ABSTRACT
What are we now to make of the peculiar pose of Jessica Lynch? She appeared, “smiling beguiling” (as Paul Weller once sang) on the April 2003 cover of Newsweek, framed by a star-spangled banner. It is the smile of a youth, albeit one wearing the green fatigues of combat, and it is clear—some clarity of focus in her gaze unclouded toward the camera makes it clear— that, as yet, she has seen no combat, witnessed no deaths of her comrades, nor yet seen the face of the enemy. This is a photograph before experience, and it resembles nothing so much as the graduation pose for one of those American high school yearbooks. Indeed, Jessica was once acclaimed by her classmates, as though from a bygone era, Miss Congeniality. It is certain that somewhere in the annals of some municipal high school in a poor-white district of West Virginia where she comes from is a very similar photograph of a high school leaver. Miss Congeniality, of pleasant disposition, sympathetic, agreeable; her classmates were onto something! These self-same qualities recognised by her peers and motivated who knows by genuine affection, though perhaps just as easily by the absence of anything in particular to say about this essentially unremarkable person, are all qualities the US military’s public relations corps no doubt recognised when they approved this photograph for publication and concocted her story. The editors of Newsweek, that most congenial of American imperialist publications, surely understood immediately the impact that the juxtaposition of this photograph on its front cover would make alongside the haunting images and harrowing account of the soldier Jessica Lynch’s violent assault, her abduction, and the fevered speculations of her subsequent captivity.
