Though the realities of war and disease, cruelty and selfishness, bombard us with evidence to the contrary, life is a precious gift. For notwithstanding the unsubstantiated beliefs of religionists, we are all afforded but one lifetime, one chance to love and be loved, to influence and be influenced, to inspire and be inspired. This is self-evident. And yet wars are still waged, crimes still committed, sins yet spun into existence, all of which are actions that violate the principle of preciousness.
There is but one conclusion that can be drawn from this paradox, that we consider the lives of others to be cheaper than our own, that we are willing to do onto others what we would not want done to us, that we do not recognize that most enduring truth about life. That it can be taken from us in an instant, leaving us broken and bewildered on its merciless horns... Few people are more aware of this than Jessica Lynch. Mr. Bragg elaborates in this captivating biography.
On March 23rd, 2003, life as Jessica Lynch knew it was shattered. A 20-year-old private in the 507th maintenance company of the United States Army, she was part of a supply convoy, supporting the US military's invasion of Iraq, that was ambushed by enemy combatants in the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah. Having been lead into danger by the navigational errors of the convoy's commanding officer and the failure of other nearby military units to alert them to the danger, the convoy was trapped and cut to pieces by enemy fire which claimed the lives of dozens of US personnel. Lynch, who was riding in the back of a vehicle driven by her best friend, remembers very little of the next three hours of her life, recalling only that her weapon, the notoriously fickle M16, jammed just prior to a firefight that would claim the lives of her friends and the sanctity of her body which, over the next several hours, was subjected to torments her conscious mind cannot recall.
Ms. Lynch would come back to herself in an Iraqi hospital, being tended to by Iraqi medical practitioners, in the heart of an Iraqi city being bombed back to the stone age by American warplanes. Over the next eight days, she would lie in her hospital bed, semi-conscious, being kept alive by the Iraqis until a dramatic April 1st rescue by US special forces returned her to her family and the small town in West Virginia that she had called home for the totality of her life. Having enlisted in the military to pay for college, she could have never imagined her life being ripped apart on that fateful day in Iraq. She was a country girl, who wanted to teach elementary school. And now she was a wounded veteran of a politically tempestuous war, made, without her knowing, into a symbol of patriotism, none of which would help her to heal her many, grievous wounds of body and soul.
Published eighteen months after her sensational rescue, I Am A Soldier Too is an arresting biography. Mr. Bragg, an award-winning American journalist, is welcomed into the lives of the Lynches, recounting here not only Jessica's harrowing crucible in Iraq but the torments of her family and friends who were forced, over the eight days of her disappearance, to hang on every phone call, every shred of news, every glimmer of hope. He chronicles the town's prayers for a miracle, a miracle for a girl most of them didn't even know, prior to her being reported missing on that fateful day in March. And he captures their unrestrained joy at her rescue, an event around which her hometown rallied and celebrated, that is, until they were made aware of the severity of her circumstance.
It would be easy to criticize Mr. Bragg's account, to label it a sappy, saccharine love letter to the beautiful ideal of small-town America. But such a critic would have to have a heart of stone. For this slim volume has captured an astonishing degree of kindness, a generosity of spirit unleashed by Jessica Lynch's ordeal that easily possesses the capacity to temporarily convert the most hardened cynic into a dewy-eyed optimist. If the men and women of Palestine, West Virginia, weren't building Ms. Lynch a new, wheelchair-accessible home, they were supporting her family and throwing parades in her honor, any gesture that might ease the pain of a girl coming to grips with not only her broken body but the loss of her best friend cut down in the sands of Iraq. It is true that such communal good feeling is notoriously brief, lasting only as long as the difficulties of every day life can be set aside, but awareness of this fact does nothing to diminish the display of human solidarity that ought to make a mockery of the war that made it necessary.
From her dreams to her rehab, from Iraq to West Virginia, Mr. Bragg has put together a moving document that cannot but convince us of the preciousness of life. For not only can it be taken from us at any time, it can be broken as well, turned into brittle shards of a whole we once loved and now can only lament. Captivating work that serves as much as a reminder as an edifier... (4/5 Stars)
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