ShareThisAfter the rumors and conspiracy theories, and the periodic Pentagon reviews of his disappearance, the mystery of Navy pilot Scott Speicher may have been as simple as nomadic Bedouins complying with the Islamic requirement that a body be buried as soon as possible after death.
Speicher, an F-A18 Hornet pilot shot down on Jan. 17, 1991, was the first casualty of Gulf War I, his death being personally announced on television by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. Ten years later, the Navy changed his status to missing, and then in October 2002, as the Bush administration was making it case for invading Iraq the next spring, his status was mysteriously changed to "missing/captured."
In 1993, a Qatari hunting party found fragments of what proved to be Speicher's jet. In 1995, a team under the auspices of the Red Cross was able to investigate the probable site of the crash, but found no body and no evidence, like the ejection seat or a parachute, that would indicate Speicher might have survived.
Throughout, Speicher's family and friends kept pressing the Pentagon to conclusively resolve his fate, particularly because right up until the invasion there were rumors that he was being secretly held in one of Saddam Hussein's prisons. But post-invasion investigations turned up nothing, and the crash site was in a remote part of Anbar province, up until the Sunni tribes switched sides in 2006-2007 perhaps the most violent place in Iraq.
Then last month an Iraqi approached a Marine unit and said he knew of two other Iraqis who had witnessed Speicher's burial by the Bedouins. They led the Marines to the grave. Among the remains recovered was a jawbone that allowed positive identification to be made by military pathologists.
A local tribal leader said that he had been asked for guidance on whether it was religiously acceptable for Muslims to bury a Christian. He said it was. But it remains a mystery why only now did the Iraqi witnesses come forward, more than 18 years after the crash and more than six years after the invasion.
But no matter. Last week, like all the U.S. Iraqi war dead, the remains arrived at Dover Air Force Base. Capt. Michael Scott Speicher is finally home.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
