Posted on 11/07/2003 7:31:52 AM PST by presidio9
Jessica Lynch has angrily accused the Pentagon of using her for propaganda. The 20-year-old private, portrayed as a female Rambo after she was captured by Iraqis during a blazing gun battle, then freed by American troops, told ABC there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," Lynch said in an interview with Diane Sawyer that airs Tuesday, Veterans Day.
"Yeah, it's wrong," Lynch said. "I don't know why they filmed it, or why they say the things" they said.
That footage of U.S. commandos wheeling a grimacing Lynch to a waiting chopper was among the most dramatic of the war - and helped cement her image as a female warrior.
But Lynch said the true heroes were the soldiers who saved her.
"They're the ones that came in to rescue me," she said. "I'm so thankful that they did what they did; they risked their lives. ... They are my heroes."
She also disputed the Pentagon's early version of her capture by Iraqis, which suggested she had heroically defended herself - going down only after firing all her ammo.
Lynch says her M-16 jammed and she never got off a shot.
"My weapon did jam and I did not shoot, not a round, nothing," she said simply.
There was no immediate response from the Pentagon, which awarded Lynch a Purple Heart for her injuries.
ABC released excerpts of Lynch's first television interview yesterday after the Daily News obtained a copy of Lynch's authorized biography and revealed its most shocking secret - that she was raped by her Iraqi captors.
She has no memory of the rape. The book says there was a three-hour gap after her capture, a blank in her mind, during which she was assaulted.
"Even just the thinking about that, that's too painful," she told Sawyer.
Lynch said she was awakened from her stupor by searing pain.
"I seriously thought I was going to be paralyzed for the rest of my life," she told ABC.
The young soldier said at first she did not trust her Iraqi doctors - and tried to stifle her screams.
Trapped in her bed, Lynch said, she tried to tame her terror by thinking about her family, her fiancé, Sgt. Ruben Contreras, and her G.I. buddy Lori Piestewa.
After she was rescued, she learned Piestewa was dead.
In her book, "I Am a Soldier, Too," author Rick Bragg says the scars on Lynch's body and medical records indicate she was anally raped, and tells the reader to "fill in the blanks of what Jessi lived through on the morning of March 23, 2003."
Lynch says her unit was sent into battle armed only with M-16s - no grenades or anti-tank weapons - and in lumbering trucks that could not keep up with the convoy barreling toward Baghdad.
When the trucks in her unit tried to catch up, radio contact with the main convoy was lost - and so were they.
She was filled with foreboding.
"Jessi's fear of being left behind was beginning to come true," Bragg wrote.
Frankly, if I had been anally raped by a bunch of Iraqis, I wouldn't want anyone to know. She's upset that they filmed the rescue, but she has no problem publishing the fact that she was sodomized? So they filmed the rescue...big deal! I'd be so grateful that I was alive that I could care less if they had 20 cameras on me. I think down the road, Jessica Lynch will end up feeling used by more than just the military.
Post #145: By the way, can you tell me what you're so angry about?
Your credibility is waning.
Actually, yes, that is pretty much exactly the job of the Army's public affairs and press offices. Maybe not all stories, but one as major as they played this one at the time, damn right they better be on it. (Vietnam Lesson #254)
More b.s., Jessica Lynch could be a national hero and very wealthy, if she chose to allow the liars in the media out there to attribute acts to her that never happened. If you have the ability to pay attention to DETAILS, you will realize that her going on television and writing a book about the truth is actually taking millions of dollars away from herself. She is refusing to let people call her a hero, she is telling the facts as they only she knows they happened. She is setting the record straight by saying, in effect: "look, don't make me into something I'm not. I never fired my weapon or fought with anybody. All I did was survive a terrible ordeal."
Be refuting the media and army hype about her story, this girl is sacrificing much money and fame to maintain her personal integrity and character. She just wants to be herself. I used to be against the "Army hero" Jessica Lynch, but now that I see her courage and moral conviction she has become a power of example for me. God love her.
I'll be the first to tell you the Army is capable of serious screw-ups, but I'm enough of a loyalist to get my back up over this constant lying crap about the Army "using" or "abusing" her.
Just what did this Army "abuse" consist of? That they released the ops tape of her rescue when millions of us were praying for her and wondering every single day what happened to Jessica and Shoshana and Laurie?
--Army vet, Army dad.
You just said it better than I ever could.
Glad to see the honesty and the sentiment.
She may not know where the info was released from. Besides, she feels used. She is angry. She is hurt. She is humiliated. She is emotionally scared. She is physically scared. She wants this all to go away. Don't blame her for blaming the Pentagon. In her eyes and state of mind (and reinforced by the media circus that won't go away), my cats are at fault too.
Stop by to learn more about and support Lt. Col. Allen B. West I spoke to him last night and his lawyer will be sending more information that will soon be posted.
Glad to see you admit you shouldn't have said what you said then.
Closer tolerances than what?
Than other guns! What do you think? lol
The fitting of the firing pin is tight enough that no sand and dust would build up in the spacing to cause binding. Once cocked and loaded there are no other mechanisms that could get stuck resulting in a failure to fire. If a light hammer blow(dust) resulted in a misfire, it could be immediately cleared. Unless the owner allowed the inside of the reciever to fill with a significant amout of sand and/or dust, the shooter could clear it with one, or a few manual cycles.
Blah, blah, blah. All I know is that those with as much experience as you with these guns said they can indeed jam before firing and they said it was because of closer tolerances than say, an AK47. Discussions about pins mean nothing to me, we didn't go that deep.
That could be, but this is the NY Daily News. Are they the liberal media?
Yep. The New York Post and the Wall Street Journal are the only two good papers in New York (and the Wall Street Journal does have liberal reporters, but their editorial page isn't bad).
They said she, "angrily accused the pentagon of using her for propaganda."
They lied. She said she was "hurt". But that could mean anything, she could be hurt because of all the hate directed toward her by people like you who are using this stuff to bash her.
I hope that at her age she knows that she will not be able to please everybody about her life. No matter what she says she will forever have some people hating her or what she stands for. Knowing this at 19 is a burden to carry unless she has the wisdom and strenth to do it. Appearently she has the strenth. God help her with the wisdom. I hope that after everything is said and done about her she can still stand tall and have some self-respect.
I think, among many other things, Jessica Lynch feels used and abused by the feminists, (including those in the Pentagon), who have used her as a battlefied experiment to see if girls can be good soldiers. Most conservatives are against women in combat roles, myself included. It's easy to fool a young girl into thinking they can handle combat as well as a man; I'm guessing that Jessica thinks differently now, that she feels like she's been taken on a cruel, torturous ride.
I don't know if this is Lynch, or the media distorting this (probably the latter).
Lynch's convoy wasn't sent into battle. She was a member of a supply company, and they were never intended to "do battle."
An argument could be made that they should have been better armed and protected. And CERTAINLY an argument should be made that women should not have been put so close to battle lines. But it is not true that Lynch and company were "sent into battle."
What the hell do you guys want? You've said for months that she should come out and deny what was said and then when she does, you accuse her of whining. You people are just bashers, that's all. I hope to hell she isn't trying to please people like you, because you are too inconsistent to know what you want. She need do do what Johnny Cash did and take a full page ad out with her giving the finger to everyone criticizing her.
Where's that press release Corky? What actually happened is that media published outlandish rumors because they're lazy morons.
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