Jessica Lynch

[Mudwalker]

As someone who was in An Nasiriyah on the 23rd of March I can shed some light on some of the questions raised.

1. We were told by the Army (3rd ID I think) that An Nasariyah was clear. (Tell that to the 18 Marines who lost their lives later that day) They were about 3 hours ahead of us. As we rolled up toward the Tigris bridge we could see smoke columns in the distance. We had no information that they were missing a resupply convoy. It was later learned that they made a wrong turn. Our lead tank spotted a vehicle speeding toward them then suddenly stop and turn around heading back to the city. This vehicle was one of the vehicles trying to make it back. They ended up stopped at a burning truck where we caught up to them. We secured the area and tended to the wounded and dead. Most of their weapons were unloaded and there was ammo strewn around the cabs of the vehicles, as if they were trying to load their magazines.

2. During the next few days we got intel about americans being held at the hospital. Which hospital was unsure. There were two in Nasiriyah.

3. The Iraqi informant came to us originally, I was fortunate enough to meet him. Once the info was passed the rescue was turned over to SpecOps. We supported the rescue with tanks which did engage in a firefight outside the hospital.

4. It was one of our tank commanders who noticed mounds in the courtyard and grabbed a shovel from his tank and discovered the remains of at least 9 Americans. The Army didn't want anything to do with dead Americans. It seemed to us that they wanted a live one. It's obvious to me that they wanted a media prize.

5. It was later determined that the Iraqi Fedayeen were bolstered by the ease at which they were able to destroy the convoy, causing them to stand their ground when we came through.

[USMC-FO]

Great "intel" and commentary Mudwalker. Much appreciated.

WELCOME HOME !!

Semper Fi !!!

[Lock-n-Load]

Can't PM...so hopefully, you'll review your last post...Phil, you are all cleared for the Semper Fidelis Society of Boston's [USMC 228th Birthday] bash in Boston 10Nov at the Hynes Convention Center downtown...arrive by 11am and recon table #33 [Medford Police Table]...I have received the OK for you to chowdown with us..glad to have you back on/board again...of the 10 seats...3 are combat Marines of Vietnam War...rest are combat Korean War Marines...Gung-Ho SSGT CHRIS SARNO-USMC FMF

[a911devildog]

I think Ill wait for the movie about the real heroes, the men who went in and saved her ass.

[thedrifter]

Here we go again..........


Iraqi doctors refute Lynch rape claim

Associated Press

Nasiriyah, Iraq — Iraqi doctors who treated former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch dismissed on Friday claims made in her biography that she was raped by her Iraqi captors.

Although Ms. Lynch said she has no memory of the sexual assault, medical records cited in I am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story indicate that she was raped and sodomized by her Iraqi captors, according to U.S. media who said they had advance copies.

The book, due to be released Tuesday, covers Ms. Lynch's experiences between March 23 when her 507th Maintenance Company convoy was ambushed in Nasiriyah and April 1 when she was evacuated from a hospital by U.S. commandos. It was unclear if the book cites American or Iraqi records.

A family spokesman, Stephen Goodwin, confirmed the book alleges Ms. Lynch was raped.

Ms. Lynch suffered broken bones to her right arm, right leg and thighs and ankle and received a head injury when her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle. Eleven U.S. soldiers were killed in the attack.

Dr. Mahdi Khafazji, an orthopedic surgeon at Nasiriyah's main hospital performed surgery on Ms. Lynch to repair a fractured femur and said he found no signs that she was raped or sodomized.

Dr. Khafazji, speaking at his private clinic in Nasiriyah, said he examined her extensively and would have detected signs of sexual assault. He said the examination turned up no trace of semen.

Dr. Khafazji said Ms. Lynch was taken first to the Military Hospital, a few hundred metres from the ambush site at around 8 a.m., about an hour after the attack. A few hours later, she was brought to his hospital.

"She was injured at about seven in the morning," he said. "What kind of animal would do it to a person suffering from multiple injuries?"

Dr. Jamal al-Saeidi, a brigadier-general and head of the orthopedic department at the now disbanded Military Hospital, remembers seeing Ms. Lynch's motionless body on a bed in the crowded lobby of his hospital. He said a police van parked outside appeared to have brought her to the hospital.

"When she was brought there she was fighting for her life," said Dr. al-Saeidi at his private clinic. "She was in shock because of the severity of her injury."

He said Ms. Lynch was fully clothed with her field jacket buttoned up. "Her clothes were not torn, buttons had not come off, her pants were zipped up," Dr. al-Saeidi said.

Dr. Al-Saeidi said he found no signs of rape during an examination although he acknowledged he was not looking for signs of sexual assault.

Dr. Lynch had lost more than half of her blood because of a 10- to 15-centimetre long wound on the left side of her head, as well as broken limbs that caused internal bleeding, Dr. al-Saeidi said.

"We had a few minutes, golden minutes to save her," he said.

He rushed her to the operating room, away from the crowded lobby, and gave her intravenous fluid and blood and stitched her head wound.

Another U.S. soldier, Lori Piestewa, died half an hour after arriving at the hospital with Ms. Lynch of severe head injuries, doctors said.

Half an hour after surgery on Ms. Lynch, Dr. al-Saeidi assured her that she was in good hands.

He told her that she had to undergo surgery in a couple of days, but Ms. Lynch said: "-'No, I want to be in the States.'-"

Soon afterward, military intelligence officers came to the hospital to take Ms. Lynch away. Dr. Al-Saeidi told them if she did not get medical attention she would die. They took her to the Saddam Hospital, where she stayed nine days until Iraqi soldiers left the hospital.

Several hours later, American commandos raided the hospital and evacuated her.

"Why are they saying such things?" asked Dr. Khodheir al-Hazbar, the hospital's deputy director. "We were good to her."

In an interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer, Ms. Lynch said she has no recollection of a rape. "Even just the thinking about that, that's too painful," she said.

Ms. Lynch told Ms. Sawyer she doesn't remember being slapped or mistreated at the hospital, and she recalled one nurse sang to her.

She also accused the U.S. military of using her capture and dramatic nighttime rescue to sway public support for the war in Iraq.

Video of American commandos whisking Ms. Lynch to a waiting chopper helped cement Ms. Lynch's image as a hero. But in the Primetime interview to be aired on Tuesday, Ms. Lynch told Ms. Sawyer there was no reason for her rescue to be filmed.

"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," Ms. Lynch said. "It's wrong."

Ms. Lynch told Ms. Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos of the attack. "I'm not about to take credit for something I didn't do," she said.

"I did not shoot, not a round, nothing. ... I went down praying to my knees. And that's the last I remember."


http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...International/


Sempers,

Roger

[Phantom Blooper]

The Rambo who wasn't
November 9, 2003
The Sun-Herald


US Army Private Jessica Lynch in the TV interview with American ABC's Diane Sawyer. Picture: Reuters

The Pentagon turned Private Jessica Lynch into a female Rambo. Now the former soldier says she never fired a shot and was certainly no hero. Gerard Wright reports.

No one looked at the calendar until much later. All they knew was that on that date - in a daring nocturnal raid, fortuitously captured by a video camera with night vision - US Special Forces soldiers rescued one of their own with guns blazing, helicopters hovering and the enemy apparently resisting ferociously.

"They made a show," said Dr Anmar Uday, who saw it happen, "an action movie, like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan, with jumping and shouting, breaking down doors."

Official and unofficial Pentagon statements say Private Jessica Lynch fought until the last bullet after her 507th Maintenance Company drove into an ambush in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. Eleven of her colleagues were killed. Six were captured. Lynch, suffering from bullet and stab wounds, was a prisoner of war in a heavily guarded hospital. Then she was rescued. It was all there on film.

The date was April 1 and America had itself a war hero.

The hero has finally spoken, and the story of the capture and rescue of Private Lynch is unravelling like hasty knitting.




Her gun jammed before she could fire a shot. Her injuries were from the crash of the Humvee she was riding in. Iraqi doctors saved her life.

"I'm not about to take credit for something I didn't do," Lynch said, in a television interview to be broadcast in the US on Tuesday. "I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that's the last I remember."

Propaganda didn't get better than this: a blonde heroine, short and slight, from a town called Palestine, West Virginia. Jessica Lynch joined the army to help pay for her university education. She is not happy with her new life as a military fable.

"It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," Lynch told interviewer Diane Sawyer. "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."

Asked if the Pentagon's portrayal of her rescue bothered her, Lynch replied, "Yeah, it does. It bothers me that they used me as a way to symbolise this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong."

The television interview was timed to coincide with the release of Lynch's biography, I Am A Soldier, Too by Pulitzer prize-winner Rick Bragg. Lynch was reportedly paid $US1 million ($A1.4 million) for the rights to her story by the Knopf Publishing Group of New York.

As with everything else about the story of Jessica Lynch, who received a medical discharge from the army in July, the book's most controversial claim - that Lynch was raped and sodomised after her capture - is not standing up well to scrutiny.

Lynch has received the military's award for those wounded in combat, the Purple Heart. Bragg's prose is of a matching hue.

"The records do not tell whether her captors assaulted her almost lifeless, broken body after she was lifted from the wreckage," he wrote, "or if they assaulted her and then broke her bones into splinters until she was almost dead."

Dr Mahdi Khafaji, an orthopedic surgeon who operated on Lynch's broken femur at Nasiriyah's main hospital, said he saw no signs of sexual assault during an extensive pre-surgery examination.

In her interview, Lynch said she had no recollection of a sexual assault. "Even the thinking about it, that's too painful," she said.

Lynch had broken bones in her right arm, right leg, and ankle. She was also bleeding heavily from a 10- to 20-centimetre wound on the left side of her head and near death from the loss of blood.

"We gave her three bottles of blood, two of them from the medical staff because there was no blood at this time," said another doctor who cared for Lynch.

Soon after her surgery, Lynch was moved to another hospital, the Saddam Hospital. There she was seen by Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, a local lawyer.

In the NBC movie, Saving Jessica Lynch, to be shown tonight across America, Al-Rehaief says he saw Lynch being interrogated and slapped in her hospital bed.

"My heart was cut," he said. "I tried to forget what I saw, but I couldn't."

Lynch has denied any ill-treatment by the Iraqis. "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."

Lynch had told her Iraqi doctors she wanted American medical care. On March 30, she was placed in an ambulance and driven to an American military command post. The ambulance was fired upon and returned to the hospital. The following day, the last of the Iraqi soldiers left the hospital.

Meanwhile, Al-Rehaief found a group of American marines near Nasiriyah and told them what he saw. They persuaded him to return and map the hospital. Al-Rehaief said he did, barely escaping with his life.

Al-Rehaief's charitable endeavour has been repaid. He and his wife and daughter were granted asylum in the US four weeks after Lynch's rescue.

Since his arrival in the US, Al-Rehaief has received a book deal, employment with a lobbying firm run by a former Republican congressman and was a consultant on Saving Jessica Lynch - the "docu-drama" whose star is now telling a very different story.

[MillRatUSMC]

What now is the TRUTH?
What is real and what is made-up?
And the truth shall set thee free.
All this is taking a life of it's own.
Much like the Rambo movies.
Soon many won't be able to tell the TRUTH from the FICTION.

Semper Fidelis
Ricardo

[Phantom Blooper]

This is just like the game that is played,where one say's something and by the time it gets to the end it is totally different from the original story.The story changes,depending on the reporter and the paper,thats why I keep posting them.I wonder what Primetime Live has to say,inquiring minds want to know.They are almost as good as the jokes in the Chuckles of the Day Forum. Semper-Fi! Chuck Hall

[firstsgtmike]

Several months ago I came to a conclusion.

All "news" stories concerning PFC Lynch should start with the same phrase;

"Once upon a time ......................."

[2091351]

W I T F should her alleged hero status have anything to do with this USMC forum?

Take Care-Steve

[Sixguns]

There are several stories here.

One, the Jessica Lynch story: I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was not a hero, merely a scared soldier. I was raped after capture and was later rescued. Since receiving a hero's welcome and the awards of such, I am now too traumatized to return to duty.

Two, The Army of One story: The private did what we train every soldier to do -- Use their head and their weapon to successfully overcome an enemy. It was only after she had exhausted every attept to repell the enemy of superior size and force that she was taken prisoner. Her training kept her alive and contributed to her safe return.

Three, the book and made for TV story: Well, enough said.... In order to sell books and advertising for the show, a dramatic emotional story had to be written and displayed.


I feel badly if in fact this soldier was tortured or raped, but with a Iraqi doctor stating he examined her and found no evidence of rape and another Iraqi lawyer using his own initiative and sense of honor to get word to the Marines that a female prisoner was in the hospital, I am really not sure what to believe.

[firstsgtmike]

Sixguns:

Fill in the blanks:

Once upon a time ................ ........ ........ .......... ...... ... ...... .... ..... ................ ....... ..... ...... ....... ....... ..... ........ ....... ........ .... ...... ... etc. etc.


And they lived happily ever after.

Until Humpty Dumpty said to Ducky Lucky that the sky was falling.

( and if you don't remember that, I'll have my three year old explain it to you.)

[Sixguns]

First Sergeant,

That was a nice story, can I hear another???

SF,

SIXGUNS

[Howie]

I have been wondering that myself. Why not see the man who gave the Marines her where abouts, so the rescue could take place. It does not make any sense, unless we do not have the full story. She is no hero, those who gave the last full measure for freedom are the true heros. May God bleess and comfort their families. This nation and the people of Iraq owe more than can be stated.