News-Info-Alerts

Re: The POW Rescues

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: April 17, 2003

Author unknown.

"Viewpoint - POW Rescues

By: April 17, 2003

To those of us who don't know them, they can seem tin soldiers - helmeted, uniformed and uniform in their training, generally more faceless than the Iraqis "wanted" in a deck of cards and playing the hand they're dealt.

Embedded reporters with videophones brought a few faces into our homes with a quick "I want to say hello to" whomever back home. But mostly we saw the back of them, and from the back a soldier is a soldier is a soldier.

Then supply column vehicles took a wrong turn in the desert and, outgunned in an Iraqi ambush, nine died, four soldiers were rescued by U.S. forces and six were captured, their predicament giving the lie to an artificial divide between support troops and combat troops in war. And putting six oh-so-young faces on the public radar and half a dozen families on tenterhooks.

A day or so later, the downing of an Apache helicopter with two crew aboard brought the number of known captives with now-public faces and anxious families to eight.

That number dropped to seven with Jessica Lynch's dramatic rescue on April 2 following a tip from an Iraqi lawyer. A U.S. commando, along with fellow Army Rangers and aviators, Navy SEALs, Marines and Air Force pilots and combat controllers, told Jessica Lynch in an Iraqi hospital bed, "We're United States soldiers and we're here to protect you and take you home." "I'm an American soldier, too," said Lynch.

On Sunday, that number mercifully dropped to zero, when Marines alerted by Iraqi guards abandoned by their officers kicked in the door of a house in Samarra, shouted at all inside to get down, then said, "If you're an American, stand up." Seven Americans stood and walked out of three weeks' captivity, Shoshana Johnson on gunshot feet and her fellow soldiers, a Marine present noted, sporting "really good beards."

Neither the rescued nor the rescuers consider themselves American heroes, just trained and resilient. But each of them, and the Iraqis who disclosed their whereabouts, acted as most of us would like to think we would in their circumstances - and as the Iraqi high command decidedly did not, not toward Iraqi soldiers, not toward Iraqi civilians.

More than 100 American servicemen and women have died in this war. Four American servicemen are still missing in action, and the U.S. armed forces will do their best to find these men whose names and faces they know. That, too, is part of a job done as well as human soldiers ever have.

©The Herald Chronicle 2003 "