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Piecing
together Lynch’s body, story
Details
reveal Pfc. Lynch — who is still hospitalized — suffered massive injuries in
crash
By
Dana Priest, William Booth and Susan Schmidt
THE
WASHINGTON POST
June
17 — Jessica
Lynch, the most famous soldier of the war, remains in a private room at the end
of a hall on an upper floor of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, her door guarded
by a military police officer.
To repair the fractures, a spinal injury and other injuries suffered during her
ordeal, the 20-year-old private first class undergoes a daily round of physical
therapy. But she does so alone, during the lunch hours, when other patients are
not admitted.
Her father, Greg Lynch Sr., wearing a fresh
T-shirt each day with a yellow ribbon pinned to his chest, rarely leaves her
side, except to sleep at night. Lynch has been in the hospital now for 67 days.
Her physical condition remains severe. But she also appears to suffer from
wounds that cannot be seen — and the story of her capture and rescue remains
only partly told.
Her family says she doesn’t remember
anything about her capture. U.S. military sources say she is unable — or
unwilling — to say much about anything that happened to her between the ambush
and when she became fully conscious sometime later at Saddam Hussein General
Hospital in Nasiriyah, Iraq.
As the world would remember, Lynch and her
Army maintenance unit were ambushed in southern Iraq on the morning of March 23.
Eleven of her fellow soldiers were killed; five others were taken captive and
later freed. Blond and waiflike, Lynch was taken prisoner and held separately
for nine days before a dramatic nighttime rescue from her hospital bed by a
covert U.S. Special Operations unit, Task Force 20.nitial
news reports, including those in The Washington Post, which cited unnamed U.S.
officials with access to intelligence reports, described Lynch emptying her M-16
into Iraqi soldiers. The intelligence reports from intercepts and Iraqi
informants said that Lynch fought fiercely, was stabbed and shot multiple times,
and that she killed several of her assailants.
“She was fighting to the death,” one of
the officials was quoted as saying. “She did not want to be taken alive.”
It became the story of the war, boosting
morale at home and among the troops. It was irresistible and cinematic, the
maintenance clerk turned woman-warrior from the hollows of West Virginia who
just wouldn’t quit. Hollywood promised to make a movie and the media, too,
were hungry for heroes.
Lynch’s story is far more complex and
different than those initial reports. Much of the story remains shrouded in
mystery, in large part because of official Army secrecy, concerns for Lynch’s
privacy and her limited memory.
The Post’s initial coverage attracted
widespread criticism because many of the sources were unnamed and because the
accounts were soon contradicted by other military officials. In an effort to
document more fully what had actually happened to Lynch, The Post interviewed
dozens of people, including associates of Lynch’s family in West Virginia,
Iraqi doctors, nurses and civilian witnesses in Nasiriyah and U.S. intelligence
and military officials in Washington, three of whom have knowledge of a
weeks-long Army investigation into the matter.
The result is a second, more thorough but
inconclusive cut at history. While much more is revealed about her ordeal, most
U.S. officials still insisted that their names be withheld from this account.
Lynch tried to fire her weapon, but it
jammed, according to military officials familiar with the Army investigation.
She did not kill any Iraqis. She was neither shot nor stabbed, they said.Lynch’s
unit, the 507th Maintenance Company, was ambushed outside Nasiriyah after taking
several wrong turns. Army investigators believe this happened in part because
superiors never passed on word that the long 3rd Infantry Division column that
the convoy was following had been rerouted. The 507th was 12 hours behind the
main column and frequently out of radio contact before it was attacked.
Lynch was riding in a Humvee when it plowed
into a jacknifed U.S. truck — a precarious position that led to major
injuries, including multiple fractures and compression to her spine, that
knocked her unconscious, military sources said. The collision killed or gravely
injured the Humvee’s four other passengers.
Two U.S. officials with knowledge of the
Army investigation said Lynch was mistreated by her captors. They would not
elaborate.
Days later, tipped that Lynch was inside
Saddam Hussein General Hospital in Nasiriyah, the CIA, fearing a trap, sent an
agent into the facility with a hidden camera to confirm she was there and help
draw a blueprint for her rescue, intelligence sources said.
The Special Operations unit’s full-scale
rescue of the private, while justified given the uncertainty confronting the
U.S. forces as they entered the compound, ultimately was proven unnecessary.
Iraqi combatants had left the hospital almost a day earlier, leaving Lynch in
the hands of doctors and nurses who said they were eager to turn her over to
Americans.
Neither the Pentagon nor the White House
publicly dispelled the more romanticized initial version of her capture, helping
to foster the myth surrounding Lynch and fuel accusations that the Bush
administration staged-managed parts of Lynch’s story.
Only Lynch is in position to know
everything that happened to her — and she may not ever be able to tell the
story.
“The doctors are reasonably sure,” said
Army spokesman Kiki Bryant, “that she does not know what happened to her.”
In the western outskirts of Nasiriyah, just a few miles from the city’s
downtown, a middle-aged farmer named Sahib Khudher was worried and outside of
his house when a large U.S. convoy — a dozen or more trucks, trailers,
wreckers and Humvees — passed by on the road heading north at a few hours
before dawn, he said. It was March 23, the third day of the war, as U.S. troops
poured into Iraq in a modern-day blitz.
The farmer waved at the Americans. “But
they did not see me,” he said.
A few hours later, trucks mysteriously
returned. At first, Khudher thought they might be Iraqi Army members or
Republican Guards coming to fight. But he saw that the vehicles were American,
and that they were being pursued in a wild, running gun battle with pickup
trucks filled with what Khudher assumed were militia from Saddam’s Fedayeen
and Iraqi irregulars in civilian clothing. They were firing into the U.S.
vehicles and at their tires.
“There was shooting, shooting
everywhere,” Khudher said. “There were accidents, too. Crash sounds. You
could see and hear the vehicles hitting each other. And yelling. Screaming. I
could hear English.”
The 18 Humvees, trailers and tow trucks of
Lynch’s 507th Maintenance Company were the tail end of the 3rd Infantry
Division’s 8,000-vehicle convoy snaking its way from Kuwait to Baghdad. A
Patriot missile maintenance crew by training, the members of the 507th based at
Fort Bliss, Tex., were assigned to keep the Army’s war machine moving.
The initial plan called for moving north on
“Route Blue,” Highway 8, until the southern outskirts of Nasiriyah,
according to military officials. Because the city was still teeming with enemy
fighters, commanders decided to reroute the column to “Route Jackson,”
Highway 1, which skirted around the town to the south and west.
But the 507th never got word of the change.
The
miscommunication happened, in part, Army investigators believe, because a
battalion commander in the 3rd Forward Support Battalion to which it was
attached never made sure the 507th had received word of the route change.
“They didn’t know about Route
Jackson,” said one senior military officer briefed on the investigators’
findings. “We believe it would have never happened if the proper procedure had
been followed.”
The unit fell behind as the enormous
wrecking tractors and cargo trailers — equipment to haul other giant Army
vehicles and supplies — tried to adjust to the division’s changing pace.
But other mishaps contributed. Long before
they reached Nasiriyah, two of the 507th’s 5-ton trailers had broken down,
forcing the back half of the unit — 18 vehicles in all — to fall further
behind the lead elements, where the company commander was riding.
Lynch was among the soldiers in that
trailing half.
By the time the 507th reached Nasiriyah,
some of the unit’s soldiers and officers had gone without sleep for 60 hours.
As one officer put it, they suffered “a fatigue that adversely affected their
decision-making.”
A ‘CATASTROPHIC’ CRASH
As they entered the city, the commander of
Lynch’s company — a captain whose identity could not be learned — informed
superiors up ahead that they had fallen as many as 12 hours behind. “He was
advised the rest of the column has to move on time whether the rest of them get
there or not,” a defense official familiar with the Army’s investigation
said.
Navigating through unfamiliar streets,
troops jury-rigged antennas to stay in touch with the lead elements of the
battalion since their radios had a range of only 10 miles. But the radios
didn’t always work.
As they entered the city, it was about 6:30
a.m., and few Iraqis were about. Those who were, including soldiers at
checkpoints and armed men in SUVs, just waved at the Americans as they drove by,
military officials said.
Using a navigational device, the company
commander turned the convoy left and, minutes later, came to a T-intersection,
where he ordered the vehicles to turn right again. Then the commander decided
turn the column of huge, lumbering trailers and tractors around.
They attempted to retrace their route, but
missed a turn. Then one of the American vehicles ran out of fuel.
Lynch at this point was riding on a 5-ton
truck.
It was 7 a.m., and more Iraqis were
appearing on the streets, military officials with knowledge of the Army
investigation said. The company commander instructed his troops to lock and load
their weapons. Each soldier had 210 rounds of ammunition. The senior
non-commissioned officer, Master Sgt. Robert J. Dowdy, 38, took the rear
position in the column, while the company commander went up front.
“We have to pick up speed, move
faster!” Dowdy began yelling over the radio, according to the defense
official, who has read the surviving soldiers’ accounts.
As the convoy drove back into central
Nasiriyah, it was met by Iraqi forces, some in civilian clothes, who fired at it
from on foot, from vehicles and from stationary mortar positions. Soldiers
interviewed by investigators said the Iraqis fired AK-47s, machine guns,
rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades and mortar shells. The Iraqis fired
from both sides of the road.
At least one Iraqi T-55 tank appeared, and
the Iraqis positioned sandbags, debris and cars to block the convoy’s path.
“A very harrowing, very intense” gun
battle was how the senior military officer described it. The U.S. troops fired
back.
“We don’t know how many rounds she got
off,” the official said of Lynch, or whether she got off any shots at all.
“Her weapon jammed severely.”
At some point, Lynch’s vehicle broke down
and she got into Dowdy’s soft-top Humvee, which was driven by Pfc. Lori
Piestewa, one of Lynch’s close friends. They were joined by two other soldiers
whose wrecker became disabled. Dowdy pulled them to safety at great risk to
himself, the defense official said. They took the seats on either side of Lynch,
who sat atop the transmission hump in the middle.
As his soldiers came under fire, Dowdy, now
with four soldiers in his Humvee, sped along the road at speeds of 50 mph,
encouraging his soldiers “to get into the fight, trying to get vehicles to
move and getting soldiers out of one broken-down vehicle and into another,”
the senior military officer said.
The soldiers in Dowdy’s Humvee “had
their weapons at the ready and their seat belts off,” said the senior officer,
who was also briefed on the investigation. “We assume they were firing
back.”
There were other acts of bravery. One
soldier, whose name could not be learned, bolted from his vehicle to try to
rescue other soldiers from a disabled vehicle. He took cover behind a berm, not
realizing at first that Iraqi soldiers were on the other side in a mortar pit.
When he did, he killed a half-dozen of them with his weapons, the defense
official said. Soon, though, he was surrounded by a couple of dozen armed Iraqis
and is believed to have been killed on the spot.
“He didn’t have a chance,” said the
official.
A U.S. tractor-trailer with a flatbed
swerved around an Iraqi dump truck and jack-knifed. As Dowdy’s speeding Humvee
approached the overturned tractor-trailer, it was hit on the driver’s side by
a rocket-propelled grenade. The driver, Piestewa, lost control of the Humvee,
swerved right and struck the trailer.
The senior defense official described the
collision as “catastrophic.”
Dowdy, sitting in the passenger seat, was
killed instantly. So, probably, were the two soldiers on either side of Lynch.
Piestewa and Lynch were seriously injured, according the senior officer’s
account.
Lynch’s arm and legs were crushed by the
compression, U.S. military doctors would later conclude. Tiny bone fragments
protruded through her skin.
Khuder, the Iraqi farmer, remembered seeing
a Humvee crash into a truck. Later, when it was safe to approach the road, he
saw “two American women, one dark skinned, one light skinned, pulled from the
Humvee. I think the light one was dead. The dark-skinned one was hurt.”
Khudher appears to have seen Lynch, who is
white, unconscious, taken prisoner, as well as Piestewa, who was Native
American, still alive.
In the hours after the ambush,
Arabic-speaking interpreters at the National Security Agency, reviewing
intercepted Iraqi communications from either hand-held radios or cellular
phones, heard references to “an American female soldier with blond hair who
was very brave and fought against them,” according to a senior military
officer who read the top-secret intelligence report when it came in. An
intelligence source cited reports from Iraqis at the scene, saying she had fired
all her ammunition.
Over the next hours and days, commanders at
Central Command, which was running the war from Qatar, and CIA officers with
them at headquarters were bombarded with military “sit reps” and agency
Field Information Reports about the ambush, according to intelligence and
military sources. The Iraqi reports included information about a female soldier.
One said she died in battle. Some said she was wounded by shrapnel. Some said
she had been shot in the arm and leg, and stabbed.
These reports were distributed only to
generals, intelligence officers and policymakers in Washington who are cleared
to read the most sensitive information the U.S. government possesses.
These intelligence reports, and the one
eavesdropped snippet, created the story of the war.
‘SHE WOULD HAVE DIED’
Down a two-lane blacktop rolling through
dry farmlands, just a mile or two from the ambush site, lies the Iraqi military
hospital of Nasiriyah. It was where the Lynch was first treated after her
capture.
Today, the three-story structure is a
gutted ruin, charred from fires. Mangled brown Iraqi military vehicles fill the
parking lot.
On the morning of Lynch’s capture, the
military hospital was a beehive, with fleeing, fighting and wounded Iraqi troops
coming and going as U.S. troops swept into Iraq from Kuwait.
Adnan
Mushafafawi, a brigadier in the Iraqi Army medical corps, a member of Saddam
Hussein’s Baath Party and the director of the hospital, said a policeman
brought in two female U.S. soldiers about 10 a.m.
“They were both unconscious,” he said.
They were severely wounded, he recalled, exhibiting symptoms of shock and
trauma. He read their dog tags: They were Jessica Lynch and her friend and
fellow 507th soldier Lori Piestewa.
“Miss Lori,” Mushafafawi said, “had
bruises all over her face. She was bleeding from the eyes. A severe head
wound.” He said Piestewa died soon after arriving at the hospital.
Did either soldier display evidence she had
been stabbed or shot? “No, no,” he said. Pressed, he later answered,
“Maybe, Miss Lori, maybe shot.”
Mushafafawi said he and his medical staff
cut away Lynch’s uniform and threw her clothes on the floor. She lay on a
gurney, almost naked, as Iraqi military doctors and nurses worked on her, he
said.
Lynch had multiple fractures, Mushafafawi
said, a head injury that he described as minor. He said the staff sutured the
wound. She was given blood and intravenous fluids, he said. The staff took
X-rays, partly set her fractures and applied splints and plaster casts to them.
“If we had left her without treatment,
she would have died,” Mushafafawi said.
The military doctor said Lynch briefly
regained consciousness at his hospital, but appeared disoriented. “She was
very scared,” he said. “We reassured her that she would be safe now.”
But when Mushafafawi suggested to Lynch
that he might attempt to better set her leg fracture, Lynch told him, “No, she
didn’t want us to do anything more,” he recalled.
“She was here two, three hours,” the
doctor said and then transferred by military ambulance to Nasiriyah’s main
civilian facility, Saddam Hussein General Hospital across town.
Mushafafawi said he assumed his military
hospital probably would be attacked by U.S. forces, who two days later overran
the compound. He said that it was his decision to transfer Lynch and that no
military or intelligence officers accompanied her. Piestewa’s body also was
transported to Saddam Hussein hospital.
Mushafafawi said he did not know what
happened to Piestewa or Lynch between their capture shortly after 7 a.m. and
their appearance at his hospital about three hours later.
Later that day, the Arab news network al-Jazeera
broadcast graphic close-up film of bodies, believed to be from Lynch’s unit,
sprawled on a concrete floor at an undisclosed location. Two of the soldiers
appeared to have been shot in the forehead, one between the eyes. A smiling
Iraqi moved among the bodies, displaying them for the camera.
Four exhausted and shaken POWs from the
507th were shown in the same newscast giving minimal answers to questions posed
by their Iraqi captors who had transported them to Baghdad.
‘CRYING ALL THE TIME’
When Lynch arrived at Saddam Hussein
hospital in a military ambulance that afternoon, the nurses and doctors who
admitted her said they were surprised to find an American woman, almost naked,
her limbs in plaster casts, beneath a sheet.
Interviewed recently about Lynch’s stay
at the hospital, members of the staff insisted that they gave her the best care
they could, and that they did not believe it was possible for Iraqi agents to
have abused her while she was there. Though Iraqi military, intelligence and
Baath Party officials began using the hospital as a base of operations, they
said they saw no one mistreat Lynch — though a member of Iraq’s intelligence
service was posted outside her door.
As the doctors and nurses recalled,
Lynch’s condition was grave as they brought her into the emergency room. In
addition to her multiple fractures, her extremities were cold, her blood
pressure down, her heart rate accelerated. She was unconscious and in shock.
The hospital was operating, but stressed to its limits. Only a dozen doctors
from a staff of 60 came to work; the nursing staff, especially women, was
skeletal as the roads were too dangerous to travel; the electricity was
sporadic; the generators were failing; medical supplies spotty; and all the
while, during Lynch’s stay at the hospital, the hospital was receiving more
than 200 casualties a day and one young intern said he was reduced to mopping up
bloody floors himself.
“It was substandard care, by American
standards, we know this, okay? But Jessica got the best we could offer,” said
Harith Hassona, one of two young resident physicians who assisted in her care.
After several days of treatment, Lynch’s
condition improved. She was moved from the emergency room to an empty cardiac
care unit, where she had her own room, and was tended by two female nurses.
But she was in pain, and given powerful
drugs. She ate, sporadically, asking for juice and crackers. The staff said she
was offered Iraqi hospital food, but refused. “She wanted to see things opened
in front of her, then she would eat,” said Furat Hussein, one of her nurses.
Her mental state varied from hour to hour,
according to the Iraqi nurses and doctors. “She would joke with us sometimes,
and sometimes she would weep,” Hussein said.
“She didn’t want to be left alone and
she didn’t want strangers to care for her,” said Anmar Uday, one of the two
primary care physicians. “One time, she asked me, ‘Why are you standing in
front of me? Are you gong to hurt me?’ We said no, we’re here to help
you.”
“Crying
all the time,” recalled Khalida Shnan, a nurse who wept herself when
describing how she tried to comfort Lynch by singing to her night and rubbing
talc on her shoulders. Mahdi Khafaji, the orthopedic surgeon, said he knew that
sooner or later U.S. troops would come for Lynch and “we wanted to show the
Americans that we are human beings.”
Khafaji said treating Lynch well was in
their self-interest: “She was more important at that moment than Saddam
Hussein.” He added, “You could not help but feeling sorry for her. A young
girl. An American. A prisoner. We did our best. Believe me, she was the only
orthopedic surgery I performed.” Khafaji suggested that as he worked on Lynch,
ordinary Iraqis went without treatment, and some may have died.
But Khafaji said that, without a doubt, the
Iraqi leadership was also employing Lynch as a human shield.
If the hospital was chaotic and
understaffed, it was also overrun with senior Iraqi officials, who were living
and working out of the basement, clinics, and the doctors’ residence halls and
offices.
The staff said there were 50 to 100 Iraqi
combatants in or around the hospital at any one time — though the number
shrank day by day as deserters fled at night and the Americans closed in.
The head of the municipal government,
Younis Mohammad Thareb, was there, as was senior Baath Party officer Adel
Abdallah Doori. There were military and special security officers also, as well
as Iraqi militia and members of Saddam’s Fedayeen.
“They were all here,” Hassona said.
Someone in civilian clothes, whom Hassona
said was a low-ranking employee of one of the Iraqi intelligence services, stood
guard outside Lynch’s door. Hassona and other hospital staffers said they kept
a close eye on Lynch; they feared that Iraqi officials might try to move her,
harass or interrogate her. “But you have to understand that these guys knew
the Americans were coming, and toward the end, they were most worried about
saving themselves,” Hassona said.
But there was still an atmosphere of fear.
“When she woke up once, she was saying
she was scared and wanted someone to stay with her,” Hassona recalled. “She
said, ‘I’m afraid of Saddam Hussein,’ and I said, ‘Shhhh. Don’t say
that name. You must keep quiet.’ ”
Soon after Lynch’s arrival, Hassona and
Khafaji said they were approached by an intelligence officer and asked how soon
Lynch could be moved.
“I told him 72 hours, at least,”
Khafaji said.
Khafaji said that Lynch’s wounds made him
suspicious. The fractures were on both sides of her body, for example, and “if
they all came from a car accident, there was no glass in her wounds, no
lacerations or deep bruises.”
U.S. military sources believe most if not
all the fractures could have been caused by extreme compression during her
vehicle accident. Khafaji said “maybe a car accident or maybe they broke her
bones with rifle butts or by stomping on her legs. I don’t know. They know and
Jessica knows. I can only guess.”
A LAWYER’S STORY
Within a few days of her capture, U.S.
military and intelligence agencies would learn from several Iraqis in Nasiriyah
that one of the 507th soldiers was held captive at Saddam Hussein Hospital.
One of those Iraqis was Mohammed Odeh
Rehaief, a 32-year-old lawyer who told U.S. authorities he learned about Lynch
on March 27, when he went there to see his wife, Iman, a nurse in the kidney
unit.
“In the hospital corridors, I observed a
large number of Fedayeen Saddam,” Rehaief recounted in a statement. “I knew
they were Fedayeen because they were wearing their traditional black ninja-style
uniforms that covered everything but their eyes. I also saw high army officials
there.”
Rehaief said a doctor friend told him about
Lynch. He peered through a glass panel into her room, he said, and “saw a
large man in black looming over a bed that contained a small bandaged woman with
blond hair.”
There were epaulets on man’s shirt,
indicating he was a Fedayeen officer, Rahaief said. “He appeared to be
questioning the woman through a translator. Then I saw him slap her — first
with the palm of his hand, then with the back of his hand.”
When the Fedayeen officer left, Rehaief
said, he crept into Lynch’s room and told her he would help her. “Don’t
worry,” he said. He then walked east across Nasiriyah where he encountered a
group of Marines and told them about Lynch.
The Marines, who corroborated Rehaief’s
story that he assisted them, sent him back to the hospital several times to map
out access to the site, the route getting there and to count the number of Iraqi
troops inside.
The staff of the civilian hospital believe
Rehaief did tell the Marines about Lynch, but some nurses and doctors disputed
other parts of his story.
The head nurse of the hospital said there
is no nurse named Iman employed by the facility, or any nurse married to a
lawyer. “This is something we would know,” she said.
“Never happened,” Hassona said. Men in
black slapping Lynch? “That’s some Hollywood crap you’d tell the
Americans.” Hassona said he suspected the lawyer embellished his story.
After the rescue, Rehaief and his wife were
transported by U.S. forces to a military camp in Kuwait. Rahaief, along with his
wife and daughter, was granted political asylum in the United States. He is
living in Northern Virginia, working on a book for HarperCollins and with NBC
for a television movie on the rescue.
Rahaief and members of Lynch’s family
have not sought each other out.
RESCUE
Task Force 20, a covert U.S. Special
Operations unit, worked on only the highest U.S. priorities in Iraq: hunting for
weapons of mass destruction, weapons scientists and Baath Party leaders — and
rescuing Jessica Lynch.
Among the pre-mission briefings the group
received before its move on the hospital was the fact that the hospital had been
reportedly visited by Ali Hassan Majeed, otherwise known as “Chemical Ali,”
one of the most sought-after targets in the Iraqi leadership. Sources on the
ground and imagery from Predator unmanned vehicles, which had been flying over
the hospital for days, indicated it might serve as some kind of military
command-and-control facility.
Militarily, “they knew they were going
into an unknown situation,” said one Special Operations officer. “They came
armed for bear.” Central Command was worried enough about the Iraqi
military’s response that it ordered a force of Marines, with tanks and armored
personnel carriers, into Nasiriyah in a feint to draw attention away from the
hospital.
About 1 a.m. on April 1, commandos in
blacked-out Blackhawk helicopters and protected by low, slow-flying AC-130
gunships, swooped toward the hospital grounds. Marines fanned out as an exterior
perimeter, while Army Rangers made a second protective shield just outside the
hospital walls. These forces took light fire from adjacent buildings, according
to military sources.
Commandos burst into hospital, fired
explosive charges meant to disorient anyone inside, and headed for Lynch’s
room, according to U.S. accounts.
“We
heard the helicopters and we decided we would go to the radiology unit,” said
Anmar Uday, a doctor, because the X-ray room was lined with lead.
The Iraqis heard shouts of “Go! Go!
Go!” and soon the commandos were upon them. They said no shots were fired in
the hospital and no one resisted, that there were only doctors and staff and a
few hundred patients left. “It was like a ‘Rambo’ movie,” Uday said.
“But we were not Rambo. We just waited to be told what to do.”
“There was not a firefight inside of the
building, I will tell you, but there were firefights outside of the building,
getting in and out,” Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks told reporters at Central
Command in Doha, Qatar.
The commandos found Lynch in a private
room, atop the hospital’s only bed used to ease the pain of bedsores, a
special sand-filled tub. She was accompanied by a male nurse in a white jacket.
“Jessica Lynch, we’re the United States
soldiers and we’re here to protect you and take you home,” a Special Forces
soldier called out, according to Air Force Maj. Gen. Victor Renuart, who briefed
reporters three days later.
“I’m an American soldier, too,” she
answered from her hospital bed.
Troops found “ammunition, mortars, maps,
a terrain model and other things that make it very clear that it was being used
as a military command post,” Brooks said.
Saad Abdul Razaq, the hospital’s
assistant administrator, said he was corralled with others in a corner. “They
were pointing a gun at me and I thought, it’s all over, I’m going to die,”
he said.
Razaq and the hospital staff said the last
Iraqi military and civilian leaders had fled the morning of the raid; they
stripped off their green uniforms, abandoned their vehicles in the parking lot,
and disappeared. None of the hospital staff was injured during the rescue.
The U.S. troops recovered two American
bodies from the morgue. Staff escorted the Americans to a grave site outside the
building, by a soccer field, where the bodies of seven U.S. soldiers were
buried. The hospital staff said the bodies — all members of Lynch’s convoy
— were put under the earth because the morgue’s faltering refrigerators
could not stop decomposition. Navy SEALs dug the bodies up with their hands,
according to military officials.
A few hours after the last members of Task
Force 20 flew away in helicopters, a contingent of U.S. tanks and trucks rolled
up to the hospital’s front door without firing a shot.
Central Command’s public affairs office
in Qatar geared up to make the most of the rescue.
“We wanted to make sure we got whatever
visuals were available,” said one public affairs officer involved. The task
force had photographed the rescue. Special Forces had already provided
exclusive, opening-day video to the news media of Iraqi border posts being
destroy by nighttime raids. That had been a hit, public affairs officers
believed.
“We let them know, if possible we wanted
to get it, we’d like to have” the video, said Lt. Col. John Robinson, a
Central Command public affairs officer. “We were hoping we would have good
visuals. We knew it would be the hottest thing of the day. There was not an
intent to talk it down or embellish it because we didn’t need to. It was an
awesome story.”
For
the U.S. military and the American public, Lynch’s rescue came as a joyous
moment in one of the darkest hours of the war, when U.S. troops looked like they
were going to be bogged down on their way to Baghdad. But the rescue had gone
off without a hitch.
“It took on a life of its own,” said
one colonel who tried to answer the barrage of media queries. “Reporters seem
to be reporting on each other’s information. The rescue turned into a
Hollywood concept.”
MAKING PROGRESS
After her rescue, nowhere was the joy
greater than in Lynch’s hometown of tiny Palestine, W.Va., where parents Greg
and Deadra Lynch had struggled to stay hopeful as days slipped by without news
of their missing daughter.
The family’s elation was tempered when
they discovered the true extent of Lynch’s injuries when they reached her
bedside at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.
At Walter Reed, Lynch’s bones have been
put back together with such a delicate and extensive network of rods and pins
that it can take an hour for her to moved from bed to wheelchair.
“She
is still struggling with pain and her recovery will be slow,” said family
spokesman Randy Coleman. Her mother said, “It’s amazing she can walk at all,
she is a body full of pins and screws,” Coleman recounted.
Still, Lynch is making progress. She
recently walked more than 100 steps using a walker. “She works hard at
physical therapy. She doesn’t sit around and complain. She is certainly
determined to get well,” said Walter Reed spokeswoman Beverly Chidel.
People who have seen her said she is
psychologically traumatized, and appears somewhat dazed, though she is better
now than in the early weeks. Recently she has talked on the phone to friends and
sent emails from her laptop.
Booth reported from Nasiriyah,
interviewing Iraqi doctors and nurses in the hospitals where Lynch was treated,
and Iraqi citizens who witnessed elements of the initial capture. Priest and
Schmidt reported from Washington, interviewing military and intelligence
officials with detailed knowledge of Lynch’s capture and rescue, as well as
officials close to the Lynch family.
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