Jessica Lynch Didn’t Follow Script Written For Her: A Unique Form of Bravery

Telling Truth To Lies on Capitol Hill re Falsified Stories about Her Captivity in Iraq

Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense –shouldn’t he be called to ‘The Hill’ to answer about his oversight, or lack of it, on this matter? and not one more time let ‘the who, what, why, where, how and when’ of this seeming ‘failed publicity stunt’ fall to his subordinates… who are then forced to engage in a circular firing squad using finger pointing as their weaponry of choice?

The military apparently passed wrong information to the national media… some say The Washington Post was the first to spill ink on the story composed of many false facts. The story thence reported globally was this one: Pfc. Jessica Lynch had been ambushed in Iraq along with her 11 comrades who all died at the scene; that she alone survived even though she’d been stabbed and shot; that she held off attackers with firepower but was captured; and later rescued from an enemy hospital in a daring raid by US soldiers, and that none of the other 11 soldiers were found…

… when in fact, Pfc. Jessica Lynch never fired her weapon (jammed with sand); was not stabbed or shot, but had broken bones from being thrown when her vehicle crashed; and during her ‘rescue’… no Iraqi solders were in the hospital; and even more thwarting to those who passed the false story, even though the story remained on the air waves, in print and on film for weeks without being retracted… the hospital staff continued to say they had already tried to arrange her transfer back to American forces before her ‘rescue.’ The bodies of the 11 soldiers were recovered by US forces.

As a military wife, married to an NCO who re-upped in the military for 21 years, 17 years of which were in public affairs… just like journalists in the national print and television media, there are also military story-gatherers who are legendary straight arrows, but there also seem to be a thin stream of those who are crooked as a Lippes Loop. It may not be by accident that the word ‘storyteller’ in most every language, means both the venerable art of gathering and detailing history, but is also used as a euphemism for a person who tells lies in order to blow smoke.

Pfc. Lynch’s real story in Iraq may have gone awry from the beginning. All it takes is one military officer or subordinate– either a first reporting eyewitness, or first writer, or first reader or transcriber—who got it wrong by accident at first, (easy to do in the heat of things everywhere, at every level of reporting from scenes of tragedy, but allowing the false story to go on and on, that is the issue), or who either embellishes their own ‘dangerous’ role in the ‘rescue,’ or who thought Pfc. Lynch’s story ought (in their minds) go something like this…

‘…Let’s make a hero out of her… think of it, a woman in a combat situation is a relatively new thing; Picture her, uniform shot away, muscles showing, half naked body, M-16 firing, holding off enemy Iraqis with her three last bullets while bleeding from stab and gunshot wounds. Wow! What a story!’

Yes, but only on the cover of a comic book.

It is completely unnecessary to make up stories about harm and bravery in war. There are plenty of real stories of harm and bravery in war, ones that are imperfect, and therefore all the more miraculous. Warriors aren’t one-dimensional Terminator action-figures crated in plastic.

From what I know re more than 40 years of listening closely to war stories from family members and patients who served in wars, I’d put it this way: those who go as soldiers to a war are not MGM actors, but our neighbors, schoolmates and family members who through training, and in some combination of love and fear and horrification and hope, get filled with the ‘Four S’s�

…soul and sweat and snot… and ‘stuff’ as we say, that ‘stuff’ being an inner and outer force that is greater than the person themselves… a sudden wise sense that erupts in moments that call for utter prescience, that offers a mysterious radar, that says, ‘Don’t think, just move in this direction… this way, not that way, over here, over here.’

To make up ‘a story that wasn’t,’ and circulate it worldwide, yes, this deprives Pfc. Lynch of her actual story of fear and fumbling and striving and bravery… We never get to hear her story without the fog of the false story.

We also don’t focus on what has been widely reported and appears to have been verified by her… that she was raped. That that may have been perpetrated on her at the ambush site, and compounded her injuries. One arm: shattered with multiple compound fractures piercing the fascia, muscles, nerves and skin with bone shards. Spine fractured in two places. Right foot crushed. Left leg broken into pieces, the broken mosaic of bones severed nerves leaving that leg without feeling.

Yet today, four years after the fatal ambush on 23 March 2003, you see a pretty and articulate woman who walks with a gait clearly belonging to a person once badly injured physically. Bodies heal as best they can, and often enough good almost as new. Emotional wounding takes longer.

But, as much, and even more so, to falsify this news story of Private First Class Lynch, also diminishes the stories of those who were ambushed with her that day, those whose stories and injuries and even names are completely lost in this entire story… that is, the eleven soldiers, our neighbors, classmates and family members who died.

Falsified stories like the one made up about Pfc. Lynch can hit other soldiers hard. Many have little and big sisters and mothers; they have sweethearts and other women and men and children they care for deeply … They are soldiers, they identify with protecting others. To falsely fill a soldier with encouragement to avenge something that never happened to Pfc. Lynch, to incite soldiers who are tired and far from home with desire to ‘make right’ something that was never wrong… that is even an egregious recklessness and manipulation.

Still, Pfc. Jessica Lynch should be put in for a medal. She could have ‘gone along.’ She could have been silent. She is her own witness with these words from the book of her travails: “My heroes are Lori (Pvt. Lori Piestewa, who was killed during the ambush on Lynch’s convoy), the soldiers that are over there, the soldiers that were in that car beside me, the ones that came and rescued me. I’m just a survivor.”

I’d suggest a new medal be struck…. maybe something like “Speak Truth to Liesâ€? medal, awarded to a person who, while serving in any capacity with the U.S. Army, is cited for gallantry in action against “an enemy of the United Statesâ€? …and that this must have been performed with marked distinction.

And who would “an enemy of the United Statesâ€? be? What if sometimes the US is its own worst enemy, aided and abetted by various and sundry? What if the enemy is those who refuse to be carefully accountable to the very soldiers they oversee? What if its someone like a former Secretary of Defense who is 75 years old and who doesn’t appear to have the maturity of a woman soldier who hadn’t even made Corporal yet at age 19…?

What if Pogo was right? Paraphrased, “We have met the enemy and he is ‘one of’ us.”

“Jessica Lynch Didn’t Follow The Script Written For Her: A Unique Form of Braveryâ€? from I Put the Culture on the Couch, © 2007, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved, is printed here under Creative Commons License by which author grants permission to copy, distribute and transmit this particular work under the conditions that the use be non-commercial, that the work be used in its entirety and not altered, added to, or subtracted from, and that it be attributed with author’s name and this full copyright notice. For other uses, contact copyright holder.