On most nights of the year, this stretch of country road is only a flat place in the dark. But for a few nights in late summer 2003, it blazed in neon, smelled like smoked sausage, spun sugar and blue-ribbon hogs and rang with screams of people who had bought a ticket to be scared. They rode the Tilt-A-Whirl, browsed tents of prizewinning fruit preserves and lined up for the cute-baby contest, and if there is such a thing as a time machine on earth, it must be powered by the Ferris wheel at the Wirt County Fair in West Virginia. Back from the war, Jessica Lynch asked her mother and father to take her there.
"She went every year until she left for the Army," said Dee Lynch, Jessi's mother. "She would meet her friends--everybody knew everybody. It's just a little county fair. You could sit at one end of the thing and watch your kids play at the other end. It never changed."
The ping and rattle of the rides and games reached all the way to the parking lot as Greg Lynch pushed Jessi's wheelchair toward the glow of the midway, over ruts that jostled her legs (which had been repaired with a metal rod and screws), her pieced-together arm and her back, which had been realigned with metal plates.
But she was sick of lying in her adjustable bed at home. "It was her first real public appearance," her mother said. "She wanted to see the cute-baby contest, but we never got that far."
It started with a polite, shy inquiry from an old man.
"Ma'am, can my wife stand by you while I take a picture?"
And in seconds--not minutes, but seconds--Jessi was surrounded by people who just wanted to touch her, to say hello, or just to look at her. The word trickled through the crowd--"Jessi's here"--and there was no way to move the wheelchair one inch farther.
"Can I sit my child on your lap?" one woman said, and then another asked, and another. The cameras flashed, and old women hugged her shoulders or said, "Bless your heart." A little girl asked, "Mommy, is that the girl from TV?" One old man told her that he had lost two sons and had given up on living but that her story made him ashamed to give up.
"It was real nice and stuff," Jessi said.
Over and over again, they said the same thing to her.
"You're a hero."
The word bounced from person to person.
Hero.
An hour passed, the wheels of her chair locked in a circle of adoring people.
Hero.
"It was weird," Jessi said later, sitting at her kitchen table, her pain medications lined up in front of her beside a glass of chocolate milk. The very word makes her sad. "For 20 years, no one knew my name. Now they want my autograph. But I'm not a hero. If it makes people feel good to say it, then I'm glad. But I'm not. I'm just a survivor. When I think about it, it keeps me awake at night."