Word: lynch
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...fearsome thing to be turned into an icon, draped with powers and meanings of other people's choosing. To the thousands who wrote letters, sent teddy bears and flowers and handmade quilts, to the millions who prayed for her safety, Lynch is an archetypal American soldier, a symbol of courage under fire. As the challenge in Iraq grows, as the nightly body count reminds us of the terrible risks the soldiers face, people want to show they care. Lynch's is the name they know, and so the letters keep pouring in, and old women press notes scribbled on napkins...
...many died, and her best friend's body was pulled out of a shallow grave on the hospital grounds by the same commandos who rescued her. That friend, Lori Piestewa, is her hero, for staying so calm under fire, as are the soldiers who fought bravely all around her. Lynch herself did not fire a shot and spent most of her time in the humvee huddled in a protective ball. Ask her what she would like to symbolize, and there is a long, long pause. "I haven't really thought about that," she says, even if everyone else...
...Lynch is too intent on moving forward to spend a lot of time looking back. She has read Bragg's book but says she skipped the parts that were too hard to relive, the things that made her parents cry. Ever since she was a child, both her parents say, she was strong-minded, determined. That tenacity, so crucial to her physical recovery, may also be what saves her from being crushed by the attention that now surrounds her. "When it's all over," says her father Greg Lynch, "she'll just be an old country girl"--the label...
...kids, never big on 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...
...Fort Bliss, where she made about $1,100 a month as a supply clerk, keeping records, ordering toilet paper. She thought it would be good business experience and steady, safe. "They told me I'd never probably see the frontline area," she says. It was at Fort Bliss that Lynch found her soul mates: her boyfriend Ruben Contreras and her roommate Lori Piestewa, best friend and protector. Lori was a Hopi Indian, the single mother of two. "We were completely opposite people--two different worlds it seemed like we came from," Lynch says. "But we clicked. She was like...