September
2002
Book
Review: No One Left Behind: The Lt. Comdr. Michael Scott Speicher
Story
By Amy Waters Yarsinske
New York: Dutton
290 Pages
$25.95 (Hardcover)
Unkept
Promises
by
Mark Feffer
So, I'll admit I was planning to review Janet Evanovich's Hard
Eight when I came across this book, at about the same time
that I first heard the name of its subject-Lieutenant Commander
Michael Scott Speicher--mentioned on the radio. An F/A-18 Hornet
pilot flying off the U.S. aircraft carrier Saratoga, Speicher
was among the first aviators lost during the Persian Gulf War
in 1991. But from the start, his case has been anything but clear-cut:
No search-and-rescue mission was launched for him, and reports
of his status were confused within the war's chain-of-command.
At
a news conference, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney made
an almost off-the-cuff pronouncement that Speicher had been killed,
which impacted how POW/MIA officials regarded his case from that
moment on. Reports of radio signals from Speicher were explained
away, and he was declared dead four months after his loss-in violation
of federal law requiring officials to wait a year and a day. While
some authorities were sure Speicher died when his aircraft exploded,
others didn't believe there was enough evidence to draw any firm
conclusion. Still others became convinced he had survived his
flight.
In
the mid-1990s, a U.S. team finally examined his plane's wreckage
in the Iraqi desert and determined, among other things, that Speicher
had ejected safely. Though it received credible reports that an
American pilot was being held in Iraq, America's Defense bureaucracy
resisted suggestions that it might be Speicher, weighing each
new piece of information against evidence that supported its initial
findings.
Now that we're being treated to a hapless drumbeat about another
war with Saddam Hussein, Amy Walters Yarsinske's No One Left
Behind: The Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher Story takes on
a special poignancy-and urgency. I should say I began the book
as a skeptic. Lately, I've simply become weary of conspiracy theories-from
the suggestion the Navy shot down TWA Flight 800, to the idea
that moon landings were staged, to the notion that Saddam Hussein
continues to hold Americans captive a decade after he lost the
war. But Yarsinske convinced me, not necessarily that Speicher
is alive, but that he might be, and certainly that the very organization
to which he had dedicated his life had let him down in a chilling
way.
Beginning with a blow-by-blow account of Speicher's last flight,
Yarsinske details the bad assumptions, confusion and outright
incompetence that conspired against him. She contends Speicher
survived his ejection and was picked up and held by a Bedouin
tribe until he was discovered by the Iraqis. Following a common
practice in the area, the Bedouins intended to care for Speicher
until they could turn him over to the United States in return
for whatever reward they could negotiate. Over the course of three
years during the middle 1990s, the Bedouins' efforts to return
Speicher were ignored, Yarsinske writes, until finally the Iraqi
government captured him and murdered the entire Bedouin tribe.
Back home, meanwhile, the years passed in a succession of confrontations
between those in the Defense community who believed Speicher survived
and those who insisted on sticking to decisions already made.
Often, Speicher's advocates were left out of meetings and briefings
for superior officers and members of Congress.
Yarsinske's
theme is that decisions made at the Pentagon's middle levels abandoned
Speicher to years in the desert, and then to Iraqi prisons. She
builds her case thoroughly, and although she quotes unidentified
sources a bit too often, she does name names when it comes to
who may have stonewalled and who may have bungled.
Unfortunately
Yarsinske is not the clearest writer, and the book is handicapped
by this. A former intelligence officer in the Naval reserve, she
is obviously at home within the structure of the armed services.
She speaks their language, and writes with a comfortable familiarity
of politics inside and outside the Pentagon. But she doesn't translate
that comfort into an easily read narrative. She has a tendency
to fall back on government acronyms (CENTCOM for Central Command,
SOCCENT for Special Operations Command Central, even ICRC for
International Committee of the Red Cross), which is confusing
in the best case, but maddening over a ten-year narrative, when
agencies' names are changed and readers are forced to keep track
of their organizational lineage.
In
addition, she seems to intent on laying out her facts in essentially
a timeline, so both minor and major matters are often given equal
play. For example, the contention of one source that "virtually
no" search and rescue operations were conducted for downed
flyers during the Gulf War is reported in one paragraph, documented
in another, and commented upon in two more. I suppose I should
applaud Yarsinske's restraint, but I'd think a bit of rage might
be in order.
What
Yarsinske does exceptionally well, though, is back up the notion
that Speicher might be alive, detailing how Hussein kept prisoners
from the Iran-Iraq War for decades, and of how in his mind the
keeping of a secret prisoner could be a victory in itself. It's
something to think about as another President Bush casts a wary
eye toward the desert of Iraq. Despite its shortcomings, this
is a valuable book that exposes how petty politics can impact
the lives of troops in the front lines.
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Mark
Feffer is founding editor of the Trenton Writes Project (www.trentonwrites.com)
