Jessica Lynch Scared When Rescue Began

Nov. 11 -- When POW Jessica Lynch heard helicopters and gunfire from her hospital bed on the night of April 1, her first reaction wasn't happiness — but fear.

She could hear soldiers asking where, "'Where's P-F-C Jessica Lynch?'" But she couldn't tell if they were U.S. or Iraqi soldiers.

"I thought, 'Oh, you know, here it comes, they're about to kill me. It's, you know, about to happen,' " Lynch told Diane Sawyer in her first interview since her nine-day captivity in Iraq.

Lynch's dramatic rescue would be touted as one of America's most heroic episodes in the Iraq war, but Lynch says she was actually expecting the worst until she actually saw the soldiers.

"The guys come in and I was, like, OK, they don't look Iraqi," she told Sawyer. "And I actually had to, you know, see that it said U.S. Army on their uniforms."

One soldier, Lynch said, ripped an American flag off his suit and handed it to her. "I would not let go of his hand. I clenched to his hand because I was not going to let him leave me here. He was going to take me out."

Clarifications and Disclosures

In the interview, Lynch also discloses some of the details recounted in her upcoming book — including a sexual assault she suffered during her captivity in Iraq.

A medical report indicates the private was sexually assaulted at the hospital, but Lynch says she has no recollection of the attack. "Even just the thinking about that, that's too painful," she said.

She also clears up conflicting stories about her actions during the March 23 ambush in which she was taken prisoner. Initial reports portrayed the Army supply clerk, then 19, as a hero who was wounded by Iraqi gunfire but kept firing until her ammunition ran out, shooting several Iraqis.

But Lynch confirms that was not the case. She tells Sawyer she was just a soldier in the wrong place at the wrong time, whose gun jammed during the chaos. "I'm not about to take credit for something I didn't do," she told Sawyer in the interview airing tonight.