Leave Jessica Alone

By TAD BARTIMUS

The best thing we can do for Pfc. Jessica Lynch is leave her alone.

That's about as likely as a snowball in Baghdad.

Lynch is America's latest sweetheart. When U.S. Special Forces rescued the injured POW from a filthy hospital in Nasiriya, she put a human face on Iraq's blurry video blitzkrieg and gave us a genuine American heroine. Who better to exemplify the courage of our military men and women on the front lines than this sweet-faced teen-ager from Palestine, W. Va., pop. 900?

No one is ever prepared for the ferocity of combat or the terror of captivity. Only a survivor can experience his or her unique pain and the trauma of its aftermath. Lynch surely watched friends die. She may have also killed. Her injuries testify to her profound physical suffering.

When the 507th Ordinance Maintenance Company took a wrong turn, Iraqi forces attacked and captured her. Bodies of 10 of the 14 soldiers with her when the convoy was overrun have been recovered and identified, including that of her roommate, Pfc. Lori Ann Piestewa.

Navy Seals and Army Rangers swooped in to free Lynch on a tip from an Iraqi civilian whose wife was a nurse at the hospital. The soldier had two broken legs, a broken right arm, a broken right ankle and broken right foot.

She now must bear the burden of those physical and psychological wounds until her own death. How she shoulders them will depend on how she chooses to live. Her choices will be helped -- or harmed -- by the advice, actions and desires of those closest to her.

Right now every hustler in America wants a piece of Lynch. Book and movie deals are pouring into her parents' home. She's being offered cars, trips, gifts, and full scholarships to West Virginia University and Marshall University, also in West Virginia.

Politicians will clamor for photo opportunities. Barbara, Katie and Diane will jockey for exclusive tell-all TV interviews. Corporations will dangle lucrative product endorsements.

The frenzy is summed up by a book agent who told The New York Times: "This has the makings of an amazing story that could not only make them rich, but make me rich."

We Americans are experts at temporary veneration. We elevate our suddenly discovered Joe Blows and Jane Does to icon status, then abandon them in our stampede to the next ordinary person who's done an extraordinary thing.

The public may soon forget what happened to Jessica Lynch, but she won't. I know, because I didn't. When I returned from reporting on the Vietnam War or the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland or the guerrilla movements in Latin America, I brought home all the baggage war heaps on witnesses as well as participants. My mental movies have never gone away, but with help I've been able to turn down the volume and shrink the images.

I could never have done that in a fishbowl; no one can. It will be up to Lynch's parents, siblings, friends and military minders to form a protective human shield of compassion and love around this injured young woman so she can begin healing her body and mind. It doesn't matter that they can neither imagine nor understand what she's experienced; what counts is that they act only in her best interest to make sure she isn't further damaged by exploitation.

Up until she took that wrong turn in the desert, Lynch had been just a country girl excited that the Army had sent her to Mexico, Kuwait and Germany, "places that half of Wirt County will never see," she wrote her former kindergarten teacher.

The child of "small-town country people with simple aspirations," as her father, Gregory Lynch Sr., described his family, Jessica enlisted after high school graduation in order to see the world and get military credit toward a college education she couldn't afford. In exchange, the Army turned Lynch into a soldier trained to kill and, if necessary, die for her country. That sounds like a fair trade in peacetime. In war, it becomes a hell of a bill to pay. We are all in Pvt. Jessica Lynch's debt; the least we can do is repay her with peaceful time in a safe place.

© 2003 The Women Syndicate

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