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She was never interrogated. "No one even asked me anything about our troops. I couldn't answer anyway." Jessi said all she could have told them was that she was a clerk, in charge of pencils, packs and toilet paper.
--"I'M GOING HOME"
In the last few days of Jessica's captivity, one of
the doctors spotted an American soldier on a nearby rooftop. The nurses slid Jessi's hospital bed over to the window so it would be in plain sight. "They wanted them to see me," Jessi said.
Rumors had trickled in for days of a female captive in the city, of a soldier with blond hair. "As the situation developed over time, we began to get some indications...that there may be an injured U.S. military member held in this hospital," said U.S. Air Force Major General Victor E. Renuart, Centcom's director of operations. Then, on about March 27 or 28, Mohammed Odeh Rehaief, a lawyer in Nasiriyah, approached some Marines just outside the downtown area and told them of a blond captive inside Saddam Hussein General Hospital.
Around midnight on April 1, a small group of Black Hawk helicopters and fearsome AC-130 gunships came in low over Nasiriyah's dark skyline. Army Rangers and Marines moved quietly into place, encircling the hospital's walls. Other Marines rolled into Nasiriyah in tanks and personnel carriers in a noisy diversion, to draw attention, to draw fire.
Inside, Jessi lay sleepless, her blood pressure dangerously low, her heart rate high. From her bed she could not see a thing, but she could hear the thump, thump of the helicopters. She thought the Iraqis had come for her by air, to take her to Baghdad or to kill her. She felt the panic again.
From the hallway, she heard her name.
The commandos, made up of U.S. Army Rangers, Navy SEALS, Marines and Air Force combat controllers, went hard into Saddam Hussein General Hospital. Armed with machine guns, they kicked down doors even as a hospital administrator tried to give them a master key, the doctors would later tell television reporters.
On the perimeter the Rangers and Marines took fire, and returned it. But inside Saddam General, there was no resistance--and no one to resist. There were about 200 patients and a skeleton staff, but no soldiers, no militia. The commandos did not know that, their officers would later say, and they treated their assault on the hospital as if it was still being used as a hiding place for heavily armed Iraqi fighters--to do anything else would have been foolish. The commandos shouted that they wanted to know where to find Jessica Lynch, and one of the doctors told them he would take them there. The doctor led them up to a second-floor hallway. As the commandos moved down the hallway, one of them yelled her name.
"Where is Jessica Lynch? Where is Jessica Lynch?" Inside her room, Jessi cowered under her covers. What if it was Saddam's people, come to get her again? It didn't matter that the words were in English; so many Iraqis spoke English. "Oh, God," Jessi thought, "don't let it be them." She could not see the door clearly because of the curtain. She lay, her good hand clutching the sheet to her chin, and refused to answer. There was some light in the room, enough to see a man's form as he walked in. And then, just like she had wished it, a soldier was standing there by her bed.