Reply #1: America’s Most Famous POW, Jessica Lynch, Honors the Hopi Woman Who Saved Her Life [View All]

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http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/07/america%E2%80%99s-most-famous-pow-jessica-lynch-honors-the-hopi-woman-who-saved-her-life/

The route leading to this longtime campsite amid the pines on the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho includes several miles of gravel road swooping through hilly farm country. Green with crops, it looks nothing like Iraq, but still gave Jessica Lynch a moment of flashback. “It was the dust,” Lynch says.

A car ahead of the one bearing Lynch to Talmaks Camp on Monday morning kicked up a cloud of dust that carried her back to March of 2003, when she was a 19-year-old supply clerk and private first-class in the U.S. Army driving a truck in the enormous military convoy racing across the desert to Baghdad during the invasion of Iraq by coalition forces. “All you were seeing was dust and sand and you had to follow the person in front of you by their taillights,” Lynch recalls. “We were exhausted and tired and hungry… ”

It was her experiences as a woman in combat in Iraq—she was taken prisoner by Iraqi troops after a vicious firefight—and her unlikely friendship with a young Hopi woman, Lori Piestewa, that prompted the Talmaks board of directors to seek out Lynch as a speaker at the annual camp, sponsored by the six Nez Perce Presbyterian churches on the reservation. Every Fourth of July the camp has a ceremony and a speaker to reflect on freedom, liberty and the price these concepts sometimes demand from people. Lynch delivered the 114th Oration at this ceremony that began in 1897. Slender, and with a sweep of blonde hair, the 28-year-old Lynch reflected on war and sacrifice for an audience that included a dozen Nez Perce veterans going back to World War II.

Talmaks board member JoAnn Kauffman sent an e-mailed invitation to Lynch in the spring but says she thought it was a long shot that Lynch would come speak in remote north-central Idaho on Independence Day. “As soon as I saw it was a Native American reservation, I was all for it,” Lynch says. “I just knew that my friendship with Lori … well it threw me over the top.”