
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, June 11, 1995                   TAG: 9506120080
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: AVIANO AIR BASE, ITALY                                LENGTH: Medium

DOWNED PILOT DESCRIBES ORDEAL

As he lay in the bushes near where his parachute landed, his face in the dirt and his ears covered with camouflage gloves, Capt. Scott F. O'Grady thought that a few feet away there were people looking to kill him.

``It wasn't that they were just walking around me,'' the 29-year-old pilot said Saturday. ``It was that they were shooting their rifles, and they weren't just shooting at bunny rabbits, because I never saw any bunny rabbits. I think they thought they saw something that was me, and were trying to kill me.''

At his first news conference since his dramatic rescue two days ago, O'Grady, whose F-16 jet fighter was downed by a Serbian missile while on NATO patrol over Bosnia, told how he managed to survive for six days in a Bosnian forest, hiding by day, never sleeping for more than a half-hour at a time, moving only at night.

He scrounged for water - even wringing a few drops of rainwater from the wool socks he was wearing - and dug for ants. And he gave nicknames - Leroy and Alfred - to two pesky cows who twice closed in on his hiding place. He called their cowherd Tinkerbell.

O'Grady cried as he listened to a tape of the radio conversation he had early Thursday with his friend, Capt. Thomas O. Hanford, who was flying 30,000 feet over his hiding place. ``I'm alive. Help,'' said O'Grady's faint voice, barely audible over the static.

``I am not a Rambo,'' O'Grady said. ``All I was was a scared little bunny rabbit trying to hide, trying to survive.''

O'Grady, who leaves today for the United States to join his family, said he was still weak. ``I can't walk very fast and my feet are pretty bad right now, but I'm OK,'' he said, adding later that when his leave is over, he wants to go back to his job flying F-16s.

by CNB