Lynch Has No Memory of Capture

Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch, making progress after surgeries for injuries sustained in Iraq, is doing well emotionally but still cannot remember her capture and may never do so, one of her doctors said Thursday.

Greg Argyros, assistant chief of the Department of Medicine at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where Lynch is being treated, said evaluations of Lynch so far suggest there is only a slim chance she may remember her ordeal.

“The likelihood is very low that she will remember any of the events from the time of the attack until the time she woke up in the Iraqi hospital” from which she was rescued, he said in an interview on NBC’s “Today” show.

What happened in the March 23 incident in which 11 Army troops were killed and Pfc. Lynch and five others were captured is unclear. A convoy of her 507th Ordnance Maintenance Unit was reported to have taken a wrong turn and been ambushed by Fedayeen Saddam militia members in southern Iraq. Lynch was rescued by special operations forces April 1.

Doctors have completed surgeries for the 20-year-old clerk, who suffered various fractures and broken bones, the hospital said.

Emotionally, she is doing very well, said Argyros. He said her case was not amnesia, which he defined as forgetting something once known. Instead, she has no memory of the ambush.

“Anytime anybody goes through a traumatic event of any kind,” Argyros said, “there is the risk that they may have a period that they don’t remember what happened.”