Dead or Alive? - Part 2: Presumed Dead
By LON WAGNER AND AMY WATERS YARSINSKE, The Virginian-Pilot
© December 31, 2001
Dave Renaud was shell-shocked.

He strode through the passageways of the carrier Saratoga, his mind replaying that night's strike, working to unscramble the radio calls about the MiG, the fireball he'd seen and the other pilots trying to get a response from Scott Speicher.

He couldn't believe that, of all the pilots in the sky, he had the best view of the explosion. It seemed so big, like no one flying over Iraq at the time could have missed it.

He chastised himself. He should have marked his position. He should have broken onto the AWACs frequency and reported what he saw, but the radio was busy, he had missiles to fire and he kept quiet.

When he landed his F/A-18 back on the Saratoga, he went straight to the ship's intelligence center, where pilots report the details of their missions.

The intel officer asked Renaud if he'd seen anything out of the ordinary. Renaud told him about the fireball, how big and bright it was and how he watched it fall into the desert.

``It didn't look to me like that was a survivable explosion,'' Renaud said.

(On Jan. 17, 1991, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell briefed reporters about the first strike of the Persian Gulf War. They said one plane had been hit and its pilot killed. AP file photo above)

``You know,'' the intel officer told him, ``Speicher did not come back. Go straight to Spock Anderson and tell him what you know.''

Renaud found Michael ''Spock'' Anderson, Speicher's skipper, in one of the ready rooms. Renaud always flew with a tape running in his heads-up display, a monitor that records the action in front of a Hornet and in the cockpit. On a night mission, the video would be worthless, but he'd still have the sound -- the radio communications and anything he said.

They listened to the tape a couple of times, found where Renaud was when he spoke into his microphone about the explosion. They matched that against other Hornet data that tracked Renaud's flight minute by minute.

If a surface-to-air missile or an enemy fighter had knocked Speicher out of the sky early that morning, Anderson would have to know precisely where to get special operations forces to search.

They pulled out Renaud's flight chart. Renaud scribbled a circle where he thought he saw the explosion.

Next to it, he wrote, ``Spike.''

Twelve hours later, military leaders in Washington briefed the media about the first night of the Gulf War. It was Jan. 17, 1991.

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell described an incredibly successful series of airstrikes.

``There's been a single American aircraft lost,'' Cheney told reporters. ``It involves a single casualty. I don't know that we want to identify the aircraft, do we?''

Cheney looked at Powell.

``It was an F-18,'' Powell said.

Was that a wounding or a death? a reporter asked.

``A . . . ,'' Cheney hesitated, ``a death.''

Cheney didn't name Speicher, but the pilots back on the Saratoga knew whom he was talking about. As soon as the squadrons returned that morning, Speicher's fate became the buzz of the ship.

Cheney's statement assumed that the blast Renaud saw was Speicher's jet and that he couldn't have survived the explosion. That theory would fuel assumptions for years.

Bob Stumpf, of VFA-83 squadron, heard that Speicher hadn't tried to contact anyone with his survival radio, but he also had heard that VFA-81s' new radios wouldn't fit in their pockets. Maybe Speicher lost his when he ejected and couldn't contact anyone.

He knew that Renaud hadn't seen a parachute after the explosion, but it was the middle of the night. Stumpf thought they would only declare Speicher killed so quickly if someone had found his body.

``They know something we don't know,'' Stumpf thought when he heard of Cheney's remarks.

If Speicher wasn't dead, the pilots knew what Cheney said could doom him. If the Iraqis had captured Speicher and if President Saddam Hussein knew U.S. leaders thought he was dead, maybe Saddam would keep him. An American pilot could be a trophy prisoner.

Fellow pilots hadn't assumed Speicher was dead. If a missile had slammed into Speicher's Hornet, he likely ejected, they thought.

``Poor bastard's probably in the desert somewhere trying to find water,'' Stumpf thought.

(The Speichers, pictured left in a 1989 church directory, had two children - Meghan, who was 3 when her father disappeared, and Michael, who was 1. File photo.)

In a war involving troops on the ground, pilots launching bombing raids from carriers in two different seas and coordination between military leaders in Washington and Riyadh, it might take days to thoroughly search for a downed pilot.

Later that day, Anderson called a meeting of his officers. Barry Hull remembers Anderson giving the news straight. He didn't speculate.

``Guys, you know Spike didn't make it back last night,'' Anderson said, ``and he did not divert, either.''

That afternoon in Jacksonville, Fla., Navy wives and relatives anxiously wondered which Hornet pilot had been killed.

A middle-class neighborhood had sprouted under the flight paths of Cecil Field Naval Air Station. Kids went to Nathan Bedford Forrest High School, Speicher's alma mater, where there's no ignoring the jets when they roar overhead.

Navy representatives drove down the street, past the yellow ribbons and red, white and blue streamers that had been tied to lampposts five months earlier when the ships first deployed for Desert Shield.

They could have stopped at many homes in that neighborhood, but they knocked on the door of Joanne Speicher. She had quit her job teaching home economics at Forrest High School to have Meghan, now 3, and her husband's namesake, Michael, nearly 2.

She had heard what Cheney said, but didn't know who'd been killed. They told her. The Boy Scout, the kid who had balanced on the end of the diving board for a shot in the high school yearbook, the husband who sat on the floor with the 4- and 5-year-olds in his Sunday school class to help color and paste, would not be home when the war ended.

The Pentagon reported that an Iraqi surface-to-air missile had knocked Speicher's Hornet from the sky. No American fighter jets had been lost to air-to-air combat, the Pentagon said.

After the family was told, Michael Scott Speicher, 33, became a headline.

(David Rowe went to high school and college with Scott Speicher. Rowe still lives in Jacksonville, Fla., and he thinks about his fun-loving friend often. ''You're living in Florida, man,'' Speicher used to tell Rowe, ''you gotta have a tan.'' Photo by Steve Earley / The Virginian-Pilot.)

A day after the airstrikes began, war coverage still transfixed most Americans. Rowe knew many Navy pilots from living in Jacksonville, and he knew others from his job at the Naval Aviation Depot.

The United States has lost its first pilot during Operation Desert Storm, CBS's Dan Rather reported.

A photo of a smiling pilot in a flight suit flashed on the screen.

Scott Speicher, his buddy with the impish grin. The kid from Missouri who moved to Florida and loved to sunbathe: ``You're living in Florida, man, you gotta have a tan.''

Scott Speicher in his yearbook from Nathan Bedford Forrest High School in Jacksonville, Fla.

The guy who one-upped his Florida State buddies on the rite of passage of diving from a 30-foot cliff into Big Dismal Sink. Speicher watched his friends jump in, then stood at the edge of the cliff and grinned.

``Is that the best you can do?'' he yelled down.

Speicher climbed an oak tree on the edge of the sinkhole and soared headfirst about 50 feet into the water. Rowe thought right then that Spike was destined to get catapulted from aircraft carriers for a living.

When Rowe saw that picture on TV, nausea swept over him, he slid off the couch onto his knees, slapped the floor and cried.

``God, no!

``God, no!

``God, no!''

The pilots on the Saratoga kept focusing on their missions.

They did not yet control the skies over Iraq. The night after Speicher went down, the Saratoga lost two A-6 jets and a few days later, an F-14.

To the other pilots, dying on a mission became a real possibility.

``Spike, he's better than me and he got it,'' Hull kept thinking. ``That means I can get it.''

For Stumpf, a 17-year veteran pilot, getting back into his F/A-18 for his second mission was the toughest thing he had ever done. Stumpf, Hull and the others tried to block out what had happened on that first strike and bear down on knocking out Iraqi air defenses.

Two weeks passed quickly. The captain of the Saratoga told Joanne Speicher that the military was making every effort to find her husband or his remains. Spock Anderson sent her this message: ``All, repeat, all theater combat search and rescue efforts were mobilized.''

But no one ever went looking for Speicher.

Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf had put Army Col. Jesse Johnson in charge of combat search and rescue efforts for allied forces opposing Iraq, and Johnson set up strict guidelines for launching a search. The teams would have to hear from a downed pilot, find out his location and assess the risk before going into Iraq.

That was a drastic change from Vietnam, where teams would head out and search when they heard that a pilot had gone down. Seventy-one search and rescue team members were killed, but Air Force rescuers saved more than 4,000 Americans, and the Navy picked up hundreds of others.

In the Persian Gulf War, 35 allied jets went down, but Johnson only launched search teams for seven of them. They rescued three pilots.

Speicher's disappearance didn't meet the requirements.

(Barry ''Skull'' Hull, one of Scott Speicher's squadronmates, remembers gathering with fellow officers and being told that Speicher hadn't made it back. Photo by Steve Earley / The Virginian-Pilot.)

After the shooting stopped, about six weeks later, Navy officers called Speicher's roommate, Tony Albano, and instructed him to go to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Iraq had released its prisoners of war, and Albano was sent to see if Speicher was among the men who walked off the plane.

He wasn't overly optimistic, but there was a chance.

The hope died quickly.

By the time the plane touched down with 21 American POWs, Albano had been told Speicher wasn't among them. He flew back to the Saratoga.

That same day, Army Capt. Timothy Connolly of the 450th Civil Affairs Battalion was stationed in the Iraqi desert. His special operations unit had set up Camp Mercy to deal with people the Iraqis were freeing from prisons. Connolly was called over to talk to a Kuwaiti man who had been captured by the Iraqis four months earlier.

The man told Connolly that he was a colonel with the Kuwaiti secret police and that he'd been in a hospital just days earlier in An Nasiriyah. In the bed next to him, he said, was an American pilot.

Connolly sent a message to headquarters and said the Kuwaiti had offered to look at photos of American pilots. Not necessary, came the response.

``The prisoner exchange has taken place. We're not missing anybody.''

The Kuwaiti went home, and Connolly jotted the encounter in his log book.

A few weeks later, Iraq sent remains to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Iraqis said they belonged to an American pilot named ``Mickel.''

The remains went to Dover Air Force Base, then to Dr. Victor Weedn at the office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner. Weedn was in charge of building the Department of Defense DNA Registry, a pioneering effort that included an identification laboratory. Later, he would use the technology to identify victims of the TWA Flight 800 crash, those who died when the Branch Davidian compound burned and the remains of Czar Nicholas II.

But this was 1991, and the science was shaky. Before Desert Storm, Weedn asked to collect DNA from every member of the military, but some superiors were skeptical and denied the request.

Then came ``Mickel,'' literally a pound of flesh. It was dried skin with some hair on it. Weedn saw that the remains came from a Caucasian but someone with a darker complexion.

Without Speicher's DNA to compare to Mickel's flesh, Weedn had to try another route. He got stubble from Speicher's electric shaver. He sent some of the flesh to a commercial lab with which he had contracted. While he waited for those results, he tested the DNA of the flesh another way and compared that with Speicher's.

They didn't match.

The other results came back: They didn't match, either.

On May 6, Weedn reported that he didn't know whose flesh he was sent, but it definitely didn't belong to Speicher.

Two weeks later, the secretary of the Navy's office said there was ``no credible evidence'' that Speicher survived his crash.

Weedn was surprised, but figured it was the Navy's call. They must know something more.

On May 22, the Navy held a memorial service at Cecil Field Chapel. The place was packed.

Speicher's college friend David Rowe was so proud of what Anderson said during his eulogy.

``He was one of the best, if not the best, aviator in the wing,'' Anderson said. ``To watch Spike land an F/A-18 on an aircraft carrier was a work of art.''

That same day, the Navy declared Speicher KIA/BNR, killed in action, body not recovered.

Later, he got a marker at Arlington National Cemetery.

Florida State University announced it would build the Scott Speicher Memorial Tennis Center. Lake Shore United Methodist Church also built a memorial.

And Rowe and some of Speicher's college friends decided to hold a golf tournament in his honor. Rowe went over to Anderson's home one night, and they talked about the golf outing and swapped stories about Speicher.

Rowe told him about the time Spike jumped from the cliff. Anderson told Rowe one of his favorite stories:

The pilots were relaxing at a hotel in the Middle East. They were several floors up on a balcony, having a cookout, and Spike looked across the street at some construction.

``Twenty bucks I can hit that bulldozer with this kielbasa,'' Spike said.

You're on, the other pilots told him. So Spike grabbed a whole kielbasa, ducked into the room to line up his shot, then quick-stepped to the railing and tossed it.

It hurtled up, out across the street and then smacked right on top of the bulldozer. The operator looked over and started yelling. The pilots cackled.

``DIRECT HIT! DIRECT HIT!''

Anderson and Rowe had a good laugh. Then Rowe asked, if Anderson didn't mind saying, what had happened to his friend.

``It was a SAM that got him?'' Rowe said.

He remembers the look that came over Anderson. How his eyes filled with tears. ``It was no SAM that got Spike,'' he said. ``Let me tell you what happened.''

So Anderson told Rowe about how Spike came to him begging to go on the mission, and Anderson said no. And Spike came back a second time, and Anderson changed his mind.

Then he told Rowe about the MiG, and how the rules of engagement leaned toward letting an enemy fighter go if you weren't sure. For months, the Pentagon had stuck to the story that Speicher had been downed by a surface-to-air missile.

``I'm telling you right now, don't believe what you're being told,'' Rowe remembers Anderson saying. ``It was that MiG that shot Spike down.

``I HAD him, Dave, and I could have taken him out.''

With that, the official story of what happened to Scott Speicher started to come unglued.

Two years later, it would fall apart completely with an unexpected discovery.

News researcher Ann Kinken Johnson contributed to this series.

Reach Lon Wagner at 446-2341 or lon1@pilotonline.com

Reach Amy Yarsinske at 627-0766 or ayarsinske@home.com

IN THIS SERIES:
Introduction
Part 1: Dead or Alive?
Part 2: Presumed Dead
Part 3: A Test of Honor
Part 4: Returning to Iraq
Part 5: Hope Reawakens
Part 6: Missing in Action