The Army dismantled the wall section and sent it back to the U.S. for testing. That same summer a soldier discovered similar initials and what appeared to be a date_ 9-15-94 — scratched into an I-beam in a parking garage in Tikrit. The FBI cut down the beam and sent it to the Smithsonian Institution for testing.
But the markings turned out to be more false leads. The museum determined the Tikrit initials were made with a special ink reserved for Iraqi religious groups — and an American prisoner would not likely have had access to such sacred ink. While other “M.S.S.” markings were found all over Iraq, the analysts were never able to tie them to Speicher.
The searchers continued to press every lead. For six years, soldiers and Marines deployed in Anbar were told to ask people there if they had heard anything about the missing American pilot.
The instructions finally paid off last July. A sheik told Marines of a Bedouin who remembered a burial 20 years earlier. The sheik couldn’t recall the exact location, but it was enough for the Marines. They returned to the old site that had frustrated the Red Cross searchers and with 100 men, bulldozers and back hoes, they turned over four football fields worth of desert, 4 feet deep.
The earth yielded another piece of a pilot’s flight suit and a jaw bone. The teeth matched the missing pilot’s dental records. Michael Scott Speicher, who reached the rank of captain because he kept receiving promotions while his status was unknown, had been there all along, Brown said.
The U.S. now says the case is closed, but Speicher’s family, from outside Jacksonville, Fla., is still unconvinced that he died in the crash.
Buddy Harris says the ending is too neat, meant to whitewash the Pentagon’s failure to launch a search and rescue mission in 1991.
“Too many people want to tie it into a nice little bow here,” Harris says. “Their motive wasn’t Scott Speicher, it was to get this thing done.”
Article Source
Pamela Hess, Associated Press Writer
Loading ...
claireshana on 
fallenone on 
