  urlLink NYT review of Lynch's story : "First is the low-intensity economic struggle of growing up working class in rural West Virginia. One of Bragg's sly suggestions is that Lynch's greatest fear, of ''being left behind'' -- which comes momentarily, horrifyingly true in the Iraq section, when her truck falls hours behind the main convoy -- was her life's default position. Soldiers like Lynch, he writes, were the sons and daughters of blue-collar workers who had jobs at plants ''that closed their doors before the next generation could build a life from them.
'' This opportunity deficit, as the author sees it, is what put them into uniform... But Bragg, a former national correspondent for The New York Times, was composing under the fog of deadline. With an impossible two months for writing, he ended up with all of a military strategist's problems: routes get confused and abandoned, supply lines between idea and expression stretch thin, straggling images mumble up and down the column...In a book of 207 pages, Bragg includes more than 400 single-sentence paragraphs -- a well-established distress signal, recognized by book readers and term-paper graders alike. "The book's final struggle is Lynch's attempt to reclaim control of her own story, which ought to be as thrilling as the Iraqi stuff.
She returned to the United States amid an avalanche of blessings that tops a Frank Capra movie: applause, civic gratitude, cascading gifts. Lynch had offers of college scholarships, Hawaiian vacations and new cars, and so much mail her town's postmaster started warehousing it in an empty jail cell. The emotional pressure -- the mixed shame and gratification -- must have been intense, yet she steadfastly corrected the record. (''The myth,'' Bragg writes, ''was made while she was sleeping. '' Upon awakening, she contradicted it. )" 
