Jessica Lynch and Shoshana Johnson
A tale of two soldiers
By LeiLani Dowell
Stories about Pfc. Jessica Lynch are appearing
all over U.S. television and in the print media. She has
appearances on ABC's Dateline and on the David Letter man show,
and will be featured on the cover of Time magazine and Vanity
Fair. In addition, an authorized biography, "I Am a Soldier,
Too," is being released to coincide with the viewing of NBC's
movie dramatization, titled "Saving Jessica Lynch," of what
happened to her in Iraq.
However, important elements of the story that the U.S.
government issued after U.S. troops stormed the Iraqi hospital
where Lynch was being treated for her injuries have been
denounced--by none other than Lynch herself. She has called
them a fabrication and a manipulation to promote the war. In
addition, not only are the stories of other soldiers being
ignored, but the charge of racism has been raised by the family
of one African American soldier captured and injured at the
same time as Lynch.
On April 1, Lynch received national headlines when the Army
released a video of what appeared to be a dramatic, high-stakes
operation performed by U.S. soldiers to "rescue" her from a
hospital in Nasiriyah.
At the time, front-page reports attested to Lynch's heroism,
saying that she had received knife and bullet wounds while
emptying her weapon at her attackers before being captured.
However, later investigations determined that Lynch's
injuries came when the U.S. Army vehicle she had been riding in
crashed into the truck in front of it, and not from knives or
gunfire. Also, her weapon had jammed before she could even fire
a round. She received a head injury and broken bones in her
right arm, right leg, thigh and ankle in the crash, and was
taken to the hospital by Iraqi people.
In addition, Lynch denies reports that she had been slapped
around during her hospital stay. She is reported to have told
ABC's Diane Sawyer: "From the time I woke up in the hospital,
no one beat me, no one slapped me, no one, nothing. ... I mean,
I actually had one nurse, that she would sing to me." (New York
Times, Nov. 7)
Lynch also revealed that Iraqi soldiers had left the
hospital the day before the rescue. When asked if the
military's portrayal of the rescue bothered her, she criticized
the Pentagon, saying, "Yeah, it does. It does that they used me
as a way to symbolize all this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong."
In an article in the Nov. 9 Observer of London, Edward
Helmore wrote, "Lynch has become a metaphor not for the heroism
of pretty young Americans captured by a devilish foreign enemy,
but for the confusion that has marked Bush's Operation Iraqi
Freedom from the start."
Little mention of the thousands wounded
As the ruling class media spends an entire week dedicated to
a false story of heroism and patriotism, the stories of other
soldiers are barely mentioned.
An article in the Nov. 9 Los Angeles Times discusses the
influx of wounded U.S. soldiers into U.S. military hospitals.
The article states that nearly 1,900 wounded have been sent to
Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, 1,500 to the
National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., and several
thousand to other smaller hospitals and clinics. One of those
soldiers, Staff Sgt. Tarik Jackson, is from the same unit as
Lynch, was shot four times, and may be in treatment for the
next year.
Injured and sick soldiers awaiting treatment at Fort Stewart
in Georgia have been complaining about the conditions there,
saying they have to wait for months in filthy barracks for
medical treatment, are housed 60 to a barracks and are forced
to pay for their own toilet paper.
On an open-line show on C-SPAN the first week of November,
the entertainer Cher called in after a visit to Walter Reed
Army Medical Center. She demanded that the stories of the
"devastatedly wounded" soldiers there--50 of them amputees--be
told.
Media time isn't the only aspect of selective attention
being given. Communities are in an uproar about the
disproportionate treatment another soldier, Shoshana Johnson,
is receiving. Johnson was taken as a prisoner of war at the
same time as Lynch, and was held six days longer. Unlike Lynch,
she did fire at her captors. Unlike Lynch, she was shot in the
melee--once in each ankle.
However, while Lynch is receiving an 80-percent disability
pension, in addition to making money from publicity about her
case, Johnson was informed that she will be receiving only a
30-percent disability pension--a difference of $600 to $700 a
month. She has had little media coverage--and then only after
protests.
Why the lesser benefits for someone who clearly displayed
more "heroism" and received more injuries? In a statement, the
Army said that the two women are receiving different benefits
because a military Physical Evaluation Board placed them in
different categories.
Many believe those categories were "Black" and "White."
For while Lynch is 19, white and blonde and, in the words of
Syracuse professor of television and popular culture Robert
Thompson, "fits the profile of the type of casting American
television has done for years," Shoshana Johnson is a
30-year-old African American woman.
The two women and their families have issued statements
supporting one another.
Racist war and occupation
The anti-war movement has condemned this racist war and its
evolution into a racist occupation. That racism touches even
the U.S. soldiers enlisted to fight the war. African Americans
continue to serve in the military in numbers disproportionate
to their population in the United States--19 percent of the
Armed Forces, 13 percent of the U.S. population.
Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson has rallied to Johnson's
cause, helping bring her case to light and demanding fair
treatment. In a Nov. 4 column in the Sacra mento Observer,
Jackson wrote:
"For Johnson and thousands of other Iraqi troops, the real
indignity comes when they return. ... President Bush likes to
say that Sept. 11 changed everything. But it didn't change this
administration's callous disregard for the lower ranks--for the
soldiers, the workers ... It didn't change the special interest
politics that choose the benefit of the few over the common
good of the many."
LeiLani Dowell, a member of Workers World Party, is
running for Congress in 2004 in the Eighth Congressional
District (San Francisco) on the Peace and Freedom Party
ticket.
Reprinted from the Nov. 20, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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