‘I Am a Soldier’ Tells Jessica Lynch’s Story
By David M. Kinchen
As I’m writing this review of “I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story” (Knopf, $23.95) I’m listening to NPR reports of 16 Italian soldiers dying in a blast in Nasiriyah, the very same city where the 19-year-old West Virginian was critically injured and hospitalized.

Rick Bragg (“All Over but the Shoutin’” and “Ava’s Man”) was the perfect choice to chronicle the story of Pfc. Jessica Lynch of Palestine, W.Va. and the attack on her 507th Maintenance Company convoy in Nasiriyah, Iraq on March 23, 2003, just three days into the controversial war.

Bragg, like Jessica Lynch the subject of media controversy, grew up in Alabama among people very much like Jessica’s parents Greg and Deadra Lynch, people for whom the military is often a step up and out of rural poverty.

Bragg left a prestigious writing job at the New York Times after he was accused of by-line improprieties that strike this veteran of five daily newspapers—including The Milwaukee Sentinel and the Los Angeles Times—as hysterically overwrought. The New York Times lost a wonderful feature writer when Bragg quit in anger earlier this year in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal.

In a little over 200 pages, Bragg tells the story expertly and vividly. He lets Jessica Lynch tell her side of the controversial hospital rescue—which has plenty of “Wag the Dog” elements for those seeking a comparison with the 1997 Barry Levinson film. The doctors and nurses at Saddam Hussein General Hospital had tried to bring Jessica Lynch to American forces, but were turned away by gunfire, Bragg writes. The American soldiers were rightly fearful of a suicide attempt and Pfc. Lynch was spirited back to the hospital.

Considering the conditions at the hospital, Jessica Lynch received excellent care. She was fearful that the doctors would amputate her severely damaged leg. The account of the convoy ambush doesn’t say much for American military equipment: Those M-16 rifles that jammed repeatedly in Vietnam, apparently are still jamming; Humvees could use better crash protection, considering the havoc sustained by Jessica and her comrades in a 45-mile-per-hour crash. Maybe the American military should consider buying Israeli Galil rifles to replace those M-16s; after all, a dozen years ago the military chose Beretta nine-millimeter sidearms to replace the venerable .45s.

Writing with sentiment but without sentimentality, Bragg tells of the welling up of support from people in West Virginia and throughout the country for Jessica and her family. Her family’s A-frame two-bedroom house has been remodeled and doubled in size, to make it handicapped accessible for Jessica. I sense from Bragg’s book that Greg and Dee Lynch, Jessi’s parents, are more than a little overwhelmed by it all. Who wouldn’t be?

Not overlooked is Jessica’s friendship with Lori Piestewa, the Tuba City, Ariz. Comrade in arms who died in the March 23 attack. The Navajo soldier, the first Native American woman to die in combat in U.S. armed forces history, bonded with the green-eyed blonde Miss Congeniality from Wirt County, West Virginia, and Bragg captures this relationship expertly. He performs a similar task with the relationship between Jessica Lynch and her boyfriend—and now fiancé—Sgt. Ruben Contreras. If nothing else, today’s “Army of One” takes people from homogeneous settings like Jessica’s Wirt County to more culturally diverse venues.

Regardless of your views on the Iraq war, “I Am a Soldier, Too” is Rick Bragg at his best in portraying working class Americans doing what’s needed to survive in an economy where family-sustaining jobs are rapidly going overseas to China and other developing countries. The playing field is being leveled, all right; pretty soon we’ll all be level with China!