Jessica Lynch, the American soldier held for eight days during the Iraq war, was raped by her captors, according to an authorised biography due for publication next week.
The book, I Am a Soldier, Too, says that scars on her body and her medical records show that she was sodomised during her ordeal. It says she has no memory of the rape but that she is unable to account for the first three hours after being captured.
An excerpt in yesterday’s New York Daily News suggests that the medical records ”fill in the blanks of what Jessi lived through on the morning of March 23 2003”.
Lynch (20) was taken after her convoy was ambushed in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriya. Since her return home to the US she has been hailed as a hero.
”Jessi lost three hours,” the book says. ”She lost them in the snapping bones, in the crash of the Humvee, in the torment her enemies inflicted on her after she was pulled from it.”
The book is just one part of a media fuss surrounding Lynch in the approach to Veterans Day on Tuesday. On Sunday NBC will show for the first time a film version of her experiences, entitled Saving Jessica Lynch.
She has been photographed for the magazines Glamour and Vanity Fair, and will be interviewed by Diane Sawyer of ABC on Tuesday.
Sawyer said: ”The book does indeed cite some intelligence reports that she was treated brutally and a medical record that says, in the book, that she was a victim of a sodomising rape.
”I talked to both her and her parents about this, asking about the decision to put it in the book, and they told me it was a decision to tell the reality, not selective parts, of a story of going to war.”
I Am a Soldier, Too takes its title from the response Lynch made to her rescuers when they told her they were US soldiers.
The book has been written by a journalist, Rick Bragg, who resigned from the New York Times in May after it suspended him for putting his byline on a story which was largely the work of a freelance.
Bragg and Lynch are splitting a $1-million advance between them. – Guardian Unlimited Â