Jessica Lynch on war heroism: 'The truth is always more heroic than the hype'
Lynch testified that after her vehicle was attacked in Iraq in March 2003, she suffered a mangled spinal column, broken arm, crushed foot, shattered femur and even a sexual assault.
But it only added insult to injury, literally, when she returned to her parents' home in West Virginia, which "was under siege by media all repeating the story of the little girl 'Rambo' from the hills of West Virginia who went down fighting," Lynch said.
"It was not true," she said before gently chiding the military. "The truth is always more heroic than the hype."
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform invited the two to testify on how the Pentagon spread false stories about Tillman and Lynch. The committee chairman, Henry Waxman, D-California, went as far as to say that the military "invented" tales.
"The bare minimum we owe our soldiers and their families is the truth," Waxman said. "That didn't happen for two of the most famous soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars."
An equally blunt Kevin Tillman, Pat Tillman's brother, told the panel that the military tried to spin his brother's 2004 death to deflect attention from emerging failings in the Afghanistan war...
Lynch became a celebrity after U.S. troops filmed what they said was a daring raid on the hospital. Lynch, the Army claimed, was shot and stabbed during a fierce gunbattle with Iraqi troops that left 11 of her comrades dead.
"The American people are capable of determining their own ideals for heroes, and they don't need to be told elaborate lies," she said. "I had the good fortune to come home and to tell the truth. Many soldiers, like Pat Tillman, did not have that opportunity.
"The truth of war is not always easy. The truth is always more heroic than the hype," she said.
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Jessica Lynch prepared statement