AN AMERICAN SOLDIER TOO

Photo credit Lew Stamp/Akron Beacon Journal.

This is how a war hero comes home: transformed forever, to a place that never again will be the same for her.

"I've read thousands of stories that said when I was captured, I said, `I'm an American soldier too.' Those stories were right," Lynch said Tuesday afternoon in her first public statement since her capture March 23 by Iraqi forces and subsequent rescue by U.S. troops — an ordeal that made her an icon of the war.

"Those were my words. I am an American soldier too."...

Signs throughout Wirt County welcomed Lynch. "Prayers for the Lynch family," read the sign at Merrill Chapel, a little cinderblock church on a wooded hillside near Slate, where the only sound was the wind as it played in the trees and rustled the faded American flags on the graves of long-dead war veterans in the church cemetery.

Yellow ribbons, some bleached white by the sun, had been tied around or fastened on almost everything in the county that would stand still long enough.

This is a ruggedly beautiful part of the world, with lush, green mountains trimmed in Queen Anne's lace, panoramic valleys and a succession of blind curves to quicken the pulse and take the breath away. Around each was another reminder of Pfc. Lynch...

Whether this little town can once again stir the imagination of Pfc. Lynch remains to be seen. Tuesday afternoon, under hot, sunny skies filled with buzzing news and state police helicopters, the courthouse clock chimed an hourly countdown to her return and the beginning of a future she almost didn't have.

Then the smallest person at the dais shifted forward in her wheelchair, leaned toward the microphone and said: "Hi. Thank you for being here.

"It's great to be home."

And it is great to have you home.

Since the inception of the All Volunteer Army certain politicians and sociologists have had much to say about the inadvertant creation of a "military class" in our nation. That the military will draw from the poor, the disadvantaged, the minorities, those without prospects. Much the same groups from which the police, the fire department and the para-rescue teams draw from.

In fact it is speculated that these groups allow the privileged to never serve a day in uniform.

And as we see that effect in Congress - where fewer and fewer members have ever served, and juxtapose that with PFC Lynch's homecoming...it raises questions in my mind.

With regard to those of privelige who never serve:

Will a 79 year old woman ever sweep the sidewalk for them?

Will anyone ever paint on the side of a barn, "Thank you God for saving "them"?

Indeed, will anyone ever call them a hero?

Unlikely.

God bless our soldiers.