Pfc. Jessica Lynch says she’s not the hero everyone thinks she is. To me, she’s a hero more than ever.
What a rare and refreshing creature she is. Lynch has served both her country and the truth.
It was not in her financial interest to set the record straight. In doing so, she has traded immortality for what will be more like 15 minutes of fame. She could have dined luxuriously off this tale for the rest of her life. But a sense of honor got in her way.
Thanks to Lynch, we now know that the ambush of her convoy in Iraq — though deadly and tragic — was less made-for-TV than TV had made it out to be. The media had repeated elaborate reports about how she had fought off the attackers, emptying her M-16 rifle before being taken captive. The truth, Lynch told us, is that she had not fired a shot.
Dropping all this extravagant praise on Jessica Lynch feels a bit odd, because I was not that interested in her before. Male soldiers killed or taken captive received a fraction of the minute-by-minute attention given to the Lynch saga. Showing so much more concern for one soldier’s ordeal seemed improper.
It was also sexist. Pentagon briefings turned sing-song when the subject was Lynch. The media portrayed her more as America’s Little Sister, if not Sweetheart, than the tough soldier she really was. That belittling tone continued into her recent interview by Diane Sawyer on ABC.
Sawyer opens the program calling Lynch "a young girl with a body full of broken bones." Near the end, she talks of "children, like Jessica Lynch, who don’t know what’s ahead when they pledge allegiance to the flag." I don’t recall hearing any male soldiers being referred to as "young boys" or "children." Imagine: All this baby talk about a woman who is walking around with steel plates in her spine, screws and rods in a shattered leg.
Lynch was herself unnerved by the Pentagon’s willingness to milk her story. She had become the American heroine rescued by American heroes. It bothered her, she said, "that they used me to symbolize all this stuff."
One expects some play with the facts in wartime, but the creative juices were really flowing for the Jessica Lynch story. We heard she had suffered stab and bullet wounds. Not true. She had suffered injuries consistent with a crash of her truck. We heard she had been slapped around in the hospital by brutal interrogators. Apparently not. She recalls meeting mostly Iraqi doctors and nurses, and they had treated her with great kindness.
We heard she was being held captive, against her will. Not so. An Iraqi doctor at the hospital said he had tried to send Lynch back to the Americans in an ambulance. When the ambulance reached the checkpoint, American troops, fearing the vehicle contained explosives, fired on it. The ambulance returned to the hospital.
The one real mystery surrounds an American medical report that Lynch had been sexually assaulted. The Iraqi doctors saw no evidence. Lynch herself was out cold for a while and does not remember. Was she raped? "It’s all kind of questionable," Lynch told Diane Sawyer. (As Sawyer’s face scrunched with motherly concern, my ABC affiliate was running an ad at the bottom of the screen reading, "Nude Lynch Photos. Live at 11.")
The details of what really happened aren’t the point here. The point is Lynch’s fidelity to the truth. Lynch had the golden opportunity to march into American folklore with an exaggerated story about her exploits. And the Pentagon was not going to issue corrections. Who would have believed a few Iraqis saying otherwise?
The truth mattered to Lynch. Furthermore, it cleared the reputations of the Iraqi doctors and nurses who had saved her life at great personal risk. She thanked them, as well as the Special Forces soldiers who came for her at the hospital. That the American soldiers used maximum force when they didn’t have to was irrelevant. They didn’t know that.
"I don’t want to look at myself as a hero," Lynch said. "I’m a survivor."
Loyalty, integrity, modesty and courage. Jessica Lynch is my hero, all right.
Froma Harrop’s e-mail address is fharrop@projo.com.
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