Posted on 04/05/2003 3:20:38 PM PST by MadIvan
When US special forces snatched Private Lynch from Iraqi hands they saved a wounded teenager. Mark Franchetti, who was with the marine patrol that got the first tip that she was alive, tells her story
An unusual message came crackling over the radios of American marines in central Iraq on Tuesday night: Precious cargo secured. The cryptic words produced an audible sigh of relief from the soldiers. Yet it was not the capture of Baghdad or some other military trophy being announced. The triumph was the daring rescue of a teenager from West Virginia.
In one of the most dramatic episodes of the military campaign so far, Jessica Lynch, a wounded private who had been taken prisoner in an ambush the week before, was snatched from a hospital in central Iraq on Tuesday night in an extraordinary mission by American special forces that did more than any military conquest to raise the morale of troops in the field.
Pictures of her smiling face were beamed around the world, turning the 19-year-old Lynch into an American icon and the embodiment of determination to overcome all obstacles. The military would not immediately reveal all the details of her ordeal but it was suggested that the young supply clerk, a diminutive figure of 5ft 4in who looked as though she weighed less than many soldiers rucksacks, had shot at the Iraqis, even after being injured, until she ran out of ammunition and was captured. She did not want to be taken alive, said an official. She was fighting to the death.
The Pentagon had heard rumours of her heroics but no confirmation. Even so, the military media spinners at Central Command could not have scripted a better feel-good story than her rescue, the first extraction of a US prisoner of war from enemy hands since the second world war. Saving Private Lynch not only demonstrated to the world the extraordinary reach and capability of its special forces but was also an accomplishment that every American could take pride in at a time when the country desperately needed a lift in its harder-than-expected campaign.
It also showed that some Iraqis, at least, were willing to help America to achieve its objectives. Lynch was found thanks to the extraordinary intervention of a gregarious young lawyer called Muhammad who says he stumbled across the American on a visit to the hospital where she was being held. He decided to help her to escape after seeing a man slapping her on the face and hearing that doctors were planning to amputate her leg.
For Lynch, who was recovering from injuries at a military hospital in Germany last week, the war may be over but the example will live on as publishers vie to secure the right to publish her story and Hollywood producers ponder who to cast in the role of the pretty young country girl turned foot soldier in the gruelling desert war against Saddam Hussein.
In Lynch they saw a symbol of American strength whose seven-stone frame belied the grit and tenacity that she acquired in her native, biblically named village of Palestine in the Appalachian mountains. With only 100 inhabitants, two churches, a post office and a gift shop, it might seem an insignificant spot in relation to the war in Iraq.
Yet last week this God-fearing place festooned with flags and yellow ribbons, and countless other such communities across America, were satisfied that they had bred the spirit and determination required for taking on the worlds most ruthless dictator and winning.
THE Lynch familys white, wood-frame home is a few miles out of town at the end of a gravel road. It has a big wrap-around porch, where the family spends most of its time. A shaggy pony munches hay in the shade of a shed across the road from the mailbox. There is a flagpole displaying the American and West Virginian flags in the driveway.
It is hillbilly country, a term that the locals resent. Yes we do have hills, said one indignantly, but were as intelligent as anybody in America.
Growing up, there was not much to do in Palestine. At 16, Lynch was voted Miss Congeniality in a beauty pageant at the county fair the most exciting event of the year for the village.
Jessie Lowe, Lynchs best friend, recalls how they spent her 18th birthday together playing softball before going on to celebrate at Pizza Hut. They were both members of Future Farmers of America and raised animals for sale at the county fair. There were always chickens in Lynchs yard.
She wasnt real serious, she liked going to the movies and having fun, said Lowe. She was popular with boys but did not have many boyfriends. On prom night she wore military boots under her gown for a laugh. I was shocked when she wanted to join the army, Lowe recalled. She was a small, petite girl. You wouldnt think of her at a boot camp or face down in the mud.
Lowe, who is also 19, married Lynchs cousin Jeff last year and they already have a four-month-old baby. Lynch was bridesmaid at their wedding, but made it clear that she thought there was more to life. She loved kids, but she wasnt ready to settle down. She wanted to do and see everything.
In West Virginia that could only mean joining the army. There is no coalmining left and the state is one of the poorest in America.
In Wirt County, where the Lynches live, unemployment stands at 15%. Lynchs burly, bearded father Greg, an independent truck driver, said he was glad when she enlisted.
She thought, Im young, what am I going to do here? The kids only entertainment is going to the mall and the movies. I knew there wasnt anything in this community except for fast food restaurants they could work at.
Her sister Brandi, then 16, met an army recruiter at school and invited him back to the house. The sergeant told her she was under age but went on to ask her 18-year-old brother Greg Jr: What about you? When he nodded yes, the sergeant turned to Lynch, then 17. She was up for it, too.
She was fit and physically tough, despite her slight frame. Her baseball coach Rodney Watson, a Baptist deacon, said: Jessie was a scrapper. She would do anything to win. She didnt have any quit.
Lynch often sparred with Greg Jr, now a fellow serviceman at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. What her brother put her through, growing up, probably prepared her a lot, her father smiled.
At school she was an average student who inspired her teachers loyalty. Ive loved this girl since I taught her in kindergarten at five years old, said Linda Davis, 50, a mother of three. Shes the sweetest, all-American girl.
Lynch wanted to follow in Daviss footsteps and become a kindergarten teacher one day. Her father said: She knew the money was a little tight. We might have been able to pay for college but it would have been rough.
The army offered her what she wanted. Lynch had never travelled outside West Virginia and wrote of her amazement that: Just since this year 2003 Ive been to Mexico, Germany and now Kuwait. Ive been to places that half of Wirt County will never see. Then on Friday, March 23, Lynch, attached to the 507th Maintenance Company, found herself in a truck heading through central Iraq.
IT was only day five of the war and the world was marvelling at Americas astonishingly rapid advance across the bleak expanse of desert towards Baghdad.
Towns in the south, where the British were left to carry out mopping-up operations, had been bypassed by the American juggernaut of armoured vehicles and tanks that rumbled northwards in two separate columns. Lynchs convoy was heading for the city of Nasiriya. They were rumbling past the burnt-out remains of Iraqi tanks in a hot zone that was to become the focus of some of the fiercest fighting in the campaign. It was noisy and dusty with danger lurking at every turn.
At some point on the Sunday, the 507th was said to have taken a wrong turn. Their vehicles were shot to pieces by Iraqi irregulars wielding rocket-propelled grenades. Lynch was one of 15 soldiers who were listed as missing, captured or killed.
Five of the soldiers but not Lynch were shown that day on Iraqi television undergoing interrogation. They looked frightened and terribly young. At least two of them were wounded. Television also showed several bodies lying in pools of blood.
The images shocked the world. There was indignation about the prisoners being paraded in front of the cameras and claims that this violated the Geneva convention. Pictures of the dead, in turn, prompted suggestions that American troops had been executed by their captors if only because some of the bodies had bullet wounds in the head.
Behind the complaints, however, was a sense of frustration at things going wrong: the ambush of young maintenance troops and the prospect of them being used by Saddam as bargaining chips had not been part of the script devised by American generals.
Among those shown on Iraqi television was Shoshana Johnson, a black 30-year-old army cook and a single mother. Claude, her father, said last week that he was confused by the news that she had been captured. What was Shoshana, a cook with a rearguard unit, doing that near the action? In Palestine they began holding nightly prayer sessions for Lynch. Before she left for Iraq she had telephoned her best friend.
She didnt sound scared but she wasnt as excited any more, said Lowe.
While waiting for the fighting to start, Lynch longed more than ever to become a teacher. She sent a letter to Davis which arrived a week and a half before her capture, offering to correspond with pupils back home. One day I will be standing in your spot, she promised. Its cool to go travelling with the army but I hope I get back alive.
In the Alpha company of the marines Task Force Tarawa, news that soldiers were missing and that some had been taken prisoner by Saddam inflicted a heavy toll on morale.
The combat around Nasiriya had left them drained and exhausted. None had expected to encounter such fierce resistance, let alone face any serious risk of being captured. Grim rumours about executions began sweeping the ranks. There were fears, in particular about what horrors Saddams henchmen might inflict on female prisoners of war.
It prompted reminiscences of the last Gulf war, when captured soldiers were beaten and tortured, and even of the war in Vietnam where the mistreatment of prisoners of war is, for Americans, still a source of deep grievance. This time they were not going to let it happen: the decision was made to go in and get them.
We dont leave our men and women behind, said an American officer from the Alpha company who sat in on one of the secret briefings for planning the rescue mission. The families must be reunited with their loved ones. Even when they are dead.
One problem was how to determine where prisoners were being held. The breakthrough came from Muhammad, a 32-year-old Iraqi lawyer, who said that he had visited the Saddam hospital in Nasiriya last week to see his wife, who worked there as a nurse. His curiosity was aroused by the unexpected presence of security agents. A doctor friend took him to a first-floor emergency wing where he pointed out a young woman lying in a bed, bandaged and covered in a white blanket.
Muhammad says he saw an Iraqi man slapping her on the face. My heart was cut, he said. He decided to help and managed to sneak into the ward the next day to comfort Lynch. Dont worry, he told her. Im going to help. Lynch apparently mistook him for a doctor.
Twice during the next two days the Americans sent him back to the hospital to gather more information, a perilous undertaking considering that American bombs were falling all around Nasiriya. Muhammad is an extremely courageous man, said Lieutenant-Colonel Rick Long of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.
He scrupulously counted the number of armed militia men at the hospital 41 and noted that there were four civilian guards armed with AK-47s watching Lynchs room. He traced routes through the building that commandos could use. Disturbingly, he discovered that Iraqi doctors were talking about amputating one of Lynchs legs that had been injured during or before her capture. Muhammad said he urged a doctor friend of his to intervene and stop the amputation.
It was not the only information the Americans had uncovered about Lynch. Last Tuesday, when I joined an Alpha company patrol, we encountered a woman who claimed she worked in the hospital.
There are seven Americans inside the hospital, she said. One, a young woman, is still alive. She is being guarded by armed men on the first floor. She is wounded in the leg. I saw her and the dead with my own eyes. An Iraqi pharmacist who claimed to have treated Lynch in the hospital later said she had often cried and asked about her family. She had wanted to know when the war would end: She kept saying she wanted to go home.
Information about Lynch was analysed by intelligence agents, who had obtained blueprints of the interior of the hospital and satellite imagery of the six-storey slab of a building that dominates the northwestern skyline of Nasiriya.
The good intelligence is what triggered the operation to storm the building, said Lt-Col Rick Grabowski, whose tanks were involved in the rescue mission. The special forces guys knew where to go look for her. They knew where they were going.
Some 16 army special forces officers had been patrolling the northern districts of Nasiriya in search of routes in and out of the hospital. By Tuesday evening Navy Seals and Delta Force commandos, backed by Alpha companys tanks, were ready to move.
As final preparations were made for the assault there were unspoken worries. The hospital was in a stronghold of the Fedayeen paramilitaries set up by Uday, Saddams son, to defend the regime. They were doing so with an unexpected vigour.
The chances of pulling out Lynch in the middle of a gun battle were not considered high; and what would be the risk to the dozens of civilians inside the building? On Tuesday at 20:47 Zulu American military terminology for Greenwich Mean Time Nasiriya was plunged into darkness as the special forces team cut off the main power grid.
To the southwest of the hospital, a huge explosion shook the city. From Alpha companys position just two miles from the hospital, I could see red tracers and the intense white flashes from artillery fire. An artillery barrage on the southern part of the city was a diversionary tactic. It worked. Small groups of Iraqi fighters believed to have been based in and around the hospital moved south to try to push back the marines. At that moment the special forces moved in.
A truck convoy of Navy Seals raced down a main road towards the target and two helicopters ferrying 40 Delta Force commandos approached the hospital from the air. Another helicopter crammed with US Rangers flew in from the south to provide cover.
Within minutes the hospital was surrounded and a safe corridor had been secured for the helicopters to get out. Attracting only sporadic gunfire from neighbouring buildings, Navy Seals wearing night vision goggles broke through the main hospital entrance and stormed the first floor.
The Delta Force, meanwhile, abseiled from helicopters onto the hospital roof while Cobra attack helicopters circled above them. Several thousand feet above them, A-10 Warthog tankbuster planes roamed in support of the ground troops. In all, more than 400 soldiers took part in the raid which was being monitored by anxious military officials on television screens back at Central Command in Doha, Qatar.
Occasionally the radios of Alpha company would crackle into life. Ineffective fire, ineffective fire, was how one special forces officer described it. Less than 10 minutes later came the communication America had been waiting for: Precious cargo secured.
Lynch was carried on a stretcher and flown to a military base south of Nasiriya for treatment while the special forces continued their search for other Americans, including the dead. An Iraqi doctor led the assault team to a small field next to the hospital.
In two hours of digging, nine bodies, some of whom are believed to be Lynchs former comrades-in-arms, were removed from shallow graves: the doctor explained that power cuts had rendered the hospital morgues refrigerators ineffective and so the decision had been taken to bury the dead.
In jubilant Palestine they put it down to the power of prayer. Friends, relatives, teachers, politicians, policemen and others descended on the Lynch home to express their joy. Sirens sounded, horns blasted and fireworks popped. I think the reason she survived through this is that she is a true angel and God knows that He wants her with us for some more time, said Donald Nelson, a friend.
Aides to Bob Wise, the West Virginia governor, said he was considering issuing a proclamation declaring a Jessica Lynch Day. Two West Virginia universities offered Lynch financial assistance to attend college and pursue her dream of becoming a teacher.
Even so, Lynch at first had little idea of the news she had made around the world. Am I in the local papers? she asked her brother when she spoke to him by telephone on Thursday. The little brats caused a big stir in this county, said her father. As soon as shes capable, were planning one heck of a shindig.
Military officers spent six hours at her parents home on Thursday trying to prepare them for her homecoming. Lynch has to cope with various physical injuries although there were no indications that she had been shot or stabbed, as had been reported. Instead, she suffered two broken legs and a broken arm as well as a laceration on the head.
The prognosis for her recovery was excellent, said the doctor treating her. In the end the psychological trauma of having been a prisoner of war and, in all likelihood, a hefty dose of survivors guilt, might outweigh the physical damage. At the same time she will also be expected to live up to her status as Americas sweetheart.
If anybody has the personality to cope, it is Lynch, say family and friends. What she has learnt, growing up in the country and the woods, said her father, and what her brother has put her through, that prepared her a lot.
Greg Jr, on leave from his own military unit in Fort Bragg, grinned as his father spoke. He is now asking to be assigned to the Gulf to take his sisters place.
Regards, Ivan
Regards, Ivan
I just passed one of them suckers. If she's gonna seven of 'em, she's gonna be laid up for awhile.
She saw her friends and comrades die.
She should be left alone for at least three months. HER life and future is the feelgood story. The death of her brave comrades is profoundly sad for her.
This is a bittersweet moment. Let the Private First Class recover in peace.
How does The Sunday Times avoid the wrath of EU bureaucrats from Brussels? I thought only metric units were allowed?
*anybody = Arkansas and Washington D.C.
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