R.I.P., American hero.
Welcome home.
WEST CENTRAL IRAQ - U.S. Marines have unearthed a remote desert grave in this war-torn country and found the remains of long-missing Navy pilot Capt. Michael Scott Speicher of Florida, according to U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson.
The military unearthed the remains last month and flew them to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for identification. The discovery brings to an end a mystery that began in January 1991, on the first night of the first Gulf War.
That was the night Speicher’s plane was shot down. It was the night then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney took to the airwaves and declared him the first casualty of the battle to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.
“My heart goes out to the family, again,” said Nelson, the Florida senator who was instrumental several years ago in getting the Navy to renew a search for the missing pilot. “We all clung to the slim hope that Scott was still alive and would one day come home to his family.”
Nelson said the pilot’s family – Speicher’s wife and two children are from Jacksonville, Fla. – were prepared for the alternative.
Speicher, 33, disappeared while flying a mission launched from the USS Saratoga. He was piloting a Navy F/A-18 Hornet that was struck by a missile fired by an Iraqi aircraft. He went down on Jan. 17, in a remote desert area of West Central Iraq.
Cheney declared the downed pilot dead during a soon-after televised news conference.
Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq twelve years later, Nelson pressed the Pentagon to renew a search for Speicher, based on evidence the pilot may survived the crash and been imprisoned. A member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Nelson once visited a Baghdad prison cell where it was thought Speicher may have carved his initials in the wall.
Over the years, the military changed Speicher's status from dead to missing-captured, interviewed hundreds of Iraqi officials, and even excavated a different gravesite in Baghdad in 2005.
Only recently, a new informant told U.S. military officials in Iraq of another possible location of Speicher’s grave – a site very near where his shattered airplane was found in 1993.
Acting on that information provided by an Iraqi in early July, Marines went to a location in the desert believed to be the crash site of Speicher’s jet. The informant told them he knew of two other Iraqis who recalled an American jet crashing in the desert and the pilot being buried there.
One of those Iraqis claimed to have been present when Bedouins found Speicher dead at the crash site and buried his body there. Speicher's remains were recovered over several days during the past week and flown to Dover Air Force Base for scientific identification by the military's medical examiner.
According to the Pentagon, the remains include bones and multiple skeletal fragments. Positive identification was made by comparing Speicher’s dental records with the jawbone recovered at the site.
Must of been so hard for his wife and children. His wife was recently remarried. Just imagine the torment of just not knowing.
I’m glad that he wasn’t found under Abu Ghraib or some other Iraqi prison. With mercy, he must have he died quickly.