Scott Speicher

Michael Scott Speicher (12 July 1957 – c. 17 January 1991) was a naval aviator in the United States Navy who was shot down over Iraq during the Persian Gulf War becoming the first American combat casualty of the war.

Michael Scott Speicher was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on 12 July 1957.

Scott and his sister went to Lakewood Elementary School and Eastgate Middle School before attending Winnetonka High School.

When Speicher was 15, his family moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where he attended Nathan Bedford Forrest High School.

After graduating from high school, he then attended Florida State University (FSU).

Speicher graduated from FSU in 1980 with a bachelor's degree in accounting and business management.

While at Florida State, he met Joanne, whom he eventually married, and they had two children.

By the early 1990s, Speicher had attained the rank of lieutenant commander and was stationed at NAS Cecil Field near Jacksonville, Florida.

He was assigned to Strike Fighter Squadron Eighty One (VFA-81 Sunliners), deploying with Carrier Air Wing 17 (CVW-17) aboard the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga (CV-60).

At the time of his deployment to the Iraq theater, Speicher and his wife had a 3-year-old daughter and 1-year-old son.

18 months after Speicher went missing in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, friend and fellow U.S. Navy pilot Buddy Harris married Joanne, and they had two more children.

Speicher's father had been a fighter pilot in World War II.

Speicher went on his first airplane flight when he was five years old.

Speicher was a cadet member of the Civil Air Patrol as a teenager.

Upon graduation from FSU, Speicher joined the U.S. Navy and attended Aviation Officer Candidate School at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida.

After flight training at various bases, he was designated as a naval aviator and spent several years as both a fleet squadron aviator in the A-7 Corsair II and F/A-18 Hornet and as a flight instructor on the F/A-18.

Speicher was flying an F/A-18 Hornet fighter, BuNo 163484, when he was shot down by Iraqi Air Force (IQAF) aircraft 100 miles west of Baghdad, in the early hours of 17 January 1991, the first night of Operation Desert Storm.

His plane crashed in a remote, uninhabited wasteland known as Tulul ad Dulaym at 33.24328°N, 42.35504°W.

He was the first combat casualty for American forces in the war.

On 22 May 1991, after the end of the Gulf War, Speicher's status was changed to Killed in Action/Body Not Recovered (KIA/BNR).

Navy Commander Buddy Harris, who was a friend and fellow naval aviator of Speicher's, became a strong advocate for searching for Speicher, often meeting with U.S. officials.

In December 1993, a military official from Qatar discovered the wreckage of a plane in the desert, which was subsequently identified as Speicher's aircraft.

The canopy was a good distance from the rest of the aircraft, suggesting Speicher had tried to eject.

In April 1994, a U.S. satellite photographed apparent human-made symbols on the desert floor near the wreck's location, which might possibly be Speicher's E & E (Escape and Evade) sign, suggesting that Speicher might have survived the crash.

A covert American operation to inspect the site was considered, but rejected by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvili, as too risky.

In December 1995, working through the International Committee of the Red Cross, investigators from the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army's Central Identification Laboratory went to Iraq and conducted an excavation of the crash site.

Bedouin nomads gave investigators a flight uniform that was likely Speicher's, with his name supposedly cut out of it, but the investigators concluded it had been planted there.

Other evidence led investigators to further conclude Speicher had likely ejected, and was not in the plane at the time it crashed.

In September 1996, the Secretary of the Navy in a new review reaffirmed the presumptive finding of death.

The U.S. Navy maintained in a 1997 document that Speicher was downed by a surface-to-air missile.

In 1997, a U.S. Department of Defense document leaked to The New York Times showed that the Pentagon had not been forthcoming with information previously requested by U.S. Senator Rod Grams of Minnesota.

Senator Grams publicly accused the Pentagon of misleading him, and joined with Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire in calling for an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The Speicher case was taken up by the National Alliance of Families, which had been quite active in the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue.

Speculative theories were developed as to the circumstances of Speicher's shoot-down, and assuming he was still alive, why the U.S. military might not want to find him and why Iraq might not want to return him.

However, an unclassified summary of a 2001 CIA report suggests that Speicher's aircraft was shot down by a missile fired from an Iraqi aircraft, most likely a MiG-25, flown by Lieutenant Zuhair Dawoud, 84th squadron of the IQAF.

Speicher was at 28,000 feet and travelling at 0.92 Mach (540 knots) when the front of the aircraft suffered a catastrophic event.

The impact from the R-40 missile threw the aircraft laterally off its flight path between fifty and sixty degrees with a resulting 6 g minimum load.

A pilot on the same mission stated: "I'm telling you right now, don't believe what you're being told. It was that MiG that shot Spike down."

The day after the shoot-down, Speicher was placed on MIA status.

His fate was not known until 2 August 2009 when the U.S. Navy reported that Speicher's remains had been found in Iraq by the United States military.