An innocent girl of 19 with plenty of stars in her eyes and fully in love with life is overnight condemned to a wheelchair with her legs repaired with a metal rod and a screw, her arms pieced together, and her back realigned with metal plates. Well, this is the kind of disaster that war produces. I am a soldier, too - The Jessica Lynch story (Alfred A. Knopf, United States, 2003) by Rick Bragg is the story of a girl who joins the military to pay her college fees, to see the world, to look for adventure, and she does it “without questioning the rightness or wrongness of a war” or the politics of it.

Besides, the 507th Maintenance Company isn’t a combat company. Her job is to provide maintenance as a supply clerk and drive the wheel of a five-ton tractor trailer, hauling a 400-ton gallon water tanker. Inexplicably enough, she is deployed to Iraq, “that maelstrom of hatred”, though she naively believes she won’t be“anywhere near danger”. Her convoy is unexpectedly caught in an ambush in Nasiriyah.

Rick Bragg starkly captures the tension and the drama of this attack, depicting a world of madness, panic and chaos. We are plunged right into the action involving rocket launchers, grenades blowing up geysers of sand, rounds of mortar pounding the road, windshields shattering to pieces, bullets hitting vehicles, soldiers scurrying for cover, frantically dragging the wounded with them, and the Iraqis gleefully searching for the bodies of their enemies to take as trophies.

Jessi Lynch is the survivor. Had she been taken in good health, maybe it would have been yet another horrific story of an American tortured by her enemies. But, seriously enough, she is somehow given every conceivable medical assistance till she is saved by American commandos.

Irony

It is ironical that the Americans take her for a hero when she just wishes she had never been there in the desert. Things go sour for soldiers like her but American newscasters quote the administration as saying that the war is going well. The parents hope that their daughter has found “a hole, a place to crawl into, a place to wait” but we know that she is a prisoner of war in a hospital.

Jessi thinks her friend Lovi is alive when, in fact, she is dead. As a result of the captain making a navigational error, the convoy finds itself right in the centre of hell where death is lurking. Jessi’s lover sends her a letter but it will never reach her. Her mother cuts her daughter’s horoscope out of the newspapers every day to find what the stars hold for her though no horoscope will ever reveal that she is at that moment in a hospital fighting for her life.

The media transform her into a kind of “invincible action figure”; she is described as “fighting to the death”. They create a myth out of her, distorting the whole truth. Jessi herself denies being a hero or having killed anyone in the ambush.

And what is the mindset of a POW in a hospital called Saddam General? The writer takes us into the mind of the wounded soldier where a drama of a different kind is going on: the nagging fear of not being released, of having her leg cut off, of being tortured, mutilated by enemies, of being interrogated, killed in the desert and left there, of the hospital being blown up.

From Jessi in a hospital in Iraq to her parents in America back to her lover and then to those people eagerly preparing her return, the narrative offers us a multiple perspective, without any distraction whatsoever. Jessica is lucky to have survived and to have told her story to a writer. But how many casualties are out there, on both sides, who suffer daily and who die the only way they know: silently, anonymously and in total indifference?

Suresh RAMPHUL