PFC Jessica Lynch's Speech Analysis

During her military deployment in Iraq in 2003, PFC Jessica Lynch was injured when a rocket-propelled grenade hit her unit’s vehicle. She then had to be rescued because of her serious injuries and was taken to an Iraqi hospital. There are two sides to what happened next: the U.S government’s story versus the doctor’s story. The U.S government reported that Lynch had been stabbed, shot, strapped down to the hospital bed and interrogated. However, the doctors that treated her said they gave her the best possible treatment they could offer and that they tried their best to help her. On April 1, 2003, a group of American soldiers came to rescue her. Civilians had been informed that she had bullet and stab wounds, which there was no evidence of.
An example of this is when Lynch goes into specific details about her injuries from her accident. She says: “I was not able to move or feel anything below my waist. I suffered a six-inch gash in my head. The -- My fourth and fifth lumbars were overlapping causing pressure on my spine. My right humerus was broken. My right foot was crushed. My left femur was shattered.” This creates an emotional response from the audience because listening to, not just anyone, but a war veteran talk about their pain is hard to hear. When the audience acknowledges this they become more empathetic towards Lynch and this causes them to listen and believe her argument. This is a helpful appeal for Lynch to use to convey her message because of her topic of war, especially her personal experience, is not something many people have first world experience in. However, pain is something everyone experiences, so for her to explain, in detail, her painful experience in the war, causes everyone to not just have a new perspective on her experience, but to sympathize with her on something that is typically hard to relate to. This causes her message get across better and the audience to trust her
Lynch uses this technique by saying: “When I remember those difficult days, I remember the fear. I remember the strength. I remember that hand of that fellow American soldier…” In this quote, she is saying that she lived the war in Iraq, in a first world experience. Because of the spread of misinformation, people are discounting Lynch and her struggles. When Lynch reminds people that unlike all of the news outlets and government officials, she's one of the few that lived in the situation and that if the audience should listen to anyone it should be her. She’s the one that lived through all of the pain and fear, so if the audience decides to listen to a news outlet or government official over her it’s deemed as disrespectful. So, when Lynch uses her credibility, she subconsciously persuades the audience to listen to her argument with open ears, because the audience understands that they should be listening to someone that actually lived in the events taken place, not someone that’s just reporting on