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He took off his helmet so she could see him better. "Jessica Lynch," he said, "we're United States soldiers, and we're here to protect you and take you home." She did not know what to say, was still too afraid even to think, so she said the first thing that popped into her head.
"I'm an American soldier, too."
The soldier reached to his shoulder and ripped a patch from his uniform and pressed it into her free hand. "And I held on to that patch and held on to his hand, and I was afraid to let go." They laid her gently but quickly on a stretcher and carried her down the hall and into the stairwell. They passed quickly into the courtyard, and Jessi felt the wind from the rotors wash over her. Someone was still holding her hand. The helicopter lifted off, its rotor blades slicing through the dark.
"O.K., this is real. This is real," thought Jessi. "I'm going home."
--A FAMILY REUNION
The first few seconds of the fuzzy, long-distance phone call still haunt Greg Lynch. In Jessi's voice, he had his first hint that his daughter had been through more than a battle, that she had survived something that could not be covered over with a flag or pinned back together with a medal.
"Daddy?"
The voice was sleepy, drugged and so weak it broke his heart.
"Jessi? Baby?"
"Daddy, they broke my arm."
It was Jessi's first telephone call home after she was rescued from the hospital in Nasiriyah, and the first and only time that she would hint at what had happened to her.
"You'll be all right, baby. You'll get over this."
"The Iraqi man broke my arm."
He wishes sometimes that he had pressed her on what she meant just then, that he had asked her to tell him more, but he was afraid to push, because Jessica sounded so strained, so barely there--and he let the moment, and the opportunity, pass.
She would later say she did not remember saying it, and she would never say anything like it again. Greg believes, like his wife Dee, that Jessi had begun to remember what happened to her and just picked it from her mind like a splinter--along with the rest of it--and that made the hurt disappear.
Dee spoke to the doctor that day, and it had scared her to death all over again. It was the first time she had a rundown of Jessi's injuries, and as the doctor went through the litany of Jessi's damage, Dee kept wishing that he would stop, but he just kept going.
The American doctors would applaud the efforts of the Iraqi doctors, saying they did a good job with the little they had to work with, Dee said. But it would become more evident, she said, that the commandos had not only freed Jessica, they had saved her.
Nine hours [after they took off from America], their jet touched down at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. They were taken to the hospital, and they walked down a hallway where heroes lay inside every half-open doorway. The Lynches stopped just outside Jessi's room, a tiny, intensive care room that, from the outside, seemed to be mostly machines, with one small, bandaged bit of flesh and blood in the middle.