Flying Was Not Just ‘Job’ to America’s First MIA : Military: Model Navy pilot disappeared in gulf sortie. He grew up in sight of an air base, always hoping to soar.

If he stands back a ways from the high fence and looks up through the legs of the longleaf pines, a boy can watch as the narrow, keening jets pull themselves off the Earth and out into the glaze-white sky above the sea.

Scott Speicher was one of the boys who stood and watched and hoped. And Scott Speicher learned the art himself, and in time, pulled his own jet off the wide, hot path to the sky.

This week, on another path into a different sky, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher and his jet vanished in a bright burst. He is believed to be the first American casualty in the war against Iraq.

If someone had to be first, this man, from this place, fits as neatly as the flawless dress uniforms on the Navy people who came Thursday afternoon to Joanne Speicher’s front door, where the Christmas poinsettias still blazed in a tub.

In this neighborhood--a raucous ground zero below the flight paths of two air stations--yellow ribbons and tricolor bunting have fluttered and faded from carriage-lamp posts for five months. Here, everyone knows what those dark dress uniforms mean.

Linda Hucks, the nurse coming home from work, saw them and began to cry and then to pray. The uniforms had come around some years before, when a training pilot cartwheeled in, and the smoke from it rose above his own street.

The F/A-18 fighter-bomber had been the newest and biggest deal a Navy pilot could yearn for on a day years back when Speicher took a friend on a tour of Cecil Field. From the conning tower, the friend would recall, Speicher spotted one. “Look,” he pointed, his voice eager. “Look at that. It looks fast just sitting there.”

If war in the next hemisphere managed for a time to carom off TV screens like some absorbing video game, a missing man, Scott Speicher--nobody called him Michael--has put a specific human cost to the abstraction of combat.

“It comes even more strongly home to us,” said Gov. Lawton Chiles on Friday as he ordered the U.S. flag atop the state Capitol flown at half-mast, “when we realize our first casualty is a Floridian.”

Thus, the pleasant mundanities of Speicher’s life have been elevated: the Boy Scout with a ready humor; the toothy kid who posed at the end of the diving board in the Confederate, the 1975 yearbook of Nathan Bedford Forrest High; the Methodist Sunday school teacher who was especially good with the 4- and 5-year-old boys of single-parent homes, who colored and pasted in the “make it, take it” class.

Speicher was a small boy when his parents brought him here from Kansas City, Mo. There is no escape, in Jacksonville, at Forrest High, from the scream of the jets. And Speicher, like the dozens of pilot-bit boys before him, wanted no escape.

A swimming scholarship took him to a North Carolina college for a time. He came back to Florida State University, for a degree in management and accounting. But the next month--July, 1980--he had enlisted. Flying had him back; it would never let him go again.

“It wasn’t a job to him. If he could fly he was happy. . . . That and his family were his life,” said neighbor Thomas P. Mills, whom Speicher’s 3-year-old daughter, Megan, and just about everyone else in the neighborhood, calls Pop.

Mills is the godfather of Speicher’s two children, and on Friday he was running interference for their mother: “She requests you say MIA till it’s proven differently.” On the three-block street where Mills lived during World War II were 17 gold stars, 17 combat deaths. He understands the difference.

According to Pentagon officials, Speicher had flown off the Mayport, Fla.-based carrier Saratoga the first night of action when his plane was struck by an Iraqi-fired surface-to-air missile. While there has been no indication Speicher escaped, and no trace has been seen of him or his remains, his family clings to his official classification as missing.

“Scotty’s coming home,” Speicher’s father, Wallace, told reporters at the door of his Jacksonville apartment.

The elder Speicher, himself a fighter pilot in World War II, said it was he who introduced his son to the glories of military aviation. The lesson took.

“That was the one thing in his life,” said Bob Long, a brother-in-law.

As Mills recalled, Scott Speicher “loved to talk about flying . . . if there was something faster, he’d want it.” At the Speichers’ parties, Mills, writer and music teacher, would find himself amid the eager young fliers and “I wouldn’t know what they were talking about half the time.”

The Millses were next door when Speicher moved in about eight years ago with a couple of pilot-roommates, and then married a woman he had met in college, said Mills.

Joanne Spiecher taught home economics for a year at Forrest High, and quit her job to have Megan, followed by Michael, now almost 2 years old.

In all the months that his duties took him away and overseas, Speicher never missed a Christmas at home, until this one. He left hurriedly in August, leaving straight from work one day, “not the goodby we’d have liked,” said Mills.

His letters and cards were “mostly, please take care of the kids, look after my wife,” and his last card, as chipper as ever, was of the “doing a lot of flying, this is just great, we’re ready if they need us” stuff. Nothing different.

Up and down the street, too, was the acclaim for the exemplary Navy wife, capable on her own, calm in crisis. “You couldn’t ask for a better military wife,” said Nigel Markoski, a Navy wife herself for 22 years. Her daughters baby-sat for the Speicher children when Joanne went to the wives’ auxiliary and support meetings.

This week, the support came here, materialized almost instantly, pilot wives who had had reason to be on “pins and needles themselves,” said Mills, “wondering if it was their husband.”

Now that they knew it wasn’t--this time--they came in grim-faced relays, with babies and parcels, taking the flowers that came to the door, fending off the calls. A month ago, the Saratoga lost 20 sailors in a ferry accident in Haifa. Now it was one pilot who had their attention.

One of the women left Friday as another drove up. She bundled her baby into a car seat and jammed her key into the ignition. What she said sounded like what any of them would have said if it had been them inside that gray house she had just left.

“He loved the service, or he wouldn’t have been doing what he did.”

The same spring that Speicher was graduated from high school, America plucked itself ignominiously off the roof of a crumbling embassy in Saigon.

That kind of thing matters around here. Forrest’s Vietnam veterans are named on brass plaques embossed long before Speicher graduated. If there aren’t as many military brats here as there were in the 1970s, they are no less ardent, in their classrooms under the whining flyaways of Cecil Field--named for a 1930s dirigible commander who died spectacularly in his own craft.

Four students from this blue-collar school were accepted to the Air Force Academy last year. The aerospace science class is always hard, always full. A box on the front counter collects “goodies” for “the men in the Middle East.” Someone has penned in “and women.”

With so many military brats with family overseas, the school is beginning next week to offer counseling. Scott Speicher’s disappearance--”an actual life that came to this school, sat in these chairs,” as Vice Principal Leila Mousa puts it--makes it seem more urgent. Certainly more real.

“I know exactly what she’s going through, exactly,” a secretary said of Joanne Speicher. Her pilot-husband was killed in Vietnam. “Except I had four little ones.’

Boys unborn when Speicher graduated from Forrest walked in. Chris Corbett, 16, wore a T-shirt that proclaimed, “I’d fly 10,000 miles to smoke a camel.” Charles Davis, also 16, wore a camouflage cap, and the hair of Adam Castle, 17, was cut in a fashion that no military barber could fault.

They will parcel themselves out to Army, Air Force, Navy when they are done with school--”Serve my country,” they all said promptly, chorus-like.

“I’ve wanted to be a pilot since I was 4 or 5,” says Davis. “The F-15E Eagle is my specialty.”

When they can, on weekends, after school, they go to the air station. They get as close as they can to the flightline, and they watch eagerly as the narrow, keening jets fling themselves into the glaze-white sky.