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By Tamara Jones
REPRINTED FROM THE WASHINGTON POST
The Washington Post
PALESTINE, W.Va., Mar. 25 -- It was a warm spring evening when the U.S. Army recruiters showed up in their battle dress uniforms at the white clapboard house up in the hollow where Lynches have always lived. It was Brandi Renee, the youngest of Gregory and Deadra's three children, who had invited them, but soon enough the whole family was out there on the wide front porch, listening raptly to the promises the strangers made. Neighbors and cousins drifted over as well.
There were golden opportunities the military could offer, the recruiters said -- a free education, lucrative careers, a chance to see exotic lands. Standard recruiting patter, but in this beautiful, hardscrabble patch of West Virginia, where jobs are scarce and money for college often beyond reach, the words resonated like poetry, and the Lynches exchanged excited glances. Brandi was crestfallen when the visitors told her she would have to wait another year to enlist. Staff Sgt. James Grady looked at Gregory Jr. What about you? he asked the Lynches' only son, then 18. Greg nodded. The stranger then turned to Jessica Lynch, a pretty 17-year-old who had always dreamed of becoming a schoolteacher. What about her?
Jessica would be graduating from Wirt County High School in a few months. She was thinking about enrolling in state college, but now she found herself nodding, as well.
Two years have gone by, and the Lynches are congregating on the front porch again. There are TV news crews clogging the long dirt driveway, neighbors and relatives hovering anxiously, a yellow ribbon tied around an old sycamore tree by the road. Now her family asks the same question her country once did.
What about Jessica?
Private First Class Jessica Lynch, a month shy of her 20th birthday, is among about a dozen soldiers missing or taken prisoner in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah after their supply convoy was ambushed on Sunday. Five are known to be prisoners of war. But the fates of Lynch; Brandon Sloan, 19, of Bedford Heights, Ohio; Lori Piestewa, 22, of Tuba City, Ariz., and several others not yet named remain unknown.
"War Hits Home" read the banner headline in the local newspaper today, above a photograph of Jessica, her blue gaze direct, her grin carefree as she sits propped against a tree, the country girl about to leave home and experience the world.
On Mayberry Run Road, her mother holds vigil inside a house of cool shadows, while Greg Lynch Sr. interrupts a nonstop stream of interviews to take a call from one of his daughter's girlhood friends. They all cling to the belief that Jessi escaped during the attack, that she will make her way safely back to her unit.
Jessica was never one to give up, they all say. Plucky enough to make the high school basketball team despite her petite 5-foot-4 frame; gutsy enough to survive basic training without a complaint, making even her sexist big brother admit proudly that he had underestimated the strength and perseverance of women. He felt a pang of jealousy when she got called to war first.
Now his own duty has shifted, from soldier to son. Home on emergency leave, Greg Jr., 21, watches helplessly as his parents wander through the house picking up pictures of Jessi, as his mother sobs through another sleepless night, as his father puts on a too-brave face and his baby sister puts on her too-brave smile. And they all wait.
"No, we haven't heard a thing," Greg Sr. is saying into the phone now. Calls have come in from as far away as Dublin, Ireland. "We're prepared for the worst, you know. It's something you can't prepare for, but we've got to." And then: "We can't give up hope. It's just a bad thing, not hearing. They ought to be able to give us a little information each day, but we haven't heard anything since word come she's missing."
That word came -- another uniform at the door -- at 11 o'clock Sunday night, when a state trooper and National Guardsman showed up and confirmed what the Lynches already had gleaned from TV.
There's no bitterness, the Lynches insist, no regrets that three children of three consider serving their country the chance of a lifetime. This past Christmas, they decorated a tree in red, white and blue, with tiny flags tucked amid the boughs. Brandi had just gotten her coveted delayed entry, and despite all this she, too, still plans on entering the Army upon graduation this spring. "I want to earn money for college and to travel," she says in a small voice. Make sure it's what you want, Jessica advised her in a last letter home.
They saw Jessi at Christmastime when she was on leave from Fort Bliss, Tex., and was loving military life so much she had just signed up for another four-year hitch. She stopped by her old grade school to visit the kindergarten teacher, Linda Davies. Davies heard from her again a week before the ambush, when a letter arrived from Kuwait. Jessica was "settled in," Davies said, and wanted the kindergartners to become her pen pals.
The children drew pictures and dictated letters, but Jessica was missing before they could be mailed. "I kept thinking about how much she would have enjoyed them," Davies said, quickly correcting herself: "how much she will enjoy them."
At the high school, the staff and several students stayed late Monday to make yellow ribbons -- little ones to pin on lapels, big ones to tie around light posts and tree trunks -- 600 of them in all, stopping only when they could find no more yellow ribbon to buy. Principal Ken Heiney held an assembly for the 325 students and passed along the bare-bones news -- all anyone had -- about Jessica Lynch. All day, tearful clusters of students and teachers gathered in the halls, and before the final bell rang, they had taken an informal survey and discovered that the student body had about 60 relatives on active-duty military.
"This brought the reality of what's going on very close to them," Heiney said.
And in Palestine, W.Va., such reality brings not protest but prayer.
"The only thing we really need is prayer and hope," Greg Lynch Sr. says into the phone again and again. Two favorite small cousins of Jessica's cling to their grandmother, Greg's sister Carla, who says the preschoolers believe Jessica is playing hide-and-seek and will come out soon. Carla worries aloud about Jessica's sickly grandfather, in his house up Mayberry Run, refusing to accept that this was really Jessica's unit attacked, even as he sits unmoving and struggling to breathe before the TV.
The Lynches generally try to avoid the graphic war images on the newscasts, but with the Army and Red Cross maintaining official silence, this is their surest link to the faraway desert where Jessica was last seen. "You can't bear to watch it," Greg Sr. says, "but you can't not watch it."
Jessica called her folks before she shipped out last month, excited and upbeat. "I'm ready," they remember her saying.
She called her Aunt Carla as well.
"We could always hide you, not let them take you," protective Carla joked.
"No, no," she remembers Jessica's reply. "I want to go, Aunt Carla. Most people never get out of Wirt County, and I'm going to another country."
The last time they saw her was when her family drove Jessica to the airport in Columbus, Ohio, when her leave was up in January. Along the way, they pulled into a truck stop, and Deadra Lynch bought a wind chime adorned with tiny soldier figurines, each clutching an American flag in hands of clay. It hangs now on the same front porch where a young girl dreamed of adventure, and it carries a lonely song on a warm spring night.
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