Well, excuse me for exercising my right to freedom of speech. Of course, not having been in active combat myself, I have no right to comment on this subject.
So, which part exactly of this statement is factually incorrect / insulting:
Hero? Hah! It’s not like she’s a football player or something real important.
Y’know, samarm, I am frankly speechless that you could post that about a severely injured person who, if the media reports are correct, and I will admit that is always a big if, fought like a cornered wildcat for her country and not see how it is insulting to her.
Uhh… how is an armed, uniformed soldier a “non combatant?”
She was the very DEFINITION of a combatant.
OK I can see how what I said could be taken as insulting, and I’m sorry if that was how you read it. It wasn’t my intention. I want to make it clear that I have admiration for her courage and bravery. What I was driving at was that there are many other heroes in this war who go unmentioned. There are men and women who give their lives for their country - and they are little more than a statistic. I’m just trying to bring a little perspective to the picture. In any case, and FWIW, Doctor Goo Fee’s post makes a lot of sense to me - maybe he expressed my thoughts better than I was able.
That was big of you, samarm. No hard feelings on my part, and you’re right – a lot of people have done tremendous things that have not been noted by the media.
Hmm… you know I’m not sure what that means either. I guess it doesn’t make much sense - how can a soldier at war not be a combatant? It was a term I read somewhere. If I have time I will try to find out more about what this means exactly.
Peyote: 
samarm:
First and formost, honoring heros is not about the heros themselves: it’s for everyone else. On a cynical level, you can certainly claim that it is so that we can convince future gerenations of barely-adults to do what is, on the face of it, patently illogical: risk pain and death for the sake of someone’s else’s ideals. If you are less cynical, you can say that heros are so that we never forget the cost of war, and that by honoring heros we make sure that when we decide to go to war, we do so with a full understanding of the cost we are paying.
Either way, Lynch makes a better hero than a dead person. It’s alfully hard to imagene being dead. We’ve never been dead. We’ve never talked to anyonr whose been dead for any appriciable time. On the other hand, we’ve all experienced pain and lonliness and terror: not to the degree that Lynch did, by any means, but enough that we have a taste of it and can begin to get a glimpse of what she endured. We can identify with Jessica Lynch.
The celebrated hero is always a representitive: it’s the nature of the beast. This isn’t new phenomenon brought on by the fact that Lynch is female–it happened in every war we’ve fought.
Regarding Lynch’s “combatant” status: She was a clerk in a supply outfit, by definition a non-combat position.
(She was with a resupply convoy that made a wrong turn, not a combat patrol. On the other hand, I would hope that all units near the front are armed, given the fluid (not to say porous) nature of the lines in the early days of the war.
Regarding her heroic defense: I have seen it reported several times, but I have not seen an official statement from the military, so I do not yet know how true the story is.
Regarding her being alone in her fight: the convoy was separated into either two or three parts after the ambush. The description given in the version where she fought on alone (remember, still not confirmed) was that group she was with had been separated from the group from which the other prisoners were taken.
I do not have an opinion on what was “most likely” true, since the fog of war obscures all such events. I simply passed on one scenario that had been mentioned in the media.
As was touched on upthread, the media during wartime loves symbols. Lynch, being a photogenic young female soldier is the perfect symbol to be a media darling.
As far as being a “hero”, it’s an open interpretation. The “She fired till she ran out of ammo” thing is what is expected of all soldiers. Maybe she saved some fellow soldiers, who knows?
If so, she deserves to be decorated.
As a former member of the army (1st/79th FA 7th Div), I can say that the troops of her unit who were killed surely did the same if they had the chance.
While they were in a supply outfit, they were far enough up the front to be considered combatants, though they surely didn’t expect to come under fire.
I think she just did her job, which is fucking good enough.
I’m not going to stand on my soapbox and give my patriotic speech, but as a counselor for disabled combat veterans I can assure you that she deserves every ounce of respect you can muster up.
She is a hero just as every other soldier out there fighting are heros. She might not be a hero because she was wounded or that she emptied her gun, but she sure as hell is a hero for being there in the first place.
How many of us would be willing to trade places with a soldier right now?
And Diane as you said it better than I, my last line is what you said. Any soldier out there doing the job is worthy of respect.
They are all heroes in my book!
According to some reports she killed at least three Iraqi soldiers during the attack, and she kept fighting even with multiple gunshot wounds and after several of her fellow soldiers had been killed…
If those reports are true, she’s a fucking hero AFAIAC.
IMHO, there’s a bit more to it.
It’s not just that she fought so hard. She’s a soldier. That’s expected.
But she is also a she. And a freaking kid, to boot. She’s 19 years old. A 19-year-old girl, fighting like that. I’m 35, and thinking back to what I was like when I was 19…no way in hell I could have done what she’s done.
Maybe somebody who hasn’t had so much exposure to aluminum cans can remember the details, but a few years ago some guy got shot down or something and spent two days eating bugs before he was rescued. Almost immediately after he was universally declared a hero, a controversy broke out about what the minimum conditions for herohood actually were. Well, it wasn’t resolved by the time the world got bored with this guy, and now I can only remember him in a broad way.
My initial take on Jessica Lynch was that if nothing else she had a greater claim to heroism than that guy. I found the story, as it was given at the time, clearly inspiring. She had two broken legs, she fought until she was out of ammo, and even then she had to be stabbed to subdue her. It turns out that the gunshot and stab wounds mentioned in the Washington Post report were falsely reported. I wondered after this if there was anything of the initial report that was true.
She is destined to become the linchpin (as it were) of someone’s argument about women in the military no matter what happens. But whose argument depends on things we can’t know now, and I’m not sure I want the media to talk about – was she raped, and if she emptied her gun at the enemy, was it out of fear of rape?
Some facts (not speculation) about her injuries:
From the offical Army website:
http://www.dtic.mil/armylink/news/stories/Apr2003/a20030404Lynch.html
Please do not flame me for this (see my most recent posts for my views of Lynch). I’m just correcting some assumptions.
According to a lot of the news sources I’ve seen, you are a hero if you are out there full stop. It is only when you do something bad that you lose hero status and get demoted to “mere human being”.
Thank you for the info samarm.
I don’t see how you would be flamed for that.
Of course, this IS the Pit…j/k, thanks again