Lynch's movie-like rescue inspired nation

Editor's note: Saturday's installment dealt with the ambush of Jessica Lynch and the 507th Maintenance Company. Today's installment focuses on her rescue and recovery.

When Jessica Lynch arrived at Saddam Hussein hospital in a military ambulance the afternoon of the ambush, the nurses and doctors who admitted her said they were surprised to find an American woman, almost naked, her limbs in plaster casts, beneath a sheet.

Interviewed recently about Lynch's stay at the hospital, staff members insisted that they gave her the best care they could, and that they did not believe it was possible for Iraqi agents to have abused her while she was there. Though Iraqi military, intelligence and Baath Party officials began using the hospital as a base of operations, they said they saw no one mistreat Lynch -- though a member of Iraq's intelligence service was posted outside her door.

As the doctors and nurses recalled, Lynch's condition was grave as they brought her into the emergency room. In addition to her multiple fractures, her extremities were cold, her blood pressure down, her heart rate accelerated. She was unconscious and in shock.

The hospital was operating but stressed to its limits.

Only a dozen doctors from a staff of 60 came to work; the nursing staff was skeletal as the roads were too dangerous to travel; the electricity was sporadic; the generators were failing; medical supplies spotty; and all the while, during Lynch's stay at the hospital, the hospital was receiving more than 200 casualties a day and one young intern said he was reduced to mopping up bloody floors himself.

"It was substandard care, by American standards, we know this, OK? But Jessica got the best we could offer," said Harith Hassona, one of two young resident physicians who assisted in her care.

After several days of treatment, Lynch's condition improved. She was moved from the emergency room to an empty cardiac care unit, where she had her own room and was tended by two female nurses.

But she was in pain and given powerful drugs. She ate, sporadically, asking for juice and crackers. The staff said she was offered Iraqi hospital food but refused. "She wanted to see things opened in front of her, then she would eat," said Furat Hussein, one of her nurses.

Fragile mental state

Her mental state varied from hour to hour, according to the Iraqi nurses and doctors. "She would joke with us sometimes, and sometimes she would weep," Hussein said.

"She didn't want to be left alone and she didn't want strangers to care for her," said Anmar Uday, one of the two primary care physicians. "One time, she asked me, 'Why are you standing in front of me? Are you gong to hurt me?' We said no, we're here to help you."

"Crying all the time," recalled Khalida Shnan, a nurse who wept herself when describing how she tried to comfort Lynch by singing to her night and rubbing talc on her shoulders. Mahdi Khafaji, an orthopedic surgeon, said he knew that sooner or later U.S. troops would come for Lynch and "we wanted to show the Americans that we are human beings."

Khafaji said treating Lynch well was in their self-interest: "She was more important at that moment than Saddam Hussein." He added, "You could not help but feeling sorry for her. A young girl. An American. A prisoner. We did our best. Believe me, she was the only orthopedic surgery I performed." Khafaji suggested that as he worked on Lynch, ordinary Iraqis went without treatment, and some may have died.

But Khafaji said that, without a doubt, the Iraqi leadership was also employing Lynch as a human shield.

If the hospital was chaotic and understaffed, it was also overrun with senior Iraqi officials who were living and working out of the basement, clinics and the doctors' residence halls and offices.

The staff said there were 50 to 100 Iraqi combatants in or around the hospital at any one time -- though the number shrank day by day as deserters fled at night and the Americans closed in.

The head of the municipal government, Younis Mohammad Thareb, was there, as was senior Baath Party officer Adel Abdallah Doori. There were military and special security officers also, as well as Iraqi militia and members of Saddam's Fedayeen.

"They were all here," Hassona said.

Someone in civilian clothing, whom Hassona said was a low-ranking employee of one of the Iraqi intelligence services, stood guard outside Lynch's door. Hassona and other hospital staff members said they kept a close eye on Lynch; they feared that Iraqi officials might try to move her, harass or interrogate her. "But you have to understand that these guys knew the Americans were coming, and toward the end, they were most worried about saving themselves," Hassona said.

But there was still an atmosphere of fear.

"When she woke up once, she was saying she was scared and wanted someone to stay with her," Hassona recalled. "She said, 'I'm afraid of Saddam Hussein,' and I said, 'Shhhh. Don't say that name. You must keep quiet.' "

Soon after Lynch's arrival, Hassona and Khafaji said they were approached by an intelligence officer and asked how soon Lynch could be moved.

"I told him 72 hours, at least," Khafaji said.

Khafaji said that Lynch's wounds made him suspicious. The fractures were on both sides of her body, for example, and "if they all came from a car accident, there was no glass in her wounds, no lacerations or deep bruises."

U.S. military sources believe most if not all the fractures could have been caused by extreme compression during her vehicle accident. Khafaji said "maybe a car accident or maybe they broke her bones with rifle butts or by stomping on her legs. I don't know. They know and Jessica knows. I can only guess."

Within a few days of her capture, U.S. military and intelligence agencies would learn from several Iraqis in Nasiriyah that one of the 507th soldiers was held captive at Saddam Hussein Hospital.

One of those Iraqis was Mohammed Odeh Rehaief, a 32-year-old lawyer who told U.S. authorities he learned about Lynch on March 27, when he went there to see his wife, Iman, a nurse in the kidney unit.

"In the hospital corridors, I observed a large number of Fedayeen Saddam," Rehaief recounted in a statement. "I knew they were Fedayeen because they were wearing their traditional black ninja-style uniforms that covered everything but their eyes. I also saw high army officials there."

Rehaief said a doctor friend told him about Lynch. He peered through a glass panel into her room, he said, and "saw a large man in black looming over a bed that contained a small bandaged woman with blond hair."

He reported seeing a Fedayeen officer with Lynch. "He appeared to be questioning the woman through a translator. Then I saw him slap her -- first with the palm of his hand, then with the back of his hand."

When the Fedayeen officer left, Rehaief said, he crept into Lynch's room and told her he would help her. "Don't worry," he said. He then walked east across Nasiriyah where he encountered a group of Marines and told them about Lynch.

The Marines, who corroborated Rehaief's story that he assisted them, sent him back to the hospital several times to map out access to the site and the route getting there, and to count the number of Iraqi troops inside.

Parts of story disputed

The staff of the civilian hospital believe Rehaief did tell the Marines about Lynch, but some nurses and doctors disputed other parts of his story.

The head nurse of the hospital said there is no nurse named Iman employed by the facility, or any nurse married to a lawyer. "This is something we would know," she said.

"Never happened," Hassona said. Men in black slapping Lynch? "That's some Hollywood crap you'd tell the Americans." Hassona said he suspected the lawyer embellished his story.

After the rescue, Rehaief and his wife were transported by U.S. forces to a military camp in Kuwait. Rahaief, along with his wife and daughter, was granted political asylum in the United States. He is living in Northern Virginia, working on a book for HarperCollins and with NBC for a television movie on the rescue.

Rahaief and members of Lynch's family have not sought each other out.

Task Force 20, a covert U.S. Special Operations unit, worked on only the highest U.S. priorities in Iraq: hunting for weapons of mass destruction, weapons scientists and Baath Party leaders -- and rescuing Jessica Lynch.

Among the pre-mission briefings the group received before its move on the hospital was the fact that the hospital had been reportedly visited by Ali Hassan Majeed, otherwise known as "Chemical Ali," one of the most sought-after targets in the Iraqi leadership. Sources on the ground and imagery from Predator unmanned vehicles, which had been flying over the hospital for days, indicated it might serve as some kind of military command-and-control facility.

Militarily, "they knew they were going into an unknown situation," said one Special Operations officer. "They came armed for bear." Central Command was worried enough about the Iraqi military's response that it ordered a force of Marines, with tanks and armored personnel carriers, into Nasiriyah in a feint to draw attention away from the hospital.

Commandos launch raid

About 1 a.m. on April 1, commandos in blacked-out Blackhawk helicopters, protected by low, slow-flying AC-130 gunships, swooped toward the hospital grounds. Marines fanned out as an exterior perimeter, while Army Rangers made a second protective shield just outside the hospital walls. These forces took light fire from adjacent buildings, according to military sources.

Commandos burst into the hospital, fired explosive charges meant to disorient anyone inside and headed for Lynch's room, according to U.S. accounts.

"We heard the helicopters and we decided we would go to the radiology unit," said Anmar Uday, a doctor, because the X-ray room was lined with lead.

The Iraqis heard shouts of "Go! Go! Go!" and soon the commandos were upon them. They said no shots were fired in the hospital and no one resisted, that there were only doctors and staff and a few hundred patients left. "It was like a 'Rambo' movie," Uday said. "But we were not Rambo. We just waited to be told what to do."

"There was not a firefight inside of the building, I will tell you, but there were firefights outside of the building, getting in and out," Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks told reporters at Central Command in Qatar.

Troops find Lynch

The commandos found Lynch in a private room atop the hospital's only bed, a special sand-filled tub used to ease the pain of bedsores. She was accompanied by a male nurse in a white jacket.

"Jessica Lynch, we're the United States soldiers and we're here to protect you and take you home," a Special Forces soldier called out, according to Air Force Maj. Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr., who briefed reporters three days later.

"I'm an American soldier, too," she answered from her hospital bed.

Troops found "ammunition, mortars, maps, a terrain model and other things that make it very clear that it was being used as a military command post," Brooks said.

Saad Abdul Razaq, the hospital's assistant administrator, said he was corralled with others in a corner. "They were pointing a gun at me and I thought, it's all over, I'm going to die," he said.

Razaq and the hospital staff said the last Iraqi military and civilian leaders had fled the morning of the raid; they stripped off their green uniforms, abandoned their vehicles in the parking lot and disappeared. None of the hospital staff was injured during the rescue.

Two bodies recovered

The U.S. troops recovered two American bodies from the morgue. Staff members escorted the Americans to a grave site outside the building, by a soccer field where the bodies of seven U.S. soldiers were buried. The hospital staff said the bodies -- all members of Lynch's convoy -- were put under the earth because the morgue's faltering refrigerators could not slow decomposition. Navy SEALs dug the bodies up with their hands, according to military officials.

A few hours after the last members of Task Force 20 flew away in helicopters, a contingent of U.S. tanks and trucks rolled up to the hospital's front door without firing a shot.

Central Command's public affairs office in Qatar geared up to make the most of the rescue.

"We wanted to make sure we got whatever visuals were available," said one public affairs officer involved. The task force had photographed the rescue. Special Forces had already provided exclusive, opening-day video to the news media of Iraqi border posts being destroy by nighttime raids. That had been a hit, public affairs officers believed.

"We let them know, if possible we wanted to get it, we'd like to have" the video, said Lt. Col. John Robinson, a Central Command public affairs officer. "We were hoping we would have good visuals. We knew it would be the hottest thing of the day. There was not an intent to talk it down or embellish it because we didn't need to. It was an awesome story."

For the U.S. military and the American public, Lynch's rescue came as a joyous moment in one of the darkest hours of the war, when U.S. troops looked like they were going to be bogged down on their way to Baghdad. But the rescue had gone off without a hitch.

"It took on a life of its own," said one colonel who tried to answer the barrage of media queries.

"Reporters seem to be reporting on each other's information. The rescue turned into a Hollywood concept."

After her rescue, nowhere was the joy greater than in Lynch's hometown of tiny Palestine, W.Va., where parents Greg and Deadra Lynch had struggled to stay hopeful as days slipped by without news of their missing daughter.

The family's elation was tempered when they discovered the true extent of Lynch's injuries when they reached her bedside at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.

At Walter Reed, Lynch's bones have been put back together with such a delicate and extensive network of rods and pins that it can take an hour for her to move from bed to wheelchair.

"She is still struggling with pain and her recovery will be slow," said family spokesman Randy Coleman. Her mother said, "It's amazing she can walk at all, she is a body full of pins and screws," Coleman recounted.

Still, Lynch is making progress. She recently walked more than 100 steps using a walker. "She works hard at physical therapy. She doesn't sit around and complain. She is certainly determined to get well," said Walter Reed spokeswoman Beverly Chidel.

People who have seen her said she is psychologically traumatized, and appears somewhat dazed, though she is better now than in the early weeks. Recently she has talked on the phone to friends and sent e-mails from her laptop.

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