Jessica Lynch, the Media, and History

The American public only sees short bites of history on the evening news and receives precious little detail in their morning newspapers. Seldom are stories revisited for in-depth analyses. In the case of the invasion of Iraq, reporters were embedded with specific units and were required to stay with units as they advanced toward Baghdad, leaving no time for in-depth reporting.

The story of Jessica Lynch is an excellent example. Initially the news media reported that Jessica fought to her last bullet. That story was quickly recanted. It wasn’t until after the invasion that this story was clarified. Sergeant Donald Walters’s vehicle broke down north of An Nasiriyah, while the 507th was trying to flee from an Iraqi attack. Walters, a blonde-haired veteran of Desert Storm, jumped from his disabled vehicle and returned fire as the other vehicles in his beleaguered convoy turned around and headed back toward the American lines. Walters was left, far behind enemy lines. He resisted as long as he could, but was eventually captured by members of Saddam’s Fedayeen. They took him to an abandoned Iraqi military compound where he was executed. For his selfless heroism, Sergeant Donald Walters was awarded the Army’s Silver Star.

Certainly, we all remember video of Shoshana Johnson, the first black female POW, being questioned on camera by her captors. The news media had few details to report other than American soldiers had been “ambushed” and some had been captured and killed. Initially, even the military did not have the details. Rumors swept through the Marine units approaching Nasiriyah that Iraqis had feigned surrender only to open fire on Jessica’s unit. The fog of war could not have been thicker on March 23rd, 2003.

Embedded reporters, trailing far behind the Marine front-line troops, had little information to report. They only knew that there was a large battle brewing on the horizon. 

The tragic story of the Ambush of the 507th Maintenance Company started the night before. As the 1st Battalion of the 2d Marines moved into position to attack the dusty desert town of Nasiriyah, Captain Troy King’s vehicles raced past the Marines’ armored column and headed directly for an armed camp in An Nasiriyah. Half of Captain King’s maintenance company had fallen well behind the main supply convoy with breakdowns and vehicles mired in the Arabian sand. In his rush to catch up, King missed a critical turn. Now he was leading his thirty-three soldiers into the jaws of death. As they drove past the Marine armored vehicles in the dead of night, Sergeant Curtis Campbell wondered why they were passing combat troops. LtCol Rickey Grabowski, the Marine battalion commander, told me months later that he would have jumped out in the road and stopped them if he knew who they were.

But on that night, with all the vehicle traffic, Colonel Grabowski thought the Army knew what they were doing. Captain King raced forward through the predawn morning and at sunrise he crossed a railroad bridge, rolled past a company of dug-in Iraqi tanks, drove through a manned Iraqi Army check point, over the Euphrates River, through the heart of Nasiriyah, across the Saddam Canal and he continued north for another several kilometers. In the process, he woke every Iraqi with a gun.

Finally, Captain King realized he was lost. He ordered his small convoy to turn around. King would try to retrace his route.  Sergeant James Grubb was exhausted after three days of movement into Iraq. The soldiers of the 507th had little or no sleep in the last 72 hours. Riding shotgun in the Company’s empty fuel truck, Grubb dozed off as soon as the convoy turned around. His nap was quickly interrupted when a bullet ripped through his leg. The doomed convoy had ventured little more than a kilometer when small arms and machine gun fire erupted all around them. Armed Iraqis were swarming out onto the road, trying to stop the sixteen vehicles.

In the lead, Captain King had his driver accelerate. In their panic, they missed the turn that would take them back south through Nasiriyah and across the Euphrates to Grabowski’s advancing Marines. The convoy would have to turn around – again. It was on this dusty road, 3 kilometers northeast of Nasiriyah that Sergeant Walters made his heroic stand while Captain King and the lead three vehicles quickly turned and ran the gauntlet back across the Saddam Canal, through the city streets of Nasiriyah, back over the Euphrates River, and south to the railroad bridge.

Sergeant Joel Petrik was driving the trailing vehicle in this first group. The Iraqis were doing everything they could to stop their retreat. They were shooting and throwing obstacles into the road. The Iraqis had blocked the road just north of the railroad bridge. King’s driver swerved off the road avoiding the roadblock then back up onto the road, followed by Petrik. As Petrik crested the last bridge, he saw Grabowski’s lead tanks on the horizon. “Please don’t let them shoot, ‘cause they don’t miss,” he thought.

The second group of five vehicles managed to get across the railroad bridge, but all five were disabled in a hail of gunfire and RPGs. Campbell and nine other soldiers took refuge in a trench, vowing that they would fight to the death.

The third and final group of vehicles never made it to the railroad bridge. All the soldiers in this group were either captured or killed. Lori Piestewa was driving 1st Sergeant Robert Dowdy’s Humvee. Jessica Lynch was riding in the bed of the truck. Dowdy had remained behind to shepherd the trailing vehicles to safety. In the middle of the ambush, Dowdy and Piestewa picked up Sergeant George Buggs and Specialist Edward Anguiano when their vehicle broke down. They jumped in the back with Lynch.

With the railroad bridge in sight, an explosion rocked the flatbed that SPC Edgar Hernandez was driving. He swerved off the road and jackknifed. Lori couldn’t react fast enough and slammed her vehicle into the back of the flatbed, instantly killing Sergeant Dowdy. Lori and Jessica were pulled from the wreckage by the Iraqis and taken to a nearby hospital and Lori died while being treated.

Once the Marines realized that American soldiers were trapped behind enemy lines, Brigadier General Richard Natonski ordered Colonel Grabowski to accelerate his attack and he concluded with, “We have to do what we can to save those soldiers. They would do it for us.”

The short media account of captured American soldiers and the ambush of the 507th by Iraqis feigning surrender was not even close to what happened. I spent two and a half years researching the battle for An Nasiriyah for Marines in the Garden of Eden. I conducted nearly one hundred interviews. I spent much of that time trying to sort out what really happened to the soldiers of the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company. I personally interviewed four of the survivors of the ambush and many Marines who came upon the scene of the ambush within an hour of the event.

Jessica’s story, and the story of the thirty-two soldiers who were with her, is truly tragic. Eleven were killed, six were captured, and a dozen others wounded. Had it not been for Marines racing to their aid, ten others would have been captured or killed. A week after the ambush, Jessica’s rescue was just as dramatic. She was the first American prisoner of war to be successfully rescued since World War II. The operation was expertly executed with not a single injury on either side. Jessica’s 70 pound shattered body was whisked to safety within ten minutes of the first American boots hitting the ground.

With the commercialization of the traditional news media, 21st Century authors and historians have a new responsibility. We have to tell the story of what is happening around us, and tell it accurately. Then, and only then, will readers have the resources they need to understand our rapidly changing world and make informed decisions when it is time to vote.