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Jessica Lynch and the Captivity Narrative
by Ashleigh Crowther, posted October 17, 2007
Army Pfc. Jessica D. Lynch was born in 1983 in Palestine, West Virginia. She was serving in Iraq with the 507th Maintenance Company when her convoy became lost near Nasiriya and was ambushed on March 23, 2003. On April 1, 2003, the Associated Press broke the story that Lynch had been rescued from an Iraqi military hospital by US forces. What followed was a series of conflicting accounts of what actually happened in those 10 days between the attack and her return to US custody, and a deconstruction of the war-hero archetype and the traditional captivity narrative. A sensational piece appeared on the cover of the Washington Post on April 3, 2003. Titled "She Was Fighting to the Death," the article quoted US officials who claimed that Lynch had shot her rifle until it ran out of ammunition before her capture. As for Lynch's "rescue" from the Iraqi hospital, it described an action movie-style "Special Operations raid, with U.S. commandos in Black Hawk helicopters engaging Iraqi forces on their way in and out of the medical compound," and a makeshift torture chamber in the hospital's basement. Conveniently for tv journalists, the "rescuers" caught the whole operation on tape; the Pentagon released the footage to the networks on April 2, saying that Lynch had been slapped and interrogated in the hospital.
The portrayal of Lynch fighting Stallone-style until her capture was discredited. In a June 17, 2003 front page story, the Washington Post re-examined its April 3 story, admitting that Lynch had never fired her gun, which had been jammed. Jessica Lynch herself denied the "little girl Rambo" story, testifying in a hearing for the House Government Reform Committee on April 24, 2007.
The accounts of poor treatment of Lynch in Saddam Hospital in Nasiriya were discredited by Iraqi doctors and hospital staff. In a May 15, 2003 article in The Guardian, Dr Harith al-Houssona- the doctor who cared for Lynch during her time at Saddam Hospital- said that Lynch had been treated well during her stay. He said that she had been assigned her own nurse, and that hospital staff had even donated their own blood to help save her life. On April 1, US "rescue" troops had arrived in a helicopter, threatened the hospital staff with guns, and restrained them with plastic ties, even though the US agents knew that there were no Iraqi soldiers in the hospital at the time.
When the image of Lynch as a tough-girl POW survivor who braved torture was dissolved by the British press, the American media became confused about how to portray Lynch. When she could no longer fit into the masculine warrior hero archetype, she was transformed into its traditional feminine foil: the battered woman.
This role-reversal came on November 11, 2003, when Rick Bragg's biography of Lynch, I Am A Soldier Too was released. The book claimed that Lynch had been sexually assaulted during the attack, and media outlets such as CNN and USA Today siezed on the story.
The rape claims made by Bragg came under scrutiny days before the biography's release when Dr. Mahdi Khafazji, an orthopedic surgeon at Nasiriyah's main hospital who operated on Lynch shortly after the attack, told CBS News that he had seen no signs of sexual assault during his examination of her.
Some observers saw the rape accusations as a narrative device in framing Lynch as a helpless female. "The allegations of sexual assault fit into a patriarchal captivity narrative, that assists in the heightening of a sense of outrage at the supposed barbaric behaviour of Iraqi soldiers, in comparison to the chivalric rescuers, the U.S. military," said Dr. Sara Buttsworth, author of "Who’s Afraid of Jessica Lynch? Or, One Girl in all the World? Gendered Heroism and the Iraq War."
So was the entire thing a male-chauvinist plot to feminize Lynch's war experience? Not exactly, according to Joshua Goldstein, author of War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. "In my opinion there was definitely a rush to turn Jessica Lynch's story into a damsel-in-distress story and to misconstrue the facts when they didn't fit," he said, but added, "there's no big effort to force a gender stereotype onto stories about women soldiers, nor are they a novelty anymore."
In other words, the media was not trying to stereotype Lynch as a female soldier. They were trying to tell her tale in the most convenient terms possible- the "woman warrior" vs. the "damsel in distress"- the ready-made templates that have been used time and time again.
Sources:
Bragg, Rick. I Am A Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story. New York: Knopf, 2003.
Latest page update: made by AshleighC
, Oct 16 2007, 11:52 PM EDT
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