Saving Jessica Lynch- next Sunday

[Dis]

I'm going out on a limb here and saying Jessica Lynch should never have been there.

Most women cannot fight. Period.

Her gun jammed which showed she wasn't taking good care of her gun in the desert

she had no business being there.

I'm not going to proclaim every soldier a hero. They joined because it's a job, not because they expected to go to combat to defend their country.

I'm not going to call someone a hero for doing their job poorly.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Chemical Ollie
If Mark Bowden* or someone like him was involved in making the script, it might be a very good TV drama. But I doubt anything from this war will be retold in a neutral, accurate and still dramatized way.

*Author of Blackhawk Down

Bowden got a number of things wrong wrt the Somali factions, etc., but he didn't get any front time, and relatively little "street time" after the fact. Some of his interviews with Somalis had a heavy bit of slant to them, and he didn't seem to pick up on that.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Dissident
I'm going out on a limb here and saying Jessica Lynch should never have been there.

Most women cannot fight. Period.

Her gun jammed which showed she wasn't taking good care of her gun in the desert

M16A2's and M4A1's don't funtion well when the barrels are bent and the actions and stocks ****ed up by blast and fragment effects of RPG fire.

she had no business being there.

I'm not going to proclaim every soldier a hero. They joined because it's a job, not because they expected to go to combat to defend their country.

I'm not going to call someone a hero for doing their job poorly.

There's no indication that any of them did their jobs poorly. What was done poorly, and this can be laid back to the highest authority, was that the area was not secured and the route not marked and controlled by MPs, since traffic control along supply lines is an MP function. Simply put, some naive command assumptions were made, and shortcuts were taken which cost 28 KIA that day.

[Spec]

Wow....I never thought people liked to shove a banana up their You-know-what so much...


Spec.

[Dis]

they got lost- primarily because they had a woman driver

[Dis]

Originally posted by Spec
Wow....I never thought people liked to shove a banana up their You-know-what so much...


Spec.

yes, you learn things about fellow Poly memebers you never knew before, or wanted to know.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Naah, because the guy wouldn't stop and ask for directions.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Spec
Wow....I never thought people liked to shove a banana up their You-know-what so much...


Spec.

Compared to watching this movie?

[Dis]

I think it's funny this movie is up against, the Smart movie.

The Daily Show had a bit on this today.

exploitation at it's finest

[Dis]

so what da ya think. would a Jessica Lynch/Elizabeth Smart (when she turns 18) porno be pretty cool?

[JohnT]

Posted by The Wordsmith...What was done poorly, and this can be laid back to the highest authority...

Er, so this is Bush's fault?

[The Mad Monk]

Originally posted by Dissident
so what da ya think. would a Jessica Lynch/Elizabeth Smart (when she turns 18) porno be pretty cool?

Depends.

Would Amy Fisher be available?

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by JohnT

Posted by The Wordsmith...What was done poorly, and this can be laid back to the highest authority...

Er, so this is Bush's fault?

Normally, you have MP's at key intersections, bridges, etc., to direct follow on traffic - divisional CSS forces, supply, etc., and you have forces to create a security zone around your lines of supply.

The 507th Maint. Co. and a large number of the USMC casualties at Nasiriya on 23-March can be laid to the fact that main combat forces bypassed the area, and there was no follow on force tasked to secure the single most obvious place for enemy resistance until you got all the way up to the Iraqi MLR. At Nasiriya, the forces cross one bridge, went up the opposite side of the river for about 3-4 km, then cross a bridge going back, so in that 3-4 km stretch, they're isolated from whatever allied forces are up and down the road, and if you can control either bridge, you trap forces in that little pocket.

Yet the assumption was made that there would be no enemy resistance because the Iraqis would really welcome us as liberators or some such horse**** - but no forces were made available for that type of traffic control and security zone duty, so the Marines had to **** up their advance and pull large numbers of forces in to secure that area, after the **** hit the fan.

The decision on when to start the war and with what forces to conduct came from Washington, DC.

[Ned]

Her gun jamming probably saved her life. Had she been firing, the Iraqi's would have killed her. Instead, they saved her life, it appears.

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

Although 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 by her Iraqi captors, according to U.S. media who said they had advance copies.

The book — due to be released Tuesday — covers Lynch's experience between March 23 when her 507th Maintenance Company convoy was ambushed in Nasiriyah (search) 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 Lynch was raped.

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 soldiers were killed in the attack.

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

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 Lynch was taken first to the Military Hospital, a few hundred yards 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 7 in the morning," he said. "What kind of animal would do it to a person suffering from multiple injuries?"

Dr. Jamal al-Saeidi (search), a brigadier general and head of the orthopedic department at the now disbanded Military Hospital, remembers seeing Jessica'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 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," al-Saeidi said.

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

Lynch had lost more than half of her blood because of a four- to six-inch wound on the left side of her head, as well as broken limbs that caused internal bleeding, 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 (search), died half an hour after arriving at the hospital with Lynch of severe head injuries, doctors said.

Half an hour after surgery on Lynch, 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 Lynch said: "'No, I want to be in the States."'

Soon afterward, military intelligence officers came to the hospital to take 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?" a bitter Dr. Khodheir al-Hazbar, the hospital's deputy director, said. "We were good to her."

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

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

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

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

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

Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. "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.foxnews.com/images/clear_dot.gif

[Ned]

MEET THE REAL HERO OF THE JESSICA LYNCH STORY
Thu Nov 06 2003 12:43:19 ET

Hardly a person in America has not heard of Private Jessica Lynch. But if it weren’t for the heroic efforts of a much less known soldier, Lynch would have been a statistic – killed in action -- instead of the subject of headlines, a movie and a book. Mike Wallace interviews Pfc. Patrick Miller, awarded a Silver Star for action that saved the life of Lynch and several others near her, in a report to be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday, Nov. 9 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

Miller, from Valley Center, Kan., tells Wallace how he earned the Silver Star by single-handedly stopping a mortar attack several Iraqis were aiming at Lynch and others around her after their convoy was ambushed. Two of Miller’s fellow soldiers, who were also saved by his action, recount how Miller risked his life that day to save theirs and Lynch’s.

Lynch went on to be captured and then rescued in an event that became a central and controversial story in the war. Early accounts of a heroic stand by Lynch have been proved false and some have charged that her rescue was overly dramatized by the military.

The real hero behind the Jessica Lynch story doesn’t think he is one at all. “It’s good to know that you actually did something to save other people’s lives, but for me,” says Miller, “I don’t feel that I’m a hero because I feel I was doing my job as a soldier.”

Developing.

http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2003/11/06/20031106_184406_flash5.htm