Gulf War
According to the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, 47 Americans were listed as POW/MIAs at some point during Operation Desert Storm. At the conclusion of the Gulf War of 1991, U.S. forces resolved all but one of those cases : 21 Prisoners of War were repatriated, 23 bodies were recovered and 2 bodies were lost over the Gulf and therefore classified as Killed-In-Action, Body Not Recovered. That one MIA case, that of U.S. Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher, became quite well known. He was reported as missing after his F/A-18 was shot down in northern Iraq on the first night of the war. Over the years his status was changed from missing to killed in action to missing-captured, a move that suggested he was alive and imprisoned in Iraq. In 2002, his possible situation became a more high-profile issue in the build-up to the Iraq War; The Washington Times ran five successive front-page articles about it in March 2002 and in September 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush mentioned Speicher in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly as part of his case for war. However, despite the 2003 invasion of Iraq and U.S. military control of the country, Speicher was not found and his status remained under debate. It was eventually resolved in August 2009 when his remains were found in the Iraq desert, where according to local civilians, he was buried following his crash in 1991.
How many Iraqi forces went missing as a result of the war is not readily known, as estimates of Iraqi casualties overall range considerably.
Read more about this topic: Missing In Action
Famous quotes containing the words gulf and/or war:
“And into the gulf between cantankerous reality and the male ideal of shaping your world, sail the innocent children. They are right there in front of us—wild, irresponsible symbols of everything else we can’t control.”
—Hugh O’Neill (20th century)
“The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart: his words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords.
Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved.”
—Bible: Hebrew Psalm LV (l. LV, 21–22)