The Hell with Heroes
Why should we prefer a lie over the truth?
Even when the truth is far more interesting than the fiction?
The fiction was that Jessica Lynch was a hero in Iraq.
"Five years ago, America needed heroes. Just three days into a polarizing war with Iraq, the 507th Maintenance Company, the last in a column of 600 vehicles making its way toward Baghdad, got mired in sand with jammed weapons.Over a period of 60 to 70 hours with little rest and limited communications, the company, composed in part of welders, mechanics, and cooks, was isolated and stretched to its limit.
Then it got lost. As the 507th soldiers, members of a Patriot missile support group, drove through the city of Nasiriyah--the result of a navigational error--Iraqi residents appeared more stunned than hostile. When the unit made a U-turn and passed through the town again in an effort to rejoin its convoy, it ran headlong into what the U.S. Army's official report of the day describes as a "torrent of fire." Of the 33 soldiers from the 507th who were involved in the attack, 11 were killed, nine were wounded, and seven were taken captive.
...
From this backdrop emerged Pvt. Jessica Lynch.
She was tiny and blond, and military officials did not dispute the notion that she went down fighting.
"Reports are that she fired until she had no more ammunition," then Capt. Frank Thorp, a senior military spokesman in the Persian Gulf, said at the time.
America was looking for a hero, the media were anxious to supply one, and in the fog of war, the military was loath to disabuse the nation of its admiration for a soldier who had indisputably been through so much.
"There was never, ever any intentional deception involving Lynch," says Thorp, now a rear admiral. But that did not dampen the nation's desire for a hero.
That's America," he adds. "We want heroes, in baseball, in politics, in our day-to-day life."
Ok, I get this: we all want to believe that someone is significantly better, someone to look up to, and perhaps fill the void for our lack of graven images.
But consider what did happen that day.
"As the details and facts of the 507th capture began to emerge, Patrick Miller's role in the immediate aftermath of the attack garnered relatively little attention.But in her congressional testimony nearly one year ago, Jessica Lynch singled out Miller as one of the soldiers whose real heroics that day were "legendary," one "who actually did fight until the very end."
As his truck doubled back through town and was disabled by gunfire, then Private Miller ran beyond the crash site. Miller says that it was not his intention to get in a firefight. He simply wanted to see if he could get a stalled truck started again and in doing so, get some of his fellow soldiers out of town. But he saw an Iraqi setting up a mortar pit on the back side of a truck. "I thought, 'Holy s - - -,' " he says. "So I shot, and he fell down."
With no one else in the mortar pit, Miller pivoted, and as he turned, he found himself "looking straight at an rpg."
He hit the ground behind a mound of earth as it exploded.
"There was dirt everywhere," he says.
After checking to see if he still had arms and legs, Miller looked back toward the mortar area.
"And there's another guy trying to load the tube, and I shot him," he says."And I did that probably six more times after that."
He turned around and fired more shots at a man to his rear. "And he didn't get up."
When he turned around to look at the mortar pit again, there were "30 or 40 guys standing on the road."
At that point, Miller began disassembling his weapon. "I popped one pin out of the assembly," he says, and threw the parts in every direction "so they wouldn't use it against us."
As soon as he finished doing that, he was gang-tackled.
There was an argument then, he says, about who exactly was going to take him. They removed his Kevlar body armor and, in doing so, found in his helmet a piece of paper with numbers written on it. They were military radio frequencies, but "I told them they were prices for power steering pumps." That bit of fast thinking came to him, he says, as a result of the errands he was running to get his car fixed just before he went to war. "I don't know what the hell they were thinking, but they threw [that piece of paper] in the fire."
Read the entire article on Jessica Lynch and others and then tell me why we prefer fiction to fact, even when the facts are more interesting.
