Jessica Lynch

How can you write a book about something you don't remember?

Jessica Lynch Inspires Tattered Nation To Finger Paint
San Francisco Chronicle's Mark Morford
9/3/03

== Jessica Lynch Inspires Tattered Nation To Finger Paint ==

Because as if you weren't utterly depressed enough at the state of cheap-ass celebritydom and the nature of gold-digging fame, sweet little schoolteacher wannabe Jessica Lynch has struck a $1 million deal for a book that will tell the story of her capture and rescue in Iraq, which of course, wasn't a rescue at all, but more a staged PR stunt, but oh well.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced that the former prisoner of war who became a national hero for some unknown and embarrassing reason will collaborate on "I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story" (oh dear God make it stop) with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and disgraced NY Times reporter Rick Bragg, because the guy is like, so desperate for a gig right now he'd write stump speeches for Larry Flynt.

The book is scheduled to come out in mid-November, with a first printing of around 500,000 copies. That means six weeks from now. Six weeks. For an entire book. That means Lynch will sort of sit there on the family couch with a bottle of white zin and recount the hazy memory of what sort of but not really happened to her, leaving out the part about the bogus staging and the ridiculous military crap, and Bragg will frantically transcribe it and embellish it wildly and make it into this sweetly saccharine all-American tale of one not very bright woman's quest to become a kindergarten teacher via joining the military, which should tell you something right there about her intellectual acumen. Lynch and Bragg will split a $1 million advance, with any royalties going to Lynch.

Look for the book on the shelves by mid November, and in the remainder bin for $1.99 by Christmas.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2003/09/02/financial1521EDT0166.DTL&nl=fix

AOL ran a poll about Lynch's book deal.

Question: Would you read a book on Jessica Lynch's ordeal?

Yes................19%......290,986
No.................67%...1,023,073
I'm not sure...13%.......209,758


Doesn't look like it will be much of a profitable deal for the publisher.

wenchilina - i was rolling my eyes when i heard about this yesterday.


what is she going to write about (ok, she's not writing it, really)? her feelings about the media coverage?

Go figure!
In todays media of Reality TV and such - it fits!
(sad or not)

I wonder how long it will be until a 9/11 movie comes out or maybe there has and I don't know.

Oy vey....and another

husker, first the docu-dramas will come out about 9/11, then a feature flick about the rebuilding of the two towers. The dust has almost settled long enough....

I wonder if the last chapter will conclude with a shower scene ala "Dallas" and state that it was all just a dream...

I don't understand the animosity here.

I've read both of Rick Bragg's books. He made me understand and sympathize with some very off-putting people.

When Jessica Lynch was elevated to a Two Gun American Icon I was a bit skeptical. Now that she's just a 20-year-old kid retired from the Army on disability--and a lot of aches and pains, I wish her well.

I think a book about Ms. Lynch could explore a number of ideas: "The Army as Escape"; "Women in the Army", "The Lonliness of a Survivor"...
"Why did the Pentagon and the Media manufacture a heroine?"

Very few 20-year-olds can be classified as Great Thinkers (and those who can be slotted in the Genius category probably will not get book deals). Very few 20-year-olds join the army in support services, see combat and are captured as Prisoners of War.

I don't think she sought her temporary celebrity--but she did earn it and any perks that it brings.

Bragg writes well. Knopf does not publish trash. I probably won't buy the book, but I'll take it out of the library--and I'll probably learn something that I don't know now.

Bragg is not in a good place. He was suspended from the NYT this spring, in the middle of the Blair mess.

Ms. Lynch didn't really see much in the way of combat. She was in rather a bad vehicular accident, which caused her injuries.

Knopf, like all other publishers, has a bottom line. They hope this book will help that bottom line. I won't help them with it by supporting this sort of dreck.

May 21, 2003
The New York Observer weekly newspaper publishes the first extensive interview with Blair, in which he laughs about his journalistic deceptions and appears to take pride in them. Blair says he is looking for a book deal.
May 23, 2003
The Times suspends Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer Rick Bragg for two weeks after it determines that a June 2002 article about Florida oystermen should have also carried the byline of a free-lancer.
May 28, 2003
Bragg resigns.
June 5, 2003
The resignations of Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd are accepted by publisher Sulzberger. The newspaper says former executive editor Joseph Lelyveld will return as interim executive editor.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/922617.asp#BODY

If the Lynch book were to focus on the position and difficulties faced by women in the junior enlisted ranks of the Army, it would be quite an educational read. I doubt that this book will be the one to cover these issues. This will most likely be a "Go team" book.

Go Jessica! They made you a fake hero, do the American thing (read the human thing) and cash in!

"I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story"

. . . Poor little girl.


. . . Poor little girl.


Image is everything. Being helpless and weak is highly powerful manipulation.
Reminds me of some (adult!) women I know who are viciously passive and blaming,
in that I do not trust image players.

This is a soldier trained to survive, dominate and kill.

I don't approve of plagerism or exploiting humble newspaper stringers.

Still Rick Bragg accepted responsibility for his lapse in ethics and resigned without whining.

Read All Over But the Shoutin'. Rick Bragg can write.

As for Jessica's girlish wishes to produce a book about a hill country girl who went to war and saw the elephant.....

She's had a lot of time lately to do a lot of thinking. I don't expect her insights to be unique--but I expect they will be described both kindly and wisely.

Well, code, in today's Army, its more a stoty of a girl trained to follow orders, rely on regs,and try not to make waves.

Temptestuous teapot . . .

Very cynical. Knopf, like so many book people, is having a hard time. I guess they figure this will be an easy Christmas present. In the light of everything they know, there's a hard line to all this - Like they're hard pressed for books that matter. Sort of cheapens Knopf.

Mark Morford: The Big Lie Of Jessica Lynch
============= SF GATE MORNING FIX =============
September 5, 2003 -- Raquel Welch turns 63 today
By Mark Morford: [email protected]
http://sfgate.com/columnists/morford/a/
"Lube up, lean into the fire, and laugh"
~~ nil desperandum ~~

== MARK'S NOTES & ERRATA ==
Where opinion meets benign syntax abuse

== The Big Lie Of Jessica Lynch ==
A $1 mil book deal, zero memory of any "rescue" and the worst book
you'll read this year
(By Mark Morford)
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2003/09/05/notes090503.DTL&nl=fix


Hey, remember that dramatic CNN footage of that big statue of Saddam
Hussein being toppled by U.S. forces in that Baghdad square a few
months back, during the "war"? Remember how powerfully symbolic it was
supposed to be?

Remember, later, seeing the wide-angle shot on the Internet, the one of
all the U.S. tanks surrounding the square and the whole bogus setup of
how they staged the event, complete with a big crane and some strong
cable and strategically positioned "citizens" cheering their
"liberation" as the statue fell, as just off camera, a handful of
genuine Iraqis loitered nearby, looking confused and bored?

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/NYI304A.html

Remember how you felt then? Like this little black worm had bored into
your skin and was crawling around in your small intestine and you had
the perpetual urge to go off into the corner and eat pie and slam
double scotches and scream at the state of BushCo's nation?

The Jessica Lynch story is just like that, only much, much worse.

These are the things that make you wince and sigh. These are the things
that put it all in perspective, make you realize what the Pentagon and
the military hawks really value.

These are the things that make you realize, goddammit, here I am
working every day and struggling to make ends meet in a BushCo-gutted
economy and all I really needed to do all along to make a million bucks
is stage some sort of bogus wartime heroics and sell it to a war-numbed
American populace for $24.95 in hardback, and, boom, Range Rover City.

Jessica Lynch. You know the one. The sweet, American-pie 19-year-old
soldier and kindergarten-teacher wanna-be whose army squad took a wrong
turn in Iraq and was, apparently, ambushed.

And some of her comrades were killed and she was taken prisoner, full
of stab wounds and bullet holes, and she was whisked off to a ragged
Iraqi hospital and held for eight days by vicious Iraqi guards and
ostensibly abused, and later supposedly "rescued" in the most daring
and macho made-for-TV moment of the war by elite teams of hunky U.S.
Army Rangers and U.S. Navy SEALs. Wow.

Except that it never really happened that way. Except that Lynch
herself doesn't remember a single thing and all the nurses and doctors
and eyewitnesses on the scene say the Iraqi fedayeen guards had fled
the day before the "rescue," and there was no danger whatsoever, no
resistance of any kind, the U.S. forces could just walk right in, and
they knew it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,956255,00.html

And the hospital doors were wide open, and the nurses and doctors had
gone out of their way to provide decent care for our precious Jessica,
considering the circumstances, and doctors even tried to return Lynch
to U.S. forces themselves.

And despite U.S. claims, Lynch had no knife wounds or bullet holes at
all, just a few broken bones, and the dramatic and violent "rescue" was
really just inane and silly and entirely faked and yet America bought
it, hook, line and Rumsfeld, because it was on TV.

And now, here we are. Jessica and disgraced N.Y. Times reporter Rick
"Oh my God do I need a gig" Bragg just inked a $1 million book deal to
tell her nonstory, titled "I'm a Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story,"
not "Oh My God You Are Such a Sucker for Buying This Book I Mean Wow."

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2003/09/02/national0907EDT0509.DTL&nl=fix

Because this is how we fabricate our history. This is how we spin our
patriotism, how we bake our jingoistic cake, the Lynch tale the most
apt and definitive myth of the war so far.

Because Jessica's story, much like WMDs and Saddam's nukes and
biotoxins and Orange Alerts and our imminently prosperous economy and
Jenna Bush's ostensible prowess with a beer bong, does not rely on
truths. We do not rely on first-hand reports. We do not rely on
anything so piffling and small and dangerous as honesty.

We rely, simply, on PR. We believe the TV images of the bogus "rescue"
at the expense of common sense because we are a nation drunk on the
idea that the U.S. can do no wrong and TV would never lie.

And goddammit if Hannity and Rush and O'Reilly say it happened like
that, it must be true, and damn you America-hating libs for daring to
question the integrity of our armed forces when they are out there
right now protecting us from, uh, what was it again? Higher gas prices?
Israel's scorn? Dick Cheney's pallid sneer? Something like that.

Look, there is no war without spin. There is no war without outright
lying to the populace, without trying to coerce a wary nation into
supporting our unprovoked savagery by way of Hollywood-style set pieces
performed specifically to deflect attention from the brutality and the
decapitated children and the still-dying U.S. soldiers and the burning
bodies by the side of the road.

This is nothing shocking. This is nothing even remotely unusual or
uncommon. The fabric of war consists not of gallant battles fought by
hardy soldiers for some noble collective good yay yay go team, but of
manufactured tales of valiant brotherhood and purebred heroism designed
to make the vile pill slightly less bitter.

War is, of course, vicious and primitive and disgustingly violent and
not the slightest bit gallant, and America has rarely been more
thuggish in its short history than when we annihilated Afghanistan and
Iraq lo these past few years, the world's greatest bloated superpower
hammering down on two nearly defenseless, piss-poor nations in the name
of, well, petrochemical rights and strategic political positioning.
It's not a war, it's a gang beating. Uncle Sam wants you.

And, hence, we need the sugar. We desperately need the sweet,
teary-eyed images of flags and salutes and stunning "rescues" to make
it all go down smoothly, to suppress the collective recoil, the
national gag reflex. After all, who wants to see burning babies and
crying mothers and hot screaming death on prime time? Show me Old Glory
waving in slo-mo! Ahh, that's better.

We need, in short, pretty 19-year-old memory-impaired soldier girls
being rescued by manly SEALs wearing bitchin' night-vision goggles and
yelling "Go! Go! Go!" with lots of explosions and helicopters and maybe
a cameo by Bruce Willis looking squinty and tough, with the Pentagon
cameras rolling and everyone's adrenaline pumping like at a horse race,
except for maybe the baffled Iraqi hospital personnel who were calmly
taking care of Ms. Lynch when the U.S. storm troopers swooped in and
knocked them down.

Of course, this isn't about Jessica herself at all. She has served her
country bravely and is probably very sweet and at least partially
articulate and is just in it for the quick wad of cash, and what the
hell she doesn't remember a damn thing about the rescue anyway, which
makes her the perfect one to write a whole book about it, with Bragg
along to, ahem, "fill in the blanks." Ain't that America.

And we can just imagine how the Pentagon brass doubtlessly winked at
Jessie and said hey sweetie, you go girl, take the book deal, and the
movie deal, and the commemorative plates by the Franklin Mint, it would
be good for the country if you go along with the ruse, there there now,
that's a good little soldier.

Jessica Lynch is but a puppet, a toy, a convenient TV-ready canvass
onto which we can project our impotent myths of patriotism and war,
spit forth by the BushCo military machine to ease America's pain, to
assuage that increasingly nagging fear that we have committed this
horrible thing, this irreversible atrocity.

In short, Jessica's myth helps numb the idea that we have removed a
pip-squeak, nonthreatening tyrant from power and left behind a reeking
miasma of violence and bloodshed and thousands of dead citizens, more
rabid anti-U.S. sentiment and mistrust and global instability than
Saddam (or Osama) could've ever dreamed.

And little Ms. Lynch, she is America's new doll. She is our little G.I.
Jessica, all safe and clean in her homecoming fatigues, her imaginary
story ready to grace the nightstands of the happily gullible across
America.

Because really, why bother with all that icky messy nonfiction, all
that violent unsavory fact, when straight fiction is so much more, you
know, patriotic?