News-Info-Alerts

Re: Students, Police Join Free Speicher Effort

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: December 12, 2002

"Students, police join Free Speicher effort

By Paul Pinkham
Times-Union staff writer
When teacher and Gulf War veteran John Kern assigned his Landon Middle School students to write essays about missing Jacksonville Navy pilot Scott Speicher, he had no idea it would come to this.

Essays turned into letters, and the letters were sent to politicians, businesses and the media, urging support for efforts to determine Speicher's fate after he was shot down over Iraq the first night of the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

Yesterday, Kern and his students were honored at a ceremony outside the San Marco school and helped Sheriff Nat Glover place yellow "Free Scott Speicher" ribbons on police cars. Glover said the ribbons would fly from all patrol cars in the city.

"We, too, join the effort to free Scott Speicher," Glover said of police.

Speicher was declared dead the day after his FA-18 Hornet disappeared over the Iraqi desert. The Navy changed his status to missing in action last year and to missing-captured this year, based on military and intelligence information that concluded he survived the crash and probably was captured. That information includes an analysis of his jet found in 1995 and statements by Iraqi defectors about an American pilot imprisoned in Baghdad.

The Iraqi government insists he died in the crash.

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  Yellow ribbons will be flown from Sheriff's Office vehicles to show support for Navy pilot Scott Speicher.
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Kern was a Marine corporal aboard the USS Saratoga that night and remembers the crew mourning after being informed that Speicher didn't return from his bombing run. Eleven years later, teaching sixth-grade history in Speicher's hometown, he turned a lesson about comic book heroes into one on real heroes, using Speicher as an example.

"The kids really took to heart what they read about him," Kern said.

About 140 letters went to President Bush, CEOs at Pepsi and Kellogg's and local radio personalities, among others. They've received about a dozen responses, including one from the president, who said he was working to resolve Speicher's fate.

Speicher's former classmates at Forrest High School said the students' letter-writing campaign and the sheriff's ribbons are meaningful.

"I'm proud to see the youth of America, especially right here in Jacksonville, getting involved in a campaign that happened before they were even born," said Mark Reed of Friends Working to Free Scott Speicher, an organization made up mostly of Speicher's ex-classmates.

But to the Landon classmates who wrote the letters, it just seemed like the right thing to do.

"We should remember heroes like Scott Speicher because they went to war to defend our country," said sixth-grader Marion Benkaiouche.

Staff writer Paul Pinkham can be reached at (904) 359-4107 or ppinkhamjacksonville.com.

© The Florida Times-Union "