Jessica Lynch, shown in September 2000 photo, was rescued from Iraqi captors yesterday. Posted on 04/02/2003 5:40:30 AM PST by veronica
Jessica Lynch, shown in September 2000 photo, was rescued from Iraqi captors yesterday.
Firecrackers popped and horns honked in West Virginia last night as news of Pfc. Jessica Lynch's rescue spread through the tiny town of Palestine. The 19-year-old Army supply clerk who disappeared — and was feared dead — after her maintenance crew was ambushed March 23 in central Iraq was rescued by U.S. Special Forces, Central Command announced last night.
"Oh, mercy! It's been like a big weight has been lifted," Lynch's grandmother Wanema told the Daily News.
"We got the word last Sunday she was captured, and we've been waiting ever since. Waiting, hoping and praying," she said. "We have to thank the Lord for miracles, and he certainly gave us one tonight."
Lynch's father, Greg, was so overcome last night he could barely speak.
"We're just glad it happened," he told a local TV station.
"I'm just so excited," said her mother, Dee. "I'm just speechless."
Nearly every tree in this poor town of 900 people was wrapped with a yellow ribbon in hopes that the dollfaced young woman a month shy of her 20th birthday would return home safely.
"They ran out of yellow ribbons," said another relieved relative, Rheta Lynch.
Costly wrong turn
Five members of Lynch's unit, the 507th Maintenance Company out of Fort Bliss, Tex., were believed to have been captured after taking a wrong turn near Nassiriya.
Two are confirmed dead. Besides Lynch, the fate of seven others from the unit remain a mystery.
U.S. Special Operations forces swooped in and rescued Lynch at Saddam Hospital in Nassiriya after a Marine was handed a note in English that said a woman POW was in the hospital, MSNBC reported.
"She's still alive. She's in room [XXX]," the note read, according to MSNBC.
Capt. Jay La Rossa, spokesman for the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, told Reuters that Lynch had two broken legs and one broken arm, but was in good condition. Early reports that Lynch also suffered at least one gunshot wound could not be confirmed.
La Rossa said Special Forces also found the bodies of two U.S. soldiers.
Iraqi TV has displayed five POWs from the 507th, along with the bodies of several dead soldiers. Sources told The Washington Post that no other POWs were at the hospital at the time.
But yesterday, Lynch's safe return offered a glimmer of hope to the families of other soldiers listed as captured or missing in action.
"I'm happy that she's been rescued," said Claude Johnson, father of Army Spec. Shoshana Johnson, 30, a cook who was shown on Iraqi TV in enemy hands. "I'm keeping my line open for information about my daughter."
But will they still vote for Sen. Byrd?
They aren't going to announce the names of the dead until they've made positive identification.
Bodies usually aren't photogenic.
This event is a tremendous lift, after all the sniping by the press and the unfair characterizations of the coalition's efforts, and of Rumsfeld in particular. Think the naysayers will put a sock in it now?
veronica, I thought you knew better.
It will be a Lifetime special.
But they can't do anything more to her now. She's safe. She's been rescued and she's in our hands.
If you saw the tape of her on the stretcher, you'd see that one person (one of the medics, but no face shown), talking to her and holding her hand as she was being taken to and put in the helo. Whomever it was, they treated Pvt. Lynch very carefully and tenderly.
My prayers to out to her and her family.
I only wish that we'd been able to save the others who were there. It would've been far too painful for the families of the others who are missing or POWs to show their pictures.
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