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Elizabeth, W. VA - Former POW Jessica Lynch, the injured
Army private whose story of capture and subsequent rescue
touched millions, came home Tuesday to her shithole town where
she is expected to spend the rest of her life.
"The only shooting around here is gonna be at squirrels
with my brother's bb gun," Lynch said as the aroma of
the nearby sewage plant filled her nostrils. "God, I
miss that smell!"
Lynch, a 20-year-old Army supply clerk with the 507th Maintenance
Company, whose convoy took a wrong turn in Iraq which lead
to the attack, read a short statement before her motorcade
made its way to her family home in Palestine, West Virginia.
But not before making yet another wrong turn during the parade
route.
Lynch is thrilled to return to her shitty hometown, a community
of about 300 mostly unemployed miners, where she hopes to
play drinking games with her cousins and finally learn how
to read a road map during her long and painful rehabilitation.
"I can't wait to get out of this uniform and into one
of those nondescript housecoats my mother bought me as a homecoming
gift. It's great to be home."
The two-bedroom home where Lynch grew up has been transformed
by volunteers with new ramps for her wheelchair, an extra
bathroom and a new first-floor bedroom. They also removed
three truckloads of old lawn furniture and replaced it with
three truckloads of new lawn furniture.
Community and family members were surprised when Jessica
announced she had a new boyfriend, Sgt. Ruben Contreras, who
accompanied her on the trip home.
While her family welcomed the idea of marriage and grandchildren
they can't help being a little sad that Lynch's high school
beau Jimmy Lynch, who planned to propose marriage that evening,
was arrested at the press conference for public intoxication
before he could read his love poetry.
"A Lynch should end up with a Lynch," distant cousin
Jimmy said through tears at the police station. "I don't
care how highfalutin' she thinks she is, it's a Palestine
tradition."
Palestine is located in the smallest county in West Virginia
but boasts a grocery store, two churches, a collectible figurines
store and a museum dedicated to the filming of "Deliverance,"
shot on location in the town in 1973 but declared "mostly
fictional."
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