Nice pick your brain kind of article with lots of info I hadn't really heard before. Plus she is looking like a little hottie...
Posted on 09/11/2006 10:48:52 AM PDT by steel_resolve
Running is something I want to get back to. I last went running in Kuwait, on the sand. Before we went to Iraq.
I wanted to think it's like riding a bicycle, you don't forget. I've tried on a treadmill, but it's not pretty. It's getting back into learning how to do it.
What were the odds? For me to be one of a few POWs out of all the soldiers deployed? It was a definite shock.
There have been times when my physical abilities and mental abilities have been tested. But that also keeps me going.
My brother and I signed up on the same day in July 2001. When I left for basic on Sept. 19, it was a week later, and I was kind of scared. I was afraid they would ship us straight from basic to the war, but I didn't know anything then.
Most of the earlier stories about what happened to me were untrue. I think people wanted the story to turn out with that whole Rambo-style shooting, the things that didn't really happen. They wanted that fairy tale story.
(Excerpt) Read more at postgazette.com ...
God bless Jessica Lynch and all like her who endure hardship on our behalf.
I heard she became a multimillionairre after she became the most famous wounded/captured person in the Irag War II. Book and movie rights deals, product endorcements, etc. Is that correct?
It's the pregnancy.
yeah, I think I heard that also.
...with the boyfriend...not exactly my poster girl for God and country.
Colonel, USAFR
She sounds like the wave of liberal GI Jane mentality stuff just kind of swept her along. The Libs wanted her to be a Ranbo, but she was just a soldier doing her job.
I always felt a bit of extra sympathy for her...I got the impression she was not able to heal and come to terms with what happened to her in peace.
If she is a millionare...good for her. I wish all of our military people could be millionares. They certainly put a priceless chip on the gambling table...their lives.
Jessica Lynch is a disgrace.
She comes home to a multi-million dollar book/movie deal, and for what? Never firing a shot because she failed to clean her weapon, and cuddling up in the fetal position in her vehicle?
How many lives did she cost because she never returned fire? The convoy was one man/rifle short because of her irresponsibility and abject disregard for maintaining the bare minimum of her equipment.
How many people died because of this?
How many have done and accomplished so much more and never returned to lucrative business deals, talk show appearances, etc?
Hell, the Army now has the new "Soldier's Creed" which is basically the anti-Jessica Lynch creed
"I will never accept defeat.I will never quit....I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills. I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself. I will always maintain my arms, my equipment, and myself."
You know, pretty much everything she failed to do.
Talk to anyone in a real unit, and they will tell you everything I just said and more.
Absolute disgrace.
I haven't seen her in any product endorsements, her book deal and TV movie deal probably made her a few hundred grand at most, not multiple millions.
Well, at least the kid will have a stable home life. How noble.
I don't know which active duty soldiers you have been talking to... none of those around me feel the same way, nor do I.
They there armchair, thanks for your opinion. I'll file it in the appropriate place.
They there = Hey there.
Armchair? I, unlike you, am in the military.
My, how sanctimonious.
After taxes and agents' and lawyers' fees, depending on various factors, that's probably 400K or less net.
I'm sure she made other money on interviews or speaking engagements, but I doubt it all adds up to even a million.
So he is refusing to marry her, I guess.
Yeah, I have little respect for those people who get others killed due to their own negligence and then monetarily rewarded when they come home.
Plus, what about Lashonda Williams? Why wasn't there a media hug-fest over her being a 'hero'? Why didn't she get a Lifetime movie and a Simon and Schuster book deal?
So is she anything less than Lynch?
Yes, it is unfortunate that Lynch was taken prisoner...but when you don't fire a shot because your weapon is too dirty to fire, because you failed to clean it and/or even know how to operate, even though you are in COMBAT...
Wow - loss of words here...
What about my buddy from the 3rd ID that got hit with an RPG? He maintained his equipment, he fired his weapon, he didn't curl up in the fetal position in the back of his Abrams, spent months in recovery...but yet he gets no book/movie deal, Oprah appearance, etc?
The way I read wideawakes comment, it seems like he agrees with you, yet you disagree with his agreement?
She wasn't a pretty blonde white girl - the ultimate crime in the land of mass media.
her reasoning:
(1) Lynch claimed that her weapon "malfunctioned" and that therefore she was unable to use it during the 45 minute engagement. My s-i-l pointed out that everyone was extensively trained in the SPORTS technique for unjamming jammed M16s and that the process takes a minute or so, and that they were repeatedly drilled on it before deployment precisely because of the desert conditions.
(2) Lynch admitted that once her weapon jammed she panicked and curled up in a ball, crying. Other women present, including the deceased Lori Piestewa had the presence of mind to assist others in trying to extricate themselves.
My s-i-l feels that if Lynch couldn't get her weapon to fire she should have helped out in other ways, by resupplying other soldiers with ammunition, helping other soldiers establish communications with air support or anything else besides lying on the ground crying.
(3) That nothing Lynch did merited a Bronze Star.
I take the opinion of a woman who served as a captain in Iraq on attacked convoys fairly seriously.
As much as I hate when people pull the race card...in this case, it fits like a glove.
She should not have been within 2,000 miles of combat to start with.
The MSM has a sick obsession with bad things happening to pretty blond white girls. JonBenet Ramsey, Natalee Holloway, etc... none of these would have gotten remotely as much coverage if they'd been black.
Yep.
...........as the late, great Yogi Berra said (or supposedly said....), "this is deja-vu all over
again....." didn't we go through a 400 or so posting
knock-em-down and drag-em-out a few weeks ago regarding this rather pregnant, Bronze Star-holding celebrity...??
geeeshhhhh; let this one rest......
She NEVER fired her weapon when her convoy was being ambushed. How many lives could that one rifle possibly saved?
If Princess Diana had weighed 200 pounds, no one would have cared that she died in a car accident.
Umm...Yogi isn't "late" just quite yet. He is still alive and kicking.
I am not defending Lynch - far from it.
I am pointing out that instant celebrity usually nets the celebrity far less cash than people imagine.
I got into argument with another poster who claimed that Cindy Sheehan made millions off her books, the rights to her story and her speaking engagements.
While she is living off of her son's death, I doubnt she got paid very much either.
Her books came out under the Koa imprint of Parallax - a small publisher. Her movie - two years after the deal - has yet to be filmed and may eventually be shelved altogether, and the rights were bought by a small production company. And her speaking engagements are generally at universities and "community activist" forums, so she probably doesn't get paid too much for those either.
She lives comfortably off her son's corpse, but she's not a multimillionaire either.
The real money is made in being a publisher, an agent and a producer.
You are missing the point. She never fired her weapon while her convoy was being slaughtered. Instead, she acted like a coward and curled up in the fetal position, while her fellow soldiers were doing their best to stay alive.
She did NOTHING to help them, yet she is called a 'hero'?
Maybe if she had fired her weapon, some more people would have actually came home to their family in something other than a box.
So what makes her a 'hero'?
This guy would know how many lives can be saved/taken with one rifle.
Sgt Alvin C York.
Did you even read my post?
As I recall, during the time that she was "acting like a coward," she was very seriously injured from the truck crash, the reason she's still partially disabled.
Maybe if she had fired her weapon, some more people would have actually came home to their family in something other than a box.
They came that close to shooting their way out?
How about you settling down, OK?
Kinda like Audie Murphy.
.......was it Jimmie Stuart who played Sgt. York in that
famous movie of many decades ago....??? what a movie...!!
I wonder what Sgt. York would think of the American armed
forces of today....?
Have a nice life, Jessica Lynch. I hope your recovery continues so you can run and play with your children.
.....so maybe she can run and play WITH HER HUSBAND and
her children.......
You are correct. You don't want a "Jessica Lynch" watching you back.
Was it her fault? Yes. Equal responsibility lies with the training. The Marines have always known that they need to smoke out candidates like her in order to keep unit cohesion under stress.
That just didn't happen.
Responsiblity does lie with the training. However, I don't know about you, but when I went through Basic that stuff was drilled into us time and time again.
Hell, how many hours have you spent cleaning a rifle that was already clean?
All training aside...common sense should have kicked in somewhere that 'you are in combat and having a functional weapon sure would be nice'
I think it was Gary Cooper.
...you are right.....! damn...! I'm havin' a lot
of "senior moments" today.....!!! I could see Gary
Cooper's face in my mind, and I thought it was
Jimmie Stuart.... I think my brain needs some
Metamuscil therapy........!!
Most people don't realize the men were fighting, and some heroically, this guy is one of them.
By all accounts, he was not Ranger material: A scrawny, 23-year-old Army soldier from Kansas who shot a mediocre 26 on the M-16 qualification range, worked as a welder in a rear-area maintenance unit, and in his own words, had authority problems with officers.
That was until the morning of March 23, 2003, on the banks of the Euphrates River outside Nasiriyah, Iraq, where Pfc. Patrick Miller became an icon of heroism and true grit.
Miller was driving a five-ton wrecker towing a water trailer when the rest of his unit from the 507th Maintenance Co. took a wrong turn and drove straight into the city. The horrific ambush that followed, where Iraqis killed 11 soldiers (including two from another unit), wounded nine and took six prisoner, has been widely documented in recent months because of the media feeding frenzy over Pfc. Jessica Lynch.
It is a sad and cynical commentary on our times that reporters, Hollywood screenplay writers and other members of the chattering class were so blinded by the politically-correct stereotypes fueled by the (inaccurate) accounts of Lynch's heroism that they were blinded to the astounding story of what Miller did during the ambush at Nasariyah.
Miller and a second soldier and the other 507th soldiers were trapped by a fast-moving mobile ambush staged by Iraqi Fedayeen Saddam fighters in trucks and other vehicles, who riddled the cumbersome vehicles with AK-47 fire and RPG grenades. At one point, they slowed to pick up two other soldiers in a disabled vehicle, retrieving one while the other vanished and was killed several hundred yards away. Minutes later an Iraqi bullet shattered the windshield, instantly killing Pvt. Brandon U. Sloan.
Miller was desperately trying to reach friendly troops on the other side of the Euphrates River when the truck's transmission began giving out. He and the other survivor, Sgt. James Riley, jumped from the truck and ran forward until they came upon a grisly sight: an Army Humvee that had smashed into a disabled truck. All five soldiers inside were either dead or seriously injured, and only one, Lynch, would survive.
It is clear that Miller and the other soldiers were unprepared for the vicious firefight that was escalating around them. As the official Army investigation into the ambush later concluded, practically all of the soldiers' M-16 rifles had already jammed due to insufficient maintenance and cleaning. Miller himself, Bowman writes, had not even fired his M-16 since visiting a training range seven months earlier, in August 2002. Bowman's narrative continues:
"Miller reached an earthen berm just across the road from the Iraqi truck. Then he noticed a group of Iraqis in front of the dump truck, some 50 feet away, setting up a mortar tube. A rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the far side of the berm, and Miller rolled out the other side. When he crawled back inside and peered over the top, he could see an Iraqi ready to drop a mortar round into the tube.
The Iraqis, apparently untrained Fedayeen fighters, sprayed Miller's berm with inaccurate fire. Meanwhile, the young welder discovered he could only fire his rifle in single-shot mode. Bowman continues:
"But Miller's rifle was jammed. A spent round would eject, but the new round would only go halfway into the chamber. Miller slammed his palm into a lever on the side of the gun, and the bullet slid into place. He raised his rifle and fired. The Iraqi collapsed in a heap before he could fire the mortar round. …
"One by one, Miller, by his count, shot seven Iraqis as each popped up and tried to work the mortar. After it was over, a large bruise spread over Miller's palm from the constant slapping against the rifle."
Suddenly, several dozen armed Iraqis swarmed the site and Miller and the others threw down their weapons. Miller and four other soldiers were hustled off into captivity while their captors took gravely injured Pfc. Lori Ann Piestewa (who died shortly thereafter) and Lynch to a hospital.
In captivity, his co-prisoners described Miller as defiant, singing Toby Keith's anti-terrorist song, "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue." He even managed to fool the Iraqis into believing that a sheet of radio callsigns and frequencies in his pocket was a list of machine parts and their order numbers. Several weeks later, a Marine patrol rescued them.
Through no fault of her own, Jessica Lynch became the poster girl of women in combat, stoked by Pentagon officials with an axe to grind and reporters unable (or unwilling) to look beyond their own most cherished illusions.
Interviewed by reporter Bowman, Patrick Miller declined to express resentment or anger over Lynch's book deal, movie contract and network TV interviews. One of his fellow prisoners in Iraq, Spc. Shoshana Johnson, said it best, telling Bowman: "Jessica's a wonderful girl, and we're happy she's OK. But it was Patrick; it wasn't Jessica. His weapon was working. He was doing everything possible. Patrick deserves so much, and he's not getting the recognition. He's still a private first class. He hasn't even been promoted."
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.