Word: lynch
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...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 of your mind that something can happen," says Greg Lynch. "You wonder, Is the equipment ready? Have they trained enough? I don't know." He knows all the things that can go wrong even under the best circumstances. "They trained with those trucks on concrete. Bases don't have sand, and they don't have sand like over there...
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...
...antitank weapons, no heavy artillery, just a .50-cal. machine gun that--like the soldier's M-16 rifles--didn't work very well, clogged and jammed with three days' worth of blowing sand. By the time her lost convoy came under fire in the streets of Nasiriyah, Lynch's rifle was about as useful as a hockey stick. The soldiers had been instructed to clean their weapons "anytime we got the chance," Lynch says, "but we never really had a chance...
...that battle and Lynch's cameo in it turned into a breathless movie script, that was less a conscious public relations ploy, Pentagon officials say, than "a comedy of errors." According to several officials, a "single-source intelligence report, nonconfirmed," surfaced detailing the 507th's battle just about the time Lynch was rescued. "It said that our people who ran were killed, and those who put up resistance were captured, and that there was a female who fought to her last breath," a senior Pentagon official said. "It was like a five-line report that wasn't grounded in anything...
...turn down a road that is made, at best, for two skinny cars to get to her house in the hollow. Greg Lynch grew up half a mile from here, in the house his great-grandmother lived in. He picked out the spot for his future home when he was 11 years old. "We raised three kids in four rooms, and we were happy and content," Dee says, "but with Jessi's disability, we just knew there was no way." When they learned their daughter was alive but in a pretty broken state, they debated what they were going...