This is quite similar to Chris’ adventures in the film. Luckily, they didn’t shoot, and he cut his chute, grabbed some essentials, and ran into the woods.
As O’Grady ejected, he thought his parachute might burn up, and while landing, he noticed paramilitary troops chasing him. The Serbs shot the missile without radar guidance, to avoid detection, and only turned it on when they were close to the F-16. The military later uncovered that a U-2, a high-flying reconnaissance plane had picked up illumination from the mobile base minutes before O’Grady and Wright were hit, but they couldn’t relay the message in time. Wright’s detection system had relayed a quick warning of a potential threat, but nobody saw it coming. Although they knew about fixed missile sites along much of the route, there was a mobile site that intelligence units had not spotted. On June 2, 1995, O’Grady and Wright were on a routine combat air patrol, where they were flying in an oval pattern over northwest Bosnia. The Air Force captain was flying over Bosnia, enforcing the no-fly zone, when a surface to air missile slammed into his F-16. Scott O’Grady, the pilot on whom Chris is based, survived death for six days in the summer of 1995.
The plot draws inspiration from the Mrkonjić Grad incident which happened during the war. While ‘Behind Enemy Lines’ is not completely a true story, it does take creative liberties based on the real events that happened in 1995.