The hot month of June 1995 arrived to the Balkans on a Thursday, while I was on night shift at Belgrade radar site, surveying the Bosnia No Fly Zone. Just when I was leaving the radar room, on the next morning, I noticed something strange was happening. All the Serbian controllers were very excited, but at start, I couldn’t understand what it was. Suddenly some said that an American aircraft had been shot down.
According to the civilian controllers, a pair of NATO F-16 fighters had been doing the normal patrol tour over Bosnia, in what was known as “Normal Operations”. The Bosnian Serb air defence systems were active and vigilant, because of the recent NATO airstrikes around Srebrenica. The two fighters flown in direction of the Banja Luka air base and, somewhere between Bihac and Banja Luka, in the vicinities of a small village called Mrkonjic, a Surface to Air Missile (SAM 6) mobile station was activated and fired its missiles shooting down one of the aircraft. The second F-16 stayed on site for several minutes, after which it went away, back to its departing point in Italy – most probably Aviano Air Base.
I rushed back to the radar site and I saw a radar screen so full of radar blips, there’s no more space over Bosnia to fit in additional aircraft. NATO had scramble all its birds to the crash site.
This was the famous incident where the US Air Force Captain Scott O’Grady, was shot down, during a routine patrol flight over Bosnia.
The SAM 6 missile exploded a few meters away from Captain O’Grady’s F-16, seriously damaging it. The aircraft had lost its capability to fly; therefore the pilot ejected himself out of the falling aircraft.
During several days the VRS looked for Captain O’Grady, but he managed to hide and escaped the Serbian soldiers. He was saved much later, during a night raid operation, by US Special Forces using helicopters from an aircraft carrier in the Adriatic.
The incident was largely covered by the international media, and has inspired the Hollywood film “Behind enemy lines”, staring Owen Wilson, Gene Hackman and the Joaquim de Almeida.
On the night of the 2nd of June, CNN was making a story about the incident, demonizing the Serbs and inviting people to phone to their Atlanta studios and participate on the debate. Some of the interviewed, with responsibilities in the US Governmental system, were in favor of bombarding Belgrade and everything with a Serbian connection. Those persons were acting in a very irresponsible way, forgetting that there was international staff on the ground, and they had just put their life in danger.
Bottom line, O’Grady’s shot down was providing antenna time to hardliners on both sides of the equation, and everyone could see that the Serbs were going to lose that “media battle”. The CNN journalists were not acting as impartial reporters; the evening news anchorman was not reporting facts, but expressing opinions and commenting the news report. CNN used to refer to the Yugoslav Federation as: – “The Serb Dominated Yugoslavia”.
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