"They called 'em birth control glasses -- and they really were. A method of birth control. Ain't no guy gonna come anywhere near you as long as you are wearing a pair of those glasses. She did not want to see the world that badly. 'I am a four-eyed, birth control glasses-wearing geek,' she thought."
       So much for the fashion-statement aspect of her vision problem. But later in the narrative, we learn that Jessica cannot see without her glasses. She is damn-near blind.  I am reminded, reading her book, that her eyesight is and was about the same as my pre-teenage son who, while playing football in a Boy's Club league (before he had glasses) would run right past the ball carrier on a kickoff return without tackling him -- he couldn't see that the kick returner had a football cradled in his arm. When his mother took him to the doctor and got him glasses, his comment to her was, "Mom, these glasses are really great. I didn't know that grass had blades."

        Jessica Lynch had and has the same problem. We only learn of this peripherally in the Bragg book and the Sawyer interview. One has to search for the proof of her near-blindness in the pages of lyrical prose describing Jessica's early childhood and her traumatic experiences as a POW in the hands of the Iraqis. It is there, but completely hidden as one of the most important elements of her story -- the physical standards for acceptance in the 'support tail' of today's military have been lowered so far that a nearly blind female can become 'a soldier too.'

       Bragg's book (pp. 80) brings this fact into clear focus, although inadvertently, when describing Jessica's recovery of consciousness in an Iraqi military hospital just three hours after the Humvee accident during ambush. "She tried to focus her eyes, but a blur - enough to tell people from furniture - was all she could manage. Were her eyes injured, too? No, she had just lost her ugly glasses."

       This fact crept into the story again on page 112 of Bragg's book, this time in a description of her treatment and 'bonding' with the Iraqi doctors and nurses in the civilian hospital in Nasiriyah from which she was subsequently rescued by American troops. "But at the time, and especially after they tried to cut off her leg, they were still the enemy. It might have been different if she could have seen them clearly, if she could have seen their smiles, their faces. But without her glasses she saw only the shapes of men and women, knew that one doctor was tall and thin and one was shorter and stockier, that one of the nurses who treated her was young, and the one who sang to her was old." Indeed, Jessica Lynch was and is nearly blind without her glasses. And this condition preceded her Iraqi experience. It was not a condition suffered by injury during her stay in Iraq. This is a clear testament of the reduction in qualification standards in the U.S. military -- especially in the 'socialized' 'support tail' of the U.S. Army. No soldier, male or female, with such poor eyesight should ever have been anywhere near a battle zone. She is a striking example of how low the physical standards have become in today's all-volunteer force.

The Jessica Lynch story, the real story, is the revelation of a failed experiment with women in combat. It is an illustration of how far our military has been 'socialized' and turned into a jobs corps for women and minorities - especially in its 'support tail.' The Lynch story epitomizes, in miniature, what would have befallen our 'tip of the spear' fighting forces if the Clinton administration, the shrill sisters in Congress, and weak-kneed military brass had succeeded in 'feminizing' the entire force as it purged the 'warriors' and the 'warrior ethos' from those parts of the military that succumbed to their politically inspired move to promote 'equality' instead of military readiness.

       We Americans can only thank God that the politicians and senior military brass who allowed such incompetence to seep into our armed forces were not successful in 'feminizing' the 'tip of the spear' of our fighting armed forces during the 1990s. Had they succeeded, our children's grandchildren could be at great risk of growing up speaking a foreign language and worshipping in a mosque.

The Jessica Lynch Story Starts to Unfold

       The story of the young teen-age private from Palestine, West Virginia, started to unfold during the November 2003 television 'sweeps' period when, first, NBC-TV presented an unauthorized account [3] of the ambush of the 507^th Maintenance Company in Nasiriyah, Iraq, Lynch's subsequent capture, and her rescue by American Special Forces and Marines from an Iraqi hospital. Second, Jessica was interviewed by Diane Sawyer on ABC-TV in a Primetime Special Edition, which purported to reveal the real Jessica Lynch story [4]. This version was based on interviews with Iraqi doctors and nurses, U.S. doctors, and Rick Bragg, the author of the authorized book [5] which was released on the same day.
       During this time and immediately thereafter, there emerged a deluge of national media coverage on the Jessica Lynch Story. The Washington Post Parade Magazine featured front-page coverage [6] of how "Jessica Lynch's experience as a POW during the Iraq war gave her a new understanding of what it means to be an American." The New York Times [7], USA TODAY [8], The Washington Times [9], and Newsday [10] all trumpeted the TV sweeps competition between the story of a former Iraqi POW and Elizabeth Smart, a 14-year-old kidnap victim abducted by a self-styled messenger of God in 2002.

       Richard Cohen, the quintessential Boomer-generation liberal leftist columnist for The Washington Post labeled Lynch [11] a "...hero, not for what she did in Iraq but for what she did on the 'Today' show -- told the truth." Presumably because Jessica refused to "...pose as an older generation's military mannequin." The Associated Press reported [12] that Lynch said, "...there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. 'It's wrong,' she said." The liberal left press used the occasion to bash President Bush.

       Articles were written to provide disparate details of the Lynch Story. USA TODAY told us that [13] "Ex-POW tells of fighting doctors to save her leg." In a later story, USA TODAY reviews Lynch's book, 'I Am a Soldier, Too.' It suggests [14] that "Jessica Lynch's story raises questions, [but] offers few answers." The New York Times provides an anti-Bush rampage by the cultural Marxist columnist Frank Rich who intoned [15], "Pfc. Jessica Lynch Isn't Rambo Anymore."

       Several major national news outlets muted the 'Lynch as Hero' story to suggest that Jessica was getting more attention than she may have deserved. CBS News featured Mike Wallace in a story [16] that described "...the heroic actions by Pfc. Patrick Miller who actually saved Lynch's life by killing seven Iraqis who manned a mortar pit 25 yards from her convoy." NEWSWEEK magazine summarized untold stories [17] from the 507^th Maintenance Company soldiers, including that of Sgt. Donald Walters, a 33-year-old mechanic who was killed in the ambush, apparently while fighting bravely.  This theme is accentuated by still another such story, this one in the Wall Street Journal, which explains [18], "Why You've Heard Of Jessica Lynch, Not Zan Horbuckle." The explanation backs up that which I provide in an essay at the link, 'Who Chooses America's Heroes.' It has a great deal to do with the 'feminization' of American culture. This essay will address that subject in more detail later.

       Nearly all of these major news outlet stories about Jessica Lynch were repeated in countless small-town newspapers across the country, as is the current practice. Consequently, nearly everyone in America who isn't living under a rock has heard of Jessica Lynch -- her capture, her rescue, her homecoming, and her 'heroism.' And now they would know that much of the early stories about her were concocted out of whole cloth. For example, the first report on Lynch from The Washington Post on 3 April, 2003 stated:
                                                         "Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital,

                                                         fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi
                                                         forces ambushed the Army's 507^th Ordnance Maintenance
                                                         Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition,
                                                         U.S. officials said ... 'She was fighting to the death,' the official
                                                         said. 'She did not want to be taken alive.'

The truth of the matter is revealed in Bragg's book and in the Primetime Special interview with Diane Sawyer on 11 November 2003:
                                                           "Jessica told her mother and father ... that her gun had jammed and
                                                           that she had not shot anyone. She told her parents that the last thing
                                                           she remembered was being in the Humvee with Lori, and bowing her
                                                           head, and praying. The headlines said SHE WAS FIGHTING TO
                                                           THE DEATH. 'I didn't do that,' she said."

       Of course, this truth was well known by those of us who followed the Jessica Lynch story closely. See my essay at the link, 'The Mythical Modern American War Hero,' which explains who propagated the Lynch-as-hero myth, as well as how and why they did it. The news stories summarized above served to explain this truth to the American people -- belated but accurate.

       Surprisingly, The Washington Post was the harshest critic of Jessica's book. Surprising because it was the Post which fed the fraudulent account to the world and, when found wanting, published a second article which blamed the unnamed Pentagon intelligence sources for the misinformation. Of course, long after the Post's 'hyped' version was plastered in the headlines of every home town newspaper in America. In the book, when Lynch says the fraudulent story '...keeps me awake at night," the Post book review responds [18a], "As well it should, along with, one might add, scores of reporters and editors, most notoriously the Washington Post, who midwifed the Lynch myth from the Army to the front page without double-checking the initial reports to see if they were true...The problem is, once the original myths surrounding her capture are stripped away, Lynch, as unworldly as she is sweet, simply doesn't have much of a story to tell."

       One part of the Jessica Lynch story that has been publicized, but muted, is the fact that she was raped by her Iraqi captors during her captivity in the hands of the Saddam Fedayeen. Much of the silence on this matter was invoked in respect for her privacy. Both the Bragg book and the Sawyer Primetime Special announced this fact. Bragg informs us that [19]:

                                                         "The [U.S. military] medical records also show that she was a
                                                         victim of anal sexual assault. The records do not tell whether her
                                                         captors assaulted her almost lifeless, broken body after she was
                                                         lifted from the wreckage, or if they assaulted her and then broke her
                                                         bones into splinters until she was almost dead."

                                                         "Jessi's body armor and her bloody uniform were found in a house
                                                         near the ambush site, the place that some military intelligence sources
                                                         said she was taken to be tortured. But Jessi remembers none of this.
                                                         When she awoke in the military hospital, it was during treatment,
                                                         not torture. When she came to, the cruelties were over."

       Diane Sawyer [20] attempted to draw Jessica out on this subject but was not successful. A transcript of the interview follows:
Sawyer:  Her spine is still damaged. No one knows how long. 'You say that, because of the injury in your spine, that your
              kidneys and bowels  weren't working properly. They [U.S. Army doctors] tried to stimulate them electronically --
              didn't work. It was devastating.'
Lynch:  Yes. It is devastating. No, that ... it didn't work.
Sawyer:  What now?
Lynch:  Just time. Time to tell if it comes back or not.
Sawyer:  Whatever her visible injuries, her book tells of yet another one. Something that it says, that could have happened in
               a period that she doesn't remember. In a time before the hospital and right after the crash. The exact words [camera
               focuses on the open book and Sawyer reads the words from the book quoted above], "I spoke with Dr. Greg
              Argyros, Lynch's doctor at Walter Reed [Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.] who told me that the medical
              record from her first examination by American doctors in Germany does show agreement by physicians of 'The
              traumatic nature of her perianal lesions.' Lynch and her family remember the day that the doctors brought them this
              news.
Jessica:  It was just ... like they were speaking but they weren't speaking to me.
Sawyer:  The family asked that if I approached the subject with her, to do it without using graphic words. 'What did you
                think when you heard it?'
Jessica:  I just remember ... you know ... looking off into space and not reacting to anything.

Sawyer:  Was it a hard decision to put it in the book?

Jessica:  Yeah, it was, because I have no memory of that and I don't want ... [a two-second  pause] ... people ... [a two-second
               pause] ... to look at me in a shameful way -- which I had no control over even if it did, in fact, happen. But, you
               know, if it did happen, then people had to know that -- that's the kind of people they are. That's how they treat the
               female soldiers that are over there.
Sawyer : Rick Bragg, the author of the book, said that Jessica did have reservations about putting these passages in.
Sawyer to Bragg:  Why did you decide to put in those paragraphs about what happened in those hours [between Jessica's
                              capture and her arrival at the military hospital]?
Bragg:  Well, I think we had to.

Sawyer:  Why?

Bragg:  Because, to leave it out ... [thoughtful pause] ...would leave out ... [pause] ...the consequence. You could have
             written a fairy tale -- about -- the princess goes off to war. That's like watching old war movies. When people get
             shot and they don't bleed ... you know ... or people get hit in the jaw and they don't fall down. Jessica got hit in the
             jaw and fell down.
Sawyer to Lynch:  You really wonder whether it happened? You don't necessarily believe it?
Lynch:  Hmmm. It's all kind of questionable. I mean I don't ... it's all too painful [to think about].
Sawyer to Bragg:  Any chance that the military spin artists are spinning you
Bragg:  [Shaking his head side to side] I don't think so, because I don't think any of this helps them.
Sawyer:  To make her ... I guess ... more in need of rescue ... to make the Iraqis more the enemy ...
Bragg:  Why not leak it out at the beginning, if that's true, so they could have milked it all along.
Sawyer: And, indeed, two other POWs have now confirmed that during their captivity, they were brutally beaten [the two Apache helicopter crewmen]. So, once again ... the question ... is there something buried in Jessica Lynch's memory?
Sawyer to Jessica:  Is it work to keep it from coming back? Do you think, sometimes, do you feel some memory you don't
                               want coming back and you have to fight it away.

Jessica:  No. I don't want to have any at all memory ever for that to come back ... so I can remember that. I don't want that. That's a part that I hope that fades away forever and I never ever recall any of that.
       Rick Bragg describes the scene in the book [21] from Jessica's mother, Dee's, point of view. "Dee stood beside Jessi's bed and held her good hand, and Greg stood on the other side of the  bed, his hand resting on her. Col. Harvey told them that Jessi had been assaulted, and of the injuries resulting from that savagery."
       Jessi's face did not change.
       "She just lay there, and her face was blank," said Dee.
       She thought Jessi might at least grip her hand harder, something, but her hand was limp.
       "She was numb. She was on a lot of medication. Maybe that was it," Dee said.
        Jessi acted as if it were something that had happened to someone else, someone she didn't know.
       "I don't remember,' she said, turning her face up to look at her mother. "I don't know."
       Dee kept waiting for her to just break down.
       She was still waiting.
       "She didn't cry," Dee said. "They couldn't get her to cry."
       Dee leaned over her daughter's face.
       "It's okay," she said. "You don't think about it. You don't have to think about it."

       Later, doctors would say it would be better for Jessi if she could cry about it, if she could face it, but Dee is not sure about that. If Jessi wants to keep those hours in a dark place, a place darker than the deepest mine, then her mother will stand guard at the entrance to that place, all her life if need be, waiting. She does not know what she will do if it ever comes out.

       Maybe it never will.
       "And I will thank God for that," she said.

       It is clear from this conversation that Jessica Lynch, and then her family in support of her, have gone into that magical box where reality is submerged into the subconscious and the soothing, wonderful world of the imagination rules -- their 'Happy Place.'

       Few major newspapers picked up on the details of the book's description of her sexual assault by the Iraqis. The Washington Times reported the book's revelation and noted the disinclination of family and local supporters to focus on that aspect of her captivity [22]. "The complete story of her capture is a very painful one for Jessica," said family spokeswoman Aly Goodwin Gregg. "However, she felt it was important to tell her story so that people fully understand the atrocities of war. But her story is more than just one incident."

       Newsday [23] reported on the book's findings. Advertiser Newspapers Ltd. 'The Advertiser,' a British tabloid, shouted [24] that 'Medical checks reveal Lynch's rape hell.' USA TODAY, a liberal left Gannet publication, gave a 'balanced view.' One [25] reveals that "...the Lynch book tells of rape by captors," but another [26] gives the view of the negative, held by Lynch's Iraqi doctors. In spite of these denials, Lynch's medical records establish beyond any doubt that she was raped anally in a savage and vicious manner by the Iraqis -- presumably during the period between her capture and delivery to the military hospital in Nasiriyah.

Jessica Lynch's Injuries and the Possibility of Torture

       As confusing as the mass media accounts were of Jessica Lynch's injuries during the early days (April 2003) after her rescue from the civilian hospital in Nasiriyah, Iraq, there is now (November 2003) a clear and consistent public understanding of their general nature. I have described in great detail the discrepancies in reports of these injuries during the early period (i.e. April 2003 when she was rescued) and those emanating from both the U.S. military hospital in Germany and Walter Reed Medical Center in the United States. These descriptions are listed and compared in the essay at the link, 'Jessica Lynch's Army.' There is still, however, great confusion and understanding of when, how, and by whom these injuries were inflicted on Jessica and by whom.

       A summary description of the final medical condition of Jessica Lynch was reported from the Walter Reed Medical Center on 9 April by the Washington Post [27]. "Lynch is in stable condition in a private room in intensive care after undergoing three operations. Her most serious injury involves a vertebra in her lower back. She also has fractures in four places: her upper right arm, upper left leg, lower left leg, and right ankle and foot. The hospital said it wasn't clear how Lynch suffered the injuries. Gunshots from a low-velocity, small-caliber weapon may have caused one or more of them, but no bullets or metal fragments have been found."

       Bragg's book describes her wounds as follows [28]: "Her medical records show what happened in the three hours missing from Jessi's memory [between the Humvee crash and waking up in the Iraqi military hospital]. Her right arm was shattered between her shoulder and her elbow, and the compound fracture shoved slivers of bone through muscles, nerves and skin, leaving her right hand all but useless. Her spine was fractured in two places, causing nerve damage that left her unable to control her kidneys and bowels. Her right foot was crushed."

       "Her left leg had broken into pieces above and below the knee, also a compound fracture, and splintered bone had made a mess of the nerves and left her without feeling in that limb. The flesh along the hairline of her forehead was torn in a ragged, four-inch line."

       The Sawyer interview [29] gave the same report as the book, but with slightly different adjectival descriptions of the severity of the injuries.  "Her left leg was completely shattered below the knee, her foot crushed to splinters. [Jessica described the leg as] completely destroyed from the femur to the foot. Her right arm was broken at the shoulder and again below. Her spine was fractured in two places. [She had] a lacerating wound to her head."

       It is of note that the rescue operation showed Lynch holding onto the hand of a rescuer with her left hand: her left arm was either or both heavily bandaged and/or in a cast. No mention is made in either report of this 'injury.'

       Neither the book nor the Sawyer interview draw any specific attention to the two fractures of Jessica's spine. I have, however, noted (see the essay at the link: 'Jessica Lynch's Army,') the similarity of these injuries with those inflicted on Johnny Michael Spann, the CIA operative who was caught in an uprising by hundreds of Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners in the Qala-i-Jangi fortress-prison near Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan where he was tortured during the early stages of the war there before being summarily executed by a shot to the back of his head. To be specific, According to Robin Moore [30], when American Special Forces recovered Johnny Spann's body, they found that "Spann's body would bear out the worst of the rumors -- he had been captured alive and tortured by the AQ. Both of his legs had been broken below the knees in a typical al Qaeda torture method. What was not reported was that he had been alive for quite some time after. Two bullets had been placed in the small of his back, on either side of his spine. A final bullet, which killed him, had been inflicted some time later, in the back of the neck, probably as he knelt down with his hands tied behind his back."

       Despite the succinct but non-descriptive nature of the details of the injuries to Lynch by the U.S. Army doctors, it is clear that, while they satisfied the elites who write the news accounts and 'analyze' the situation, they did not satisfy the country-boy truck driver and all around handyman, Greg Lynch, Jessica's father. His experience with the real world of trucks, accidents, and injuries in nature's world led him to express doubts that Jessica's injuries could have been caused in the crash of the Humvee.

       Bragg's book relates that [31] "The wounds to her limbs, with splintered and protruding bone, had been a mess, but [Jessica's parents] still wonder why [U.S. military] doctors said bluntly early in her treatment that Jessi had been shot, and then changed their minds. Later, doctors would say that all her broken bones probably came in the wreck of the Humvee, but that puzzles [Jessica's parents] too.

       "Some Iraqi doctors had said that Jessica seemed to have injuries consistent with having been stomped and beaten with rifle butts, and [Jessica's parents] wondered how she could be so badly broken in a crash the army estimated at about forty-five miles per hour on impact, when she had been in the rear compartment, wedged between the bodies of two soldiers and surrounded by duffel bags of [clothing] and equipment. 'It just doesn't make sense,' Greg [Jessica's father] said. How did the impact break bones on both sides of her body; how did that happen? Pictures of the Humvee had circulated in West Virginia newspapers -- it had not looked badly damaged."

       "But it was better to believe it was just a wartime traffic accident, better to believe she was never subjected to the horrors they heard about day after day of how Iraqi soldiers treated their captives." Indeed, as Jessica found her own solace, her own 'Happy Place' in her imagination to block out the reality of her terrible pain and suffering, her family also found their 'Happy Place.' It would be better to look away and not ask detailed questions concerning whether or not their daughter had been brutally tortured by the Saddam Fedayeen in Nasiriyah.

       Rick Bragg is a spell-binding story-teller. His folksy manner, grasp of timing and temper, in telling stories is a lost art in today's elite punditry on television and pop-culture books. But he is a master at his craft. I have observed him on C-Span completely enthrall an audience with his mastery of the art of down-home storytelling during his discussion of his book, 'All Over but the Shoutin.' He is especially effective in wooing a female audience of older women. But an astute book reviewer for The Wall Street Journal observes that [32] "[Bragg] makes much of the fact that, although the convoy was attacked at 7 a.m., Pfc. Lynch didn't arrive at the hospital until 10 a.m. Are the 'three hours missing' important? Was she tortured, as 'some military intelligence sources' believe? Jessica Lynch doesn't remember, and Rick Bragg is a lyricist, not an investigative reporter, so readers interested in the answers to these questions will have to look elsewhere."

       The reviewer is right and wrong at the same time. True, Bragg is a lyricist and he has spun a masterful story that should maintain Jessica Lynch solidly in the pantheon of America's military heroes (if only in the minds of militant feminists, male and female). And hardly anyone could resist 'liking' the little waif of a girl who sat and chatted with Diane Sawyer for one and one-half hours on Primetime television. The interviewer treated Jessica as softly as one might treat a child, a pre-teen waif of a girl, but one who had been subjected to brutal treatment by savage adults and taken advantage of by her military superiors by placing her in extreme danger.

       But Bragg also places all of the pieces in the book on which to build an iron-clad case that Jessica Lynch had, indeed, been brutally TORTURED by her Iraqi Saddam Fedayeen captors. The problem is that his 'evidence' is spread all over the book in bits and pieces that more fit his 'lyrical' style. He spends so much time in the book telling us about Jessica's childhood, relationships with siblings and school mates, and other 'public interest' puffery (e.g. her friendship with Lori Piestewa and her boyfriend who 'tented' in the Kuwait desert near her) that the 'meat' of the whole untold story is there but dispersed among relative trivia such as, Jessica "... cried on the first day of kindergarten." That Lynch [in mastering arithmetic] "...loved to divide, but hated the rest of it, the adding, the multiplying, the subtracting."

       Even someone who has been following the Jessica Lynch episode from the beginning and scanning all of the applicable news stories would have trouble picking the wheat from the chaff in Bragg's account. But it is there, if you look. Jessica Lynch was TORTURED by her Iraqi captors.

       After the three-hour period during which Jessica Lynch was apparently unconscious, from the Humvee crash until arriving at the Iraqi military hospital, she awoke. According to Bragg [33] on page 80, "From the circle of faces, she heard English. One of the faces leaned in closer. 'Don't hurt me,' was the first thing she said. 'I am not going to hurt you, the face said. She did not believe him."

       The Diane Sawyer interview gives a more emotional sense of this conversation. The transcript of the interview follows:
The segment introduction by a male voice-over promo:  "Coming up next. Waking up to a nightmare. Surrounded by the enemy."

Jessica:  I kept repeating, 'Please don't hurt me. Please don't hurt me.
Sawyer:  Prayers [by her family and friends back in Palestine, WV] for a girl, who lies unconscious in the heat, and dust, and
               wreckage. Lynch's book says three hours will pass from the time of the collision until she awakens in the [Iraqi]
               military hospital, and then she opens her eyes.
Sawyer to Lynch:  What's the next thing you remember?
Lynch:  Waking up in the hospital, surrounded by Iraqis.
Sawyer:  What was your first physical sensation?
Lynch:  It was just pain. Constant. I mean, I even tried to get up but I was just flat on my back. I couldn't move anything.
Sawyer:  Your head even?  Like ...
Lynch:  It was so horrible. Like, I've never felt that much pain in my entire life. It was from my foot to my other foot to my
             legs to my arms, to my back, (the camera pans to a table in a dark, empty room -- presumably a torture chamber),
             to my head. I knew that if I felt that much pain, then at least my legs, arms, and head and back ... everything were
             still attached. But I seriously thought I was going to be paralyzed for the rest of my life.
Sawyer:  Her first words to an Iraqi doctor [the Baathist military commander of the military hospital].
Lynch:  I kept repeating, 'Please don't hurt me.' 'Please don't hurt me.
Sawyer:  We found that doctor, Adnan Mushafafawi, commander of the military hospital just five minutes from the ambush.
Mushafafawi:  I assured her that we will not hurt her and she is in hospital now.
Sawyer to Lynch:  Did you believe him?
Lynch:  No! I mean, would you though? I mean, if you were surrounded by a whole hospital of Iraqis, would you believe him?

       The clear implication of this conversation is that Jessica Lynch must have been brutally beaten and tortured during the time that she was held captive by the local Saddam Fedayeen fighters who ambushed her convoy. Why would she have used such a pointed phrase, 'Please don't hurt me!, unless she was had been brutally injured during torture by her captors.

       But there is more evidence in the book, however disjointed, to more than imply that Jessica Lynch was brutally tortured by the Iraqis. On page 148, Bragg describes his first long-distance telephone conversation with his daughter shortly after she was delivered to the U.S. military hospital in Germany [34]. "'Daddy?' The voice was sleepy, drugged and so weak it broke his heart. 'Jessi? Baby?' 'Daddy, they broke my arm.' It was Jessi's first telephone call home after she was rescued from the hospital in Nasiriyah, and the first and only time that she would hint at what had happened to her in those three hours before she was carried by Iraqi soldiers into the emergency room [at the Iraqi military hospital]."
       "'You'll be all right, baby. You'll get over this.'"
       "'The Iraqi man broke my arm.'"
        "He wishes sometimes that he had pressed  her on what she meant just then, that he had asked her to tell him more, but he was afraid to push, because Jessica sounded so strained, so barely there -- and he let the moment, and opportunity, pass."

       "She would later say she did not remember saying it, and she would never say anything like it again. At the time, [Jessica's father] knew that she had been broken and mangled, but he did not know about the three missing hours -- or the cruelty they had contained. 'I know that they tortured my baby, that they tormented her,' [her father] said.  He guessed it then -- what else could the words mean? But he figured there would be plenty of time to talk about the meanness in the future, and he did not want to fill this precious time up with that ugliness. 'I just wish I'd thought to ask her more, but .. but it don't matter: It don't matter,' he said."  Indeed, Jessica's father had found his own personal 'Happy Place.'

       So, there we have it. Straight from Jessica Lynch's mouth to her father. Jessica Lynch was tortured by her Iraqi captors. To deny this fact in the face of such powerful, straightforward evidence would be either foolhardy, or driven by a hidden agenda.

       More of the damaging evidence of this torture is presented by Bragg on page 170 of the book [35]. "A few days after the family arrived in Germany, Jessi's psychologist, Lieutenant Colonel Sally Harvey, met with [Jessica's parents] in Jessi's room to tell them what she could about what had happened in those lost hours ... Col. Harvey told them that Jessi had been assaulted, and of the injuries resulting from that savagery."

       More such evidence is revealed, disjointedly again, on page 164 of Bragg's book [36]. "...[U.S. Army] doctors would say that all her [Jessica's] broken bones probably came in the wreck of the Humvee, but that puzzles [Jessica's parents] too."

       "Some Iraqi doctors had said that Jessica seemed to have injuries consistent with having been stomped and beaten with rifle butts, and [Jessica's parents] wondered how she could be so badly broken in a crash the army estimated at about forty-five miles per hour on impact, when she had been in the rear compartment, wedged between the bodies of two soldiers and surrounded by duffel bags of [clothing] and equipment. 'It just doesn't make sense,' Greg [Jessica's father] said. How did the impact break bones on both sides of her body; how did that happen? Pictures of the Humvee had circulated in West Virginia newspapers -- it had not looked badly damaged."

       Then again in a disconnected manner, Bragg presents a summary statement concerning Jessica's torture at the hands of her Iraqi captors. On page 195, in summarizing Jessica's homecoming parade in her hometown of Palestine, WV, he tells us that [37] "Now she was a hero, whatever that meant. She was the girl who had been beaten and brutalized and rescued in the middle of a war, who came home to magazine covers and morphine, to movie offers and physical therapy."

     I rest my case. Rick Bragg has told us, howsoever indirectly in his fascinating book, that Jessica Lynch had been tortured by the Iraqis. You can read detailed accounts of these torture methods used by the Saddam Fedayeen in my essay at the link, 'Jessica Lynch's Army.' They are ugly. They are savage. They are brutal. They are heartless. They are cruel. But they are true. And the fact-of this torture is a major, dominant part of the Jessica Lynch story.

       The only missing fragment of information concerning the Iraqi torture of Jessica Lynch is when it occurred, how it was done, and by whom. Bragg tells us that [37a], "...The [U.S. medical] records do not tell whether her captors assaulted her almost lifeless, broken body after she was lifted from the wreckage, or if they assaulted her and then broke her bones into splinters until she was almost dead." There are two, and only two possibilities. No account is available concerning where and when the assault occurred. It could have been carried out by the local Saddam Fedayeen fighters who ambushed her convoy before she was delivered to the Iraqi military hospital at 10:00 a.m. Or it could have occurred in the military hospital after she was delivered there and before she woke up on a gurney. She was reportedly worked on by doctors at this hospital for a two hour period from 10:00 a.m. to noon and then (according to Bragg) was loaded into an ambulance that afternoon. The Washington Post reported that [37b] "When Lynch arrived at Saddam Hussein hospital in a military ambulance that afternoon, 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."

       There are two and only two possibilities. Jessica was brutalized either by the ambushers before they delivered her to the Iraqi military hospital, almost dead from her wounds. Or she was brutalized in the Iraqi military hospital after her delivery there and before she regained consciousness. We have only the word of the commander of that hospital that she received only life-saving treatment there. However, the military hospital was found to have a torture chamber in its basement, which was used as a command post for the Saddaam Fedayeen and its Baathist political party operatives. It was commanded by a Baathist Party member.

       Nevertheless, Jessica was either sexually assaulted after arriving with her injuries as a result of the Humvee collision (highly unlikely) or she was assaulted by her captors and then severely tortured by crushing her bones afterward.

       I do not for a minute believe that Rick Bragg deliberately obfuscated the fact-of Jessica Lynch's torture by her Iraqi captors. He did not. It is just that, as a lyricist, he had a story to tell and in telling this story in the most effective and emotionally inspiring way, the evidence detailed above is spread incoherently over many disconnected pages. It takes some effort to 'connect' these disparate accounts. But when one takes the trouble to do so, a very different picture emerges from Bragg's book. Indeed, the story of Jessica Lynch is directly connected to the issue of women-in-combat, which is directly connected to the 'Feminization of American Culture,' which is directly connected to the 'socialization' of the U.S. military [37c], which is directly connected to the cultural revolution that took place in America in the 1960s and 1970s, which is directly connected to the Frankfurt School - all of which are directly linked to each other and to the prospect of the loss of our Constitutional Republic which important implications for the disintegration, decay, dissolution, and possible ruin of American civilization.

       Indeed, as is described in Malcolm Gladwell's book [38], 'The Tipping Point,' "Little things can make a big difference." Indeed, Jessica Lynch's story is a relative small, insiginficant event that could be illustrative of a cascade of destruction through the 'network' of our American social fabric in such a way that the existence of our venerable American civilization could be threatened. One need only read Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's account [39] of how we are all 'linked' together in a social network - the dynamics of which produce a self-organizing system - to understand that our Constitutional Republic (along with our Christian heritage) is the most important foundation of our American civilization, which, indeed, is one such self-organizing system.

The Feminization of American Culture

       I have written extensively of the historical record of the feminization of American culture. Essays at the links, 'Who Placed American Men in a Psychic Iron Cage - Part I,' and Who Placed American Men in a Psychic Iron Cage - Part II,' were published in 1997 and 1998 respectively, soon after my first book, 'The New Totalitarians,' was published in 1996. A detailed summary of this movement to 'feminize' American culture is presented on this Web Site for the first time. It was written in 2002.

       To fully understand the Jessica Lynch story, one must first understand the radical feminist movement to open the U.S. military to accept women in combat positions. In order to understand women-in-combat, one must first understand the history of the feminist movement in America, from the late 1700s through the present. To understand that movement, one must understand how it 'self-organized' and became fiercely radicalized during the 1960s and 1970s. Only then can one come to understand how this radical movement came to political power during the 1990s. The essays at the links above provide a vivid description of how these concepts are 'connected,' - in terms of Network Theory, Chaos Theory, and the concept of a 'Tipping Point.' The latter being the idea that small beginnings can lead to huge results - e.g. the cascading of an idea that moves a people to revolution. The Jessica Lynch story is a microcosm of this process. That is why it is so important to understand the 'real' story of Jessica Lynch, not the story that has been foist on the American people by the various 'communities' which, acting in their own 'best interests,' have created the Mythical Modern American War Hero - Jessica Lynch. The story portends consequences far beyond the experiences of a little waif of a girl from Palestine, WV.

       A quick summary of the feminist movement, as it pertains to the concept being presented here is that [40], "[There exists] a link between militant feminism and all other egalitarianism activities carried out in the past under the rubric of 'individual freedom and equality' in both the American and Ancient Greek experiments with democracy.  We shall see that militant feminism is one of many elements that, in the past, have led to decay, dissolution, and death of democracy.  It will be shown that Betty Friedan's "Feminine Mystique" is nothing more than a human condition (vice female condition) that has, in the past, led males to lives of moral decay and physical dissolution that in turn led to the weakening of the family unit, which has always served as the fundamental strength of the nation-state in democratic societies.  Radical militant feminism is an extension of a natural malaise that has invaded every democratic society since the first--a malaise stemming from the abundance and freedoms that are characteristic of the absolute best form of social control, free democratic government.  History has shown that such societies simply risk decay into chaos resulting from the excesses that derive from the single form of government that optimizes the freedom, performance, and success of the individual."

      " In early Grecian times, this [Friedan's] 'malaise' was expressed as  "Moral disorder accompanied the growth of luxury and the enlightenment of the mind. . . . As the state religion lost its hold upon the educated classes, the individual freed himself more and more from the old moral restraints--the son from parental authority, the male from marriage, the woman from motherhood, the citizen from political responsibility.  Sexual and political morality continued to decline.  Bachelors and courtesans increased in fashionable co-operation, and free unions gained ground on legal marriage.  The young men spent all their time among flute-girls and courtesans; those who were a little older devoted themselves to gambling and profligacy; and the whole people spent more on public banquets and entertainments than on the provision necessary for the well-being of the state.  The voluntary limitation of the family was the order of the day, whether by contraception, by abortion, or by infanticide."  It is obvious that the 'boredom' of a free and luxurious existence left time to contemplate, "Is this all there is to life?"  This is precisely the 'feminine mystique,' in ancient Greece for men as in the 1960s America for women."

       "As with the men of ancient Greece, American housewives of the postwar period were bored with life.  "The problem was dismissed by telling the housewife she doesn't realize how lucky she is--her own boss, no time clock, no junior executive gunning for her job.  Does she still want to be a man?  Doesn't she know yet how lucky she is to be a woman?  As Newsweek put it (March 7, 1960): 'She is dissatisfied with a lot that women of other lands can only dream of.  Her discontent is deep, pervasive, and impervious to the superficial remedies which are offered at every hand...An army of professional explorers have already charted the major sources of trouble...From the beginning of time, the female cycle has defined and confined woman's role."

       "Friedan mistakenly believed that the problem did not rest with the fact that American women had luxuries that women in other times and lands never dreamed of.  She obviously did not go far enough back into history.  If she had studied the Greek millennia between 1000 B.C. and the birth of Christ, she would have realized that the same malaise affected the men of the Greek Empire--and it perished because they could not recover from their reaction to the bounty that resulted from their free democracy.  At any rate, Friedan believed that, "...part of the strange newness of the problem is that it cannot be understood in terms of the age-old material problems of man: poverty, sickness, hunger, cold.  It is not caused by lack of material advantages; it may not even be felt by women preoccupied with desperate problems of hunger, poverty or illness.  And women who think it will be solved by more money, a bigger house, a second car, moving to a better suburb, often discover it gets worse."

       "Friedan had part of the answer; it can be entirely explained by the problem of plenty.  The history of democratic societies reveals this as mankind's foremost problem.  Friedan actually stumbles over the problem without picking the nugget out of the rubble.  "And strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework--an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life."

      " Whereas men, when bored with an excess of plenty in their lives, turned to debauchery and frivolous pursuits, women turned inward with a malaise called the 'Feminine Mystique.'  Friedan asked herself whether the problem that has no name was somehow related to the domestic routine of the housewife.  "Is she trapped simply by the enormous demands of her role as modern housewife: wife, mistress, mother, nurse, consumer, cook, chauffeur, etc?  Doctors she interviewed decided that the real problem must be something else--perhaps boredom."

       This is precisely the situation that affected well-to-do Greek men just before the collapse of 1,000 years of Greek democracy [41].  "Only an act of persistent imagination, or a gift from observation, can enable us to realize what it means to a nation to have its traditional religion die.  Classic Greek civilization had been built upon a patriotic devotion to the city-state, and classic morality, though rooted in folkways rather than in faith, had been powerfully reinforced by supernatural belief.  But neither faith nor patriotism survived in the educated Greek; civic frontiers had been erased by empires; and the growth of knowledge had secularized morals, marriage, parentage, and law.  The pursuit of pleasure consumed the adult life of the upper classes.  The old problem of ethics and morals--to reconcile the natural epicureanism of the individual with the necessary stoicism of the state--found no solution in religion, statesmanship, or philosophy.  Education spread, but spread thin; as in all intellectual ages it stressed knowledge more than character, and produced masses of half-educated people who, uprooted from labor and the land, moved about in unplaced discontent like loosened cargo in the ship of state.  Sexual morality was relaxed even beyond the loose standards of the Periclean age.  Homosexualism remained popular.  Dances of naked women were accepted as part of the mores.  Athenean life was portrayed in Menander's plays as a round of triviality, seduction, and adultery."

       "Greek women participated actively in the cultural pursuits of the time, and contributed to letters, science, philosophy, and art.  Some philosophers, like Epicurus,, did not hesitate to admit women into their schools.  Literature began to stress the physical loveliness of woman rather than her worth and charm as a mother; the literary cult of feminine beauty arose in this period alongside the poetry and fiction of romantic love.  The partial emancipation of woman was accompanied by a revolt against wholesale maternity, and the limitation of the family became the outstanding social phenomenon of the age.  Abortion was punishable only if practiced by a woman against the wish of her husband, or at the instigation of her seducer.  When a child came it was in many cases exposed [taken into the wild and abandoned to die].  We may judge how widespread the practice of limitation had become.  Polybius wrote, about 150 B.C.,'The whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit . . . For as men had fallen into such a state of luxury, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or, if they married, to rear the children born to them, or at most but one or two of them, so as to leave those in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance--the evil insensibly but rapidly grew.'"

       The point being made here is that the "feminine mystique" which was the cornerstone of the reawakening of the feminist movement in the United States in the 1950s is nothing more than the feeling of "Is this all there is to life?" which was displayed by males in ancient Greece during its Golden Age of democracy.  It is the same feeling of boredom born of luxury and economic excess and extravagance in an age wherein the barbarian was simply waiting for the strong soldier-citizen of Greece to decay morally into weakness.  The Greek empire fell suddenly and absolutely in a very short period of time [53 years at the hands of Roman legions].  The creeping weakness from within generated the cracks in the Greek civilization which led to its swift demise.  The "feminine mystique" is not a gender-specific malaise.  It has occurred in past history.  It occurred to the male population.  It led to chaos and decay of a magnificent civilization.  Carried to its extreme, militant radical feminism could be one factor in America's travel down that same path.

       A note here about the role of the Greek philosopher, Epicurus, the founder of the Epicurian movement in ancient Greece which competed with Zeno and his Stoic philosophy for the soul of Greece in the period of its descent into obscurity. This was described by the esteemed scholar and popularizer of history, Will Durant [42], who summarizes the era in which Stoicism flourished in ancient Greece--the cradle of democracy. It was an era of decay--decay from within.

       "When Sparta blockaded and defeated Athens towards the close of the fifth century B.C., political supremacy passed from [Athens]...and the vigor and independence of the Athenian mind decayed. When in 399 B.C., Socrates was put to death, the soul of Athens died with him, lingering only in his proud pupil, Plato. And when Philip of Macedon defeated the Athenians at Chaeronea in 338 B.C., and Alexander burned the great city of Thebes to the ground three years later...Athenian independence was irrevocably destroyed. The domination of Greek philosophy by the Macedonian Aristotle mirrored the political subjection of Greece by the verile and younger peoples of the north."

        "The death of Alexander (323 B.C.) quickened this process of decay. The boy-emperor, barbarian though he remained after all of Aristotle's tutoring, had yet learned to revere the rich culture of Greece ... [and] he underrated the inertia and resistance of the Oriental mind, and the mass and depth of Oriental culture ... The quantity of Asia proved too much for the quality of Greece. Alexander himself, in the hour of his triumph, was conquered by the soul of the East ..."

        "This subtle infusion of an Asiatic soul into the wearied body of the master Greek was followed rapidly by the pouring of Oriental cults and faiths into Greece ... the young conqueror had opened up the broken dykes [which] let in the ocean of Eastern thought upon the lowlands of the still adolescent European mind. The mystic and superstitious faiths which had taken root among the poorer people of Hellas were reinforced and spread about; and the Oriental spirit of apathy and resignation found a ready soil in decadent and despondent Greece."

        "...The introduction of the Stoic philosophy into Athens by ... Zeno (about 320 B.C.) was but one of a multitude of Oriental infiltrations. Both Stoicism [the apathetic acceptance of defeat] and Epicureanism [the effort to forget defeat in the arms of pleasure] were theories as to how one might yet be happy though subjugated or enslaved ..."

        "...when Greece had seen Chaeronea in blood and Thebes in ashes ... and when the glory had departed from Athens, she was ripe for Zeno and Epicurus."

       Please observe that the ancient Greek Epicurian philosophy is precisely the same as Jessica Lynch's 'Happy Place.' Thus, her 'Happy Place,' to which one can retreat within herself, forget the reality of the day, and simply 'disappear' - and submerge it so that what one wishes life to be, a happy dream world, a world in which one's mind 'goes to sleep' and fantasy prevails -- is precisely the concept, which if applied on a grander scale to the American people, can have tragic consequences.

       Have the American people reached their 'Happy Place?' Have we become so 'PASSIVE' as we view the panorama of the cultural changes that have befallen us over the past three decades or so? Have we accepted Jessica Lynch as a Hero, a model for the woman warrior? Have we fallen asleep and accepted the concept of women in combat in our armed forces? Have we become 'passive' as we observe our culture falling apart at the seams? As alien ideas, concepts, and forces have taken over our public institutions. Have we allowed America's tradition and heritage to become tainted with cynicism? Have we failed to educate our children and grandchildren to the objective history of our venerable Constitutional Republic? Or have we allowed the counter-culture revolution, led by the foot soldiers of the cultural Marxist revolutionaries attack and destroy every institution in the land? Jessica Lynch is an icon for the destruction of the penultimate institution, the U.S. military, to come under attack and which has partially yielded to the onslaught. The traditional American family, the fundamental unit of any democratic society, is the last institution still standing firm. Will we allow it, also to be degraded to the point that American civilization, like the ancient Greek civilization before it, crumbles from within and disappears into the dust bin of history?

The Korean War POW Experience
       Major William E. Mayer, U.S. Army, is the psychologist who debriefed 1,000 of 4,000 American GIs who returned from captivity by the Koreans (and then the Chinese) after the Korean War. These interviews were conducted in 1954. They revealed, for the first time, the nature of the re-education program invoked by the Chinese to change the behavior of the American G.I. Excerpts of this record follow [43]:

       " And there, ladies and gentlemen, you have an ideal situation for the tyrant. If you think that the rest of us can tell what you are thinking about, in our culture today, you'd be psychotic. But in that culture, once you have learned that people can tell this, that they know your shortcomings, that you are indeed exposed, you're in great danger. You are very vulnerable.

       They were very much like -- well, they were going through something that happens more to women than happens to men in our culture today. And you females who've experienced this will know instantly what I mean. It's a situation in which you've gone into the powder room with some other gals during a party or something and you've talked about yourself. And suddenly you find you've gone farther than you intended. And maybe you've told more about yourself than you had originally planned to do. You've expose yourself. You've told confidential business, private affairs. I know boys do this too, but I think girls are better at it.

       Well, when you're confronted with this situation which is definitely anxiety-producing, there is only one thing you can do to defend yourself, isn't there? And that is to collect an approximately equivalent amount of information about your listener. Because then sort of an armed truce exists and then everybody understands exactly where he stands. And this is exactly what was happening in these camps. These men were listening to each other, paying attention, being critical, making suggestions, jotting it down, and actually, or just in the backs of their minds so that they could be defended. And they would leave a self-criticism meeting and they would walk in ten or twelve separate directions -- not together. Feeling very isolated indeed.

       Well, this is brain washing if there is such a thing. You don't have to have prisoners of war to do this. They're doing it in Shanghai. It's called the 'neighborhood control system.' They go into the urban areas, designate as a neighborhood a group of 30 to 50 people. They select almost invariably a housewife in this group, appoint her monitor, give her a very minimal amount of training in techniques and a continuous supply of instructional material and directions from on high, and the neighborhood begins to function in just this way. And while the two Chinese that I know quite well, who are psychiatrists, who have come from China and have been educated in America and are psychiatrists in Honolulu, both have told me that they didn't believe that this Communist thing could ever be imposed on China and they're just beginning now to see how. And this is how.

       It works. It works on perfectly good non-Communists -- like you, and like me. Now, it can be done in all degrees. By selling certain ideas, this kind of thing is being communicated today in America. The same kinds of ideas that were communicated to these people rather abruptly and in intensified form. For example, we have among us today certain tendencies to minimize emotional things. Emotional is somehow identified with bad or weak or somehow not socially acceptable, don't you know. And thus it is, that if there's a parade, you see, you shouldn't get very excited about this and you certainly shouldn't get a lump in your throat when they play the star spangled banner, because, not only is that crass emotionalism, it is also chauvinism, you see, and it's nationalism, and this is what got Hitler going. And this is always how the world has come to trouble before.

       There is a tendency among us to feel -- among us, I mean our country -- to feel that we should love more people, one world. The U.N. But I say to you, unless you know how to love your neighbor, you can never love other people. Unless you learn that in the first social organization that you join, your family, the meaning of real love and real devotion, and real willingness to take responsibility, and willingness even to deny yourself and give to somebody else, you can never have this kind of feeling for a larger society. It's got to be learned on the level of the individual, regardless of IQ. And this is a point that is being lost. And so, there is among us, a tendency to become PASSIVE."

       " I think this has something to do with the emancipation of women. I'm not opposed to the amendment that gave the vote to our better halves. But I wonder how many of our females have become, not more emancipated, better females, but have instead become, somehow, imitation males and are competing with males as males. I think this is unhealthy. The nice thing about males and females is that they are different. Profoundly different. Now, this does not mean that females shouldn't be educated. It doesn't mean she shouldn't be a physicist. It only means that we are losing our idea of what the role of a female is and what the role of a male is in our culture.

       And so it was that PASSIVITY in Korea was a deadly ailment. And it can be an equally deadly ailment, so it's slower, but equally deadly in America today. It can easily destroy us, as no fallout will ever get a chance to do. I'll talk specifically in a minute about exactly what I mean about that.

       First of all, however I'd like to mention to you the fact that this process applied to the Americans in Korea was successful beyond any previous captors' wildest hopes. Now, the results of the program, combined, please remember, with the first six months which was not part of the Communist program, but made in the U.S. The results of this were phenomenal.

       To begin with, more men died in captivity than have ever died before in military captivity -- in any war in which America has engaged. Four out of ten men died. And one of the main reasons was PASSIVITY among the soldiers."

       "In Korea, we saw a lack of resistance. We found that in ten of the twelve camps, there were no barb-wire fences around the camps, no machine-gun towers, no electric barricades, no guard dogs, and as few as one armed guard per 100 American prisoners. No resistance.

       Worse than that, during the first six months, we found, and we had four physicians who were themselves prisoners, and we examined hundreds of these cases, we found that a new disease had occurred -- a disease explicitly of PASSIVITY. This was a disease of that most popular of all of the targets of the psychiatrists -- the mother's boy. The unresolved Oedipal complex, or whatever you want to call it. Nonetheless, the passive kid. He would walk into his hut in Korea, look despairingly about him, decide it was no use trying to participate in his survival, would go off into a corner by himself, pull his blanket over his head, and in 48 hours was dead."

       Indeed, the record shows that during the Korean War POW experience, many American men found their 'Happy Place.' They just rolled up in a corner, found a place in their imagination where they could blot out reality -- a magical place where they could dream, a place where their imagination took hold -- and curl up and die.

       T.R. Fehrenbach, a military historian who writes the most insightful account of the Korean War, tells us (from the mouth of an enlisted soldier, Schlichter, who RESISTED his captors attempts to 're-educate' him) that [44] "The veneer of civilized decency is much thinner than most Americans ... think. Civilization is a fragile discipline, at best...The sick and those with war wounds died first. Then the men without faith began to die, often, seemingly, of nothing at all."

"The youngest men, oddly, died first."

"Schlichter, who never lost his determination to live to return, or his faith in God, believed that most who died didn't have to die..."
"There were men who had grown up with no strong belief in anything; they had received no faith from parents, school, or church. They had no spiritual home or haven. Exposed to horror and misery, when the man with the gun cut the line to home, destroyed every material reason for living, they could not adjust. They no longer wanted to live."
"Schlichter saw men who refused to eat the meager slop he was eating, in his own effort to stay alive. He heard men mumble fantasies, living in a dream world of their own warm, protected past. One boy angrily told him, as he urged the youth to eat, 'My parents never made me do things like this!'"

"Another told him one night, sobbing, 'I know my mother is bringing me a pie tonight -- a pie, Sergeant.'"

"In Charles Schlichter grew a feeling, which he never lost, that some American mothers had given their sons everything in the world, except a belief in themselves, their culture, and their manhood. They had, some of them, sent their sons out into a world with tigers without telling them that there were tigers, and with no MORAL armament."

       In this way, some American G.I.s found their own 'Happy Place.' They simply curled up within their own mind, became invisible, and died. They had become completely PASSIVE.

       A partial answer to the idea of our 'passivity' to the fact-of the counter-culture revolution in America is contained in an article I wrote which was published in the FORUM section of the Sunday Washington Times. It is at the link, 'FORUM 6/11/00,' and in more detail in the essay at the link, 'Unedited FORUM 6-11-00.' The latter describes how the American people have become so PASSIVE in the face of this onslaught. It tells of the role Kurt Lewin, the father of the 'sensitivity training' movement in America.  An excerpt is repeated below:

       "Kurt Lewin (a former OSS operative during World War II, and researcher sponsored by the Navy Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.), developed psychological warfare techniques to be used as behavior modification tools on the enemy. After the war, Lewin developed and perfected the 'sensitivity training' techniques, the extremely effective small-group encounter methods being used on our military personnel - at all levels - today.

       These powerful psychological behavior and attitude modification techniques have been and are being used throughout our society by the power elites of the Boomer generation, the 'foot soldiers' of the Frankfurt School intellectuals who came here, dispersed, and spread their ideas of a 'quiet revolution.' Their revolution would be one so powerful that 'it could not be countered even by the use of force' And, now, they are gone. Disappeared. As in an apparition. Some dead. Some repatriated to Germany after World War II ended. But their presence is still felt.

       These 'phantom spirits,' while here, achieved a strong bond with the elites of our nation's potentially most dangerous generation--the idealistic Boomer generation--during their young adulthood in the mid-1960s. And the counter-culture revolution, which the youthful Boomers spawned, has been partially carried to completion during their adulthood. They are exemplified by Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and the other power elites of the Boomer generation who came to executive-branch and congressional political power in the 1990s.

       The seemingly disjoint and unconnected events, a few of which are summarized above, are the products of these Boomer 'foot soldiers' of the Frankfurt School gurus. We can now connect the dots more clearly. They connect to us through every institution in the land: our universities, our K-12 public schools, our churches, our mass media, our judicial system, our corporations, our neighborhoods, our politics, and now our military--the next to last institution to hold fast against this dark onslaught. The only places they have not yet entirely corrupted is our families--our homes, the last bastion of RESISTANCE against the utopian dream of the revolutionaries' 'enlightened imagination.'

       And now it appears that, given the Elian Gonzalez affair, even our homes are vulnerable to attack by a totalitarian use of armed force in the dark of the night. How could all of this come about?  Why are we--the American people--so PASSIVE in the face of this tyranny?

       The answer lies in the realization that we have been rendered PASSIVE by the same mind control techniques that the Chinese used on our Korean War POWs back in the 1950s. But now, these techniques have been used by our own government to render us PASSIVE to the spectacle of a complete breakdown of the rule of law--from Bill Clinton's impeachment trial to the kidnapping of little Elian Gonzalez.

       Recall that I warned of this phenomenon in a FORUM commentary ('Military moral imperative,' 2/13/00) which reviewed the Korean War POW experience. These techniques, applied by the Chinese, worked on our Korean War POWs. According to the best data available: Only 5 percent RESISTED the enemy indoctrination; 15 percent were consistent, dedicated, hard-core COLLABORATORS with the enemy; The other 80 percent were rendered "PASSIVE" by their captors' 'sensitivity training' methods and stood for nothing but their own survival.

       Most Americans have not yet recognized that these same methods, devised independently by U.S. citizens and applied by Americans, are morally corrupt. Few know that they serve a revolutionary agenda--the destruction of American civilization.

       These techniques are being used every day, in nearly every walk of our lives. These attempts to change the world view of the populace have become mainstream in America. They have been used in a huge social engineering project to change the very nature of our fragile experiment with democracy.

          The purpose of their social engineering? To slowly but surely replace our Constitutional Republic, handed down to us by our Founding Fathers, with a socialist utopia of their own 'enlightened imagination.'

       We have deceived ourselves. While winning the Cold War abroad, we were slowly and almost imperceptibly, losing a war at home to 'cultural Marxism.' In fact, we are so far behind that many have thrown their hands up in despair--and surrendered. They have been rendered PASSIVE.

       The Frankfurt School intellectuals would not even have registered a footnote in history had they not captured the imagination and souls of the counter-culture Boomer elites as they came-of-age in the mid-1960s. Now these 'foot soldiers' of the Frankfurt School gurus, the elites of the idealistic Boomer generation, have risen to power in every institution in the land.

       The U.S. military was the next-to-last last institution to come under attack. It is being destroyed from the top-down. Just the opposite direction that has corrupted every other venerable institution in the land.

       And now, it has become clear that the last institution still standing--our families in our own homes--are under assault by a Federal Government out of control. While we remain PASSIVE to this totalitarian impulse of the power elites of the Boomer generation.

       Will America retreat from this onslaught into its own 'Happy Place' -- the final resting place, a lonely grave in the wilderness of history? 'Will Jessica Lynch's denial of reality in the world of the small be the precursor to the same malaise on a grand scale over the American people? If it is, then American civilization as it was originally constructed -- the America our Founding Fathers, our grandparents and our parents handed down to us -- will dissolve and disappear.

       The fight to preserve our uniquely American ideals will require RESISTANCE across every facet of our lives to the agenda of the Frankfurt School gurus as it is being carried out by their New Age 'foot soldiers,' the power elites of the Boomer generation.

       The fight is up to each of us individually. Are you a RESISTER?  A COLLABORATOR?  Or are you PASSIVE?  If our family members, our friends, our neighbors, our fellow workers, our church members, our professional associates, and our military veteran acquaintances are not of the RESISTER group, they are part of the problem. It's up to us. The future of our precious American civilization is in our hands.

Who is Responsible for the Rape of Private Jessica Lynch?

       The White House, the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. Army and the elements of the military establishment who have, over the past decade, touted the radical feminist line that women have a right to 'fight' for their country and must establish 'equality' in every aspect of American culture, including the military, have a problem with the Jessica Lynch story. It was not only the families of the female soldiers in the 507^th Maintenance Company who were shocked that they would be placed in harms way. The disgust and horror that Americans in their living rooms registered when they found out that women were being killed, captured, and possibly tortured by the Iraqis would redound harshly on those who were responsible for placing America's women at risk in a combat zone. Not only was America sending women into a combat zone, but two were single mothers with toddler children. America should be outraged at this situation. Who would be held responsible? Not just the radical feminists, but the senior military officers, congressmen and women, and Executive Branch civilians who had implemented the Clintons' agenda to 'feminize' our armed forces would feel the wrath of the American people for what happened to Pvt. Jessica Lynch.

       Consequently, a way had to be found to 'fuzz' the realization that our female soldiers were being killed, captured and possibly tortured in Iraq. The way out was to immediately create a myth -- the myth of the Modern American War Hero. It would portray Pvt. Jessica Lynch as the centerpiece of this myth. This situation is discussed in detail in an essay at the link: Private Jessica Lynch: The Mythical Modern American War Hero.

       It is useful to question just who could gain by a coverup of the sexual assault and sadistic torture of Jessica Lynch. There are groups of Americans who would benefit if the truth were covered up. First, the radical feminist organizations who have lobbied, pressured, pushed, schemed, and used the mass media to usher females into combat or near-combat positions in the armed forces would benefit. The outrage of the American people, if they knew the truth, would be aimed directly at them.

       Second, the politicians in the congress and in the Executive Branch would benefit if the truth were covered up because they would feel the same wrath of the American people directed at the radical feminists. That would include all of those who voted for the repeal of the 'combat exclusion rule' for women in 1993, which allowed women to be assigned to combat aviation and combat ships, as well as thousands of 'jobs' in the Army in 'high risk' near-combat areas. Senators John McCain, John Warner, the 'shrill sisters' in the Senate and the House and many others were swept up in the 'political movement' to provide 'equal opportunity' for women in our armed forces. They would not stand up to the radical feminists. They would not stand up against the tide of public opinion which sided with the 'equal opportunity' arguments of the radical feminists. Why? Simply to get re-elected to office. Their high position was worth more than a stand on principle and the experience of 'tested' combat veterans that would not have introduced reduced standards in our armed forces, especially in its vast 'tail' of support elements -- of which the 507^th Maintenance Company was one.

       The largest group who would benefit from such a coverup is that comprising the general and flag-rank officers in our armed forces. They were the ones who, knowing that the Clintons' agenda to 'socialize,' indeed 'feminize' our nation's armed forces would reduce operational readiness by the resulting lowered standards, went along to get along -- in the interest of their careers. The very people who are in charge at the upper echelons of fighting the war with Iraq, providing the news and developing the intelligence have gone through a 'purge' in the past decade that eliminated the 'warriors' and the 'warrior ethos' from the support 'tail.' of our armed forces. That 'tail' was reduced to a jobs corps for minorities and women.

       And last, but not least of those who share the blame for the rape and brutal torture of Jessica Lynch at the hands of the Iraqis are those Americans who retreated into their own 'Happy Places.' The fathers of young women, who not only supported their daughter's dreams of a military career, but actively proselytized organizationally and politically in supporting their daughter's best interest. I know fathers who were members of the Navy's Tailhook Association who took direct action with the Board of Directors to deny my access to their members to let them know of my new book, 'From Trust to Terror: Radical Feminism is Destroying the U.S. Navy.'

       Among this last group is a nameless and faceless group of people in responsible positions associated with the institutions which they represent who pretended to be resisters to the inroads made by the counter-culture revolution in their sphere of interest but who, in reality, served their own best interests in 'going along to get along' and/or actually becoming the instrument by which the revolutionaries infiltrated their institution. I have written extensively about these people. See the essays at the links: 'The Judas Goat,' 'Anatomy of a Collaborator,' 'The Anatomy of a Closet Leftist,' 'Rebuttal to Maguire,' 'Ethics Rebuttal Essays,' 'Song of Solomon,' 'Going After Cacciato,' 'Tim O'Brien's USNA Ethics,' 'Enemies Within,' 'Conversation with a Father,'  'The Bob Stumpf Affair,' and 'The Annapolization of America.'

       And to bring up the rear of this list of those responsible for the rape and torture of Private Jessica Lynch are those of us  who were too 'busy' -- with their recreational activities watching and/or even tailgating at professional and college football games, playing and/or watching golf on TV, going to the theatre, and other recreational outlets -- to pay any attention to and doing nothing about the damage being done to our civilization by the counter-culture revolutionaries bent on destroying it. This last group includes most all of us. Indeed, we all found our own little 'Happy Place' in  which to close our eyes and 'disappear,' just as did Jessica Lynch. We are all to blame. Wake up America!

How Can All of this Be Explained?
       I have gone to great length in several essays on the subject to 'explain,' at the most fundamental level, what has been working in the underbrush to destroy our great civilization. The essays at the links: 'Chaos Theory and Generations,' 'The Fourth Turning,' and 'America's Generations' address the foundation for this 'explanation.' In addition, the recent advances of researchers (especially in the last-half of the 1990s) in the field of Network Theory have provided support for these explanations in terms of dynamically growing networks. These networks display the same self-organizing mechanisms that are described in Chaos Theory texts. The popular book [49], 'The Tipping Point,' contains a less esoteric 'explanation' of this 'science of surprise' in terms that the 'man in the street can understand - epidemics, fads, and other cascading events observed in our normal lives.

       Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a physicist at Notre Dame University, is a leading researcher in the field of Network Theory. He and his colleagues have found that [45] "Nature normally hates power laws. In ordinary systems all quantities follow bell curves, and correlations decay rapidly, obeying exponential laws. But all that changes if the system is forced to undergo a phase transition [akin to water molecules freezing to snowflakes in the clouds or iron atoms all aligning themselves in the same direction in a sufficiently strong magnetic field or a material becoming a superconductor under certain conditions]. Then power laws emerge -- nature's unmistakable sign that chaos is departing in favor of order. The theory of phase transitions told us loud and clear that the road from disorder to order is maintained by the powerful forces of self-organization and is paved by power laws. It told us that power laws are not just another way of characterizing a system's behavior. They are the patent signatures of self-organization in complex systems." And, of course, American civilization is a fabric whose warp and weave are comprised of individual threads, each of which exhibit complex behavior themselves. Indeed, American civilization is a self-organizing system. It comprises choices made by independent people, free to choose at every level of their existence -- within the context of a regulatory system (again freely chosen) governing the morality of the individual, Christianity.

       The World Wide Web, which operates on an interconnected set of routers [maintained by several independent institutions] called the Internet, is a dynamically growing (new web sites appear every day) network which is characterized by a property called preferential attachment. That is, we do not link randomly to every site on the Web -- we do not link to ordinary nodes. We most often choose to link to the most popular Web Sites. When choosing between two pages, one with twice as many links as the other, about twice as many people link to the more connected page [46]. While our individual choices are highly unpredictable, as a group we follow strict patterns. These two properties, growth and preferential treatment, guarantee that the network, any network, will be scale-free, that is, it obeys a power law. This will also guarantee that the network will be self-organizing. It grows dynamically without the invisible hand of an all-controlling spider at the center of the Web.

       The spread of the AIDS virus followed the pattern of networks which are scale-free, with a few highly connected nodes (hubs) and which have the property of diffusion. According to Barabasi [47], "Gaetan Dugas, once a French Canadian flight attendant, is often called Patient Zero of the AIDS epidemic. This is not because he was the first to be diagnosed with the disease but rather because at least 40 of the 248 people diagnosed with AIDS by April 1982 had either had sex with him or with someone who had. He was at the center of an emerging complex sexual network among gay men, a web anchored between the East and West Coasts of North America, spanning San Francisco, New York, Florida, and Los Angeles."

       "[Dugas] figured that he had about 250 sexual partners a year. While some estimates put the total number of his partners as high as 20,000, his decade of promiscuity in gay clubs and bathhouses clearly put him in sexual contact with at least 2,500 people...Dugas played an important role in turning the AIDS epidemic in a few short years from an obscure and rare 'gay cancer (Kaposi's sarcoma) to a North American health care crisis. He is a terrifying example of the failure of classical epidemic models and evidence of the power of hubs in our highly mobile and connected society. Indeed, when it comes to viruses and epidemics, hubs make a deadly difference."

       Barabasi observes that recent research on sexual behavior, characterized by Gaetan Dugas and Wilt Chamberlain's (self-proclaimed 20,000 heterosexual encounters over his lifetime) sexual appetites, are not unique [48]. "The scale-free topology [of the network of sexual associations] implies that, though most people have only a few sexual links, the web of sexual contacts is held together by a hierarchy of highly connected hubs. They are the Wilt Chamberlains and the Gaetan Dugas, collecting an astounding number of sexual partners."

       "The deadly virus must have followed the route already spotted [by network researchers] in the spread of innovation and computer viruses: Hubs are among the first infected thanks to their numerous sexual contacts. Once infected, they quickly infect hundreds of others. If our sex web formed a homogeneous, random network, AIDS might have died out long ago. The scale-free topology at [the] AIDS [virus] disposal allowed the virus to spread and persist."

        In the late 1990s, researchers