Eighteen months after Speicher went missing in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, friend and fellow U.S. Navy pilot Buddy Harris married Joanne.

[7] Upon graduation from FSU, Speicher joined the U.S. Navy and attended Aviation Officer Candidate School at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida.

[3] By the early 1990s, Speicher had attained the rank of lieutenant commander and was stationed at NAS Cecil Field near Jacksonville, Florida.

[1][2][3] Speicher was flying an F/A-18 Hornet fighter, BuNo 163484, when he was shot down by Iraqi Air Force (IQAF) aircraft 100 miles west of Baghdad, in the early hours of 17 January 1991, the first night of Operation Desert Storm.

The impact from the R-40 missile threw the aircraft laterally off its flight path between fifty and sixty degrees with a resulting 6 g minimum load.

[14] In December 1993, a military official from Qatar discovered the wreckage of a plane in the desert, which was subsequently identified as Speicher's aircraft.

[14] A covert American operation to inspect the site was considered, but rejected by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvili, as too risky.

[14] In December 1995, working through the International Committee of the Red Cross, investigators from the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army's Central Identification Laboratory went to Iraq and conducted an excavation of the crash site.

[13] In 1997, a U.S. Department of Defense document leaked to The New York Times showed that the Pentagon had not been forthcoming with information previously requested by U.S.

[16] Speculative theories were developed as to the circumstances of Speicher's shoot-down, and assuming he was still alive, why the U.S. military might not want to find him and why Iraq might not want to return him.

[18][19] In conjunction with the change in classification, Speicher was promoted to commander,[20] in accordance with U.S. Navy practice for POWs held a long time.

[22] Speicher's status was changed again to "missing/captured" on 11 October 2002, one day after the United States Congress authorized the use of military force in Iraq.

Officials stated that the 90-page document offered no evidence of whether Speicher was alive and might have been written either to provide an accounting of former Iraqi POWs or to confuse the U.S. military.

[26] His jawbone was used to identify him after study at the Charles C. Carson Center for Mortuary Affairs at Dover Air Force Base.

[18][27] The Christian Science Monitor termed the case "a veritable saga punctuated with hope, uncertainty, and despair for the past 18 years.

A U.S. Navy F/A-18 Hornet on display outside the Naval Aviation Schools Command at NAS Pensacola, Florida, was dedicated to the Speicher family in May 2009.

A front-page story in the 7 August 2009 issue of the Naval Air Station Pensacola newspaper Gosport describes how Speicher's remains were discovered and identified after 18 years.

On 13 August 2009, the remains of Captain Speicher arrived in Florida 18 years after having been shot down in the Persian Gulf War.

The plane containing his remains touched down at Naval Air Station Jacksonville at 3 p.m. Thousands of friends and family gathered for his burial.

Captain Speicher's final resting place is at the Jacksonville Memory Garden located in Orange Park, Florida.