I Am a Soldier, Too : The Jessica Lynch Story
Author:
Genre: Biographies & Memoirs
Book Type: Paperback
Author:
Genre: Biographies & Memoirs
Book Type: Paperback
Only Rick Bragg's skill as a journalist keeps this from being a total car wreck. The story of Jessica Lynch, a 19-year-old small-town girl captured in the early days of the Iraqi war, is ultimately a story composed of equal parts bathos and outrage.
Lynch, who grew up in a blue-collar family in West Virginia, followed many of her friends and classmates into the military,and for the same reason -- it promised a path out of the hollers, money for college, and a chance to see the world. Buried in the small print was the reality that soldiers sometimes go to war, and the promise of a clerical job stateside isn't always kept.
How Jessica and her companions ended up in a brutal firefight in an Iraqi city they had been specifically warned to avoid, with equipment that refused to function and communications that failed, is the story of incompetence, carelessness, and criminal unpreparedness. Captured, brutalized, dumped near death on the doorstep of an Iraqi hospital, Jessica was ultimately the subject of a rescue mission that caught the imagination of the world and whose methods and later promotion only later began to be questioned.
Again, Bragg is a professional journalist (as well as a hell of a writer), and he never lets the story slant off the straight and narrow. But neither does he gloss over the fact that mistakes, miscalculations, and negligence by Jessica's superior officers led to the death of seven of her companions and the wounding of eleven more.
Early on, as the background of Jessica's early life is spun out, the book drags somewhat, picking up only with the events leading up to her capture, bouncing back and forth between Iraq and West Virginia. The balance of the book, outlining her rescue, recovery, and return home, are actually more compelling than the battle scenes, and even harder to forget or dismiss.
It's an honest and thoughtful book that digs deep into the heart of America and takes a hard look at what we really ask of our children in times of conflict.
Lynch, who grew up in a blue-collar family in West Virginia, followed many of her friends and classmates into the military,and for the same reason -- it promised a path out of the hollers, money for college, and a chance to see the world. Buried in the small print was the reality that soldiers sometimes go to war, and the promise of a clerical job stateside isn't always kept.
How Jessica and her companions ended up in a brutal firefight in an Iraqi city they had been specifically warned to avoid, with equipment that refused to function and communications that failed, is the story of incompetence, carelessness, and criminal unpreparedness. Captured, brutalized, dumped near death on the doorstep of an Iraqi hospital, Jessica was ultimately the subject of a rescue mission that caught the imagination of the world and whose methods and later promotion only later began to be questioned.
Again, Bragg is a professional journalist (as well as a hell of a writer), and he never lets the story slant off the straight and narrow. But neither does he gloss over the fact that mistakes, miscalculations, and negligence by Jessica's superior officers led to the death of seven of her companions and the wounding of eleven more.
Early on, as the background of Jessica's early life is spun out, the book drags somewhat, picking up only with the events leading up to her capture, bouncing back and forth between Iraq and West Virginia. The balance of the book, outlining her rescue, recovery, and return home, are actually more compelling than the battle scenes, and even harder to forget or dismiss.
It's an honest and thoughtful book that digs deep into the heart of America and takes a hard look at what we really ask of our children in times of conflict.
