The story of the dramatic rescue of Private Jessica Lynch from the clutches of the Iraqis at the height of the Iraq war was one of the great patriotic moments of the conflict. A video of her rescue by US Special Forces was all over the satellite channels at the time and has continued to galvanize gung-ho sentiment in the US.
Private Lynch, a 19-year-old army clerk, was captured in an ambush just outside Nassiriyah. Nine of her comrades were killed and Lynch was taken to a local hospital. Eight days later the Special Forces went in, all guns blazing, and came under fire from inside and outside the building. Undaunted, they managed to whisk Lynch away in a helicopter. Not before time. Reports said she had been stabbed and shot and slapped about by interrogators in her hospital bed.
Or had she?
Hospital staff at Nassiriyah have told the BBC there were no Iraqi soldiers around at the time. One doctor who looked after Jessica in Iraq said the rescue reminded him of “a Hollywood film.” The special soldiers were screaming “go, go, go” he said, and making the maximum racket for the camera, firing blanks while bewildered hospital staff looked on.
Two days earlier, the hospital had attempted to hand Private Lynch over to the US but were fired on at a checkpoint and had to turn back. It appears the US nearly finished what the Iraqi soldiers in the Nassiriyah ambush had started.
That is bad enough. But now the subject of the “America Loves Jessica Lynch” fridge magnet herself has said that she sees no reason why her rescue should have been filmed.
Far from shooting at her captors until her ammunition ran out, Lynch says, she never fired a single shot because her gun jammed in the chaos. Nor did she suffer abuse at the hospital. Instead, one of the nurses used to sing to her.
Lynch believes that the US government used her as a patriotic symbol, and that using her like that was wrong. But what is the occasion of the ABC interview in which she makes these criticisms? The release of her authorized biography.
Of course she cannot be blamed for staking a claim to her own story at last, or even for wanting to make a little money out of a story that has brought great benefits to many others, not least the US government that so skillfully stage-managed it. But it appears that in the US no truth may be told unless it is first ground through the publicity machine.
By standing up to tell her story on ABC, that is to say through the same channels that distorted it in the first place, she adds grist to the mills of a mechanism that looks increasingly unable to tell any kind of truth at all.
