Twelve JESSICA LYNCH

Twelve JESSICA LYNCH: MULTIPLE IMAGES, MULTIPLE REALITIES Laura Duhan Kaplan On 23 March 2003, the United States Army reported Pfc. Jessica Lynch miss- ing in action in Iraq. On 1 April 2003, she was the severely injured object of a glorious rescue by United States Marines from Saddam General Hospital. The United States public learned that that she fought bravely, firing on her Iraqi attackers. We learned that she had not fired a single shot because her gun had jammed. We learned that she had been raped, and that she had not been raped. We learned that Iraqi military personnel had interrogated and tortured her in the hospital, and we learned that doctors and nurses, trying to heal her with quite limited resources, had treated her compassionately. We learned that the rescue was a dangerous expedition into Iraqi military and Fedayeen headquarters, and we learned that the headquarters had been abandoned, and that the rescue was a contrived media event. Lynch faded from the public imagination without our ever hearing any definitive version of the facts. Many of the facts will never be available to us. Battles are chaotic. Angry guerilla fighters rarely create files of memos sub- ject to eventual declassification. Medical professionals treating enemy soldiers may not keep entirely truthful records. Heavily drugged patients do not recall their ordeals accurately. We cannot analyze the actual event. Only the media event is available to us. The media event created a symbol out of Jes- sica Lynch, a poster child for the American military effort in Iraq. Lawrence Hoffman, writing in a non-philosophical context, offers the best philosophical definition of the work of a symbol that I have ever read. According to Hoffman, “symbols symbolize.”1 We cannot pin down exactly what they symbolize in a single analysis. Powerful public symbols gain their power from their openness, from their ability to speak in different ways to different people. Jessica Lynch is one such powerful symbol. To some she symbolizes women’s ability to endure the dangers of war, a move forward in gender equality. To others, she symbolizes a pin-up caricature of the damsel in distress, a mark of our country’s reactionary stance on gender. To others, she is the Caucasian woman singled out for praise to the exclusion of her black sister soldiers, an expression of our country’s reactionary stance on racial is- sues. Some see her as an inspiring hero; others see her as a pathetic victim. 246 LAURA DUHAN KAPLAN Here I propose to offer a sketch of possible feminist analyses of each of these symbolic roles Lynch plays. I do so in the context of a caution. Feminist cultural critics have spoken endlessly against the objectification of women and their exploitation in the media. For years, we have criticized the facile division of women into virgins and whores, and the reduction of women to two-dimensional images for consumption by heterosexual men. So let us try to resist reducing the real Jessica Lynch, a young woman adjusting to a life with disabilities, into nothing more than a set of powerful symbols about gender, race, and politics. 1. An Account of the Realities Because of this caution, and in spite of my reservations about the availability of reliable facts, I will tell one version of the facts of Lynch’s capture and rescue. This version relies heavily on Rick Bragg’s book, I Am a Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story. I choose this version because I resonate with some aspects of the ideological perspective Bragg presents.2 Lynch, a nineteen-year-old supply clerk in the 507th Maintenance Com- pany, was riding in a 100-mile long convoy of supply trucks heading towards Baghdad. Her end of the convoy became separated from the lead trucks. Her commanding officer—exhausted, unable to distinguish one desert landscape from another, and working with poor directions given by apathetic Marines— took a wrong turn and brought the trucks straight into downtown Nasiriyah, Iraq. Local Iraqis, thinking they had been invaded, fought fiercely. The American soldiers of the 507th Maintenance Company, driving slow-moving heavy trucks, wielding guns that had filled with blowing sand, and psycho- logically unprepared for combat, had limited means of resistance or escape. Lynch’s best friend, Lori Piestewa, drove up to Lynch’s truck in a Humvee. Lynch jumped in, and cowered in the back seat, as Piestewa drove a slalom course through the chaos. When Piestewa also was shot, the Humvee ca- reened into a tractor-trailer. Three hours later, Lynch arrived at Saddam General Hospital. She spent ten excruciatingly painful days on gurneys and beds, with broken arms, legs, and spine. Gradually, she regained consciousness. Nurses surrounded her with care and sang to her. Doctors performed surgeries to repair her shattered bones. At one point, American soldiers fired upon doctors trying to return Lynch to an American checkpoint. Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, an Iraqi lawyer whose wife, Iman, was a nurse at the hospital, and whose sympathies opposed Saddam Hussein, reported her presence to American soldiers. At their request, he and his wife gathered information to help plan a rescue.3 On 1 April 2003, a team of United States Special Forces, accompanied by a video camera recording at night vision level, stormed the hospital and airlifted Lynch to a United States military base in Germany. .

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