. Then Mykleby threw out a yellow smoke grenade to better mark O’Grady’s position.

  O’Grady warned Mykleby of the heavy firing he had heard the night before, then pulled on the bright orange knit cap from his survival kit. “I’m wearing an orange hat,” he told Mykleby.

  “Buster,” Mykleby radioed Tarbutton—code for proceed ahead at maximum speed.

  Tarbutton throttled up his engines and pulled the control stick into a hard climb. The two Super Stallions slashed across the fog bank and climbed the steep ridge.

  The clearing was just large enough for the two Super Stallions to land with minimum clearance between the rotor tips. Marines piled out to form a security perimeter as Mykleby radioed O’Grady: “Run to the helicopter.” O’Grady pounded through the thicket, his boots slipping on the wet rocks.

  Berndt saw movement in the fog to the left. O’Grady’s orange hat was bright in the mist. Sgt. Scott Pfister, crew chief on Dash Two, jumped from the hatch. O’Grady was wobbling, obviously exhausted. “Over here, sir,” Pfister shouted. Throwing his arm under the young pilot’s shoulder, he pushed O’Grady inside.

  A Marine wrapped the pilot in a thermal blanket. O’Grady’s hands were cold, wrinkled claws, his bearded face waxy. “Thank you, thank you,” he kept saying.

  Tarbutton ordered the formation to move up and out at maximum speed, flying only 50 feet above the rolling hillsides, so fast that obstacles rushed by in a blur. They were coming up to the final mountain range when the cockpit warning instruments gave a sharp beep.

  Tarbutton caught a glimpse of movement to his left and heard Mykleby’s warning: “SAMs in the air!”

  Mykleby saw a chalk-white smoke trail corkscrew toward the helicopters from the left. As another missile sailed toward them, Mykleby popped a string of glaring magnesium flares to decoy the shoulder-fired SA-7s’ infrared homing warheads. But even as he countered the missiles fired from the left, glowing orange baseballs sailed toward the helicopters from the right, incandescent red tracers of an automatic anti-aircraft gun on the ground. The pilots threw their aircraft into violent zigzags. Sgt. Scott Pfister returned fire with a short, rattling burst from his .50-caliber machine gun.

  As O’Grady hunched beneath a blanket, warmth slowly seeping into his chilled limbs, an assault-rifle bullet pierced the Super Stallion’s tail ramp and ricocheted wildly around the troop bay. Two feet from O’Grady, Sgt. Major Angel Castro felt a blow on his side. He pulled out the empty canteen from his hip pouch. The green plastic was deeply gouged from the impact of the bullet.

  The Cobra pilots wanted to engage the anti-aircraft gun—but if Tarbutton broke the gunships from formation, he’d have no protection crossing the coastal towns ahead. They had to hold course and take fire.

  An amber warning light flashed, signaling one of Tarbutton’s main rotor blades had been hit. Then Mykleby radioed that he also had a warning light.

  Moments later, they flashed across the coastline, and the Kearsarge task force came into view on the horizon. “Mother in sight,” Tarbutton informed the team.

  O’Grady blinked at the dazzling surface of the Adriatic Sea, his face twisted with emotion. Colonel Berndt looked back from the jump seat, and O’Grady flashed a warm grin.

  Just after 1:30 a.m. in Alexandria, Bill O’Grady received another call from Colonel Wald. “Scott is aboard the Kearsarge,” Wald said. “He’s dehydrated, but otherwise fine.” Scott’s father rushed to tell Stacy and Paul the news. The family rejoiced. Stacy began counting down the hours when she would see her brother again.

  • • •

  On June 10, Scott O’Grady addressed reporters at Aviano Air Base in Italy. “If it wasn’t for God’s love for me,” he said, “and my love for God, I wouldn’t have gotten through it.” But he also reserved special thanks for the “people at the pointy end of the spear”—the Marines who had risked their lives to save him. “If you want to find heroes,” he said, “that’s where you should look.”

  THE GULF WAR

  They Went to War

  BY MALCOLM McCONNELL

  On a rainy spring night in 1944, a lanky American volunteer att
ached to the British 8th Army led a platoon of ambulances across the Rapido River in southern Italy. Lewis Harned, just 19 years old, was already a veteran of savage fighting near Monte Cassino, and now Harned was again in desperate straits.

  The Allied bridgehead was under German counterattack. His duty was to evacuate the wounded. Suddenly, small-arms fire ripped through nearby trees. “Back!” Harned shouted, throwing his ambulance into reverse. “Germans!”

  Later, Harned sat drinking a canteen cup of coffee, still twanging from the spent adrenalin of the encounter. If I ever get home, he mused, at least I’II know I’ve been to war.

  Forty-six years later, Lewis Harned, M.D., ran a sports-medicine clinic in Madison, Wisconsin. He and his wife, Sally, married 42 years, had raised five children. But in 1985, he had joined the Wisconsin National Guard, and now, at age 66, he was a full colonel commanding the 13th Evacuation Hospital, an ultramodern, 400-bed facility that could be transported anywhere.

  After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, Dr. Harned guessed his unit would be activated. On November 15, his phone rang.

  “Colonel,” his commander said, “put on your uniform. I’ll meet you at the armory with all the details.”

  • • •

  The scene was typically American: a circle of children on a shady suburban sidewalk encouraging a boy riding a shiny new unicycle. The five O’Connor children grew up on the streets of Godfrey, Illinois, a quiet commuter town across the river from St. Louis. Paula, the middle child, was 12, blond, freckled, a tomboy in blue jeans, always competing with her older brother, Tony.

  When their friend had trouble mastering his unicycle, Tony managed half a block before falling.

  “Let me try,” Paula shouted. She pedaled a whole block before dismounting. Not to be outdone, Tony managed two blocks. Then Paula pumped all the way to St. Ambrose School, a mile away. That night around the dinner table, Joe O’Connor grinned as his daughter described her adventure.

  After graduating from high school in 1985, Paula O’Connor enlisted as a mechanic in the Air Force. She had studied auto mechanics and was good with machines.

  Joe and Sarah O’Connor were shocked. “Paula,” her father, a Korean War veteran, said, “you don’t know what you’re getting into.”

  “It’s too late,” she countered. “I’ve already signed up.”

  At Lowry Air Force Base outside Denver, O’Connor—the only woman in her group of 20—learned the demanding skills of a weapons loader, arming F-16 attack jets. Modern missiles and laser-guided bombs have to be assembled and fused with exacting precision, and speed is vital. If O’Connor missed a step, the bomb might miss its target or fail to detonate.

  O’Connor spent the next two years assigned to an F-16 NATO tactical fighter wing in Spain. She had proved herself to be one of the best weapons loaders in the unit, yet people still dismissed her as a woman. “I don’t know why you’re working so hard,” one young airman told her. “If there’s ever a war, you won’t get to go anyway.”

  In June 1990, Senior Airman Paula O’Connor won a coveted assignment to the 37th Tactical Fighter Wing in Nevada, home of the F-117A Stealth fighter. The unit had been highly classified; all O’Connor knew was that the Stealth was a weird-looking plane that was supposedly invisible to enemy radar. The first day at the base, she stood in wonder beside the big black fighter’s strangely angled plates and wedges.

  The Stealths navigation and laser-weapons guidance systems made it the most accurate bomber in the world. Because externally hung bombs would be visible on radar, the F-l17A carried its munitions in a bay in its belly. This meant the loading crew had to work in tight quarters where a dropped tool, or even an elbow, could damage sensors or delicate guidance systems. O’Connor quickly mastered these skills under the pressure of simulated combat.

  In August 1990, the preparations took on urgency. Her unit was ordered to the Khamis Mushait Air Base in the mountains of southwestern Saudi Arabia. Operation Desert Shield had begun.

  • • •

  On a warm June evening in the late 1970s, two Little League teams played a hard-fought game in suburban New Jersey. Naturally, both sides wanted to win, but the thin black pitcher was more intense than the other kids. Troy Gregory relished baseball as a chance to compete—not only against his peers but against the high standards he had set for himself.

  That evening Troy’s team lost by two runs. Walking to the parking lot with his mother, he could no longer control his disappointment. He nodded toward his teammates. “They didn’t try hard enough,” he said, tears running down his cheeks. “If they had, we would have won.”

  Trying hard became Troy Gregory’s watchword. When his mother, an artist struggling as a single parent, was unable to cope, the boy went to live with his grandmother, Grace Moore. They moved to a tree-lined street in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia. There, Mrs. Moore—an old-fashioned, religious woman raised on a Virginia farm—renewed her grandson’s self-confidence.

  “Set a goal,” she told him. “And when you reach that goal, set another. That’s how people get ahead in life.”

  Gregory followed her advice and did well in school and sports. “I’m going to make something of my life,” he told his grandmother.

  Wanting to go to college and needing some financial backing, Gregory joined the Marine Corps Reserve. As soon as he was sworn in, he mounted a “Semper Fi” bumper sticker on his car to tell the world he was a Marine and proud of it. Gregory was assigned to Hotel Battery, 3rd Battalion, 14th Marine Regiment, a tight-knit field artillery unit, and trained in fire-direction control.

  By the fall of 1990, Gregory was engaged to Adrienne Ward, an accounting student at a local university, and she took him home to meet her family in rural Virginia. He was enthralled by the warm throng of brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins. The couple decided on a large spring wedding to include the whole family.

  The Gulf War, however, changed all that. The call came a few days after Thanksgiving. Gregory would be activated on December 2; Hotel Battery would join the 1st Marine Division in the Saudi Arabian desert.

  That night, Gregory spoke to his fiancée with quiet sadness. “I wish I didn’t have to leave you,” he whispered. Later, he assured her that, if there was fighting, the war would be over quickly. “Start thinking about your dress,” he said. “Pick out the music you want for the church.”

  • • •

  Early on the morning of August 31, 1987, Robert Ray Tyler was riding his motorcycle to his first day of classes at Texas A&M University. As he sped toward a curve, the cycle skidded on a gravel patch, and he lost control. He broke a leg and his collarbone, and had serious internal injuries.

  Tyler’s mother, Cissy, received word of the accident that morning. God, no, she thought. Not again. In 1979, her husband, James Willis Tyler, had been killed in a motorcycle accident.

  Cissy Tyler brought her son home for a long, painful convalescence. Ray Tyler had inherited his father’s self-confidence and zest for life. When he was able to walk without a cane, he no longer looked forward to years in college classrooms. He was eager to get out in the world.

  Tyler’s father, his uncle Robert and his mother’s fiancé, Rey Ortiz, had all served in Vietnam. Ortiz and Tyler’s uncle encouraged him to consider the military. “It’s a good way to get your feet on the ground and figure out what you really want out of life,” his uncle told him.

  So Tyler joined the Army’s Armored Cavalry scouts. The Cavalry drove the new Bradley Fighting Vehicle, a high-speed personnel carrier armed with a fast-firing 25-mm cannon and TOW missiles. On his enlistment form, Tyler disguised the extent of his injuries.

  After training, he was assigned to the 4th Squadron, 7th U.S. Cavalry, based in Germany. Their mission was to scout for the 3rd Armored Division, one of the most powerful units in the Army.

  Tyler became the driver of one of Alpha Troop’s Bradley crews, commanded by Staff Sgt. Edward Deninger. One rainy fall afternoon on a field e
xercise, deep in the hilly forests near the Czech border, the crew was working on the Bradley, drenched and covered with mud. “You know what you guys look like?” a friend shouted. “A bunch of old alley cats.”

  “Hey,” Tyler shouted back, “I like that.” Soon afterward, he stenciled “Alleykats” on the side of their turret.

  Ray Tyler planned to go home for Christmas 1990. He called his mother to assure her that his division would not be needed in the Middle East. Just before Thanksgiving, he called again.

  “Things don’t look good,” he said. The outfit expected to receive orders to go to the Persian Gulf.

  • • •

  On January 16, 1991, Col. Lewis Harned led the 13th Evacuation Hospital from a Persian Gulf port to northern Saudi Arabia, where the unit deployed behind a wide sand-mound “berm.” Then, on the night of February 23, they braced for heavy casualties. The ground war had begun.

  The next day, American and Iraqi wounded poured into the unit’s helicopter landing pads. Some of the casualties were beyond even the intervention of the 13th Evac. Miraculously, surgeons pulled other soldiers from the brink of death. During a howling sandstorm on February 28, one young American arrived in deep shock. His tank had taken a direct hit. One leg had been severed above the knee, and there were multiple open fractures on the other; his left forearm was shredded; his groin was ripped by shell fragments, and his right eye was shattered beyond repair. As one surgical team patched segments of his veins into the arteries of his fractured leg, another attended to the soldier’s other wounds.

  By four o’clock the next morning, the soldier was stable enough to be evacuated to a military hospital in Germany. But there was still one important act to perform.

  Capt. Juan Flores woke Dr. Harned from a deep, exhausted sleep. Together they went to the brightly lit evacuation ward where the soldier lay strapped to a stretcher beneath heavy blankets.

  As Captain Flores read a citation, Colonel Harned bent to pin a Purple Heart to the young man’s pillow. Then Harned grasped the soldier’s uninjured hand. “We are all extremely proud of you,” he said.