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Friday, November 7, 2003

Jessica Lynch, a friend and roommate of Lori Piestewa, the Hopi woman killed in action in Iraq, said she was "hurt" by the military's accounts of her capture and rescue.

Lynch and Piestewa were members of an Army unit that was ambushed in southern Iraq. At first, military sources said Lynch went down fighting before being captured by Iraqi forces but an official Army report disputed that account. The military later staged a dramatic rescue of Lynch but non-military sources said it was overblown.

In an interview with ABC News to be broadcast next Tuesday, Lynch said she was upset by the military's exaggerations. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said, according to a partial transcript cited by The New York Times. "Only I would have been able to know that, because the other four people on my vehicle aren't here to tell the story. So I would have been the only one able to say, yeah, I went down shooting. But I didn't."

Piestewa was driving the humvee Lynch was riding in when the unit was attacked. Piestewa died during the attack or soon after. "[Piestewa] was my best friend," Lynch would later say in her first public remarks after returning to the U.S. "She fought beside me, and it was an honor to have served with her. Lori will always remain in my heart."

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Jessica Lynch Criticizes U.S. Accounts of Her Ordeal (The New York Times 11/7)
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Army Report:
Executive Summary | Full Report [consists of scanned document pages]

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