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This week, after resting for nearly two decades in the western Iraqi desert, the remains of Navy Captain Scott Speicher were brought home to Jacksonville, Florida.
Speicher, the first American killed in action during the Gulf War in 1991, was a 33-year-old pilot of an F/A-18. A graduate of Florida State University, where he earned a degree in accounting, he joined the Navy and was serving aboard the USS George Washington as a member of VFA-18. When he was killed, he left behind two children under the age of four.
It's difficult to believe that nearly 20 years have passed since we launched a military operation to eject the Iraqi army from Kuwait, but because our conventional counter-attack was short, violent and successful---and because we did not remain in Iraq---American casualties were remarkably few: the Defense Department says we suffered only 147 combat deaths. But even among those few, Speicher was big news, and the reason was that we couldn't find his remains for many years and were not even sure he was dead.
The evidence suggests that Speicher's plane, flying more than 500 knots at 28,000 feet, was destroyed on the first day of the war by an air-to-air missile fired by an enemy MiG-25. Although I am acquainted with an Air Force pilot who, badly wounded, ejected from his damaged F-105 at 600 knots and lived, most aviation experts will say that such an incident is almost never survivable.
But, as in most cases where facts are in short suppy, in the absence of incontrovertible evidence that he was dead a large and mostly specious body of lore grew around the event. His plane was destroyed at low altitude by ground fire or a shoulder-fired missile. He had been captured, our government knew it and refused to admit it. We know he was in a POW cell somewhere in Iraq because we found his initials scratched into the wall.
The Defense Department did not help matters when it could not settle on his status. He was first listed as missing in action. Five years later he was declared killed. Then, perhaps under pressure from friends, family and the media---and with no remains to prove conclusively otherwise---he was again declared missing. To a nation of skeptics made cynical by generations of dissembling politicians and bureaucrats, it seemed as if the US government was at it again.
But he was dead. He may not have survived the missile strike and in any case did not survive the crash of his aircraft. His body was found and buried by nomadic tribesmen who traverse the remote and inhospitable area, and we now know this because a young man who witnessed the burial recently brought American officers to the site. Speicher's remains were collected, identified forensically as his---among other things, the jawbone matched his dental records---and returned home to the respect we demonstrate for all those who have sacrificed for us.
But ironically the stories and skepticism surrounding the fate of Captain Speicher are also the result of our success in recovering our warriors. In previous conflicts we sustained a much larger number of killed in action and also a substantial number of missing, many of whom were never found. On many battlefields, corpses---and parts of corpses---were buried quickly, sometimes without identification. The hallowed Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery contains the remains of actual unknowns---but none from conflicts after the Korean War. Since then, all our fallen have been known to us.
A private citizen who owns a GPS unit and can find his way from anywhere to anywhere else, who has been taught to disbelieve the government by the actions of the government itself, can probably not be faulted for concluding that a failure to find a fallen warrior's remains must be a purposeful act.
And he probably believes the same dynamic is at work in not capturing Osama bin Laden.
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I advocate nothing of the kind. My advice is that one should expect very little in the way of justice in a procedure that is not designed to administer it.
