Private Jessica Lynch, in her first public statements since her heavily reported capture and rescue, has expressed her discomfort with the military using her for propaganda purposes (which generated some interesting discussion here at the time).
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC’s Diane Sawyer in a “Primetime” interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military’s portrayal of her ordeal.
“They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff,” she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network’s Web site. “It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about,” she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
[…]
Footage of the rescue was aired repeatedly on television networks reporting how a special forces team bravely fought into and out of the hospital. “I don’t think it happened quite like that,” Lynch said.
&mdash MSNBC: Lynch: Military Manipulated Story
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.
[…]
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,” although she added that in that context anybody would have approached the hospital well-armed. She continued: “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.
“From the time I woke up in that hospital, no one beat me, no one slapped me, no one, nothing,” Ms. Lynch told Diane Sawyer, adding, “I’m so thankful for those people, because that’s why I’m alive today.”
— The New York Times: Jessica Lynch Criticizes U.S. Accounts of Her Ordeal
Right now, I feel so sorry for Pvt. Lynch — both for what she went through in Iraq and what she’s gone through since returning home — and I’m also incredibly proud of her for speaking out and expressing her dissatisfaction with the way the story was handled. It was certainly not her fault that the military chose to use her story for grandstanding purposes, and she probably needs our thoughts and support as much now as she ever did before.
(via Atrios and Dad)
Also of interest, the MSNBC story on Pvt. Lynch links at the bottom to a TV-only story questioning the differing treatment by the military and media between Pvt. Lynch and Pvt. Soshana Johnson, something that dad and I touched on when first discussing the Pvt. Lynch story. Hopefully a webcast of this story will be made available once it’s been broadcast.
I am pretty cynical on this. I know, from 21 1/2 years in the military, the news is often manipulated. I could tell story after story of supposed “BDA” (Battle Damage Assessments – a euphimism for “body counts”0 during the Viet Nam War.
She should be uncompfotable. The government should not lie.
I doubt if it will stop.
Love
Dad