Closing the book?

If you particpated as an aviator in Gulf War I, as I did-seeing this news brought a tear to my eye: 

The US military has found the remains of the last American still officially missing in action from the Gulf War.

Capt Michael Scott Speicher, an F18 pilot, was shot down over Iraq on the first day of the war in January 1991.

Last month, an Iraqi citizen took US marines, based in Anbar Province, to the crash site. He told them where the remains had been buried in the desert.

Subsequent excavations recovered bones and bone fragments. Capt Speicher was identified through his dental records.

It hardly a surprise. If he were really still alive, I can’t help but think he would have been handed over a lot earlier or at the least found when the Army invaded in 2003.

A classmate of mine was his roommate on Saratoga. Saratoga was one of three carriers in the Red Sea that launched strikes on the first night of Desert Storm.  I was on America at the time and flew on the first mission of the war-I could watch the strike aircraft from Kennedy and Saratoga launching and moving north east over Saudi Arabia on radar. America did not participate much the first night-the USAF claimed they did not have enough tankers to support packages from us as well as the other two carriers-so we launched EA-6B’s to support strikes, E-2’s such as my mission to watch Jordan and back up the other E-2’s and F-14’s for what they called "Red Sea CAP". Presumably their job was to watch for aircraft sneaking out of Jordan. Never made any sense to me-we could and should have been hitting targets in Iraq.

Saratoga on the other hand  launched several strikes and a couple of them were low level attacks-something that was a subject of debate among the Air Wings. Our CAG would have absolutely nothing to do with them. He imposed an altitude "floor" to prevent aircraft from getting hit by anti-aircraft fire. High altitude deliveries became the norm, which meant tradeoffs in weapons used.  Saratoga on the other hand did fly some low altitude strikes-they had practiced them for months. CVW-17 lost three aircraft the first night of the war as a result. As I recall, Speicher’s aircraft was not one of them-he was flying a SEAD ( Suppression of Enemy Air Defense) mission and an Iraqi Mig-25 snuck past F-15’s and shot him down.  I would still  like to know how an AWACS crew could have missed detecting a MIG-25-but then again, having watched them in action later, I probably should not be suprised. Twice I had to get them to call off the dogs (get the F-15’s to turn around) when the AWACS was vectoring them on our own strike aircraft.

At least the family knows now-and the mystery can be put to rest. Why did it take so long for the Iraqis to come forward though?

Rest in peace.