| Debasing Honors |
28 July 2003
|
PFC Lynch Comes Home, Not a Heroine
Pfc. Jessica Lynch returned to her hometown of Palestine, West Virginia, last week. The former
prisoner-of-war has been hailed as a heroine by much of the American media. The Pentagon achieved a
huge success in getting that fiction swallowed. Private Lynch was never the protagonist in her own
story, rather she has become a necessary fiction.
In the fourth chapter of 1984, Orwell's anti-hero Winston Smith creates Comrade Ogilvy out of "a
few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs" to allow Big Brother to comment on the various
virtues the never-existing Ogilvy exhibited. The only difference between the Pentagon's Private Lynch
and Big Brother's Comrade Ogilvy is that the latter was killed in the media story. Private Lynch has
thoughtlessly stayed alive. The Pentagon has yet to reach the high standards of the Ministry of Truth.
That she was hurt in the line of duty and risked her life in defense of her nation is beyond dispute, and
only the most ungenerous would argue otherwise. However, Private Lynch is not a heroine, despite the
Army's assertions to the contrary. Heroes take prisoners; they do not become them. Heroes display a
reckless disregard for self that is required under dire circumstances. Heroes usually wind up dead because
of the stupidity of their commanders coupled with their own inability to duck and run. She is brave, she
did her duty, and she did suffer for it. But she is not Sergeant York.
The world is full of blowhards, from a president who lands on the deck of a carrier having been AWOL for
8 months during his own air national guard service during an earlier war to the people in the press who go
in after the war to cover the story. But Private Lynch is different because she was not the agent of her
fame; she was not the one who pursued it. That was the Department of Defense, a bureaucracy in need of
an icon. Private Lynch the Heroine did not exist, so it became necessary to invent her.