(6 of 10)
It was a slow Sunday, winding down from a slow Saturday, in Palestine, W.Va. Cody, the old dog that had never been quite the same after being shot by a hunter some years before, played dead on the front porch. Inside the white A-frame house that had been built on a foundation of 100-year-old logs, Deadra and Greg Lynch, Jessi's parents, watched the television news. In the afternoon, CNN said a maintenance convoy had been ambushed. The network showed a video image of a truck, its doors blown away, blood running down its side. CNN said it was the 507th, and Greg told Dee not to panic, even as something like an icepick gouged at his chest. But people here have sat up late with a lot of wars, and they know that the Army usually tells bad news in person. As darkness dropped on the hollow, the only visitors were friends and kin, as word spread as if by magic through the trees that one of their own was in peril.
--"DON'T HURT ME"
She remembers the first few minutes of coming to, but this too she can tell only if she closes her eyes. "I felt like I was chained to the bed," she said, but there was nothing holding her down except the weight of her own ripped, shattered body. She could not feel her legs, could not move her feet, her toes. In the parts of her body she could feel, there was nothing but pain. It was as if the bones themselves had been sharpened and were stabbing her from the inside.
She tried to move. Nothing.
She thought, dully, what that meant. "I'm paralyzed." But that couldn't be right, could it? Do paralyzed people hurt so much?
It was not just her limbs but her back, her insides, her head. She was too weak to scream, and she was scared, as scared as she had been in the humvee. She tried to focus her eyes, but a blur--enough to tell people from furniture --was all she could manage.
Were her eyes injured too?
No, she had just lost her glasses.
From the circle of faces, she heard English. One of the faces leaned in closer.
"Don't hurt me," was the first thing she said.
"I am not going to hurt you," the face said.
She did not believe him.
She was awake for only a few minutes off and on at the military hospital in Nasiriyah. It is hard to tell how long because of the pain. She had been in shock when she was carried in, and now she slipped in and out of consciousness, convinced that the Iraqi doctors and nurses who hovered over her intended to hurt her worse, not heal her. Over about two hours, they bandaged and sutured her wounds, removed splinters of bone and placed the shattered bigger pieces into rough alignment inside her arm, legs, foot and chest.
That afternoon, the Iraqis loaded Jessi into an ambulance and drove her away from the military hospital. The door opened on the Saddam Hussein General Hospital, the public hospital, a place that would be awash in blood from early bombings, where children screamed and doctors treated wounded in the packed hallways. After doctors stabilized her, she was given her own room and an armed guard, an Iraqi intelligence agent, who took up station outside her door. Doctors said that when she got there she was in shock.