Former POW Jessica Lynch Recalls Her Captivity in Iraq

When he returned home, Miller considered getting out of the Army. "As a POW, they would've let me get out" with benefits. "But the way I looked at it is that I never really quit anything. Why would I let this make me quit?" There were other considerations as well, he says. "Looking at it with my family, what else am I going to do to support them?" he says. "Who else is going to pay me the kind of money I need to make?"

Miller extended his enlistment in October 2006 for family health reasons, he says. "My wife was in and out of the hospital, and I didn't know how I would pay for it if I didn't have the insurance that the Army gives us." The $10,000 re-enlistment bonus was also a draw, adds Miller, now a staff sergeant at Fort Carson, Colo. But he had to fight to stay in the Army, he says, after he got a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. "I told them I didn't want it [the medical discharge] and wanted to stay in." He prevailed.

Today, what he really wants to do, he says, is return to Iraq with his unit, which is now deployed there. But POWs are not permitted to return to the countries in which they were captured. He has asked commanding officers he knows to write him letters, recommending that he be allowed to return.

Shoshana Johnson

Shoshana Johnson grew up as an Army brat—her father was in the military for 20 years. So joining the Army was a natural choice after she dropped out of college following an unremarkable freshman year. When she learned that her unit would be headed to Kuwait in advance of the invasion of Iraq, she was unfazed. "I was like, 'Ah, well, I'll deploy for a little bit and earn a little extra money' " in the form of combat pay. "I figured I'd drop a couple of pounds and save some money."

Her sister, also in the military, had just returned from Kuwait, and the memory of the easy military victory of the first Gulf War was fresh in the mind of America. Johnson was an Army cook—she dreamed of being a chef one day—and as her unit began its trek across the desert toward Iraq, "we were prepared for some things but not everything," says Johnson.

Capture never entered her mind. But, she says, her worst fears about what being a POW would entail were not realized. She recalls one doctor, "an old man with two wives and 11 children, who was really nice to me." He brought her tea and proved protective, she says, once sleeping just outside her door. "I don't know if he thought somebody would come in, or something would happen to me," she says. "When people start talking to me about Islam, that's who I think of—a very nice man who took a big chance." Johnson set out to write a memoir about her experiences, but the publishers canceled the book deal last year when she didn't give them the sort of story they had in mind. "They wanted this really religious book. I'm a Catholic and my faith is important to me, but as a single mom with tattoos, I can't be writing a book telling people how to live their life." Today, she has a 7-year-old daughter and is studying to be a caterer, juggling single motherhood with classes at a local community college.

After her rescue, Johnson says, she had planned to stay in the Army. "But it was a little too much, physically and mentally." She struggled, too, with being the first African-Ameri-can woman captured as a POW. "It's not something you strive for." It has helped speaking with former Vietnam vets—and one in particular whom she met last year, a black male soldier who had been in captivity for five years. "They told him, 'You're a black man; you know that America doesn't care about you.' And he held his ground. When people talk about, 'Oh, you've endured so much,' I think of him."

She, too, had been told that America didn't care about her as an African-American POW. There was much made of the fact that Johnson, as a black soldier, received a lower disability rating than Lynch, particularly after reports surfaced that Johnson protested her disability rating. But, she says, there was a back story there: It was not Lynch's condition that caused Johnson to file a protest. "That was justifiable," she says. "She had a lot more injuries." Johnson, who took a bullet to both of her ankles during the attack on the 507th, protested because the military had initially denied her disability coverage for ptsd. The Army's assessment noted with startling bureaucratic blandness that Johnson's "time in Iraq was trying" but that her mental condition did not rise to the level of ptsd. "My mental state didn't rate," Johnson says.