Jessica Lynch: "The US Army Exaggerated My Ordeal in Iraq "

Excerpts from article by DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
November 7, 2003

Jessica Lynch criticized the US military for exaggerating accounts of her rescue.

ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer asked Lynch if the military's portrayal of the rescue bothered her, Ms. Lynch said:

"Yeah, it does. It does that they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong. "

Asked how she felt about the reports of her heroism, Ms. Lynch told Ms. Sawyer,

"It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about. Only I would have been able to know that, because the other four people on my vehicle aren't here to tell the story.

So I would have been the only one able to say, yeah, I went down shooting. But I didn't."

And asked about reports that the military exaggerated the danger of the rescue mission, Ms. Lynch said,

"Yeah, I don't think it happened quite like that. I don't know why they filmed it, or why they say the things they, you know, all I know was that I was in that hospital hurting. I needed help."

Ms. Lynch also disputed statements by Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, the Iraqi lawyer, that he saw her captors slap her. She said:

"From the time I woke up in that hospital, no one beat me, no one slapped me, no one, nothing. I'm so thankful for those people, because that's why I'm alive today."

In the book and in the interviews, Ms. Lynch says others' accounts of her heroism often left her feeling hurt and ashamed because of what she says was overstatement.

A military spokesman in Iraq had told journalists that American soldiers had exchanged fire with Iraqis during the rescue, without adding that resistance was minimal. Then the military released a dramatic, green-tinted, night-vision video of the mission.

Soon news organizations were repeating reports, attributed to anonymous American officials, that Ms. Lynch had heroically resisted her capture, emptying her weapon at her attackers.

But subsequent investigations determined that Ms. Lynch was injured by the crash of her vehicle, her weapon jammed before she could fire, the Iraqi doctors treated her kindly, and the hospital was already in friendly hands when her rescuers arrived.

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