Guest commentary: We can handle the truth

No one has captured the fear and gritty heroism required by servicemen like Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan."

Those all-too-real moments before the doors on the Higgins Boats drop on the beaches of France give us some idea of the bravery required by every person who has ever gone into battle for one's country.

In the climax of Rob Reiner's "A Few Good Men," base commander Jack Nicholson screams the now-famous philosophy "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth."

In the matter surrounding Jessica Lynch, our government acted like Reiner, even though Lynch's story was more like Spielberg's film.

Even at its most mundane, being a solider requires extraordinary courage, uncommon bravery.

It makes no sense for the government to make up facts as it did in the Lynch case.

Americans can handle the truth. Just tell us.

Private Lynch was willing to tell the truth. She told us she was not the hero the government has tried to make her out to be. She was only doing her duty, but if people want to call her a hero, so be it.

That's a far cry from a government, desperately seeking a new "positive spin" headline for the day, that fabricated details about her capture and rescue.

The government said she was captured with guns blazing, firing every last bullet as she tried to fight off her Iraqi captors with hand-to-hand combat. She managed to shoot several of them after they ambushed her company. "She did not want to be taken alive," a spokesman told the Washington Post.

Lynch told her parents that her gun jammed and she shot no one. The company was ambushed, but only after they lost their way. She didn't fight to the death. She bowed her head and prayed.

She was a 19-year-old kid, a few months away from the hills of West Virginia. Of course, she was scared.

The government made her rescue from an Iraqi hospital sound as if it was straight out of a Rambo film. It wasn't. All the Iraqi military in the hospital had long since fled.

There is no point to this lily-gilding, hero-casting story. Americans don't need it.

Being a solider is hard, dangerous work every single day. It demands brave men and women. That's heroic enough for most.

Steven Ambrose, in his D-Day book, contends the Germans' most egregious mistake in World War II was assuming their military was better prepared than ours was. They thought there was no way that a bunch of late-teen to early-20s recently trained fighting men in the U.S. military could stand up against the seasoned, veteran, well-trained German forces.

Hitler was wrong. Those brave men who fought, died and ultimately succeeded on the beaches of France proved what war strategists always have known: It is not always the brilliant strategies of the leaders that win wars, it is the determination of the combatants who believe they are fighting for a greater good.

That is a story of heroism and it's all we need.

Instead, we're being fed what the government wants us to hear and sheltered from what they don't want us to see.

The Defense Department has banned, for the first time ever, the news media from taking pictures at the Air Force base where coffins containing the bodies of American soldiers, are unloaded.

War costs lives. Sacrifices are made in the name of a nation's objectives. But the people in a free society must be free to understand the consequences of war -- from the burned-out holes that used to be Baghdad neighborhoods, to the gaping holes in bombed embassy buildings, to the flag-draped coffins.

Go ahead and show it to us. We can handle the truth. We can make our decisions as a people when we know the truth. We can't live with, we can't trust, a government that makes up fairy tales to make us feel better.

Tim Gallagher is editor and president of the Ventura County Star. E-mail tgallagher@venturacountystar.com