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Poor, poor Jessica Lynch.
She suffered, she truly did.
Lost in the desert, her bones crushed, her colleagues dead. It was luck, not sand, that jammed her M-16. If she had really gone down in a blaze of gunfire and glory, she would have gone down for good.
"We went and we did our job, and that was to go to the war, but I wish I hadn't done it - I wish it had never happened," Lynch says. "I'd give four hundred billion dollars. I'd give anything."
There are numerous reasons that people join the all Volunteer army, but for a large number of enlistees the overriding motivation is to try and catch a break in a life that my look less than rosy. It works (it really does) on a resume, and if you serve the time, you can may be able to afford an education. That was Jessica's reason. She wanted to be a teacher.
Surprising, isn't it, that a bright and pretty teenage girl had aspirations of being something beyond a supply clerk. That was her job in the army, only so that she could escape having such a job for the rest of her life.
There is really no such thing as a safe job in the vicinity of a battlefield. Photographers get shot. Cooks get shot. Supply clerks get shot. But they don't get turned into heroes all that often. There is a very good reason why people tend to support the troops even when they don't support the war. It is an act of bravery to serve, because there is always the chance that things will go terribly wrong.
Jessica was turned into a superstar, a larger that life Rambogirl fighting through the pain. A movie star. And a very fine script was built up around her. (I know that I bought it initially - it was too bold to be false.)
Truth, though, is hard to find in the reign of the second Bush. It is inconvenient... no, it is worse than inconvenient, truth serves as a cheap veneer which hides the larger truth, if only you had eyes to see.
Hassan i Sabbah showed his followers a facsimile of paradise, and taught them how to live - even at their own peril - beyond the reach of all the laws of God and Man. "Nothing is true," shouts The Assassin from the mountain fortress of Alamut. "Everything is permitted."
No one ever really dies...
Lynch has become a true hero now. "They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff." She has given voice to the lie behind the lie. "That wasn't me. I wasn't about to take credit for something I didn't do. I'm not that person." The fourth wall has tumbled down. She has broken character in what was supposed to be the role of a lifetime. For that shall she now be destroyed? Watch...
"You'll never work in this town again."
Jessica tells of a kindly nurse, who would sometimes take note when she was in significant pain. She would come to Lynch's bed, rub her shoulders, and sing to her.
"It was a pretty song, and I would sleep."
11/12/03 | 
