Chapter Two
There was a four-hour cycle between preparing to receive the first strike and prepping for the next one. “We’d gotten the first group back and were counting noses when we realized that there was one missing. The moment the rest of them got on deck,” said flight deck coordinator chief Terryl Chandler, “they bolted for the ready room, except for Spock. He came over to me and said, ‘Chief, I think we lost Speicher.’” Chandler took four of his plane handlers and staged up on the bow for the next two hours waiting and hoping that Scott Speicher would come back. They stayed there until the wing’s air boss, Captain James R. “Jet” O’Hora, came over the radio on the roof and said, “Sunliners, break the deck.”
“We knew then that he wasn’t coming home,” Chandler said, emotion breaking his voice. “We waited for him as long as they’d let us stay up there. When I shook his hand, it meant something to me. It meant we’d be there for him when he came back. I promised him.”
Dave Renaud strode through the Saratoga’s passageways in a state of shock, his mind replaying that night’s strike over and over trying to sort the radio calls about the MiG-25, the fireball he’d seen and the pilots he’d heard trying to reach Spike on the radio. He couldn’t believe that of all the pilots in the sky, he’d had the best view of the explosion. The flash was so big he couldn’t imagine anyone flying over Iraq at that time could have missed it. He chastised himself for not marking his position, and for not breaking into the AWACS frequency to report what he saw. But the radio was busy, and he had missiles to fire. Everything had been so confusing. Worse, it had happened so fast.
The air wing intelligence officer asked Renaud if he’d seen anything out of the ordinary. He told him about the fireball, how big and bright it was and how he watched it fall to the desert below. “It didn’t look to me like that was a survivable explosion,” Renaud said. “You know,” the intelligence officer told him, “Speicher did not come back. Go straight to Spock Anderson and tell him what you know.”
Renaud found Anderson in one of the ready rooms. Since he always flew with a tape running in his head-up display to record the action in front of the Hornet and in the cockpit, he offered it up. On a night mission the video would be worthless, but he’d still have the sound, including radio communications and anything he said in the cockpit. They listened to the tape a couple of times and were able to determine where Renaud was when he spoke into the microphone about the explosion. They matched that against other Hornet data which had tracked Renaud’s flight minute by minute.
If a surface-to-air missile or an enemy fighter had knocked Speicher out of the sky, Anderson would have to know precisely where to direct special operations forces to search. They pulled out Renaud’s flight chart. Renaud scribbled a circle where he thought he’d seen the explosion. Next to it he wrote “Spike.”
In the meantime, Bob Stumpf headed to the carrier’s intelligence center for his post-mission debrief. As he wound his way through the ship, he ran into a Sunliner pilot; he doesn’t recall who it was. “Hey, how’d it go?” Stumpf asked. “Speicher didn’t come back,” said the pilot. “Oh my gosh,” said Stumpf. “I guess I thought he was probably on the ground, evading, or that there was a rescue mission in process and we’d see him in the morning.” There were two likely scenarios going through Stumpf’s mind: ejected and rescued, or ejected and captured. He never considered that Speicher was dead. Stumpf based this belief on the fact that in an air-to-air situation, the missiles have smaller warheads than ground-to-air missiles. Air-to-air missiles are designed to render the aircraft unflyable, not kill the pilot or totally destroy the aircraft.
“As I recall,” said Stumpf in a July 2001 interview, “Spock Anderson started a personal movement … I mean he took it upon himself to figure this out.” He remembered Anderson saying, “I got to figure out what happened to Spike. I need to make sure things are happening.” Anderson stopped by Stumpf’s stateroom and asked for all the data from his flight. “We went to the airplane and dumped all the information out of the computer. I gave him a big stack of printouts that defined my flight pattern. He did a very detailed analysis trying to figure out when [Spike] went down, what happened, and I know I asked Frenchy [Renaud] from our squadron to be Spock’s assistant if he needed any help.”
Meanwhile, Albano wondered if Speicher had his survival radio, and, if so, was he simply going by what they’d all been told briefing the mission: Don’t turn on your radio and monitor it because the Iraqis will use direction finders to locate you. “They had that capability.” If he’d done everything right, Albano thought, he felt sure Spike was alive. Albano wondered where he’d landed. With the winds the way they were, he could have landed up to two-and-a-half miles from where his Hornet was believed to have impacted the desert floor. Then Bano inevitably came back to the thought, one he couldn’t get out of his head: “Could I have done more about the MiG-25?”
Anderson’s initial push to figure out where Scott had gone down didn’t get a great deal of support from the air wing chain of command. The Saratoga started recovering aircraft from the first air strike at 5:38 a.m. local time. By 7:04 a.m. the ship had finished recovery of its planes, minus one. The petty officer of the watch wrote in the ship’s deck log: “Completed recovery of aircraft with the exception of F/A-18 side #403 – Pilot LCDR Speicher of VFA-81.” Shortly before launching the second wave of aircraft at 11:12 that morning, the Saratoga’s commanding officer, Captain Joseph S. Mobley, came up on the 1MC, the shipboard address system, to announce that Speicher had not come back from the first strike. But still, no one had notified Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT) that they had a pilot missing.
The delay by Speicher’s air wing, Carrier Air Wing 17, in reporting his loss was critical. As a rule, the first four to five hours after a shoot down is the best window of opportunity for combat search and rescue (CSAR) success. This time frame was exceeded twice over before Lieutenant General Chuck Horner received Speicher’s status information and told General H. Norman Schwarzkopf that the navy had lost an airplane.
Back in Riyadh, General Schwarzkopf had no reason to believe the first air strike had been anything less than a complete success. No one had said anything about a lost pilot. “My air force component commander, Chuck Horner, had told me,” he said in an August 21, 2001 interview, “we could expect as high as twenty percent casualties, which would have been literally in the hundreds of aircraft shot down, so I was very anxious for the first report back.” He received it from the navy at 5:50 a.m. local time. In his combat diary, it reads: “All 56 aircraft from the first strike are back.” At 6:55 a.m. General Horner called Schwarzkopf to say, “All aircraft back.” Still no mention that the Saratoga was shy a Hornet pilot.
“Again,” Schwarzkopf reiterated, “I just assumed he was talking about all aircraft that were used in the first strike. They were going to be flying through the worst of it.” Schwarzkopf didn’t get his first indication that he had any downed aircraft until 12:55 local time the afternoon of January 17, “and that report stated at that time there had been two losses: Speicher and the British GR-1 Tornado crew of Flight Lieutenants John Nichol and John Peters. My God,” he exclaimed, “that is an order of magnitude better than what we expected.”
“I know [Anderson] was terribly frustrated,” said Stumpf. “He was not happy. I got the sense that he wasn’t getting the help that he needed from the hierarchy.” From combat reports the assumption was made that Scott Speicher had gone down in a ball of flame. Adding to that perception was the fact no one had heard a call from Speicher on any emergency frequencies. But in all the confusion, had they just been missed? The other possibility was that Scott had experienced total electrical failure, in which case he didn’t have the chance prior to ejection to make a radio call from the cockpit. The deputy air wing commander (DCAG) on Saratoga, Captain David V. Park, had flown in A-6E Intruder on the first strike, and while he didn’t know for sure about Spike until he got back on deck, he was concerned enough to initiate checks for him before going to bed. “I asked them to check divert fields before I got some sleep. We were all tired, exhausted from the mission,” he said later. “I got up four hours later and no one had done it. I made them do it when I found out.” By then nearly eight hours had slipped by and Scott Speicher was still out there. “We on the Saratoga,” said Park later, “never confirmed he went down.”
Dave Park and Captain Dean M. “Milo” Hendrickson, Carrier Air Wing 17 commander, also called the CAG, a legacy term from the earlier Commander, Air Group term for the air wing, were in key positions to save Spike. “As DCAG,” said Sunliner pilot Craig “Bert” Bertolett later, “Park was in the prime role to be responsible for communicating between what the squadron and air wing knew. For example, the oversized radios for vest pockets, disabled seat locators, [where] Frenchy’s estimated crash site [for Speicher was], and what CENTCOM or [Vice Admiral Stanley A.] Arthur’s staff should have known to execute smart decisions about CSAR.” Bertolett was not alone making this point. “I’ve often blamed the faceless ‘somebody’ in the organization who failed to act, communicate and decide,” Bertolett said.
Hendrickson and Park had issued the order to air wing squadron maintenance officers to turn off the electronic transponders (ELTs) in the ejection seats of all jet aircraft. They were not alone in this order. Some of the other air wing commanders on aircraft carriers in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf had done the same. This singular act helped seal Scott Speicher’s fate that night. Another, of course, was reportedly the Motorola AN/PRC-112 radio. The new radios arrived on the ship January 16, just hours before the first air strike launched. Rushed into service, the Motorola AN/PRC-112 never went through the battery of operational testing that normally takes place before a new product is introduced to the fleet. The AN/PRC-112s, since improved and sold to more than thirty countries, have worked fine, according to Motorola. Yet the navy had to issue a directive that the AN/PRC-112 had to be placed in a Ziploc bag because it would short out if exposed to too much moisture. The radio was not meant for carrier aviation. Further, it was not configured to fit in the vest pockets of naval aviators’ flight gear. PR1 Ted Phagan, the Sunliners’ paraloft chief, told Scott and the others on the first strike: “There’s a real good chance if you eject, this thing’s not staying in your pocket.” Though Phagan jury-rigged a flap to hold the radio in place for aviators on later strikes, it was too late to help Scott Speicher. So he thought. Scott Speicher didn’t try to pack the AN/PRC-112 into his flight vest. He’d strapped the radio good and tight to his leg. Tony Albano did the same thing. The worse that could have happened, Albano said later, was that he’d landed on it when he parachuted out of the Hornet to the desert floor below. Not surprisingly, some navy aircrews insisted on keeping their old radios, GTE-Sylvania AN/PRC-90s, when they found out the new ones were too awkward, and risky, to carry. Plus, the AN/PRC-90-1 and -2 models were improved over the version carried by aircrew over Vietnam. The AN/PRC-90 operated on 121.5, 243 and 282.8 MHz AM, and it also included a beacon mode, and a tone generator to allow the sending of Morse Code. After the AN/PRC-112 began to show its shortcomings, the AN/PRC-90 became a navy pilot’s prize possession.
The media seemed to know more about one missing aviator than the entire chain of command aboard the Saratoga in the hours immediately following his shoot down. Less than twelve hours after Scott was shot down, Paris Antenne-2 Television Network, broadcast in French, ran a news spot at one o’clock in the afternoon Paris local time that included an Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) report that an American jet was downed and the pilot ejected. Less than six hours later, back in Washington, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) sent a message traffic that included a printed transcript of the Paris Antenne-2 broadcast. Scrawled in the margin someone wrote: “Only U.S. plane lost was a navy F-18; pilot never heard from.” But no one ran down the source of the information run by the Paris network nor did anyone pass it to CSAR forces in Riyadh that a pilot ejected and was now on the ground.
Speicher’s initial loss report was not filed until twelve hours after his aircraft was first went missing. This report was forwarded from Rear Admiral Gee to Rear Admiral Riley D. Mixon, senior commander in Red Sea. “Riley,” wrote Gee, “the loss of AA403 during our initial Baghdad strike is most unfortunate.” Gee’s report included facts culled from aircrew debriefs and observations and investigation done by Spock Anderson. Anderson reported that Speicher was headed to Al Taqqadum, his target, some forty miles west of Baghdad. His time on target (TOT) was estimated to be 3:50 in the morning Baghdad time. Speicher never made his assigned tanking point along the Raisin tanker track at 4:40 a.m. local time. A radar cut gave Speicher’s last position as 29°15’N 041°00’ 30”E. The time was 3:20 a.m. and Spike was headed 015 degrees true. His launch point was 015 degrees, 268 nautical miles from his refueling point.
At 7:30 a.m. the following day, January 18, Anderson filled out the requisite paperwork for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) that provided critical information on Scott’s last mission. He was still listed as Duty Status, Whereabouts Unknown (DUSTWUN). Anderson cited the message traffic he’d sent reporting Speicher’s loss, around first light on January 17, then added, “No firm info as to where and when the aircraft was lost or the fate of pilot. Search initiated.” There were two problems with the report: no search for the pilot had been initiated at first light on January 17 and under the blank for “location of loss” Anderson scribbled CLASSIFIED. Why not DUSTWUN? After all, in truth, Anderson had no idea where Speicher was, not exactly, not then – right? But he marked his pilot’s whereabouts a secret and no one could understand why. In the meantime, shipboard, air wing and squadron log books, including maintenance and ordnance records, that pertained to Speicher’s flight, his jet and the mission; information from Sunliner and Rampager HUD tapes; voice tapes made from the pilots’ hell hole recorders located behind the pilot’s seat, and aircrew debriefs were pulled together in the Combat Data Information Center (CDIC) and turned over to the CAG before being sent forward for evaluation.
Bob Stumpf thought that Anderson had compiled enough information to go look for Spike. He’d provided a good approximate location. More importantly there was no evidence that Scott Speicher was dead, “so it seems to me that with all our massive array of airpower and rescue forces available, [much of it] exercised just a couple of days later that I know of firsthand,” said Stumpf, “it was all there, it was in place and we should have gone in and looked.” But Stumpf realized, too, that the Saratoga was a long way from CSAR forces in Riyadh. “We were seven hundred miles away from where Spike went down. We couldn’t just pick up the phone and call Riyadh and say, ‘Hey, go ahead. Launch the rescue.’”
What Stumpf and the other pilots on Saratoga didn’t know was that when the coordinates for Scott Speicher’s probable crash site were reported as 32°45’N 044°45’E, which would turn out to be far from where he actually went down. By then the damage was done. The wrong set of coordinates stuck to Speicher’s file for more than a year after he went missing. But so did something else.
Twelve hours after Scott was shot down and thousands of miles away, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell briefed the media about the first air strike of the Persian Gulf War. The picture they drew for the public was largely true. Coalition pilots had struck Baghdad hard, delivering a series of highly successful air strikes against the Iraqi capital. But then Cheney’s demeanor noticeably changed. “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 Saratoga’s pilots knew who 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 the blast Renaud saw was Speicher’s jet and that he couldn’t have survived the explosion. Cheney’s presumptive statement would fuel the assumption that Speicher died for years to come. “How do you say something like that,” said Albano later, “without knowing all the facts?”
Bob Stumpf heard that Speicher hadn’t tried to contact anyone with his survival radio, but he also heard that the Sunliners’ new radios wouldn’t fit in their vest pockets. Maybe Speicher lost his radio 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 and a parachute could not have been seen. Stumpf thought they would declare Speicher killed so quickly only if someone had found his body. “Killed in action, that’s bullshit,” said Stumpf. “They had no business saying that because there was no evidence he was dead. So he’s missing in action at that point, but they said ‘killed’ so I’m thinking, ‘Well, shit, they know something we don’t know.’ To me, that was very decisive, absolute, to say that he was KIA [killed in action].”
If Speicher wasn’t dead, the pilots knew that what Cheney had said could doom him. If the Iraqis captured Speicher and if President Saddam Hussein knew U.S. leaders thought he was dead, perhaps Saddam would keep him. An American pilot would be a trophy prisoner. Fellow pilots hadn’t assumed Speicher was dead. If a missile impacted Speicher’s Hornet, he likely ejected, they thought. “So, you know, it was premature,” said Stumpf, of Cheney declaring Speicher killed in action. But what none of the Saratoga’s pilots, and much of Speicher’s chain of command, didn’t realize was that Cheney’s public pronouncement of death was nothing more than that – a snap judgment in front of a room full of reporters. The navy’s official status for Scott Speicher was still MIA.
Why had Cheney declared Scott dead? When NAVCENT vice admiral Arthur requested information about the loss incident, Milo Hendrickson told him that Scott’s Hornet had been blown out of the sky with no chance of survival, no ejection. Arthur called Vice Admiral Jeremy “Mike” Boorda, then chief of naval personnel back in Washington, and repeated what he’d heard from Scott’s air wing commander. When Cheney came in the next morning to give his now-famous press briefing, he stuck his head first in Boorda’s door and asked where they stood on the F/A-18 loss. “Hey, it doesn’t look good,” said Boorda. Cheney replied, “He’s dead?” “Yes, sir, pretty much he’s dead,” Boorda told him.
In a war involving 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. “Guys, you know Spike didn’t make it back last night,” he told them, “and he didn’t divert either.”
“That’s when it hit us,” said Hull. “What the hell happened? Where’s Spike?” He remembered what he and others kept thinking, “Well, he must be pissed off ‘cause he’s walking around in the desert and he’s got sand in his boots. We just never let ourselves think that he was dead.”
That afternoon in Jacksonville, Florida, navy wives, relatives, friends and colleagues anxiously wondered which Hornet pilot had been killed. A middle-class neighborhood had sprouted under the flight path of Cecil Field Naval Air Station. There was no ignoring the jets when they roared overhead. Many of the pilots’ teen-agers went to Nathan Bedford Forrest High School, Speicher’s alma mater, where his wife, Joanne, had briefly taught home economics before quitting to have Meghan, then three, and Scott’s namesake, Michael, not quite two.
Scott met Joanne at Florida State University (FSU) in 1977. She was a public relations and marketing major; he was a business major one year ahead of her. She would never forget the time he went to his first job interview, in his senior year at Florida State. It was for a typical nine-to-five desk job. He couldn’t see himself pinned down behind a desk every day and told her so. “I want to fly,” he confessed.1 Though he’d never flown an airplane before, years of listening to his father, Wallace, a World War II fighter pilot, tell stories about his missions hooked Scott on the idea. The career path seemed perfectly suited to Scott, the risk-taker 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,” he’d say.
Scott Speicher loved the thrill of life on the edge. He was the guy who one-upped his Florida State buddies on the rite of passage of diving from a thirty-foot cliff into Big Dismal Sink, a sinkhole about fifteen to twenty miles south of Tallahassee. “When you got there,” said David Rowe, his friend from Nathan Bedford Forrest and Florida State, “depending on the water level, it’s anywhere from a thirty- to sixty-foot sheer drop to the water.” They all took turns jumping feet first off the edge of the cliff. To get out, they’d grab a rope and pull themselves out of the mud and slime at the edge of the water below. Speicher watched his friends jump in, one after another, then stood at the edge of the cliff and grinned. “C’mon, Spike,” they hollered up. “Is that the best you can do? That’s baby lotion!” he yelled down. “That’s baby lotion” was Spike’s way of saying, “That ain’t nothing.” Speicher climbed an oak tree on the western edge of the sinkhole and soared headfirst about sixty feet into the water. “Headfirst,” his friend recalled, “then a back flip. I can see him now with his arms flying, head back, looking to spot the water.” Rowe thought right then that Spike was destined to get catapulted from aircraft carriers for a living. “Way to go, Spike! You’re the man!” There was no doubt that Scott was okay. “You had to know Spike,” said Rowe.
Soon after graduation from Florida State in 1980, Scott headed for Aviation Officers’ Candidate School (AOCS) in Pensacola. He was an excellent pilot from the start. Two-and-a-half years later Scott had completed flight training and married Joanne, who was working as an assistant department store buyer, in a navy wedding ceremony at Cecil Field in December 1983. From the beginning, the couple understood the dangers associated with Scott’s flying. He made sure she knew what to do if anything happened to him. He’d make her recite it to him every time he left for workups and lengthier deployments. “If anything happens to me, you know what to do?” Scott asked her. She’d always reply yes.2 Joanne never imagined she’d actually have to put into action any of the contingency plans they discussed.
The car that wound its way down the street, past the yellow ribbons and red, white and blue streamers that had been tied to lampposts five months earlier when carrier battle groups first deployed for Desert Shield could have stopped at many homes in that neighborhood, but they knocked on the door of Joanne Speicher’s battleship-gray ranch house. Joanne had heard what Secretary Cheney said, but she 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 four- and five-year-olds in his Sunday school class coloring and pasting pictures, would not be coming home when the war was over. Now, as navy officers in crisp dress blues stood in Joanne’s doorway to give her the news, suddenly the past worries, the fears that she’d hesitated to share with Scott, came flooding back.
Joanne’s mind raced back to the day he left on the deployment, to August 7, 1990. She remembered that the morning was not especially remarkable, other than the fact Scott was heading off to the air station to leave for six months or more. She told Kathryn Casey of Ladies Home Journal that she kissed him good-bye at the front door and off he went. The children waved. “This was part of our lives,” she told Casey of the deployment. “It was like a regular day.”
Joanne kept to her routine, taking Meghan to her preschool three times a week and Michael to a Mothers’ Day Out babysitting program held at a nearby church on Wednesdays. Casey reported in her June 1991 article, “Ten days after Scott left, his letters began arriving. They were scrawled on yellow legal paper, and he often signed them ‘Spike.’” Though Joanne had not been in the habit of keeping Scott’s letters in the past, she started to tuck them away in her top dresser drawer. She told Casey that she’d not wanted to burden Scott with disappointing news, but when she realized their attempt to conceive a third child hadn’t worked, she had to write and tell him that it hadn’t happened. “I was disappointed. He was, too. Later I felt like there was a reason it hadn’t happened.” He wrote back, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll do it. There’s time.”
Joanne didn’t get scared until around Christmas, when tensions in the Middle East ratcheted up with passage of the United Nations (UN) Security Council resolution permitting the use of troops against Iraq if it didn’t vacate Kuwait by January 15. With that resolution President George H.W. Bush had been given the green light to go after Saddam Hussein for his fall invasion of Kuwait. In letters she and Scott exchanged during the holidays, Joanne began to share her fears with Scott, to tell him that what was happening in the Persian Gulf scared her. “You know that I am completely proficient in this airplane,” he tried to assure her. “I’ll be home. I guarantee it.”3
When the deadline for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait got closer, Joanne was glued to her television set like the rest of America. When the January 15 deadline came and went, she knew fireworks were going to follow. She’d been almost euphoric about Scott’s participation in the first strike. She woke up the following morning and turned on the television to find out what was going on. Then she heard a reporter talking about a downed F/A-18. Suddenly a dose of hard reality snapped Joanne out of her euphoria. But since no one had called to tell her anything had happened to Scott, she went about her daily routine. There didn’t seem to be any reason to worry. Not yet.
Joanne later recalled that all she heard when the car pulled up in front the house was the door closing. “She looked out the screen door,” Casey wrote, “toward the driveway and saw the admiral of Cecil Field, the local base, the commodore, the commodore’s wife, and the chaplain. The men were in their dress blues.” “They didn’t have to say a thing,” Joanne remembered of that terrible day. “The first thing I asked was ‘How did it happen?’” What followed after she uttered those words was a blur. The Speicher house soon filled with family, friends, officials from Cecil Field, and well-meaning squadron wives. They came and went. Joanne sat slumped on a couch talking to them, one at a time, sometimes in small groups. She was in shock. She was overwhelmed. Then she thought of Meghan and Michael. Meghan was old enough to understand, but Michael wasn’t. He played on the floor with his toys just like any other day, except for the crush of visitors in his house. When Michael’s two-year-old curiosity got the best of him, he stopped playing to visit among familiar faces and complete strangers, but he had no idea why they were there.
Meghan was a different story. Joanne took Meghan into her daintily decorated little girl’s bedroom to tell her about her father. As they sat there together, Joanne asked her if she knew why all the people were in the house. “No,” she said. “It’s because they have something to tell me about Daddy,” Joanne explained. “Something happened to Daddy’s airplane.” They were quiet for a few minutes, then Meghan said in her little voice, “My daddy?” Joanne nodded and said, “Yup.”4 Sensing her mother’s grief, Meghan knew that whatever had happened to her father, it was bad. Joanne didn’t have to say another word.
She didn’t know for certain what had happened to her husband, but Joanne’s thoughts drifted to what he might have been thinking in his last moments in the airplane. The torment brought on by these thoughts was nearly unbearable. But the children kept her focused. She drove Meghan to preschool the next morning.5 All she could think about was what could have gone wrong. Where was Scott? She wouldn’t know the answer to that question for many years to come.
Casey wrote that on Joanne’s thirty-second birthday, the first Sunday following Scott’s loss, she had a friend send President Bush a telegram. She didn’t want the president to think she was angry about what might have happened to Scott. Her support for U.S. action in the Persian Gulf remained unwavering and she wanted him to know how she felt. The president got the message and replied a couple of weeks later. “I am proud of your wonderful husband, and I will never forget him,” President Bush wrote. “Sometimes God acts in strange ways – ways we do not understand right away.”6
The president’s letter wasn’t the only one to arrive at Joanne’s door. For several weeks to come, letters Scott had mailed in the days preceding his disappearance were brought by a tearful mail carrier. Folded inside each envelope were several pages of yellow legal paper filled with Scott’s thoughts. He always assured Joanne he’d come home.7 She was numbed by each word, still unsure what had happened to her husband. Maybe he’d make it. Maybe he would come home. After all, the Saratoga’s captain, Joe Mobley, kept personally communicating with her. “Every effort,” he said, “continues to be made to locate Scott.” Spock Anderson told her the same. “All, repeat all, theater combat search and rescue efforts were mobilized.” She couldn’t know that this was far from the truth. She was terrified and hopeful at the same time. But it was taking its toll.
Two weeks after she’d learned of Scott’s loss, Joanne finally came to grips with the feelings of loss she’d kept pent up inside her. It was late, perhaps half past two in the morning, and she’d talked for hours with friend Albert “Buddy” Harris, who’d decided it was time for Joanne to let out the emotions she’d hidden so well from everyone, but most especially the children. She confessed her deepest thoughts, the fears she had for Scott but didn’t want to hear herself say. “I didn’t want Scott to know. I didn’t want him to be scared for one second. I didn’t want him to think, “Oh, no, I’m going down,’” Joanne told Kathryn Casey. “And I couldn’t bear the thought of having a service and having nothing to bury.”
Several days later Joanne received a large brown envelope that contained Scott Speicher’s personal effects, including a red nylon wallet with his Florida driver’s license, credit card and pictures of the children, his gold wings, a gold wedding ring – and one last letter, written January 16, 1991, the day before he disappeared. “All along I knew that there would be one more letter,” Joanne said.8 The content of the last letter Scott placed in his personal effects speaks for itself.
“As I sit down to write this letter,” he explained, “things in this part of the world seem to grow more intense every hour. I am more certain,” he continued, “that our air wing will be called upon…If you are reading this letter, it will be for one of two reasons: 1) I have decided I need to personally share these thoughts with you instead of holding them inside, or 2) something has happened to me. I hope it is number one.”9
He penned separate sections to Joanne, Meghan and Michael, each beginning with “I love you.” To his children, he offered his heartfelt wishes for what he wanted them to do with their lives. He told them to set goals and pursue a good education. Be kind to one another, he said. Put God first in your lives. To Joanne he said, “You are the centerpiece of my life. I have lived with you in complete satisfaction. If I am gone, learn to love again.” Joanne, wrote Casey, was quieted by Scott’s words. But just then she believed Scott was dead. She was ready to move on. The children would move on. “I’m at peace. I feel like it’s over, and he is in a better place. I would have been angry if he died in a car crash. This was his life, and Scott wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.”10 Asked what she would say to Meghan and Michael about their father when they wanted to know what kind of person he was, she told Casey, “I’ll tell them he was a good man. That he loved them very much and he didn’t like to leave. That he loved his job, he loved to fly, he loved his country and he loved God. That he was doing what he had to do. That they should be very proud of him, because he’s a hero.”
News of Scott’s loss rippled through all who knew and loved him. Reactions were personal and professional. Anyone who’d known him was affected in some way by the news. Wallace Speicher didn’t accept the news that his son was shot down and might never get back. He kept telling everyone, “Scotty’s coming home.”
David Rowe, Scott’s friend since high school, had just finished a day of deer hunting in Eustis, Florida, when he turned on the television. A day after the air strikes started, Americans craved news coverage and television networks obliged. Rowe knew many navy pilots from living in Jacksonville, but also through his job at the naval aviation depot there. From what he heard coming out of his television set, the United States had lost its first pilot of Operation Desert Storm. CBS News’ Dan Rather’s voice came up as the photograph of a smiling pilot in a flight suit flashed on the screen. It was Scott Speicher. When Rowe saw the picture on television, nausea swept over him. He slid off the couch onto his knees, slapped the floor and cried. “God, no!”
Marine F/A-18 pilots at Sheikh Isa Air Base in Bahrain heard the news about Scott Speicher almost immediately. Among them was a young captain with VMFA-333 Fighting Shamrocks, Patrick R. “Roller” Rink, who first met Speicher as a Hornet instructor pilot. Rink was his student. He’d never forgotten him since. “He was a great teacher.”
The Marine airfield at Sheikh Isa was supposed to be a secret, but everyone knew about it. The fourteen-thousand-foot airfield was new, thus no Bahraini airport personnel were attached to base when the Marines flew their Hornets into the break over the control tower and landed on Sheikh Isa’s pristine airstrip. “The potential for at least one of the gaggle of about one hundred fifty fighters to swap paint at the ninety, or to meet in the middle of the runway after doing simultaneous approaches from opposite positions, was averted by adopting a calm and organized, though completely spontaneous, cadence of radio calls between flights,” Rink said later. “Thank God there was no Fresnel lens at the end of the runway,” he continued, referring to the series of lights that help pilots land on the deck of an aircraft carrier by projecting a landing “ball” that pilots use to guide them onto the flight deck. “I don’t think any of us jarheads, and especially the air force Wild Weasel Phantom drivers, remembered what the ball looked like.”
The hangars were modern structures with detached office buildings that reminded Rink of his dentist’s office back in Florida. Two miles north of the airfield were barracks, brand-new and empty. To get there they drove down a newly paved, sand dune-lined road along the west side of the airstrip. Or they could take public transportation. That consisted of dilapidated buses three-quarter the size of ones in the United States. “They were driven by Pakistanis and Jordanians who secretly dreamed of NASCAR careers when the war was over,” Rink explained. “They didn’t dig the fact that we all carried our nine-millimeter Berettas in shoulder holsters everywhere we went. I know of at least one occasion in which one of those Berettas was used to persuade the madman driver to slow his Pakistani butt down.”
Sheikh Isa was a tense place to be. Spaced along the airfield road, roughly several hundred meters apart, were twenty-foot cement guard towers. They were rarely manned, and when they were, the Bahraini troops manning them had their machine guns pointed at the Marines on their way to the field instead of outward, toward the potential threat. “Those pistols of ours,” Rink said, “were feeling pretty comfy [wherever] this occurred.” At the north end of the runway were fuel pits, and beside it was a Bahraini Roland mobile SAM. For a while the crew inside the Roland chassis thought it was amusing to track the Hornets with their targeting radar as they took off. “That nonsense stopped when we locked them up with our ground attack radar returning from missions. I’m sure they saw the HARMs draped under our wings.”
The barracks looked like two-story dormitories, with living areas twice the size of normal college dorm rooms. But there were too few buildings to accommodate all the American pilots. A tent city was set up to house the troops and aircraft maintenance personnel. Ground officers and pilots, those going directly into combat, stayed in the barracks. It sounded like a good deal to everybody until they did the math. There were eight men to a room, but at least they had air conditioning.
Close quarters made for better stories, especially after the shooting started and nightmares kicked in. Hearing one of the boys scream “Pull up!” or “Break right” in the middle of a deep sleep put a damper on rolling over and going back to sleep. Even more remarkable, it was amazing to Rink how fast some of the pilots learned to don a gas mask while still asleep, and just as sheepishly tear it off. “We even had one guy draw his pistol, drop into a shooter’s stance and do a John Belushi dance like the actor did in Animal House.” He didn’t remember any of it the next morning.
When the Marines at Sheikh Isa heard about Spike, Roller, his squadron mates and other Hornet pilots were gathered in the lobby of the barracks. They’d shoved an ottoman against one of the walls, and on top of it was their primary source of wartime intelligence: a little twelve-inch television. Cable News Network (CNN) was playing ninety-nine percent of the time. Every day they’d swing through the lobby for the latest news. “It was not a morale booster to see our intelligence people huddled there also getting updated,” observed Rink, slightly amused at the sight. “As you can imagine, the lobby became quite popular when the shooting started. Most of us couldn’t sleep very well from the moment we knew the shit was about to hit the fan, which was the night prior to the commencement of festivities.”
Roller was standing in the lobby watching CNN along with a dozen or so other pilots when the news broke that a Hornet had been shot down. It was dark outside, and he was still trying to wake himself up for the mission brief that was about to get started. Later that morning, he was scheduled to fly a bombing sortie on the Az Zubayr rail yards in the slot between Iran and Kuwait, north of the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. In a telling comment tied to this mission, Rink described what missile fire looked like. That mission was the first time he’d ever encountered a SAM missile. “Huge explosion. I actually heard the Whumpf! and remember thinking for sure one of us had been hit. Being new to getting shot at, I wasn’t so sure it wasn’t me.” But the giant orange and white ball he saw was only the missile’s warhead. Everybody was okay. “I can see how someone without combat experience might have thought Spike’s jet was blown to bits,” he said.
In that lobby in the wee hours of the morning the news of a Hornet shoot down sucked the air out of the room like a giant fist to the gut. Hearing about the first casualty of the air war was not what any of them needed before stepping into the cockpit for a trip north. Yet the Marines’ attitude quickly changed to anger. “Though we didn’t know who the pilot was, we were pissed and someone was going to pay. While wondering who the unlucky pilot was,” said Rink, “we also wondered how the SAR [search and rescue] would react. Any one of us would have fought the first jerk who even suggested that we wouldn’t go in to get the downed pilot.
“I don’t think we found out the downed pilot was Spike until later that day. That was another blow. Spike had been my instructor during initial training in the Hornet,” Rink recalled. “Now here I was, still wet behind the ears with a license to carry enough ordnance to wipe out a small town, and not nearly as much knowledge and skill to effectively employ those weapons as the man who had just been shot down. You can imagine,” he continued, “where my seat cushion quickly ended up the next time I got in the cockpit to face the SAMs and triple A.” Still, he didn’t really have the luxury of time to dwell on Spike, other than thinking the usual “Why haven’t they found him?” Not only was he busy trying to keep his own backside from sitting in an interrogation room in downtown Baghdad, but he was also upgrading to flight lead – under combat conditions.
Back on the Saratoga, Speicher’s squadron mates were in much the same position as the Marines at Sheikh Isa. They had missions to fly and little time to dwell on what happened to their friend. The United States had not yet claimed air superiority over Iraqi skies. But that would come soon enough. Sunliner pilot lieutenant Craig Bertolett wrote his family and friends near the end of the war that he’d been confident all along that “we would own the skies within three days.” The night after Speicher went down, the Saratoga lost an A-6E Intruder and a few days after that, an F-14 Tomcat. “We’ve had some losses as I’m sure you’ve heard,” he told them. “LCDR Speicher did not return from his mission the first night. He was an instructor of mine when I was learning to fly the Hornet and joined our squadron just over a year ago. He was an excellent pilot and a great person.”
It took several days for Speicher’s loss to feel real to the other Sunliners. 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.” Lieutenant Douglas “Coop” Cooper was as shocked as the rest of his squadron mates that Spike hadn’t returned. No one could’ve imagined that he wouldn’t make it. They figured he’d be found and later returned to the ship. “I’ll never forget the night that I had the duty with the senior chief, just a few days before the shooting started. There was nobody else in the ready room and senior chief and I were sitting behind the desk doing nothing particular. Must have been close to midnight,” he remembered, “when in walks Spike. He looks around, makes sure no one else is nearby. You could tell he wanted privacy. Next thing you know, he pops a tape in the VCR and gets comfortable in one of the ready room chairs, thinking we’re not going to notice. The chief and I just smiled at each other.” Spike had put in a tape of his children that Joanne had sent out to the ship. “He was quiet, then you’d hear him just having the best laugh.”
For Stumpf, a seventeen-year veteran pilot, climbing back in cockpit of his Hornet for a second mission was the toughest thing he had ever done. Stumpf, Hull and the others tried to block out what happened to Speicher on that first strike and bear down on knocking out Iraqi air defenses. “There was much more running through my mind,” wrote Barry Hull of that first night, “but the main emotion was fear.” He also realized that all the practicing the Sunliners had done before the war had paid off. Pilots were conditioned to keep their eyes open, their heads on a swivel, for threats around them, especially those from behind, what pilots call their “six.” “Someone told us way back if we didn’t check six in practice, we wouldn’t do it in combat. Everyone on that mission came back with a sore neck from jerking our heads back and forth, checking six. The instinct of survival, I’ve felt it pretty good now, I think.”
Anderson released the findings of his investigation on January 25, eight days after Scott Speicher went down. He recommended that Speicher’s status stay MIA. This status was predicated both on the positively confirmed reports that Speicher’s aircraft had been shot down, so word was put out for the consumption of the Saratoga air wing, crew, Speicher’s family and friends, of an identifiable crash site. He also reported that “theater strike rescue forces have reported no visual signals or radio communications from LCDR Speicher. Strike rescue efforts will continue.”
Yet a signal had been sent. One of the many tragedies associated with the Speicher case is the dismissal of a report by a former Joint Rescue Coordination Center (JRCC) commanding officer, information that was not presented until April 21, 1994, as part of the investigation conducted after Speicher’s wreckage was located. Two clicks were picked up on January 18, 1991, by an air force RC-135 collection platform and a navy E-2C Hawkeye. The communication, heard about 8:21 p.m. local time, came in on the “404” emergency guard frequency. Department of Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) analysts subsequently dismissed the incident, correlating it to the A-6E Intruder lost off Saratoga on the night of January 17. But it could not have been the Intruder crew. One of them dropped his radio on the way down in the parachute, and the other, who’d broken his collarbone, removed his flight vest with his radio in it after getting help from his bombardier-navigator to do so. As they moved to evade potential captors, the A-6E crew left the pilot’s vest behind, with the radio inside. They didn’t have a radio to make any calls or make any clicks on 404 guard frequency.
Further, Anderson’s statement that strike rescue forces were looking for Scott Speicher was misleading. No rescues were planned or mounted. That wasn’t Anderson’s call. But all of this paled in comparison to what was actually known about Speicher’s jet. No one knew just yet that a decision had already been made – far removed from the Saratoga – that Spike would be left behind.
1 Casey, Kathryn, “The wings of love,” Ladies’ Home Journal, June 1991, p. 197. The Ladies’ Home Journal interview was the first and only interview Joanne L. Speicher gave after Scott Speicher’s loss. The Office of Naval Intelligence, which kept track of most media associated with Speicher’s loss and eventual investigation, forwarded this article with several others to the author.
2 Ibid., p. 197.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 198.
5 Ibid., p. 199.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.