The Private Jessica Lynch

By NANCY GIBBS

Forty steps. Each one is a gamble: lift, lunge, tilt, then land with a stab of the foot she can't feel. The soldier who came out of Iraq on a stretcher and back to the States in a wheelchair can now, seven months later, take 40 steps by herself. Each one is a victory.

It's getting dark and cold in this part of West Virginia. But here in rehab the lights are bright and Jessica Lynch is in shorts, a baggy T shirt and sneakers from Wal-Mart that are a half size too big, to make room for the brace that keeps her left foot from dragging.

"Good, Jessi, that's good." Physical therapist Burt Reed seems about twice her size as he holds her steady so she can practice walking forward and backward between the padded tables and weight machines. For just a moment, you can imagine they are dancing. And then the time comes when Reed steps back and she's on her own, as if she's walking a wide tightrope, careful, dangerous. "Good, Jessi"--her hands are fists, her jaw is set--"keep going," and you sense she is counting the steps under her breath.

Amid the jagged scars all over her body, there is a neat line of six holes from left knee to ankle, like vicious bites, where the rods of the external fixator held the bones in place for the first two months after her legs were broken. That came off June 26, she recalls. Lynch has a crisp memory for dates: how long she was in which hospital, which day she made which breakthrough--everything except the first, darkest moments of her captivity. Of those, she says she has no recollection. Otherwise, she is organized, thorough, precise. Perfect qualities for a supply clerk. And she is pale, skinny, with thin, straight legs that look as if they would be easy to snap. Hardly ideal for surviving the most deadly ambush of the war: 11 of the 32 soldiers with her died that day, six were captured, eight wounded. She's the only one in her wrecked humvee who survived.

Lynch joined the Army when she was 18 because she wanted to see the world. Now it seems as though the whole world wants to see her, hear the truth about what happened to her and in the process confirm every instinct about the war: what went right, what went wrong, what it means. People will have their chance this week with the publication of Rick Bragg's spare, wrenching account of her life and her war. Diane Sawyer went down to Palestine to see her; this week Lynch will visit New York City for the first time, make the rounds, do Letterman and learn whether the toughness she has shown to make it this far will protect her now.

It is a fearsome thing to be turned into an icon, draped with powers and meanings of other people's choosing. To the thousands who wrote letters, sent teddy bears and flowers and handmade quilts, to the millions who prayed for her safety, Lynch is an archetypal American soldier, a symbol of courage under fire. As the challenge in Iraq grows, as the nightly body count reminds us of the terrible risks the soldiers face, people want to show they care. Lynch's is the name they know, and so the letters keep pouring in, and old women press notes scribbled on napkins into her hands when she goes to the mall: "Thank you for your service."

But to others she is useful as a symbol of something else. The news of her rescue, complete with the spooky green night-video footage, came at just the moment when the nation was hungry for good news out of a hard war. "She was fighting to the death," an anonymous source told the Washington Post, in an account of her capture and dramatic rescue that seemed more like a movie pitch than a news story. "She did not want to be taken alive." It was all so well timed, such an emotional turning point, that questions began to arise: How had her unit got lost in the first place? Had she actually fired her weapon or been shot herself? Was it really such a daring rescue if there was no one guarding her anymore by the time the commandos whisked her out? Before long, she had become a symbol for war critics of many of their complaints: bad information and worse planning; soldiers insufficiently trained or ill equipped for the mission they confronted; a Pentagon seen as willing to stretch the truth to boost morale. One BBC report dismissed the rescue operation as "one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived." And so the uncertainty fluttered around her: Was she a hero or a pawn?

However many people are bothered by that question, Jessica Lynch is not among them. She knows she spent nine days in an Iraqi hospital with 10 broken bones, unable to move and leaking blood--and she has only praise for the Army and the soldiers who saved her. "The whole idea that the rescue was staged or the soldiers were shooting blanks, that's just obvious stuff," she says. "Why would you do that in the middle of a war? It's just crazy." She never claimed to have mowed down the attacking Iraqis; she never had the chance--her sand-clogged rifle wouldn't fire. She never said she'd been shot or stabbed, as early reports suggested; it was the doctors in Landstuhl, Germany, who broke the news to her about the full extent of her injuries: the multiple fractures of arm and legs, the spinal damage that robbed her of control of her bowels and bladder--and the trauma that could not be explained by the humvee crash. Sometime after the crash and before she was delivered to Nasiriyah hospital--a period that could have been as long as three hours--she appeared to have been forcibly penetrated by someone or something: "The exam in Landstuhl," Dr. Greg Argyros, her primary doctor during her 100 days at Walter Reed Medical Center, told TIME, "indicated that the injuries were consistent with possible anal sexual assault." The Iraqi physician who saved her life that first day with emergency surgery and blood transfusions told the Associated Press that during his exam he saw no such evidence. Lynch says she has no memory of what happened immediately after the crash. That's not surprising, Argyros says, because "she was so unbelievably sick and probably in shock for most of the time in the Iraqi hospital."

She does not call herself a hero, because the word hurts too much when so many died, and her best friend's body was pulled out of a shallow grave on the hospital grounds by the same commandos who rescued her. That friend, Lori Piestewa, is her hero, for staying so calm under fire, as are the soldiers who fought bravely all around her. Lynch herself did not fire a shot and spent most of her time in the humvee huddled in a protective ball. Ask her what she would like to symbolize, and there is a long, long pause. "I haven't really thought about that," she says, even if everyone else has. "I guess," she says, searching for the meaning of her story as the soldier recedes and the aspiring kindergarten teacher emerges, "I could be, you know, the person that shows little kids that giving up isn't something that you should do."

Lynch is too intent on moving forward to spend a lot of time looking back. She has read Bragg's book but says she skipped the parts that were too hard to relive, the things that made her parents cry. Ever since she was a child, both her parents say, she was strong-minded, determined. That tenacity, so crucial to her physical recovery, may also be what saves her from being crushed by the attention that now surrounds her. "When it's all over," says her father Greg Lynch, "she'll just be an old country girl"--the label a shorthand for the virtues that matter, like kindness and toughness. For all the attention, all the books and banners and presents and parades, her parents understand that Jessica Lynch has become a convenient emblem for this war, its first name and memorable face. "But there's other soldiers with names and faces and families just like us," says her mother Dee Lynch. "I hope people don't forget. They need just as much prayer and support as us. This is not just about Jessi--it's about all the soldiers."

Dee was never one for letting go of her kids, never big on sleepovers. She had a hard time when Greg Jr. went off to college. He did his first year on scholarship and was trying to work, but he didn't have the money for his second year. When the Army recruiter came from Parkersburg, all three Lynch kids--Greg, Jessica and Brandi--were interested in what he had to say. He talked about the travel and the training they would get. This was the summer of 2001, before there was even a whisper of war in the air. But "he did not lie to the kids," Dee says. He said there was always the possibility of war in the future. "But at that time it was before Sept. 11, and there was no terrorism," Jessica recalls, "so we were like, 'That would never happen to me.'"

For someone who loved the idea of traveling, wanted to go to college and believed deeply in duty and service, the Army was a natural choice--and yet pretty much everyone, her classmates, her family, was surprised that Jessica would join up along with Greg. She was, Dee says, "a prissy tomboy, if there is such a thing," the girl for whom, even when she was out playing on the hillside, "her socks and hair bows had to match." In third grade when she broke her arm, the doctor gave her a pink cast, and she went out and got new pink shoelaces for her sneakers. She figures she could have found a job somewhere near home, "but that wasn't me," Jessica says. "I wanted to improve my life and not just be there in Palestine forever. I wanted to get out and do something."

She left for basic training on Sept. 19, 2001, barely a week after the terrorist attacks; she wound up in Texas at Fort Bliss, where she made about $1,100 a month as a supply clerk, keeping records, ordering toilet paper. She thought it would be good business experience and steady, safe. "They told me I'd never probably see the frontline area," she says. It was at Fort Bliss that Lynch found her soul mates: her boyfriend Ruben Contreras and her roommate Lori Piestewa, best friend and protector. Lori was a Hopi Indian, the single mother of two. "We were completely opposite people--two different worlds it seemed like we came from," Lynch says. "But we clicked. She was like my sister, the big sister that I never had."

In January they heard they would be shipping out to Iraq. "Of course I had a mother's sick feeling when I heard the word deployment," Dee says. "But I thought, Oh, she's in supply, she'll be safe, she'll never be close to any actual fighting. I trusted her unit, trusted the Army that she got the proper training." Jessica even had a special advantage. She had grown up with her dad's Kenworth cabover truck in the front yard; he gets $1 a mile driving anywhere from Florida to Connecticut. Now she would be the one steering five-ton trucks full of supplies to the front. "It's always in the back of your mind that something can happen," says Greg Lynch. "You wonder, Is the equipment ready? Have they trained enough? I don't know." He knows all the things that can go wrong even under the best circumstances. "They trained with those trucks on concrete. Bases don't have sand, and they don't have sand like over there. You put one of those machines in sand for eight, 10 hours. That's when you see what you really got."

What they got, in Jessica Lynch's case, was not just one bad break but one after another in the first days of the war. The battle plan didn't allow for engines ambushed by sand. And judgment and reflexes are not sharpened by three days with no sleep. "To me, we weren't ready," Lynch says. "But obviously they wouldn't have sent us over there if they didn't think we were ready." The 507th Maintenance Company was at the very end of an 8,000-vehicle, 100-mile-long supply convoy. From the start, Lynch says, "it just didn't feel right. It really kicked in once we got into Iraq."

Because it was a support unit, the 507th was equipped for duty behind the front lines--except that the front turned out to be beside and behind and all around them. There were no antitank weapons, no heavy artillery, just a .50-cal. machine gun that--like the soldier's M-16 rifles--didn't work very well, clogged and jammed with three days' worth of blowing sand. By the time her lost convoy came under fire in the streets of Nasiriyah, Lynch's rifle was about as useful as a hockey stick. The soldiers had been instructed to clean their weapons "anytime we got the chance," Lynch says, "but we never really had a chance."

Her unit, says the official Army report on what happened, "found itself in a desperate situation due to a navigational error caused by the combined effects of the operational pace, acute fatigue, isolation and the harsh environmental conditions. The tragic results of this error placed the soldiers of the 507th Maintenance Company in a torrent of fire." During the roughly 1 1/2-hour-long fire fight that they endured, the report concludes, "every soldier performed honorably and did his or her duty."

As for how that battle and Lynch's cameo in it turned into a breathless movie script, that was less a conscious public relations ploy, Pentagon officials say, than "a comedy of errors." According to several officials, a "single-source intelligence report, nonconfirmed," surfaced detailing the 507th's battle just about the time Lynch was rescued. "It said that our people who ran were killed, and those who put up resistance were captured, and that there was a female who fought to her last breath," a senior Pentagon official said. "It was like a five-line report that wasn't grounded in anything, but it got distributed anyway--and someone exaggerated what it said. It was somebody grasping at straws, someone who was on the periphery and not knowing really what was going on." And that someone guessed that the female in question must have been Jessica Lynch and told the Washington Post. "I think," another senior military official admits, "it was the Army looking for a hero."

You turn down a road that is made, at best, for two skinny cars to get to her house in the hollow. Greg Lynch grew up half a mile from here, in the house his great-grandmother lived in. He picked out the spot for his future home when he was 11 years old. "We raised three kids in four rooms, and we were happy and content," Dee says, "but with Jessi's disability, we just knew there was no way." When they learned their daughter was alive but in a pretty broken state, they debated what they were going to do when she came home. "We talked about building her a room downstairs, with a bathroom," Dee says. There were neighbors over at the house, as there always were during those hard days, and they asked if they could help. Next thing the Lynches knew, a team of friends had set to work on the house as the family headed to Germany on a Heinz Corp. jet ("It was my first experience of flying," Dee says, "and it was like a Cadillac!").

Their joy at Jessica's survival smacked headlong into her actual condition. When her parents first saw her in the intensive-care unit in Landstuhl, "we didn't know where we could touch her," Dee recalls. "She's this tiny thing in this big bed, and the first thing I saw was the bag of blood. Then you really know it was serious." The front of her head was shaved because of a laceration; the perfect bangs were gone. "It was so sad," Dee remembers. She had brought her camcorder--and never took it out of its case. These weren't memories to save. "But we held her hand and kissed her, and she looked up and said, 'Hi, Mommy. You made it.'"

As the doctors briefed them on Jessica's prognosis, they realized they would be taking one day at a time. "I thought, O.K., she's here, she's alive," Dee says. "We'll deal with the rest as we go." Jessi hadn't eaten in days. "She really wanted hot, real mashed potatoes, not those instant ones, and turkey gravy," Dee says. Jessica's memory of those days is hazier. "I think the whole ordeal was just a terrible thing to happen to anyone," Jessi says. And of the missing three hours she is vague but matter-of-fact. "Since I don't know what happened--I was unconscious through that whole thing--it's like reading a book that really wasn't about me."

She had no idea that during the nine days of her captivity, and then with her rescue, her name and face had been beamed all around the world. She had no idea that the rescue video had been released by the Pentagon. "I didn't think that anyone out there even knew I existed, let alone write me a letter," she says. "I was asking my mom, 'Did I make the hometown Journal?' She was like, 'Yeah, you made it, plus all these world papers.'"

Jessica came home from Iraq via Germany and Walter Reed Medical Center. "It took six of us to move her from the bed to the gurney the first day," her father says. "A week later, it was five. A week after that, it was four. Then she had two crutches. Now she has one. She always did have high spirits. She could always make you laugh." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came to see her. "That was rewarding," Greg says. "Not every day that you meet the big boys." The President hasn't called, but Jessica would never expect him to. "He's got a job to do," her father says.

It was at Walter Reed that the Lynches saw for themselves that Jessica is only the most famous of a new breed: returning soldiers who in other wars at other times might never have made it home, given the extent of their injuries, but have survived thanks to better armor, better technology, better battlefield medicine. "You would not believe the number of amputees at Walter Reed," Dee says. "But you would talk to them, and they're just like Jessi. They weren't whining about their problems. They were worried about their fellow soldiers, and they were grateful to be out of there and alive."

During Jessica's 100 days there, Bragg first met with her and carefully, gently began to interview her for the book, which he would complete in four months. "The first day I met her, I felt guilty," he says. "She looked awful. It was like she was translucent, like you could see right through her. She was hurting. I didn't want to ask her questions as to how she got that way." Bragg is a Pulitzer prizewinning journalist and author who resigned last May from the New York Times after criticism that he had failed to credit a free-lancer with helping report an article.

Over time Jessica was more able to talk about what she remembered. Bragg chose not to report the story from Iraq; given his deadline, he says, there wasn't time. The story is told from the whole family's point of view, both what they remember and what the medical records revealed. It was the parents, he said, who felt that the details of her condition and of the sexual assault needed to be in the book, "because if we didn't put it in, the story wouldn't be complete," Bragg says. "It would be a lie."

Lynch finally got home to West Virginia to find her valley decorated with ribbons and flags and prayers for her safety. THANK YOU GOD 4 SAVING JESSICA says the spray-painted banner on the side of the converted barn at the entrance to town. The neighbors had moved, if not heaven, then a lot of earth to get the house ready for her when she came home. They had scraped mountains of dirt off the nearest ridge to level the front yard and spread it with crunchy new gravel, widened the porches, replaced the narrow doors with double French ones, built a wheelchair ramp and accessible bedroom and bathroom, a new kitchen. There are six American flags hanging from the porch, and a white flag with two red stars that a man from the VFW dropped off to show that the family had two children in the service. Lori's belongings are in a bedroom upstairs; she and Jessica had stored their possessions together under Lynch's name when they left Fort Bliss, so the Army shipped them all to Palestine. There will come a day soon when Lynch will have to sort through her best friend's things.

The house might have changed, but other things hadn't. The Lynches made sure sister Brandi got to go to her high school prom, even amid all the commotion. Brandi enlisted in the Army and was supposed to have reported by now. "But Jessi said, 'Don't go,'" Dee says. "And, of course, Brandi's going to do what she wants." It wasn't easy explaining to her little nieces why Jessica couldn't get down and play under the table with them anymore. "We take it for granted that we can get out of bed, stroll to the kitchen, without a thought," Reed, the physical therapist, says. "Everything Jessi does is a challenge. She has to climb those mountains every day."

Now Lynch spends at least 1 1/2 hours a day at Mountain River Physical Therapy because the doctors at Walter Reed told her she has a two-year window; after that, what hasn't healed probably won't. Her right hand was useless when she got to Walter Reed; she couldn't so much as brush her teeth or comb her hair. Now she has full use back. She has not recovered control over her bowels and bladder. "Certainly the longer it goes the less likely it is that you're going to recover function, but nothing is impossible," says Argyros. "Anatomically, the nerves are intact--there's not a spinal-cord injury that would allow us to say this is never coming back." Perhaps the foot will recover as the hand did--but that's a harder fight. She still takes half a dozen pills a day, to help her nerves mend and for pain as needed. "She's going to have a good life just the way she is, but it's not going to be easy," Reed says. "The fight's not over yet."

As for the emotional trauma, Jessi talked with the "repatriation team" in Germany and psychologists there and at Walter Reed. She's not seeing any counselors now, Dee says, but "she knows that it's there for her if she needs it." Dee herself admits to a certain amount of hiding. Asked about her daughter's trauma, she says, "That's another one of those things I just want to shut out of my mind and not think about. And I know that sounds like a coward, but it's just a mom thing. Who do you get angry at? What's anger going to do? We just focus on her. She's alive, she's getting better."

The whole family is working at returning to a place they can call normal: after the interviews are over and the phone quiets down, they will have a chance to write the next chapter. It is something of a relief that people are starting to take the signs and banners down; the one over the courthouse was delivered to the Lynches as a souvenir, blue with yellow ribbons, proclaiming JESSI IS FOUND. PRAISE THE LORD. REMEMBER OUR REMAINING TROOPS. Greg Jr. is still on active duty, and they view his deployment as inevitable. "He'll get his part in all of this," his father says. "You don't like it, but he's got a job to do. Every day we pray that this war will be over." But that doesn't mean he thinks it was a mistake. "People always ask us if we think we went in too quick," he says. "If we hadn't gone in over there, they would have been over here next."

As for Jessica, she still wants to travel (she wants to see Hawaii, she says, and Jamaica ...), go to college, still wants to teach, but only after she has come further in physical therapy and can hope to keep up with the kindergartners. "It's time," she says, sitting on the stationary bike, gritting her teeth. "It just ... takes ... time." She has that now, and other advantages as well. "She is a good kid, and her parents are good people," Argyros says. "If there's anybody who's going to come out of this and get back as normal as she possibly can, it's going to be Jessica." --With reporting by Mark Thompson/Washington

With reporting by Mark Thompson/Washington