Mandarin teacher who served with Speicher remembers his shipmate
He and his students participated in efforts to find Speicher.
By Dan Scanlan
A Mandarin educator says he's glad Navy pilot and former shipmate Michael Scott Speicher has finally come home after 18 years.
But Jonathan Kern still wonders if the fallen Navy flier survived for some time as an Iraqi prisoner of war, and knew about efforts to get him freed.
Kern spent four years as a Marine, serving in the first Gulf War and aboard the same aircraft carrier as the Orange Park flier, before turning to teaching. Now a language arts teacher at Mandarin Middle School, Kern was at the Veterans Memorial Wall and Forrest High School when the funeral procession for Speicher passed Aug. 14.
He said he spent time with members of Friends Working to Free Scott Speicher, whom he helped as they lobbied government leaders to search for the fallen flier. But there was no satisfaction in seeing the hearse.
"It was empty fulfillment. You look and say 'I only had a very tiny part to do with his coming home' and all, and I enjoyed working there with that group to help him come home. Whenever his remains were brought by, you were left with a feeling of - I don't know how I felt," Kern said. "Hopefully he does leave a legacy in which future members of the military are not subjected to what we believe he was possibly subjected to."
In 2003, Kern's sixth-grade language arts class at Landon Middle School started a letter-writing campaign to free Speicher, believed to be a prisoner of war in Iraq at the time. Copies of the letters they wrote to the president, area disc jockeys and lawmakers were posted in his Landon class, as well as answers from the White House and elsewhere.
"The kids were riding high on what they achieved. They were in the news. We even had 'CBS Evening News,' and they felt good about themselves," he remembers.
Kern said he would like to see his students work someday on another idea - expanded histories of the soldiers whose names are on Jacksonville's Veteran Memorial Wall. But he doesn't know when that might be done.
© The Florida Times-Union