Rescued POW Was 'Fighting to the Death'

ByABC News
April 3, 2003, 7:17 AM

April 3 -- Rescued POW Pfc. Jessica Lynch is in good spirits and recovering well, her mother said today, as a newspaper reported the 19-year-old Army supply clerk put up a ferocious fight before she was captured in southern Iraq.

"She was in very good spirits; she sounded good," Lynch's mother, Deadra Lynch, told ABCNEWS' Good Morning America today.

"She just sounded like our Jessi."

Lynch was captured in an ambush March 23 after her Army 507th Maintenance Co. took a wrong turn near the southern Iraq city of Nasiriyah. A team of U.S. special forces troops rescued her Tuesday from "Saddaam Hospital" in the city.

She was reported to be suffering from two broken legs, a broken arm and broken vertebrae.

Early reports said she may also have been shot and stabbed, but her father, Gregory Lynch Sr., told a news conference in her West Virginia hometown today that the reports were not true.

"We have heard and seen reports that she had multiple gunshot wounds and a knife stabbing. The doctor has not seen any of this," he told reporters in Palestine, W.Va. "There's no entry [wounds] whatsoever."

She did, however, have surgery on her back, and told her father by phone that she didn't have any feeling in her feet.

The parents of the former POW have now spoken to her three times since her rescue twice today and once Wednesday, and have learned that she is scheduled for surgery on her broken legs and broken right arm Friday. Lynch is expected to be flown to the United States as soon as she's stabilized after surgery. Her injuries are not described as life-threatening.

Her father says family members haven't talked to Lynch about her ordeal, but they have spent several hours with Pentagon officials discussing what happened to her in Iraq.

Her brother says she doesn't seem to be aware of all the attention she received. He says she wanted to know if the story of her capture made the paper back home in Palestine.

The 19-year-old former POW left Iraq on a stretcher with an American flag draped across her chest, and arrived at a U.S. air base in Germany late Wednesday for treatment at the military's Landstuhl Regional Medical Center.