W. Joseph Campbell

Posts Tagged ‘Jessica Lynch’

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Seven years after ‘fighting to the death’: Who was the Post’s source?

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post on April 2, 2010 at 10:49 am

It will be seven years tomorrow since the Washington Post published its erroneous front-page report about Jessica Lynch, the Army private whom the newspaper had said “fought fiercely” in an early engagement of the Iraq War.

“‘She Was Fighting to the Death,'” the Post‘s headline said of Lynch, then a 19-year-0ld supply clerk in the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company.

The Post cited “U.S. officials” who otherwise were unidentified as saying Lynch had “continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting” at Nasiriyah on March 23, 2003.

The Post further cited the unnamed sources in reporting that Lynch had “shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed” the 507th and kept “firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition.”

None of it was true, however.

Lynch never fired a shot at Nasiriyah; her rifle jammed during the attack. She suffered shattering injuries when a rocket-propelled grenade struck her Humvee, causing the vehicle to crash. But she wasn’t shot.

Lynch was taken prisoner and treated at an Iraqi hospital, from where she was rescued April 1, 2003, by a U.S. special operations team.

As I write in Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book about media-driven myths, “The Post’s erroneous hero-warrior tale thrust Lynch into an international spotlight that has never fully receded.”

The Post, though, has never disclosed identity of the source or sources for its bogus “fighting to the death” report, which was published April, 3, 2003.

Over the years, speculation has been that the U.S. military leaked the hero-warrior tale about Lynch. But one of the reporters on the story, Vernon Loeb, has said the Pentagon wasn’t the source.

“I could never get anybody from the Pentagon to talk about those reports at all,” Loeb said on an NPR program in late 2003. “I got indications that they had, in fact, received those intelligence reports, but the Pentagon was completely unwilling to comment on those reports at all. They wouldn’t say anything about Jessica Lynch.”

He added that “we wrote a story that turned out to be wrong because intelligence information we were given was wrong.”

So who were the Post‘s sources? Who supplied the erroneous details about Lynch?

When I reached him by phone in 2008 to talk about the Lynch case, Loeb hung up on me.

The author Jon Krakauer claimed in a book published last year that a former White House operative named Jim Wilkinson “arranged to give the Washington Post exclusive access to classified intelligence that was the basis for the now-discredited ‘She Was Fighting to the Death’ story that ran on the front page of that newspaper.”

Krakauer, writing in Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, called Wilkinson a “master propagandist” and said he “deserves top billing for creating the myth of Jessica Lynch.”

Krakauer’s book identified no specific sources for its claims about Wilkinson, who at the time of Lynch’s capture and rescue was director of strategic communications for General Tommy Franks, then the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.

I recently spoke by phone with Wilkinson, now a managing partner for the Brunswick Group in San Francisco. He vigorously disputed Krakauer’s account as “factually incorrect” and insisted that “not one shred of evidence” links him to leaking the erroneous report to the Post.

Wilkinson also said:

“Tommy Franks would have killed me” had he been the Post’s source for the erroneous report about Lynch.

Wilkinson’s denial has the ring of authenticity, especially so his point about Tommy Franks. The tenor of Franks’ memoir, American Soldier, makes it clear that Wilkinson’s subordinate and advisory role would have ended abruptly had he crossed the general.

So seven years on, the Post‘s bogus report about Jessica Lynch reverberates still.

WJC

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Recalling the overlooked heroism of Sgt. Walters

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post on March 19, 2010 at 2:05 pm

Oregon Public Broadcasting aired a segment today recalling the death seven years ago in Iraq of Sergeant Donald Walters, whose battlefield heroics were mistakenly attributed to Private Jessica Lynch.

“In later accounts,” the OPB report noted, “Don emerged as a hero who’d stayed behind to cover for his escaping comrades, before his capture and brutal death” at the hands of Iraqi irregulars, the Fedayeen.

The OPB report represents one of the few occasions when U.S. news media have called attention to Walters, a 33-year-old cook in the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company who either was left behind or stayed behind as his unit tried to escape an ambush in Nasiriyah in March 2003, during the first days of the Iraq War.

Walters laid down covering fire as his comrades fled. When his ammunition ran out, Walters was captured and soon after executed.

Owing apparently to a mistaken translation of Iraqi battlefield reports, Walters’ heroics initially were attributed to Lynch, then a 19-year-old supply clerk in the 507th.

The Washington Post sent the erroneous account about Lynch into worldwide circulation on April 3, 2003, in a sensational report on its front page. The Post said Lynch had “fought fiercely” in Nasiriyah and had “shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed” elements of the 507th, “firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition.”

The Post cited “U.S. officials” who otherwise were unidentified as saying that Lynch had “continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting March 23.” One official was quoted anonymously as saying:

“‘She was fighting to the death. She did not want to be taken alive.’”

As I write in Getting It Wrong, my forthcoming book about media-driven myths, “the Post never fully acknowledged or explained its extraordinary error about Jessica Lynch.”

I also note: “The Post’s erroneous hero-warrior tale thrust Lynch into an international spotlight that has never fully receded.”

Indeed, the hoopla over her supposed derring-do in battle obscured the actions of Walters, whose conduct Nasiriyah probably saved lives of fellow soldiers. Walters posthumously was awarded the Silver Star, the U.S. military’s third-highest decoration for valor.

Walters’ parents live in Salem, Oregon. In the OPB report, Walters’ mother, Arlene, points to an imponderable about her son in his last hours. “Our big question,” she said, “is did he choose to stay or was he left out there” in Nasiriyah in the rush to escape the ambush.

Perhaps the best account of the ambush at Nasiriyah appears in Richard Lowry’s masterful book, Marines in the Garden of Eden.

Lowry wrote:

“We will never really know the details of Walters’ horrible ordeal. We do know that he risked his life to save his comrades and was separated from the rest of the convoy, deep in enemy territory. We know that he fought until he could no longer resist.”

As I note in Getting It Wrong:

“Walters’ actions, when they became known, attracted little more than passing interest from the American news media—certainly nothing akin to the intensity of the Lynch coverage after the Post’s ‘fighting to the death’ story appeared.”

WJC

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Gleanings from the conference

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post on March 14, 2010 at 6:41 pm

My paper about the media myths surrounding the case of Jessica Lynch, the Army private whom the Washington Post lifted from obscurity early in the Iraq War, stirred a fair amount of comment and questions at yesterday’s conference of journalism historians in New York.

That’s hardly surprising given that the paper—which is drawn from a chapter in Getting It Wrong,  my forthcoming book about media-driven myths—challenges the dominant narrative about the Lynch case that the Pentagon supposedly made up the account of her supposed heroics on the battlefield.

Her heroics were reported on the Post‘s front page April 3, 2003.

The newspaper said Lynch, then 19, had “fought fiercely” in the ambush of her unit, the 507th Maintenance Company, in Nasiriyah in southeastern Iraq. The Post article cited unnamed “U.S. officials” in reporting that Lynch had “shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed” her unit, “firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition.”

One official was quoted anonymously as saying: “‘She was fighting to the death. She did not want to be taken alive.’” Lynch was taken prisoner and nine days later rescued from an Iraqi hospital by a U.S. Special Operations team.

The Post’s story about Lynch’s derring-do was electrifying–and picked up by news organizations around the world.

It soon proved to be almost entirely in error.

Lynch hadn’t “fought fiercely.” She had never fired her weapon.

She suffered shattering injuries in the crash of a Humvee as she and others in the 507th fled the ambush.

Soon enough, though, the dominant narrative about the Lynch saga took shape: The Pentagon had concocted the hero-warrior story in order to boost support back home.

But as I noted during my presentation yesterday, Vernon Loeb, one of the Post reporters who shared a byline on the “Fighting to the Death” story said late in 2003 that the Pentagon was not the source for that report.

I also noted that the Pentagon hardly would have been desperate to boost morale back home: Just before Lynch’s rescue, support for the Iraq War was topping 70 percent, according to opinion polls in the United States.

One of the questions raised at the conference yesterday was: If the military wasn’t the source, then who gave the Post the story?

It’s a fair question, and I noted that Loeb and other reporters on the story have never disclosed their sources, beyond citing the otherwise unidentified “U.S. officials.” I also pointed out that they had reported the hero-warrior story about Lynch from Washington, and that no journalists were with Lynch and her unit during the ambush in Iraq.

Not surprisingly, the crucial element of mistaken identity in the Lynch saga stirred little comment from yesterday’s audience.

The hoopla stirred by the Post‘s story about Lynch had the effect of obscuring the recognition of a real hero of the ambush. He was Sergeant Donald Walters, a cook in the 507th who did fight to the death at Nasiriyah.

As his unit tried to flee the ambush, Walters stayed behind, laying down covering fire. When his ammunition ran out, Walters was captured and, shortly afterward, executed.

But when they became known, Walters’ actions on the battlefield attracted scant interest among the American news media.

The daylong conference was sponsored by the History Division of AEJMC and the American Journalism Historians Association. AEJMC is the acronym for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

WJC

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‘Mythmaking in Iraq,’ at a conference in New York

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post on March 12, 2010 at 8:47 am

I’ll be in New York tomorrow to present a paper that’s drawn on my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong.

The venue will be the annual, daylong Joint Journalism Historians Conference; my paper is titled, “‘She Was Fighting to the Death’: Mythmaking in Iraq.”

The paper deconstructs the media-driven myth surrounding the case of Jessica Lynch, the Army private whom the Washington Post lifted from obscurity in early April 2003, in an electrifying account of her supposed heroics at Nasiriyah in the first days of the Iraq War.

The Post’s hero-warrior tale about Lynch, then 19, carried the headline:

“’She was fighting to the death.’”

The Post‘s story was picked up around the world, in a classic case of intermedia agenda-setting (wherein large news organizations set a news agenda for other, smaller outlets).

But the account proved badly in error: Lynch never fired a shot in the fighting at Nasiriyah.

Washington Post's story about Lynch, April 2003

Given that the Post’s hero-warrior narrative proved untrue, it’s scarcely surprising that other suspicions arose about the Lynch saga–namely that Pentagon officials planted the “fighting to the death” report and that the rescue of Lynch by a U.S. special forces team was contrived to boost flagging morale back home.

As I’ll note in my presentation, the Pentagon did little to promote the hero-warrior story about Lynch. Indeed, the Post‘s story was not based on Pentagon sources.

I’ll also point out that U.S. public support for the war was quite high at the time the Lynch case began unfolding.

A national CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll taken of 1,012 American adults in late March  2003—a few days before publication of the Post‘s erroneous report about Lynch—found that 85.5 percent of respondents thought the war effort was going “very well” or “moderately well” for U.S. forces.

The hoopla over Lynch had another, lasting effect: That of obscuring the recognition of an Army sergeant named Donald Walters who did fight to the death at Nasiriyah.

Walters was captured when his ammunition ran out, and executed.

Sgt. Donald Walters

Walters’ heroics were mistakenly attributed to Lynch, apparently because of faulty translation of Iraqi battlefield reports.

But when they became known, Walters’ heroics attracted little more than passing attention in the American news media.

Walters’ mother, Arlene, told me a few years ago that she called the editors of newsweeklies that had placed Lynch’s image on their covers. But “there was never any story about Don,” she said. “I called all these magazines. … They didn’t really care.”

I’ll bet most attendees at tomorrow’s conference never have heard of Sergeant Donald Walters.

The conference is sponsored by the History Division of AEJMC and the American Journalism Historians Association. AEJMC is the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

WJC

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Jessica Lynch and the lingering hero myth

In Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post on February 2, 2010 at 8:05 am

It’s amazing how “hero” still attaches to Jessica Lynch, the blonde, waiflike Army private from West Virginia who, through no exceptional effort of her own, became the best-known American military figure of the early days of the Iraq War.

Jessica Lynch, before the war

Lynch was in Florida the other day, promoting  I Am a Soldier, Too, a book about her that was written by Rick Bragg and published in November 2003 to decidedly mixed reviews.

In a report online, a Florida television station gave 267 words to Lynch’s visit; in that report, “hero” was invoked twice.

It’s amazing, too, how the media-driven aspect of her emergence to sudden fame usually is obscured these days. The Florida station made no mention of the Washington Post‘s overheated and erroneous report that gave rise to the hero-warrior myth of Jessica Lynch.

The myth is examined in detail in a chapter in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong, which is due out in the summer.

In it, I recount how Lynch was catapaulted to sudden and unsought fame during the first days of the war in Iraq. Lynch then was a 19-year-old supply clerk in the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company.

On March 23, 2003, elements of the 507th were ambushed by Iraqi irregulars in the southern city of Nasiriyah.  Lynch was badly injured in the crash of her Humvee and was taken prisoner.

Nine days later, she was rescued by a U.S. special operations unit from a hospital in Nasiriyah.

Two days after that, on April 3, 2003, the Washington Post published a sensational report on its front page that said Lynch had “fought fiercely” in Nasiriyah and had “shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed” her unit, “firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition.”

Washington Post's erroneous front-page report

The Post’s report cited “U.S. officials” who otherwise were unidentified as saying that Lynch had “continued firing at the Iraqis — even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting March 23.”

One official was quoted anonymously as saying:

“‘She was fighting to the death. She did not want to be taken alive.’”

It was a terrific story that was immediately picked up by news outlets across the United States and around the world.

But it wasn’t true.

The battlefield heroics attributed to Lynch were, quite likely, the deeds of another soldier in her unit, a cook from Oregon named Donald Walters. He fought the Iraqis till his ammunition ran out, was captured, and was executed.

Central to the myth enveloping the Lynch case is that the U.S. military encouraged and promoted the phony hero-warrior story, to help boost public support for the war.

But as I describe in Getting It Wrong, one of the reporters on the Post’s erroneous “fighting to the death” report, told an NPR radio program in late 2003 that “the Pentagon … wouldn’t say anything about Jessica Lynch.”

The reporter, Vernon Loeb, also said in that interview: “I just didn’t see the Pentagon trying to create a hero where there was none.”

And the Post‘s erroneous “Fighting to the death” report about Lynch included this passage:

“Pentagon officials said they had heard ‘rumors’ of Lynch’s heroics but had no confirmation.”

The Post’s hero-warrior story about Lynch has had many unintended consequences beyond vaulting Lynch to celebrity status, which, as her appearance in Florida suggests, has never fully receded.

Her celebrity status also helped pave the way for her lucrative book contract with Bragg. And certainly it obscured the actions of Walters, whose conduct Nasiriyah probably saved the lives of some of his fellow soldiers.

WJC

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Jessica Lynch: One of the ‘buzziest’?

In Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Washington Post on December 8, 2009 at 12:17 pm

NBC’s Today show yesterday featured Jessica Lynch, perhaps the best-known American soldier of the Iraq War, as central figure of one of the decade’s  “buzziest” news stories.

“Buzziest.”

That’s how the Lynch segment was introduced.

It was a brief report (see transcript here), in which Lynch talked about her life since she was catapaulted to sudden, unsought fame in the first days of the war in Iraq.  Lynch then was a private, a supply clerk in the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company.

On March 23, 2003, elements of the 507th were ambushed by Iraqi irregulars in the southern city of Nasiriyah.  Lynch was badly injured in the crash of her Humvee and was taken prisoner.

Nine days later, she was rescued from a hospital in Nasiriyah by a U.S. special operations unit.

The Washington Post's front page report about Jessica Lynch

Two days after that, the Washington Post published a sensational account on its front page, reporting that Lynch had “fought fiercely” in Nasiriyah and had “shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed” her unit, “firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition.”

The Post‘s report cited “U.S. officials” who otherwise were unidentified as saying that Lynch had “continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting March 23.” One official was quoted anonymously as saying:

“‘She was fighting to the death. She did not want to be taken alive.'”

It was a great story, one picked up by news outlets across the United States and around the world.

Only it wasn’t true.

The Post‘s report not only was grievously in error;  it became the launchpad for a tenacious media-driven myth, one that the Today show yesterday helped promote.

Meredith Vieira, the Today show personality who interviewed Lynch, described her as “a pawn of the military that was trying to sell, some said, a war to the American public.”

In reality, though, the U.S. military did little to promote the hero-warrior story about Lynch, who then was 19-years-old. The Lynch case is discussed in a chapter in my forthcoming book, Getting It Wrong .

One of the authors of the Post‘s erroneous report, Vernon Loeb, told an NPR radio program in late 2003 that “the Pentagon … wouldn’t say anything about Jessica Lynch.”

Loeb also said: “I just didn’t see the Pentagon trying to create a hero where there was none.”

Even so, the notion that the military promoted a phony hero-warrior lives on, and has become a central element of the narrative about the Lynch case.

The hoopla over Jessica Lynch in the first days of the Iraq War had another, lasting effect: That of obscuring recognition of an Army sergeant named Donald Walters who did fight to the death at Nasiriyah.

Walters’ heroics were mistakenly attributed to Lynch, apparently because of faulty translation of Iraqi battlefield reports.

Sgt. Donald Walters

Walters stayed behind as the ambushed 507th tried to flee  Nasiriyah. He was captured when his ammunition ran out and was executed. His body was recovered the day Lynch was rescued from the hospital in Nasiriyah.

Walters’ actions, when they became known, attracted little more than passing interest from the American news media.

And not surprisingly, they were not mentioned yesterday on the Today show’s “buzziest” segment.

Nor did Today point out that the Lynch myth took hold because of over-the-top reporting in the Washington Post. The segment contained nary a word about that.

WJC

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Akin to the Lynch case?

In Jessica Lynch on November 12, 2009 at 3:16 pm

The New York Times says that initial reports of an Army sergeant’s heroism in the Fort Hood shootings appear “to be inaccurate.” Another sergeant, the Times reports, apparently “fired the shots that brought down the rampaging gunman,” an Army major named Nidal Malik Hasan.

“The confusion over what happened and the quickness of the military to label someone a hero” is reminiscent, the Times says, “of the case of Pfc. Jessica Lynch in 2003, when the Army initially reported Private Lynch had been captured in Iraq after a Rambo-like performance in which she emptied her weapon and was wounded in battle. It was later learned she had been badly hurt in a vehicle accident during an ambush and was being well cared for by the Iraqis.”

The erroneous report about Lynch’s heroics in fighting Iraqi irregulars was published by the Washington Post in early April 2003 and picked up by news organizations around the world. The Post‘s report was placed on its front page beneath the headline, “‘She was fighting to the death.'”

Lynch_Post_front_300_clean

The Washington Post and Jessica Lynch

The international hoopla over Lynch’s purported heroics effectively obscured the deeds of an Army cook, Sergeant Donald Walters, who apparently did fight Iraqi irregulars “to the death.” Walters was captured when his ammunition ran out, and executed. As is discussed in my forthcoming book Getting It Wrong, Walters’ story attracted nowhere near the attention of the erroneous reports about Lynch, who was then 19-years-old.

Getting It Wrong also challenges the view, which is widely held and was reiterated by the Times, that the U.S. military pushed the Lynch-heroics story. One of the authors of the Post‘s “Fighting to the death” article has said the military wasn’t the source for the story.

WJC