Susan Faludi

I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story, billed as the book that finally “lets Jessica Lynch tell the story of her capture in the Iraq war in her own words,” debuted at number one on the New York Times nonfiction best­seller list in November 2003. One of the readers curious to learn its contents was the subject herself. In a Time cover story that accompanied the book’s release, Lynch told the reporter that she had taken a look at it but “skipped the parts” that might upset her. If this seemed like a peculiarly arm’s-length relationship to one’s own memoir, Lynch had her reasons. “The Jessica Lynch Story” wasn’t hers—and hadn’t been since the day eight months earlier when the nineteen­year-­old private and fellow soldiers in the army’s 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company had been ambushed on the outskirts of a desert town. Eleven of her thirty­three comrades—chefs, mechanics, requisition and supply clerks—died, five were held hostage for three weeks in a succession of houses, and Lynch, severely injured in an ensuing car wreck that knocked her unconscious for three hours, woke to find herself in a Nasiriyah hospital room, where she remained for nine days.

It would be more accurate to say that I Am a Soldier, Too belonged to its Boswell, Rick Bragg, a former New York Times correspondent who had recently left the paper under a cloud, after acknowledging that he had outsourced his reporting on an article to an intern who was neither paid nor credited for it. In this case, Bragg had interviewed Lynch, but she seemed strangely absent in the resulting account. The “I” in the title was missing from the text, which was told in the third person. The ghostwriter had ghosted his subject. And imposed on her an interpretation of the hours right after the accident that she didn’t recall, having been out cold. Of these conjured memories, Lynch told Time, “It’s like reading a book that really wasn’t about me.”

Bragg’s narrative was only the most recent in a line of ­rewrites—authored by the military, the media, docudrama script doctors, and a self­proclaimed Iraqi savior whom Lynch said she never met. “It seemed like I was doomed for scrutiny,” Jessica Lynch told me when we talked four years later. “I was the one everyone wanted to dig into and pick apart.” The only person not offering a Jessica Lynch chronicle, it seemed, was Jessica Lynch. She had packed a camcorder in her duffel bag, but during her deployment she never once removed it from its case. For months after her return, she uttered not one public word.