Jessica Lynch, Hero

By Scott LaBarge

At the same time her Pentagon-inspired image as war hero has been exposed as propaganda, Jessica Lynch has done something genuinely heroic.

Indeed, the can't-miss-story of the small-town West Virginia girl is a classic lesson in the use and abuse of heroic images.

She was first offered to the public as a classic war hero in a Washington Post story reporting a version of events supplied by the Pentagon. The article portrayed Lynch as a valiant soldier who fought off her Iraqi assailants to the last bullet, and who was then rescued from captivity in a blazing fire-fight.

Bit by bit, that story was questioned. It seems now that Lynch never fired a shot, that her wounds were all sustained in an automobile accident, and that her rescuers met no armed resistance. She herself claims to have no memory of her capture. She also asserts that she's not a hero at all, and that the military was wrong to use her as an icon for its own purposes.

She told Diane Sawyer, "They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff....It's wrong."

Society has a long-standing but silent agreement with its soldiers, especially those singled out as heroes. In order to make a war possible, we need to believe that the war serves just causes, that our actions in war are civilized and humane, and that we represent the side of decency and the right. During the war itself, a government exerts great effort to preserve all these appearances.

Our soldiers, however, see the reality of war. They cannot help but witness the brutality and moral complexities which the government tries its best to hide from the rest of us. These soldiers have the opportunity to challenge the government's chosen narrative.

The public, on the other hand, often does not want to hear that narrative challenged. We prefer the elegant moral simplicity of a story which casts us as the righteous heroes and the enemy as villains. So we strike a deal with the soldiers: Don't tell us what it's really like, we say. Don't tell us about the horrors you've seen, don't expose the lies you know have been told. In exchange, you'll be our hero. We'll praise you to the skies for your courage, we'll hold parades in your honor. Some lucky few we'll even turn into well-compensated icons of our national righteousness. All we ask is that you stick to the script.

To her credit, Jessica Lynch refused to accept this deal.

To be sure, she has not come out as an opponent of the war — she's not like the Vietnam vets who protested the Vietnam War and were pilloried for it. Moreover, she has garnered a book deal, a TV movie, and several high profile interviews from her sudden celebrity. But in refusing to be a partner in her own lionization, and in refusing all of the future benefits that such a treatment would bring, she has acheived a degree of dignity that demands respect.

The propaganda machine works in part by taking likeable, sympathetic figures and linking them to the war. If you like and admire this person, they say, how can you challenge the purpose for which this person is fighting? It tries to paint the whole war effort with the attractiveness and nobility of one little part.

Jessica Lynch has refused to be used as a human cog in the propaganda machine. That is an act which genuinely deserves our admiration.

This article orginally appeared in the San Jose Mercury News on November 21, 2003.

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