Americas
Eye on the United States
America and Its POWs
It was the first night of the war, when, somewhere over Iraq, the U.S. Navy lost contact with the pilot of its F-18 Hornet—Capt. Michael Scott Speicher’s jet never came back. It was the first American plane to be shot down, on Jan. 17, 1991. Later, we were to read that Speicher was “the only American soldier in Operation Desert Storm whose status remained Killed in Action—Body Not Recovered.”
A few days ago, new information surfaced about the pilot’s fate. According to these reports, writing was discovered on the walls of the Hakmiyah Prison in Baghdad: the initials MSS. And an informant reported that in the mid-1990s, an American pilot was held captive in this prison. The American sources of these reports, however, wish to remain anonymous.
America’s fascination with the fates of its POWs—prisoners of war—and MIAs—soldiers missing in action—is as old as the nation itself. And its way of dealing with its missing is a good gauge of the nation’s state of angst at the time. During its colonial era and the time of the Revolutionary War, “captivity tales” were a popular favorite: stories about white captives of the savage redskins, who supposedly relied on their faith in God and rescue to bravely resist sexual assault. The boundaries between actual events and myth were always blurred.
During the Korean War, American POWs became symbols of Cold War paranoia. The term “brainwashing” dates from this era. People feared that their all-American boys had been transformed by the Chinese communists into a fifth column, into remote-controlled agents, who at some propitious moment—July 4 or Thanksgiving Day—would be used to destroy America’s democratic ardor.
It took the moral military fiasco of the Vietnam War to turn the POWs and MIAs into real heroes again—and the search for them into a kind of civil religion.
American patriots such as billionaire and later presidential candidate Ross Perot organized public-relations events and demonstrations to focus media attention on the MIA issue—and counter the image of the Vietnamese victims of pacification and napalm. American soldiers became not just oppressors in an increasingly dirty and questionable war—they were turned into heroic victims, deserving of aid and support from their homeland.
Over the years, the cult surrounding the POWs and MIAs served as catharsis for the nightmare of Vietnam—and was used by the government in such ploys as calls to “adopt a POW” and intervene with the government on his behalf. The belief in POWs’ surviving in communist prison camps was fed not merely by political rhetoric, rumors, and patriotic rescue action movies like Rambo, but also by a huge output of books, pamphlets, and articles. Those created a coherent and superficially believable pseudo-history and became entirely credible.
After the first Gulf War, the Iraqis handed over their American prisoners—or their remains. All except those of Michael Scott Speicher. Shortly after that, the Pentagon declared him dead. But doubts persisted: In 1993, satellite photos showed the wreckage of his plane in the Iraqi desert. Two years later, the Iraqis allowed a U.S. mission to examine the crash site. There was no trace of the pilot, but experts declared it was highly likely he had survived the crash. Over the years, Iraqi defectors would time and again report they had seen an American pilot in a prison. Ten years after the end of the first Gulf War, the U.S. Navy undertook an unprecedented action: It changed Speicher’s status from “killed in action” to “missing in action, captured.” In the last few days, a special unit from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency has been working in Iraq, searching for clues that could point to Speicher’s still being alive.
