Guest Post by Morbo
Remember Jessica Lynch, the poor West Virginia girl who went off to Iraq, got captured by the Iraqis and was rescued in a commando raid? Remember the stories of how she went down fighting, firing her weapon until it was out of ammo and resisting capture until the very end? Remember the bad TV movie dramatizing it all?
We’ve known for a long time it was all a crock. Lynch never fired one round at her captors because her gun jammed. Furthermore, no commando raid was necessary. Iraqi nurses at the hospital she was taken to tried to return her to American forces, but their ambulance was fired on at a checkpoint, and they had to go back.
Lynch has no desire to let the false story of her capture continue to circulate. She recognizes it for what it is: mere propaganda served up to the compliant media by military brass who were eager to boost the war by offering up heroes to the public.
Lynch recently testified in Congress in the matter of Pat Tillman, an Army ranger killed in Afghanistan in 2004 by friendly fire. She made it clear, once again, that the story the Army circulated about her was not true.
In an interview with Newsweek, Lynch called the tale “the whole Rambo story” and added, “I didn’t even get a shot off. My weapon had jammed. And I didn’t even get to fire. A rocket-propelled grenade hit the back of our [Humvee], which made Lori [Piestewa], my friend, lose control of the vehicle, and we slammed into the back of another truck in our unit.”
Lynch scored the media for not checking its facts and said she had no desire to see the story of her going down fighting circulate since it is not true. She is determined to get the truth out.
That truth is this: Her convoy was in the wrong place at the wrong time in a tough war zone. She was injured and captured. There is no shame in that.
It would have been easy, I suppose, for a lesser person to go with the flow. Lynch could have adopted the military’s version of events, convinced herself that it conveyed certain truths or that it needed to be true or that there was no harm in people thinking it was true.
Lord knows this is a favorite tactic of the Republicans and the Bush administration — legislating by anecdote. The stories usually turn out to be apocryphal, but so what? They still convey a deeper truth, right?
To her credit, Lynch does not want to play that game. As a result, people lost interest in her story. A book about her authored by Rick Bragg tanked, and the media stopped coming around.
Lynch decided not to be a symbol for the media’s laziness and the administration’s desire to use her as flag-waving prop. She insisted on telling the truth instead, even though telling it did not benefit her personally.
She sure sounds like a hero to me.