News-Info-Alerts

Re: Women POWs Are Instant Celebrities

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: April 25, 2003

"Women POWs Are Instant Celebrities

By Louie Gilot Gannett News Service

    Former prisoner of war Spc. Shoshana Johnson has been offered a scholarship to a prestigious culinary school, her own bakery, and is being courted by Oprah Winfrey and NBC's Stone Phillips. The other rescued woman, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, was on the cover of People and Newsweek and had to ask well-wishers to stop sending gifts to her crowded hospital room.

    And what about the male POWs from Fort Bliss? Sgt. James Riley, Spc. Joseph Hudson, Spc. Edgar Adan Hernandez and Pfc. Patrick Miller were captured as well, in the same ambush of Fort Bliss' 507th Maintenance Company by Iraqi forces near Nasiriyah on March 23. They too were held captive for three weeks before being rescued April 13 by Marines.

    But these men have not received nearly as much attention as their female counterparts.

    "We haven't gotten any offers," said Natalie Hudson, Hudson's wife.

    Media experts and sociologists said women POW stories are more exciting because they are rare.

    There were no U.S. female POWs between World War II and Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

    "You never hear about this happening to women. It's all sort of new to us as a nation," said Tennessee gospel singer Eric Horner, who will sing his song "She Is a Hero" at Lynch's homecoming party.

    Melissa Coleman, a former Gulf War POW who was deployed from Fort Bliss, Texas, said this is nothing new.

    "The gentleman I was captured with [David Lockett], he wasn't offered anything. He wasn't even acknowledged," Coleman said.

    But the offers she got -- Sally Jesse Raphael wanted her to get married on her talk show; the president of Italy sent flowers and named a perfume after her; she was asked to help write a book about her 33 days in a Baghdad prison in 1991 -- pale in comparison to what Johnson and Lynch are being offered now, Coleman said.

    "Even though it's 2003, people are still in awe of women in the military," she said.

    Edwin Dorn, a former undersecretary of defense for President Clinton, said he was happily surprised by the outpouring of affection for the women.

    "Apparently, the public is more supportive [of women in combat] than we had expected in the early 1990s," he said. "There could have been another reaction: that [the women] shouldn't have been where they were."

    Some experts think the public may actually be more sympathetic to women who are in dangerous situations. "Our chivalrous intentions kick in," said Tim Graham, director of news media analysis for the conservative Media Research Center in Washington.  
 
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