Some time about three years ago a serious nut job named Zarqawi made his way through the Middle East from his native homeland of Jordan and arrived in Iraq. Fancying himself some lieutenant of Osama Bin Laden and the ‘head’ of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Zarqawi set out on a homicidal rampage which began in earnest with the very public beheading of an unfortunate fellow by the name of Nick Berg.
Now there has been much speculation about Mr. Berg. He was essentially wandering around Iraq without serious credentials and certainly not ‘on the firebase’ as it were; he was not a member of the US military. The fact that he died in Iraq was not surprising. Iraq is not a place that should be traveled lightly, especially if you are a single, unaccompanied Caucasian from the United States. To a degree much greater than one might experience in downtown Detroit after Midnight, you chances of not returning to whatever hotel you booked yourself into in the squalor that is Baghdad are very high. Mr. Berg found this out and the world sat in rapt horror as Mr. Zarqawi liberated Berg’s head from his body while Mr. Berg writhed in agony. It was so gruesome that when I watched this video, while in Eastern Iraq, I refused to allow my medics to see the video. Disturbing doesn’t even begin to approach the image burned into my mind.
In the old Soviet Union, the one that Aldrich Ames sold his country, and some 20 odd intelligence operatives, out too, the preferred high punishment was to take the accused into a room and make them kneel. Once on the floor the authorities would bring a high-powered pistol (something along the lines of a .357 or a .44 magnum with wad cutters) into the room, put it against the back of the accused’s head and pull the trigger. The purpose was to literally blow the face off the executed so as to render them unidentifiable to family. Then, to further the pain and suffering, the body would be tossed into an unmarked grave and the family would never be told where their loved one was buried. Imagine the torment of knowing that somewhere your child or brother lies faceless, in an unmarked grave, unrecognized by anyone and unattended by his family.
Move to Haditha.
I cannot comment on Haditha. I wasn’t there and I was not in the heads of the MARINES who stand accused of shooting civilians. That’s reality. Nobody really knows yet what happened there and so it is advisable for everyone to just take a big chill pill and wait for the courts to work it all out. What I can say is this, if you had asked me to take a gun and kill Mr. Zarqawi, I would have accepted the task and had no problem or remorse over doing so. He was not a warrior, he was not honorable, he was not even a foreign intelligence operative (at least they are working for a nation in the greater scheme of the conflict that defines the nature of the world and civilizations in contact). No, Mr. Zarqawi was a brutal, homicidal jihadi Muslim who was an equal opportunity murderer and because of this he needed to be put down, and hard. Any soldier in Iraq will tell you that nothing stirs the desire for vengeance more, than to see innocents and fellow warriors cut down by an unseen enemy who has no honor and no courage to face you, even if that means an enemy in an airplane or on a ship. At least they play by the rules of war.
We spent a lot of money and resources to find this man. He was murdering civilians at will and his rampage raised the ire of everyone over there. Consider that even the Jordanians, the people of Zarqawi’s homeland, are refusing to allow his body back into the country because it would taint their soil with evil. The efforts to find this man rival those of the hunt for Sadaam and perhaps only Bin Laden has garnered more efforts to locate.
Let’s divert briefly to the U.S.
I noticed that two weeks ago the FBI thought it necessary to tear apart a barn to find what would now be the thirty or so year old remains of Jimmy Hoffa. A barn in Michigan focused the attention of the FBI, the nation and some heavy equipment.
They spent several days tearing away at it for the purpose of finding the corpse of a man who was ostensibly killed by organized crime for some reason likely truly known only within the confines of the organization that executed him.
Americans, unlike most other nations in the world, just never seem to give up. We hunt for Sadaam, Bin Laden, Zarqawi, Hoffa...We turn the effort of locating them into small crusades. Doggedly we go after them because they are either evil people, victims of heinous crime or folks who are keeping the progress of righteousness from occurring. I would imagine that if the GAO every really measured the total dollars, in terms of man-hours, spent on these quests it would boggle the mind. We spend a lot of money to address evil and crime. It is our crusade.
A little over 15 years ago, an F-18 pilot launched on a mission over Iraq. He flew over the vast desert and performed his task and was headed home. Something happened. In the Gulf War, America suffered very little. We lost less than 200 troops and our POWs were returned to us…save one. One the way home, that particular F-18 was damaged and the pilot was forced to depart his airplane far from his base and in the middle of nowhere (there is a lot of nowhere in Iraq). We know this; his body was never found and the accident scene appears to indicate that he survived his unscheduled stop. What we don’t know is, where he is.
If CMDR Scott Speicher were still alive, he would be the longest serving POW in US history. As well he would be one of a very few servicemen who has been declared dead by his nation and then resurrected as an MIA. There is speculation that warriors from Korea and Vietnam may have served several generations as “guests” of the Soviets until, after outliving their usefulness, these Cold Warriors were executed or simply died, forgotten, save for their friends, families and fellow warriors. Where is Scott?
All of us in the military wear dog tags. It is pretty much just a symbol now though. My DNA, like millions of other warriors’, is stored safely in a Federal Repository. If I ever die and my dental records don’t prove useful, my family will get that undesired letter and the assurance that what is left of me, is me, and was confirmed by matching my DNA on file with that of my remains. Simply put, there will never again be an “Unknown” from American wars. Find a lock of hair and you will know. Find a single tooth, you will know. Find a bit of finger, an ear, a leg, a spleen and you will know who that warrior was and his family will be able to bury them with honor and their casket will have a proper flag over it, signaling to the world that the volunteer warrior held within is exactly who is recorded on the marble headstone it matches. The Iraqis returned someone’s remains to the U.S. but testing showed that it was not Scott.
Scott Speicher has no proper grave. He has no flag. He has no memorial. His family has no closure. This warrior, who went to work in his Hornet one day and retuned not to his unit, but to some godforsaken part of Iraq, has no way of telling us what happened.
It is time to find out what happened to Scott Speicher. It is time to close the horror of his war for him and his family. If we can tear down barns for victims of organized crime, if we can mobilize battalions for the sake of finding militant jihadiis, if we can move heaven and earth and offer millions to find a 6 foot tall Saudi, with renal failure, in the Tora Bora Mountains of Afghanistan, then by god we have no excuse, when we own the whole damn country, not to find out what happened on the day that Scott went to work in Iraq and didn’t come home. In this case, regardless of what you may or may not feel about Haditha or Abu Ghraib, we are justified in breaking some fingers. I have no reservation about doing that to the people who might be hiding Scott’s secret.
David Milch, the head writer of the HBO series “Deadwood” and the long since ended, Hill Street Blues, said that, “Soldiers in combat are not capable of suspending their understanding of the real world. It is that capability of suspending belief that is the precursor of art.” Or something along those lines. What he was getting at I think is that those of us who have been in war find it very difficult to come home and pretend. We have experienced a reality that goes far beyond whatever crap is being pawned onto the American people. Consider that big news here is Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie selling their child’s pictures to PEOPLE Magazine?!? And people actually care about this.
I spent time next to murderers in Iraq. Men who had killed innocent people in cold blood. I spent time next to men just a few clicks away that were intent on killing those murderers. Not pretend TV people, real people. Milch is right. I spend my days now watching Disney films because that is real fantasy that I can escape into. I can’t really tolerate watching Tom Cruise, pretend. I can no longer suspend my beliefs in reality, it is lost, the world has become all too real and for that reason the thought of a pilot, languishing in the godforsaken country of Iraq for 15 years without any word of where or how he is, is too much to accept. It is a national outrage and worth WHATEVER we need to do to find him and bring him home.
WE must find him and WE must demand that he be brought home, by whatever means necessary. There are those of us out here very willing to help make that happen.
