Another installment of Soldier Dead by Mike Sledge. Mike will be appearing on POW-MIA Freedom Radio this Sunday, March 20th, 2005. Tune in, get the book.
"The trouble with KIA-BNR classifications comes when the circumstances of the loss are not so clear as in the above example, as was the case with Michael Scott Speicher, a Navy pilot shot down at the opening of the air war against Iraq in the early morning of January 17, 1991. He and others in the Sunliner squadron from the aircraft carrier Saratoga were flying F/A-18 Hornets on a preemptive strike against radar installations. During the mission, an unknown aircraft, or Òbogey,Ó was picked up on radar but, because there was doubt as to whether it was friend or foe, permission was not given to engage it. By the time one of the Sunliner pilots finally made a visual confirmation that the bogey was a Òbandit,Ó a MiG 25, it had passed through most of the squadron, and they continued their bombing run against the radar installations.
Shortly after the MiG had supposedly hightailed it out of the area, a fireball lit the sky and an American crewman on an A-6E Intruder, flying nearby, saw a "flaming wreckage careening toward the desert below." When all the Sunliners save Speicher returned to the Saratoga, it became clear that a missile had struck his plane.7
What ensued after Speicher's failure to return can appropriately be described as a comedy of errors. Some of the foul-ups were failures to communicate on many levels, location mix-ups, uncertainty about whether he had been taken out by a ground-to-air or an air-to-air missile, and even the erroneous conclusion that the planeÕs airborne explosion was not survivable. The morning after Speicher's last mission, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell held a press conference during which Cheney stated that an aircraft had been lost. When asked by reporters if the loss was "a wounding or a death," Cheney hesitantly confirmed that the pilot had been killed.8 His words, spoken under a perceived need to provide as much information as possible, no doubt hindered Speicher's potential rescue because there was now an "official line" rather than a open question as to the pilotÕs fate. In any event, no serious search-and-rescue missions were launched to find Speicher, though they could have been, and the fog of war settled on a bright young warrior, husband, and father.
Four months later, on May 22, 1991, after POWs from Iraq had returned and following a "Secretary of the Navy status review board that found 'no credible evidence' to suggest he had survived the shootdown," Speicher's status was changed from MIA to KIA-BNR.9 However, there were still so many unanswered questions about the incident and the way events had un-folded afterward that some did not give up hope. Ten years later, on January 11, 2001, Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig resurrected Scott Speicher by changing his status back from KIA-BNR to MIA, the first time such a reclassification had ever occurred. On October 11, 2002, Secretary of the Navy Gordon R. England further modified Speicher's status to Missing/CapturedÑor, to use a more familiar term, POW, presumably held by the Iraqis.
The reclassification, difficult to procure as it was, came about because of the dogged determination of a few individuals who refused to go along with the mindset of "he has to be dead because the paperwork says so" and who slowly and continually gathered assets and resources, much as a snowball rolling downhill picks up mass and momentum, until their case overcame inertia on the part of the Navy and other military organizations. Speicher's socially dead status, lasting "through three presidential administrations and innumerable opportunities to bring him home," provides a very recent and painful reminder that KIA-BNR is ultimately a matter of judgment, not factual certainty. As of this writing, KIA-BNR is still Speicher's official classification.
As of he time of final edits to this book, Captain Scott SpeicherÕs status is still Missing/Captured, as determined by the Secretary of the Navy.
There is an administrative action, a Presumptive Finding of Death (PFOD), that, like the KIA-BNR designation, is highly controversial and subjective. A PFOD is "a declaration by the Military Service Secretary or designee of the Military Service concerned, based upon a recommendation by a board or other official body that a person who was placed in a missing casualty status is dead." This decision is rendered in cases in which it is believed that the serviceperson has been killed but the remains have not been found. As of this writing, all of the servicemen missing from World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War have been classified as KIA-BNR or have had a PFOD decision rendered. In other words, in the records of the U.S. government, there are no living missing servicemen anywhere from these three wars."