Heroism is, quite often, a choice to do the right thing when it would be far easier to do nothing at all.
Private Jessica Lynch could have quite easily have smiled and waved to the cameras and let the money roll in, knowing that in a few months, public attention would have moved on and her life would revert to normal, or at least as normal as a retired media-created hero can expect to have.
It wouldn’t be a bad life. She would start out with a nice big grubstake that she could use to buy a house and a new car and plough the rest into a retirement fund and have a fairly comfortable life. And when she’s recognized, she can look forward to deferential cops not giving her a ticket for speeding, free meals at restaurants, and the occasional request to come to a junior high and give a lecture on patriotism. Not bad for a girl who joined the army only because she couldn’t get a job at the local supermarket and had to do SOMETHING.
The right wing spin machine needed her. Putsch needed her. So the questions that were raised, mostly in the foreign press, about the exact nature of her capture and subsequent rescue, could be contained. Despite the fact that these elements were widely reported and are worthy of attention, it would come as a complete shock to most blissfully unaware Americans that not only did she not get captured while fighting like a wildcat, shooting and knifing a half dozen Iraqi soldiers, but that it was widely reported in the foreign media that the "rescue" was staged, in part if not wholly. Veterans’ groups objected to her receiving a Bronze Star for what is widely known to be a fabricated account of her capture, especially since none of her companions got such awards, despite being subject to the same capture and treatment. Shamefully, this includes one woman who did go down fighting. It will be somewhat surprising to learn that several of the troops who "rescued" Jessica have died in action in Iraq since, a rather high percentage of them. That one has become the stuff of legend among the myriad conspiracy mongers on the Internet.
The GOP, masters at outshouting and intimidating what’s left of America’s free press, and adept at convincing their brainwashed followers that any voice other than theirs is at best misguided and is at worst evil, could make those concerns go away. Never mind that Jessica, groggy from the car accident, was simply toted away on a stretcher with various broken bones and lacerations: if Putsch’s crowd decided she went down fighting like a wildcat, firing rounds and shouting defiance despite dozens of bullet and stab wounds, well then, that’s what she did. Her role in the farce was to simply punt; say she didn’t remember the events of her capture. It would be easy enough to drown out the doctors who pointed out that she didn’t have any bullet or stab wounds. In fact, the Administration admitted it, but mentioned that Iraqi doctors said that, and failed to mention that American doctors did too. Every red blooded patriot automatically knew that Republicans always tell the truth and Iraqi doctors always lie, right?
As for the rescue, why, it’s just the word of brave American soldiers against a bunch of Iraqis, right? It’s not hard to guess which side the American public is going to believe. If the London Guardian reported that the Americans made damned sure there were no enemy combatants in the hospital before they reenacted the Blues Brothers SWAT assault on Chicago’s City Hall (complete with synchronized rope climb and "Hut! Hut! Hut!"), well, that just shows that the London Guardian is a socialist rag, and the English are no more our allies than the French are or Saddam is.
It’s a sad fact that many Americans swallow that kind of crap without even blinking.
Jessica could have just sat back, smiled for the cameras, and let the right wing propaganda machine do all the work. It would have been so easy, and certainly, there was no financial or career gain to be made by saying anything that might stop the latest GOP fool’s parade.
I don’t know what made Jessica decide to speak up over the past 48 hours, just before the made-for-bad-TV movie, "The Jessica Lynch Story" was due to air. NBC is flying that turkey.
A book, also a product of the VRWC spin machine, written by some hack who left the New York Times under a cloud for shoddy journalistic practices, claimed that she had been sodomized while held captive, and perhaps that was the final straw. It’s believed that being sodomized by a prison guard while a POW caused Lawrence of Arabia to stop being the epitome of a modern major general (so to speak – he was actually a captain) and follow his own tangent. The breathless, nay, PURPLE prose of the book relates it this way: "Jessi lost three hours. She lost them in the snapping bones, in the crash of the Humvee, in the torment her enemies inflicted on her after she was pulled from it [...] The records do not tell whether her captors assaulted her almost lifeless, broken body after she was lifted from the wreckage, or if they assaulted her and then broke her bones into splinters until she was almost dead." Of course, the records also don’t tell if she was raped or not. Details, details.
Maybe she simply didn’t want people thinking that she got buggered by several Iraqis when she personally had no memory of such an event occurring, and no doctor has made any claim that such an event occurred. Maybe she was disgusted by what to her was a cheap propaganda ploy, on the level of "Iraqis spilled babies out of their incubators," and wasn’t willing to go along with it in order to increase sales. It had to be disquieting that while she vividly remembers many of the people involved in her rescue, both Iraqi and American, she has no memory at all of the Iraqi being touted as key to her rescue, Muhammad al-Rehaief, the lawyer. He got a freebie US citizenship and a book deal out of that.
Maybe she noticed that her fellow soldiers in the maintenance pool unit, who had all been in the same accident, been taken to the same hospital, and been "rescued" in the same way, but who didn’t get the same medals or the same treatment, were left out in the cold looking in, even though Jessica did nothing to distinguish herself from them. Lynch got a full disability pension while Shoshana Johnson, the black cook who was also wounded and captured by Iraqis, will receive barely a third of Lynch's discharge package. And of course, no million dollar book deals, no Vanity Fair covers, no made-for-mawkish-television movies. She DID remember one of her colleagues went down fighting after the accident as Iraqis approached to take her prisoner, but it wasn’t her. She was too busy praying. It was Lori Piestewa, who was killed.
Maybe Lynch was disgusted with what is going on in Iraq, and didn’t want to promote it.
Maybe her motives were noble and selfless, maybe it was just a matter of disgust, both with the paid liars who had taken over her life and at herself for going along with it.
But she did speak out.
She first went on Dateline, and told the flummoxed NBC reporter – who was just doing a reporter’s job and promoting the Sunday night movie – that the movie did not accurately portray her life or the rescue.
Then she accused the administration of manipulating her story for propaganda purposes, and said, 'They used me to symbolize all this stuff. It's wrong. I don't know why they filmed it, or why they say these things.'
The right wing has been vigorously ignoring her statements in their monumental hypocrisy. The same people who just last week screamed bloody murder because another made-for-tv movie had Reagan saying, "Those who live in sin die in sin." This statement made him appear cold and indifferent to the suffering of AIDS victims, and this annoyed the right wingers because Reagan really was cold and indifferent to the suffering of AIDS victims, but might not have actually said those words. I don’t want to imagine what this crowd would say if the movie had claimed he was taken prisoner and buggered, or that he really did try to save that bombardier’s life, or whatever. But they are ignoring Jessica’s protests.
Eventually, they will notice, and in the inverted values that infest the right wing, will turn on her, and call her a traitor and a coward.
But she has spoken out.
Maybe she didn’t go down fighting, maybe she wasn’t mistreated, and maybe her rescue was really nothing but cheap posturing by a Pentagon grown frantic over the slow pace of the war.
But at least now she can truly lay claim to personal courage, and to being an authentic American hero.