Posted on 11/09/2003 10:44:09 AM PST by Destro
November 9, 2003
FRANK RICH
Pfc. Jessica Lynch Isn't Rambo Anymore
Ah, the dazzling pyrotechnics of "shock and awe." The finality of the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue. The thrill of that re-enactment of "Top Gun." The sense of closure provided by the banner reading "Mission Accomplished." Like all wars of the TV age, the war in Iraq is not just a clash of armies, but a succession of iconic images. Those who control the images, and the narratives they encapsulate, control history. At least until a new reality crashes in.
Few of this war's images have had such longevity or proven more pliable than that of the smiling face of Pfc. Jessica Lynch. In the seven months of virtual silence since her rescue from a Nasiriya hospital, she has become the Mona Lisa of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Americans have been able to read into her pleasant but unrevealing snapshot whatever story they choose. Those stories, usually imposed on her by others, have become a Rorschach test for homefront mood swings.
When American forces were bogged down in the war's early days, she was the happy harbinger of an imminent military turnaround: a 19-year-old female Rambo who tried to blast her way out of the enemy's clutches, taking out any man who got in her way. When those accounts turned out to be largely fiction, she became a symbol of Bush administration propaganda and the press's war-time credulity in buying it. Then came her months of muffled recuperation: a metaphor for the low-grade fever of inertia and unease that has set in at home in the months since that Saddam statue fell.
But Private Lynch is not a passive player in her narrative any more. At a crucial moment in Iraq, as American casualties pile up and the poll numbers of support for our "post-victory" engagement there go down, she's getting ready for her close-up. Tonight NBC broadcasts its unofficial dramatization of her rescue, the movie "Saving Jessica Lynch," timed to jump the gun on the Tuesday publication of Private Lynch's own book, "I Am a Soldier, Too." The days ahead bring her whirlwind tour of the promotional stations of the cross, starting with appearances with Diane and Katie, punctuated by a visit to the Letterman couch for spice.
Few authors deserve book sales and attention more than this brave young woman from Palestine, W.Va., who joined the Army to see the world after failing to land a job at Wal-Mart. But now, as in every other step of her time in the spotlight, the way her story plays out may tell us more about a country at war than it does about our hero.
Take, for instance, tonight's surprising "Saving Jessica Lynch," as written by John Fasano and drawn in part from the account of Mohammed Odeh Al-Rehaief, the Iraqi lawyer who has written his own book about how he risked his life to lead American forces to Private Lynch. The movie begins with the inevitable disclaimer that "some characters, scenes and events in whole or in part have been created for dramatic purposes." Even so, given the facts as we know them to date, it is startling in its relative accuracy — more than earlier reportage by The Washington Post (which attributed its initial Rambo version to "U.S. officials") and The New York Times (whose reporter Jayson Blair fictionalized some of the paper's Lynch coverage).
The Lynch of this film has not been pumped up with steroids. She's a supply clerk gravely injured in a Humvee collision, not G.I. Jessica spraying bullets in a shootout. (She has only a sprinkling of lines in the entire movie, many of them in flashbacks to prewar West Virginia.) The American forces that rescue her encounter no "blaze of gunfire," as was described in an early Los Angeles Times account attributed to "defense officials and reports from the battlefield," but instead confront only compliant doctors and nurses. The White House is portrayed as being disproportionately focused on the urgency of this single mission, for no apparent purpose other than p.r. As for Iraq itself, it is presented as a shooting gallery whose citizens despise Saddam but can also be skeptical of their American liberators. Al-Rehaief's own wife tells him that he has been "poisoned" by all "those John Wayne movies."
What does it say that "Saving Jessica Lynch" is more candid than much of the reportage on the war? It wasn't that long ago when correspondents on NBC's sibling network, MSNBC, were enthusing about President Bush's aircraft-carrier landing as "the president's excellent adventure." The movie even pays a dramatic price for its integrity; a reasonable approximation of the truth is less exciting than the bogus reports of Lynch-as-John Wayne. While its title character is still a hero, as she must be, the movie portrays Private Lynch as a lowly pawn of larger, mysterious forces operating in the shadows, whether in Baghdad or Washington.
"Saving Jessica Lynch" is not to be confused with "The Deer Hunter," but its existence as prime-time entertainment during the commercially calculating ratings wars of a sweeps week reflects another change in the country's mood, toward harder-nosed realism and away from unrestrained triumphalism. The so-called "Fox effect" on the other networks may finally be relinquishing some of its hold — except at CBS. This week it replayed its craven Vietnam-era cancellation of the Smothers Brothers by yanking its "Reagans" mini-series after fire from right-wing bloviators and the Republican National Committee.
To counter "Saving Jessica Lynch" tonight, CBS is making the patriotic gesture of fielding "The Elizabeth Smart Story," a cheesy movie about another blond teenager, whose captivity ended a few weeks before Private Lynch's last spring. But the biggest threat to Private Lynch's media rollout this week is not the Smarts, whose tireless and tasteless exploitation of their daughter's trials have made them the most unwelcome parents to invade American living rooms since JonBenet Ramsey's. The real competition to Private Lynch is competing war imagery — that of the continuing bloodshed in Iraq.
The Chinook helicopter brought down last Sunday — accounting for 16 out of the day's 19 American casualties — was the most grueling replay imaginable of the most catastrophic war image of recent years, the downing of a helicopter that led to 18 American casualties in Mogadishu in 1993. Though the military turned away reporters who tried to visit the site of the new crash, the available long-shot views of the broken chopper were enough to rekindle those nightmarish 1993 images as well as Hollywood's still-fresh re-creation of the incident, "Black Hawk Down." That movie was supposed to be a favorite of Saddam's, and not without reason. As Time reported back in April, American officials believe it was distributed by the Iraqi command to its officers before the war as an instructional video guide to American defeat.
Private Lynch, a woman who risked her life for her country for entirely altruistic reasons and survived, should by all rights make us feel better at this low point in the Iraq story. The timing of her new emergence parallels that of her initial capture, in the aftermath of another helicopter crash in which the first four American casualties of the war occurred. Her book has been kept under wraps before release by its publisher, Knopf, but you can sense the upbeat flavor from any of the few sample sentences that have seeped out in advance, such as: "Back home, boys with tears in their eyes had offered to marry her, to build her a brand-new house, anything, to get her to stay forever in the high, green lonesome." The writer on the project is Rick Bragg, a former Times reporter famous for this brand of inspirational poetry.
But through no fault of Private Lynch's, she may not be the antidote to bad news in November that she was in April. The steady drumbeat of casualties is making it harder for those who pushed her into the limelight at the time of the rescue to control the stories butting against her happy ending. In broadcasting the first reports of "Chinook Down" last Sunday morning, the normally unflappable Bob Schieffer of CBS News raised his voice as he said, "If this is winning, you have to ask the question: How much more of this winning can we stand?" Later that day, on ABC's "World News Tonight," the correspondent John Berman captured a "M*A*S*H" moment when a military medic attending the American wounded looked directly at the camera and said, " `All major combat operations have ceased' " — after which he winked and, with a roll of his eyes, added a sarcastic, "Right!"
The Bush administration tries to shut down pictures as effectively as it has stonewalled Congressional committees and the bipartisan commissions looking into intelligence failures surrounding 9/11. On the day of the Chinook's fall, the president stayed off-camera on his ranch in Crawford, resting up for his next round of fund-raisers, and sent out only a written statement of grief. Reuters reported on Monday that journalists seeking access to Ramstein, the American air base in Germany to which Private Lynch was first taken, had been told that the defense department would not lift its policy prohibiting photographs of flag-draped coffins, even for the Chinook casualties. The president did not go to the funerals of the nine fellow soldiers who died in the same ambush that led to Private Lynch's capture; he hasn't gone to any funerals for soldiers killed in action, The Washington Post reports.
Two weeks ago, after spending the day visiting the wounded at Walter Reed, the same hospital where Private Lynch recuperated upon returning to the United States, Cher, of all people, crystallized the game plan. She called into C-Span to tell of her experience talking with "a boy about 19 or 20 who had lost both his arms" and then asked: "Why are none of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bremer, the president — why aren't they taking pictures with all these guys? Because I don't understand why these guys are so hidden and why there aren't pictures of them."
The answer is clear enough: the fewer of these images we see, someone hopes, the less likely we'll realize the story that goes with them. Certainly the new plot they tell is simple enough: what began as a war at a time of our choosing has become a war at the time of the enemy's choosing. It may be asking too much of even a patriot like Private Lynch to pretty up this picture as she takes her show on the road.
Which means that it's crap.
...she's getting ready for her close-up. Tonight NBC broadcasts its unofficial dramatization of her rescue...
It's common knowledge that they created this movie without her consent, or input. To turn around and imply that it's all a publicity stunt, is (again) crap.
The so-called "Fox effect" on the other networks may finally be relinquishing some of its hold — except at CBS... yanking its "Reagans" mini-series after fire from right-wing bloviators and the Republican National Committee.
The uproar was due to "The Reagans" being a blatant and vicious fiction... I suppose that truth is irrelevant??? < /sarcasm >
You must be talking about the new Jessica Lynch. We all loved the old one, the red blooded gutsy all American girl.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that the 19-year-old Army supply clerk shot several Iraqi soldiers during the March 23 ambush that resulted in her capture. She kept firing even after she had several gunshot wounds, finally running out of ammunition, the newspaper said, citing unidentified U.S. officials. "She was fighting to the death," the Post quoted an official as saying. "She did not want to be taken alive."
I can understand your frustration with this story, but I'm not sure where this came from. Though she is engaged to be married, this doesn't seem like a fair characterization.
Leni
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