Jessica Lynch Biography

Jessica Lynch was a 19 year-old supply clerk assigned to the 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company of the U.S. Army. In 2003 she became the first woman prisoner of war to be rescued.

Lynch and members of her unit had been captured by Iraqi forces after their vehicles got lost on 23 March 2003. A special U.S. team rescued Lynch from an Iraqi hospital on 1 April 2003, but found no other American soldiers alive. (The bodies of 11 other soldiers were recovered).

The Washington Post reported that an Iraqi lawyer, Mohammed Odeh Al-Rehaief, gave vital information to the rescue team, putting his own life in danger to help rescue Lynch.

She became an instant celebrity and a popular symbol of American heroism, thanks to widespread media coverage of her rescue.

The details of Lynch’s rescue became widely disputed. Original reports said that Lynch had suffered bullet and stab wounds, but that information was later called incorrect by military officials and by Lynch’s family.

A month later, the BBC reported that many parts of the story as originally reported were untrue.

Doctors from the Iraqi hospital claimed that there were no Iraqi soldiers around at the time of the rescue, that Lynch had been treated well and that they had tried to return her to U.S. forces two days before the rescue.

The doctors said she had been treated for wounds consistent with a road accident: she had head and spine injuries as well as fractures in her right arm, right foot and both legs.

Lynch’s book on the incident, I Am A Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story, was released on 11 November 2003. According to Lynch, the convoy she was in fell behind and got lost and she was taken prisoner and beaten, then transferred to a hospital where they treated her wounds (including replacing her femur with an unsterilized rod).