On the opening eve of the Gulf War, an American pilot was shot down over Iraq. Two years later, the stunning discovery of the wreckage set off an investigation that, despite government insistence to the contrary, proved that the pilot had not only survived the crash, but was captured and might still be alive today ...
"There is enough evidence to bring this whole situation into question. [The United States should] 'pursue every avenue' we can to find out what happened... that's an American tradition. " —Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz. ), author of Faith of My Fathers
"The fact is, there continue to be reports from what would have some degree of credibility that he's still alive." —Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla. )
"[Speicher's] story is at best one of excessive American caution... at worst it is one of lies and cover-up. Either way, it amounts to an extraordinary betrayal of the U. S. military's proud boast that 'no man is left behind." — The Times (London), March 14, 2002
Author and former intelligence officer Amy Waters Yarsinske breaks the incredible true story of the first American pilot shot down during the Gulf War-discovered alive eleven years after his own government left him for dead.
On January 16, 1991, Lt. Comdr. Michael Scott Speicher launched from the USS Saratoga, joining forty F/A-18 Hornets of which only 39 would return. Moments after an assault by an Iraqi MiG, Speicher's plane reportedly vanished in a fireball over the Baghdad desert. The next day, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell declared Speicher Killed in Action - the first casualty of the Gulf War.
Yet, two months later, a Kuwaiti secret police colonel claimed he was in the same hospital as a captured American pilot. Over the years, evidence of survival continued to emerge, and on January 10, 2001, Speicher was declared Missing in Action - the first time in history that a U. S. serviceman's status had ever been changed.
Tracking this explosive story for the past eight years, Yarsinske has interviewed top government and military officials, diplomats, pilots, informers, and Iraqi defectors. The result is a stunning true account of government denials and cover-ups that obscured an essential fact: Speicher survived. No One left Behind takes us beyond the lies to unearth the truth of the pilot left behind.
Amy Waters Yarsinske is the author of two dozen books and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism for her six-part series in the Virginian Pilot on Scott Speicher, written with Lon Wagner. A former intelligence officer in the naval reserves, she lives with her husband, a former naval aviator and Desert Storm veteran, in Norfolk, Virginia.
PLEASE NOTE: This is the unabridged. An abridged version is also available on the Spoken Network.
