Desdichado, They Found Him

[jeffsmith]

Remains of Michael Speicher Found in Iraq

Reported Here Too

[gunnergoz]

RIP, Michael - sincere thanks for your service, not that mere words are enough to convey our feelings. Condolences to your family. Finally some closure for them and the nation.

[Affentitten]

I'm interested in precisely why so much hope was held out for so long with this one? I know there has to be positive ID of the remains, but given that Iraq has been occupied for 6 years now, why was there this conspiracy theory bubbling along that he was still alive? Even on the Wikipedia talk page about this poor guy there are still people refusing to believe he's dead.

Why is there often such a need to create these sort of secret POW mysteries?

[Stalins Organ]

The "upgraded" him from dead to MIA then to Missing/captured.......looks like they got it right the first time!

[Affentitten]

The "upgraded" him from dead to MIA then to Missing/captured.......looks like they got it right the first time!

That's what I mean. It's almost like they got lobbied to re-visit it by MIA fanboys. His wife obviously moved on, but there seemed to be this need not to close the case. A product of the Vietnam experience?

[gunnergoz]

I'm interested in precisely why so much hope was held out for so long with this one? I know there has to be positive ID of the remains, but given that Iraq has been occupied for 6 years now, why was there this conspiracy theory bubbling along that he was still alive? Even on the Wikipedia talk page about this poor guy there are still people refusing to believe he's dead.

Why is there often such a need to create these sort of secret POW mysteries?

Between the family stirring things up to get closure and the media tail wagging the dog, a sort of synergy develops and eventually a political side comes out too. Families want answers, media wants drama, politicians want votes and to avoid scandal, etc, etc, ad infinitum, ad nausem. So I would think.

[Affentitten]

"Closure" seems to be the word of the decade. I wonder if families really need as much closure as the media seems to think they do, or whether it's just one of those lip service sayings.

At the other end of the closure scale: The excavation and identification of some Australian unknown WW1 soldiers buried after Fromelles has been getting a lot of press here. And I saw one of the descendants of one of the soldiers being quoted saying "At least now we'll have some closure." Like after 90+ years they didn't have it before? Sure, it's great that now Great Uncle Dave has a known resting place, but were the third or fourth generation of his relatives really restless about the fact that he was still unrecovered?

[Michael Emrys]

I've always been suspicious of the MIA movement. Ever since the classification was created in WW I, it has most often meant "We couldn't find any pieces big enough to identify." Cruel, but that's the nature of war.

I suspect that the post-Viet Nam emergence of the movement was partly motivated by some parties wanting to keep alive the image of the Vietnamese as cruel Asian slave drivers, and by others fanning the flames of mistrust of the US government: "The government has turned its back on our boys and its duty to those who served."

Michael

[Stalins Organ]

Not to mention "MIA" gives a good conspiracy story.......were MIA's part of the argument for invading Iraq 2nd time around? I don't recall .....

[Michael Emrys]

The major official line was WMD, with a secondary line that Saddam Hussein was a bad fellow who was oppressing his own people and constituted a threat to the region.

Michael

[Stalins Organ]

Yeah I know those weer the biggies.

Found this about the chap from 2003 - Bush did mention unaccounted for MIA's in his speech at the UN.

[ironbar]

I’d point out that the MIA phenomenon predated the American experience in Vietnam. I remember reading somewhere that a family member of one of ‘The Lady be Good’ crew members, (lost in Libya 1944) continued to pay people in Benghazi into the sixties to keep an eye out for her lost son.

I suspect it even preceded that, anytime someone important to you disappeared from your life, leaving not the merest trace, nobody sees the body, nothing to bury hard to reconcile for some. I imagine eighteenth century families who lost merchant seamen, or whalers were the people who originated the concept of the shipwrecked castaway, surviving on some lonely tropical isle, hoping for rescue. Probably an easier reality to accept for some members of a New Bedford whalers family than the unseen death of a loved one.

The nature of WW II air combat really lent itself to the propagation of such beliefs. I suspect the broad demographic base of the allied combatants rather diluted the effect. Folks in the forties and fifties were a lot less vocal about what in the west would be considered a private matter, so I think the MIA mythology was there, but harder to detect.

In Korea, the aerial combatants had roughly the same cultural background as their Vietnam era compatriots, but again a more reticent family base.

When Vietnam rolled around the military aviation culture was much more tightly wrapped, more distinctly established. With combat and non recoverable losses stretching from ‘64 to ‘73, and with casualties spread across the age and experience matrix, 30 year veterans were lost as well as brand new Second Lieutenants. Men well established in the military society, with wide ranging network of friends would one day go to “work” and by the end of the day would be gone, just as surely as he’d dropped off the face of the earth. Friends and family would have to accept and reconcile themselves to death with almost no confirming facts, really just the absence of facts.

The post Vietnam USAF was deeply marked by the trauma of those unresolved losses. In early 1981, Reagen was just sworn in, Jimmy Carter was fading into a memory, the Iranian hostages were home and across the Air Force was the stirring that, now was the time to find the POW’s many believed the Vietnamese or Laotians had held onto.

It wasn’t a conspiracy theory type feeling, it was just this vague, “We can’t afford to be wrong about this.” It was less than six years since the dust of the war had settled, and people with more than ten years in, were pretty sure to have been involved in the war, or had friends involved- if they didn’t subscribe to the belief that there were POWs being held, they at least respected the possibility.

By late 1981 the possibility had been pretty much been disproved, but some folks held onto it. Not just ‘nuts’ and ‘fanboys’, but really just folks who couldn’t reconcile lost friends or personal experiences, or had been touched by the tragedy which had touched these people

Around that time I was working with Major Mark Smith, himself a returned POW, who wouldn’t let it go either. He had been captured at Lang Vei, in 1972, while advising the ARVN Special Forces. He went on to sue the US Government in the mid eighties, trying to force the release of information he said would prove the Vietnamese were still holding American prisoners.

Hard to criticize people who went through that experience, or who hold out unreasoning hope for a loved one though.

[Affentitten]

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a criticism of the families involved, but more of the wider emotional ‘movement’ for MIAs. (Since the Michael Jackson death I have been pondering a lot about this need for people to get involved in expressions of mass grief and emotion....like they get some sort of kudos form participating in it.)

The example you gave of 18th C sailors I think is different and more understandable. It did happen and shipwrecks were more survivable than a supersonic aircraft crash. Even the Vietnam era is comprehensible, since there were POWs and after all, America did not have access to Vietnam compared to the access it has had to Iraq in the last 6 years. It would be interesting to know though what % of KIA & MIA initial findings were later shown to be wrong. ie. If the guy’s wingman sees him hit the ground with no ejection, but the body is not recoverable does he then go down as MIA or presumed KIA? And does this get re-opened later? I recall an episode in Chickenhawk where the author’s chopper is forced to land and investigate the still burning wreck of a US aircraft in order to verify no survivors. But the bodies couldnlt be recovered because of enemy action. So is this quick visual acceptable to confirm KIA? And what does the family get told? (“Mrs Johnson, I saw the plane hit the ground and he didn’t get out. I know it says MIA, but don’t get your hopes up.”)

Perhaps this Speicher focus is also a product of the relative rarity of US MIAs these days? Less examples for more people to obsess over.

[gunnergoz]

Yes, I do think you are right in that, that the relative scarcity of MIA's affects the way people react to them...that and the fact that we now hear about them virtually as they happen in many cases. It can clutch the heart strings to hear of a compatriot down, fate unknown, then presumed missing, etc. People follow it as something they personally experience first hand from the moment they hear of it. They become extras in the drama, so to speak.

And, as mentioned before, it takes on a life of its own with political overtones that can even overtake the military; as in, what was up with the reclassification of his status several time? I can only suspect that generals were scrambling around, issuing orders and making proclamations, depending upon how much heat they were getting from SecDef or even higher, to just "resolve the damn thing."

[Michael Emrys]

I’d point out that the MIA phenomenon predated the American experience in Vietnam.

[extensive snippage]

Hard to criticize people who went through that experience, or who hold out unreasoning hope for a loved one though.

Agreed, but you missed my point. No doubt individual persons and families would hold out hope against hope for some miracle to occur and their loved one would turn up alive after all.

But what I was talking about was that emotion being transformed into a kind of mass movement, almost a religion, and one with political clout. If that appeared in earlier times, it must have been rare and short-lived.

Michael

[RSColonel_131st]

Affentitten, maybe in this case it had something to do with being the first aircraft lost in the war (not many followed, IIRC) so finding him alive would have removed that "spot" from the US Military Air Campaign.

[dieseltaylor]

I think there is a more general "problem" with society where everything is sugar-coated to make it palatable to the public - the politicians interest, to schmaltzy/dramatic for the media to feed the "masses".

Plain speaking would be a pleasant change and also establish boundaries to stop wasted effort. MIA - the chances of the Iraqui's not parading a prisoner if he had survived would have been negligible. The pussy-footing around seems to show this desire to please regardless of commonsense.