eadra Lynch has been waiting by the telephone for nine days, wondering, she said last night, whether it was going to bring good news or the worst possible information that a mother could hear.Posted on 04/01/2003 9:35:31 PM PST by JohnHuang2
eadra Lynch has been waiting by the telephone for nine days, wondering, she said last night, whether it was going to bring good news or the worst possible information that a mother could hear.
Last night, Ms. Lynch said, she "got the telephone call I have been praying for." She learned that her daughter, 19-year-old Pfc. Jessica Dawn Lynch, an Army supply clerk who had been missing in action in Iraq, was alive and had been rescued in the vicinity of Nasiriyah, near where her maintenance unit was last seen.
"It's just so exciting, overwhelming, and exciting," Ms. Lynch said yesterday.
The news that the young woman was alive and safe sent this tiny community into a frenzy. Ms. Lynch said last night that "everyone in town" was at the house and that they planned to celebrate all evening and early into the morning.
Her husband could barely contain his joy. "He just went crazy, screaming and yelling: Thank God! Thank God!" said Glenn Cogar, a family friend who was seated in the Lynches' living room when the Army rang with the news. "Everyone in that room just went crazy," Mr. Cogar said. "We were all just stunned. Everyone started crying and screaming. There won't be much sleeping around here tonight."
Details of what had happened to Private Lynch were still scarce. In Doha, Qatar, an official with Central Command said that Private Lynch was found in the Saddam Hospital in Nasiriyah, which was also being used as an Iraqi military facility.
Ms. Lynch said the military officials and others who called to provide scraps of information about the rescue said that the effort to save her daughter was based on intelligence that had been gleaned from collaborators in Nasiriyah.
Her mother said she was told her daughter had been wounded, but not seriously.
As the news spread, firetrucks — with sirens blaring — whipped around the hilly roads near Palestine, the small town 70 miles north of Charleston where Jessica Lynch grew up. Her old friends set off firecrackers. A church chimed its bells.
"This is phenomenal — no, it's borderline unbelieveable," Randy Coleman, a spokesman for the West Virginia Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety, said. "I think as everyone talked to the family before, they had been wanting to preserve hope, yet to prepare them for what was really expected — the worst. There is a certain resurrection quality in this."
Ms. Lynch, who had complained to Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, last week that military officials were not doing enough to keep the family informed, had nothing but praise for their efforts yesterday.
"I just want to thank everybody for their prayers and their concern," she said last night. "Everybody has just been wonderful."
"They never lost hope," Mr. Cogar said of his old friends, the Lynches. "I reckon when it's your own kids, you never lose hope."
The principal of the high school that Private Lynch graduated from was called out of a school meeting with the news. Kenneth D. Heiney's wife rushed over to tell him. She broke into the meeting.
The staff responded with a prayer, Mr. Heiney said. "We thanked God for what he had done."
Many in Palestine did not give up hope. "This community is a community of faith and I believe deep down we thought that she would come back," Mr. Heiney, principal of Wirt County High School in Elizabeth, said. Private Lynch graduated from the school of 325 in 2001. All of its 325 students knew her, he said.
Private Lynch's older brother, who is also in the military, brought the news to Dick's Market in Elizabeth where he once worked. That set off another celebration and more horns.
When she joined the military in 2001, Private Lynch was a senior in high school. She followed in the footsteps of her father and brother, Gregory Jr., who is stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C., in the Army.
Friends and relatives say that she enlisted because of the lack of opportunities in this tiny impoverished community where the unemployment rate of 15 percent was the highest in the state.
Private Lynch, friends and relatives said, saw the Army as a means to pay for a college education that would allow her to teach in an elementary school.
In an e-mail message to her parents a few weeks before becoming missing, Private Lynch wrote about coming home to Palestine to teach. She bristled, she wrote, at orders not to stop to help Iraqi children because it might be a decoy or a trap.
Her kindergarten teacher, Linda Davies, described her as a shy five-year-old who had developed into a "tough, competent lady" who is "excited about what she's doing" even as she remained focused on children. Ms. Davies expressed optimism last week.
"Jessica is looking forward to coming and taking my place and teaching one of these days," Ms. Davies said hopefully, "and I'm looking forward to that, too."
We all look forward to that day.
But, Jessica, when you do return, please take time each day to pray for the thousands we left behind in Indo China, in Korea, and elsewhere.
You are our hero, but you are a very lucky hero who can, hopefully, put that luck to good use in the future.
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