Word: jessica
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...When it's all over," says her father Greg Lynch, "she'll just be an old country girl"--the label a shorthand for the virtues that matter, like kindness and toughness. For all the attention, all the books and banners and presents and parades, her parents understand that Jessica Lynch has become a convenient emblem for this war, its first name and memorable face. "But there's other soldiers with names and faces and families just like us," says her mother Dee Lynch. "I hope people don't forget. They need just as much prayer and support as us. This...
...sleepovers. She had a hard time when Greg Jr. went off to college. He did his first year on scholarship and was trying to work, but he didn't have the money for his second year. When the Army recruiter came from Parkersburg, all three Lynch kids--Greg, Jessica and Brandi--were interested in what he had to say. He talked about the travel and the training they would get. This was the summer of 2001, before there was even a whisper of war in the air. But "he did not lie to the kids," Dee says. He said there...
...someone who loved the idea of traveling, wanted to go to college and believed deeply in duty and service, the Army was a natural choice--and yet pretty much everyone, her classmates, her family, was surprised that Jessica would join up along with Greg. She was, Dee says, "a prissy tomboy, if there is such a thing," the girl for whom, even when she was out playing on the hillside, "her socks and hair bows had to match." In third grade when she broke her arm, the doctor gave her a pink cast, and she went...
...mother's sick feeling when I heard the word deployment," Dee says. "But I thought, Oh, she's in supply, she'll be safe, she'll never be close to any actual fighting. I trusted her unit, trusted the Army that she got the proper training." Jessica even had a special advantage. She had grown up with her dad's Kenworth cabover truck in the front yard; he gets $1 a mile driving anywhere from Florida to Connecticut. Now she would be the one steering five-ton trucks full of supplies to the front. "It's always in the back...
What they got, in Jessica Lynch's case, was not just one bad break but one after another in the first days of the war. The battle plan didn't allow for engines ambushed by sand. And judgment and reflexes are not sharpened by three days with no sleep. "To me, we weren't ready," Lynch says. "But obviously they wouldn't have sent us over there if they didn't think we were ready." The 507th Maintenance Company was at the very end of an 8,000-vehicle, 100-mile-long supply convoy. From the start, Lynch says...