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Basu: The changing story of saving Private Jessica Lynch
By REKHA BASU
Register Columnist
05/21/2003
All wars need their tales of heroism, and Americans got the perfect one in the daring military rescue of 19-year-old Private First Class Jessica Lynch from a hospital bed in Iraq.
It had everything a made-for-television story needs (and NBC has one in the works): Young, vulnerable female stranded in enemy territory. Bold self-sacrificing U.S. troops in bid to save her life. Even a civilian of the enemy country - the Iraqi lawyer who put himself at risk to tip them off to her whereabouts - rewarded with asylum and a book deal.
There's only one problem: What actually happened may be a far cry from what you've been told.
According to reports first in the Toronto Star and later on the BBC and ABC Nightly News, whatever the military believed, there never was a need for the April 1 raid on the Nasiriyah hospital. Iraqi forces had fled it nearly two days earlier while U.S. forces planned their action. Iraqi doctors say Lynch was not being held against her will when troops swarmed in with four helicopter gunships, blasting through 12 locked doors, trashing equipment, handcuffing patients and medical staff. Not only was there no enemy fire against them, but hospital staff had tried to deliver Lynch in an ambulance to American troops nearly two days earlier and were forced to retreat after being fired on.
Other pieces of the Lynch story already have morphed several times since the initial report that she was wounded by gunfire and stabbing when her unit, the 507th Maintenance Company, was ambushed after getting lost near Nasiriyah on March 23. Other U.S. troops were killed in that incident.
Early intelligence reports said Lynch took part in a gunfight and had been stabbed to death. She was admitted to the hospital suffering from a head wound, several fractures and a spinal injury, but her injuries are now said to have not been life-threatening, and may have resulted from falling out of her vehicle. Lynch's family has said they were not combat-related. The commander at a German military hospital where Lynch was taken after the raid said there were no wounds consistent with gunshots. Yet the hospital spokesman later contradicted that and said gunshots may have fractured her arm and leg.
The government has kept Lynch from the press, saying she can't remember what happened.
"The medical team that cared for Lynch at the [Iraqi] hospital . . . is only now beginning to appreciate how grand a myth was built around the four hours the U.S. raiding party spent with them early on April Fools" Day," the Star reported on May 5.
The Star interviewed a businessman near the hospital who said he had told troops before the raid that the Iraqi military had fled. What especially bothered the hospital staff, it said, is that while most accounts depicted her treatment as brutal, they provided Lynch attentive care. They gave her the special bed (which was destroyed in the U.S. raid) and assigned her a nurse who treated Lynch like her child, and feed her special food. Doctors there operated on her leg, installing three platinum plates that were in demand by Iraqi patients. After the raid, an Iraqi doctor said they were visited and thanked by a U.S. military doctor.
It's easy to see how, in the confusion of war, bad information gets around. The important thing is to correct it as soon as possible. But the Pentagon is refusing to say what really happened, and one official even suggested that reporters pursuing the true story should have better things to do.
The response to my questions from Maj. Brad Lowell of the Macdill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla. was a terse, "We're aware of the articles but we're not commenting." White House Press spokesman Ari Fleischer told Cox Newspapers he hadn't seen the reports and wouldn't comment.
Not even a denial.
In a follow-up story on the BBC Web site, a Pentagon official denied the Pentagon was responsible for putting out misinformation, and says it never released a report about Lynch. Most news stories about Lynch and her "rescue" have cited unnamed military officials.
From the White House and Pentagon's point of view, maybe the truth doesn't matter. Lynch is safe, the war is over and remains popular at home.
But if this story is wrong and left uncorrected, then you have to wonder how many other stories coming out of the war, big and small, are false.
Setting the record straight should take nothing away from Lynch, who has been used to argue everything from the readiness/unreadiness of women for combat, to the brutality of Saddam's army.
Her story is poignant enough on its own. As a young woman of modest means, she followed the route to a college education taken by thousands in her situation by enlisting, and could easily have paid with her life.
Readers of the New York Times were jolted by revelations that stories filed by 27-year-old reporter Jayson Blair were false. But the falsifications of one young reporter pale in severity compared to the Pentagon and White House participating in spreading a false story, then letting it go uncorrected - if that's what's going on.