news-record.com

ASHEBORO — Amid the intensity of launching airstrikes from the USS Saratoga on Jan. 17, 1991, David Sagers  remembers two FA-18 Hornet fighter jets landing aboard the aircraft carrier docked in the Red Sea.

“He went down in a ball of flame! He went down in a ball of flame! He’s been shot down and we need to get a search and rescue out. He went into the desert!” Sagers recalled Lt. Nicholas Mangillo  screaming from one of the FA-18s.  

Bird 402 had been lost.

Its pilot — 33-year-old Lt. Cmdr. Michael “Scott” Speicher  — was nowhere to be found.

It was the first night of the invasion of the Gulf War, and something had gone terribly wrong.

Hours after the two jets landed on the Saratoga, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney  announced to the American public that Speicher was the first casualty of the Gulf War.

The search and rescue mission Mangillo called for was never launched that night, Sagers said. The ship was at war, and such a rescue mission was deemed far too dangerous.

Lt. Cmdr. Speicher was lost.

Last Sunday, the Navy announced that bones and skeletal fragments uncovered by Marines  in the Al Anbar province  had been positively identified as Speicher’s.

Sagers, 42, who now works for the Greensboro Fire Department, said he was stunned to see the news as it came across the screen on CNN.

But that shock wore off after a few days, he said, and the same questions he had about Speicher’s fate 18 years ago have surfaced once again.

Despite Cheney’s announcement, he and the crew on the Saratoga believed Speicher could have survived the crash that night.

Speicher flew a jet designed to protect its pilot, and there was no definitive proof that he hadn’t ejected safely.

“We were thinking he was still in the desert somewhere. Everybody believed that he had made it, he had ejected out,” Sagers said.

“Why would you even say something like that so quickly? — that he was the first casualty of war?”

The bombing and news of the downed plane were covered heavily by the media at the time, and Sagers believes the quest for immediate answers tainted the search for Speicher from the start.

In March 1991,  Sagers and the crew returned home to port in Jacksonville, Fla. , to a hero’s welcome. Operation Desert Storm, the mission to stop the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, was a success.

Sagers, an aviation electronics technician, recalls stepping off the ship and looking beyond the sea of American flags and yellow ribbons at a young mother with her toddlers — Speicher’s family — hoping to get answers.

 “She wanted to talk to the guys that were there,” Sagers said. “She was just trying to search for anything that she could grab hold of.”

Years passed, and Sagers eventually left the military, went to college and joined the fire department.

While the question of Speicher’s fate remained, Sagers continued to follow news reports about the incident.

Speicher was initially classified “killed in action/body not recovered” in May 1991.  In 2002, his status was changed to “missing/captured.”  He had also been promoted two ranks to captain.

A 2002  article in The Washington Times  about Speicher’s change in status cited former Navy Secretary Gordon England  as stating an analysis of the jet’s wreckage, which was found in 1993 in the Iraqi desert, indicated he had “ejected before the crash.”

The newspaper also reported Speicher’s flight suit, still intact, was turned over to the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1995.

Gordon said that information received by the Navy about analysis of the wreckage “continues to suggest strongly that the government of Iraq can account for him.” 

“I am personally convinced,” Gordon was quoted as saying, “the Iraqis seized him sometime after his plane went down.” 
That information reaffirmed the theory that Speicher had survived the crash.

“I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt, when he went down in the desert on Jan. 17, 1991, he was a prisoner of war,” Sagers said Friday. “He was captured alive. He was taken and put in prison. He was tortured and when he died after that? We may never know.”

Speicher’s family had a briefing last week from the Defense Intelligence Agency and will have another one Tuesday from forensics experts via telephone conference. A memorial service is planned Friday near Jacksonville, Fla., where Speicher lived before he went to Iraq.

Sagers said news of the discovery of Speicher’s remains will bring closure to the pilot’s family and to the many crew members that served aboard the Saratoga.

But he thinks the military should try to find out what happened to Speicher.

“They owe it to him and his family,” he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Contact Ryan Seals at 373-7077 or ryan.seals@news-record.com