This is the clip of the CENTCOM briefing transcript from Saturday, April 5, 2003.
Now, I told you I'd spend a minute or two talking about the rescue of
Private Lynch. And I'd like to -- you'll forgive me for referring to
notes a little bit more, but the facts of this are important and I'd
like to go through those with you to try to give you a sense of what
is really one of the characteristics of this operation.
There is nothing done on this battlefield that is not a joint and
integrated operation. It's a combined operation. It takes the
capabilities of each of our components -- and I know I've talked about
this a couple of times from the podium here, but I can't overstress
this -- each nation contributing.
Each force on the battlefield brings a capability that has to be
integrated in order to be successful out there. And this is but one
example, this one very localized to a very unique problem, but across
the battlefield we have the same kinds of circumstances. And I'll
cover those in questions, if you like.
In the situation that we're talking about here with Private Lynch, as
you know, on about the 23rd of March, her 507th Maintenance Company
was ambushed in the vicinity of An Nasiriyah. A number of the members
of that maintenance company were killed, a number of captured, and a
number were unaccounted for, she being one of them.
As the situation developed over time, we began to get some indications
from local contacts in the community. And as we have used Special
Forces to develop intelligence on the battlefield, as we do everywhere
on the battlefield, we got an indication that there may be an injured
U.S. military member held in this hospital, the Saddam Hospital in An
Nasiriyah.
Any time we have a situation like that, we put together a planning
team that investigates the intelligence and decides, is this credible,
and if so, do we have the capability to respond to recover our service
member?
In this case, after some detailed planning and study, it was felt that
we not only had good intelligence information and had good access and
had the potential for good access, but we, in fact, also felt that we
had a feasible plan.
On the night of the first of April, a coalition Special Forces
operation was put together that included the U.S. Army Rangers,
Special Forces, and aviators from the Army, U.S. Navy SEALs, Air Force
pilots, combat controllers and United States Marines.
The team was designed in a way to very rapidly get into the area of
the hospital, to determine the location of Private Lynch, and then to
bring her out, and at the same time exploit some areas of the hospital
where we had reports of enemy headquarters, command-and-control
facilities and the like.
As the night unfolded, the Marine task force was given two missions.
Task Force Charlie was asked to create a diversionary tack, to focus
what small elements of Iraqi irregulars there might be in the
surrounding part of the town away from the hospital, in order to draw
them into a fight in another part of the town.
At the same time, elements of the Marines, using helicopters, moved
the recovery force rapidly into the hospital area with both ground
transport and helicopter infiltration, with the principal priority
being to recover Private Lynch and very rapidly move her out of the
hospital area.
Upon entering the hospital, the assault force actually persuaded a
local physician to lead them to Private Lynch's location, and this
local physician claimed at the same time that there were potentially
remnants -- I'm sorry, were remains of other U.S. military, either in
the morgue or possibly buried close by.
As the team entered the hospital room, they found Private Lynch in a
hospital bed. The first man approached the door and came in and called
her name. She had been scared, had the sheet up over her head because
she didn't know what was happening. She lowered the sheet from her
head. She didn't really respond yet because I think she was probably
pretty scared.
The soldier again said, "Jessica Lynch, we're the United States
soldiers and we're here to protect you and take you home." She seemed
to understand that. And as he walked over and took his helmet off, she
looked up to him and said, "I'm an American soldier, too."
As they prepared to evacuate her, a team member made a preliminary
assessment of her medical condition. The physician who had accompanied
them -- this is our physician who accompanied the assault -- took the
opportunity to further evaluate her condition, stabilized her for
evacuation. She had injuries both to her legs, her arm, a head injury,
and seemed to be in a fair amount of pain.
After she was prepared for movement and secured to the stretcher, the
team members carried her down the stairwell out to the front door to
the waiting helicopter. While the helicopter transported her to a
nearby aircraft, who was then going to move her on to a field
hospital, Jessica held up her hand and grabbed the Ranger doctor's
hand, held on to it for the entire time and said, "Please don't let
anybody leave me." It was clear she knew where she was and she didn't
want to be left anywhere in the hands of the enemy.
After a short period of time, the hospital (sic) departed and she was
moved back to the field hospital and her condition -- I'm sorry, her
evaluation, her treatment was expanded.
After Private Lynch was removed from the hospital, the team continued
with the rest of its mission. Searching through the hospital they
found a weapons cache. They found a terrain model.
And, in fact, what this was was a planning -- it was like a sandbox
model done on the floor of the basement of the hospital, and it was a
model of the town of An Nasiriyah, and it had blue and red markers on
there just like we would use for a war game, and depicted with
relative accuracy the general positions of U.S. forces and also enemy
forces in the town. So it allowed our Special Forces to gain a bit of
intelligence as well from that activity.
At the same time, the team was led to a burial site, where, in fact,
they did find a number of bodies that they believed could be Americans
missing in action. They, in fact, did not have shovels in order to dig
those graves up, so they dug them up with their hands. And they wanted
to do that very rapidly so that they could race the sun and be off the
site before the sun came up; a great testament to the will and desire
of coalition forces to bring their own home.
After completing the excavation and ensuring there were none left
behind, the force recovered all bodies and transported them back to
the staging location and moved those back with the rest of the assault
force. And as you know, we've since returned those bodies to the
States, and we have identified nine of those sets of remains.
Eight of them, in fact, were from the 507th Maintenance Company and
one from the -- a soldier from the Third Forward Support Group of the
Third Infantry Division. And those next of kin now know -- have been
notified and they know the status of their loved ones.
So while we grieve at the loss of those soldiers, we are pleased that
we were able to make a determination of their fate and bring that back
to their families.
Well, that completes the comments that I wanted to make. Let me open
up for questions for you today. This gentleman was eager to get in
early, so I'll start off right here.
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U.S. Major General Victor "Gene" Renuart briefed from Doha, Qatar: