Wrong Turn In The Desert

By Rick Bragg

On most nights of the year, this stretch of country road is only a flat place in the dark. But for a few nights in late summer 2003, it blazed in neon, smelled like smoked sausage, spun sugar and blue-ribbon hogs and rang with screams of people who had bought a ticket to be scared. They rode the Tilt-A-Whirl, browsed tents of prizewinning fruit preserves and lined up for the cute-baby contest, and if there is such a thing as a time machine on earth, it must be powered by the Ferris wheel at the Wirt County Fair in West Virginia. Back from the war, Jessica Lynch asked her mother and father to take her there.

"She went every year until she left for the Army," said Dee Lynch, Jessi's mother. "She would meet her friends--everybody knew everybody. It's just a little county fair. You could sit at one end of the thing and watch your kids play at the other end. It never changed."

The ping and rattle of the rides and games reached all the way to the parking lot as Greg Lynch pushed Jessi's wheelchair toward the glow of the midway, over ruts that jostled her legs (which had been repaired with a metal rod and screws), her pieced-together arm and her back, which had been realigned with metal plates.

But she was sick of lying in her adjustable bed at home. "It was her first real public appearance," her mother said. "She wanted to see the cute-baby contest, but we never got that far."

It started with a polite, shy inquiry from an old man.

"Ma'am, can my wife stand by you while I take a picture?"

And in seconds--not minutes, but seconds--Jessi was surrounded by people who just wanted to touch her, to say hello, or just to look at her. The word trickled through the crowd--"Jessi's here"--and there was no way to move the wheelchair one inch farther.

"Can I sit my child on your lap?" one woman said, and then another asked, and another. The cameras flashed, and old women hugged her shoulders or said, "Bless your heart." A little girl asked, "Mommy, is that the girl from TV?" One old man told her that he had lost two sons and had given up on living but that her story made him ashamed to give up.

"It was real nice and stuff," Jessi said.

Over and over again, they said the same thing to her.

"You're a hero."

The word bounced from person to person.

Hero.

An hour passed, the wheels of her chair locked in a circle of adoring people.

Hero.

"It was weird," Jessi said later, sitting at her kitchen table, her pain medications lined up in front of her beside a glass of chocolate milk. The very word makes her sad. "For 20 years, no one knew my name. Now they want my autograph. But I'm not a hero. If it makes people feel good to say it, then I'm glad. But I'm not. I'm just a survivor. When I think about it, it keeps me awake at night."

The recruiter said she would travel. Now, 20 months after enlistment, Private First Class Jessica Lynch steered her diesel truck across a landscape of grating sand and sucking mud, hauling 400 gallons of water in the rough direction of Baghdad on a mission that just felt bad. Back home, boys with tears in their eyes had offered to marry her, to build her a brand-new house, anything, to get her to stay forever in the high, green lonesome. She told them no, told them she was going to see the world.

But the recruiter had not told any lies. He offered her a way to make some money for college, so that, when this hitch was over, she could become the kindergarten teacher she wanted to be. And he offered a way to escape the inertia of the West Virginia hills, a place so beautiful that a young person can forget, sometimes until she is very old, that she is standing still. In the process, she would serve her country, something people in her part of America still say without worrying that someone will roll his eyes.

She bought it. They all had, pretty much: all the soldiers around her, the sons and daughters of endangered blue-collar workers, immigrant families and single mothers--a United States Army borrowed from tract houses, brick ranchers and back roads. The not-quite beneficiaries of trickle-down economics, they had traded uncertain futures for dead-certain paychecks and a place in the adventure that they had heard their ancestors talk of as they had twisted wrenches, pounded IBM Selectrics and packed lunches for the plants that closed their doors before the next generation could build a life from them.

The military never closed its doors, and service was passed down like a gold pocket watch. Sometimes it was a good safe bet, all beer gardens and the G.I. Bill, and sometimes it was snake eyes, and the soldiers found themselves at a Chosin Reservoir, or a Hue, or on a wrong turn to Nasiriyah.

As the convoy waddled across the sand, the world she saw was flat, dull and yellow-brown, except where the water had turned the dust to reddish paste. The big trucks had been breaking down since they left the base in Kuwait, giving in to the grit that ate at the moving parts or bogging down in the mud and sand. Her convoy followed the route that had already been rutted or churned up by the columns ahead, and every time a five-ton truck hit a soft place and bottomed out, the 33 vehicles in Jessica's convoy dropped farther behind.

Jessica remembers a foreboding, a feeling that the convoy was staggering into enemy country without purpose or direction. Two days into the mission, the convoy had dropped so far behind that it had lost radio contact with the rest of the column. One of the far-ahead convoys carried her boyfriend, Sergeant Ruben Contreras, who had promised he would look after her. The day they left Kuwait, his column had pulled out just ahead of hers--in plain view. Now he had vanished in the distance along with the rest.

The 33 vehicles had dwindled to 18, and two of them were being towed by wreckers. One day, it took five hours to lurch just nine miles. To make up for lost distance and time, the soldiers in the 507th Maintenance Company slept little or not at all. They were cooks, clerks and mechanics, none of them tested in combat. They became bone weary and sleepwalked through the days.

Jessica began to wonder, If her truck broke down, would anyone even notice her at the side of the road? There was a lot to be afraid of here. But that was what she was most afraid of, whether it was reasonable or not. She was afraid of being left behind. "I hoped that someone would see me, that someone would pick me up," she said. "But you didn't know it. You didn't know."

Three days into their mission, the transfer case in her five-ton truck "just busted"--and she and her sergeant were stranded. For a few bleak heartbeats, it looked as if her little girl's fear was real. Then a humvee swerved off the road, and the driver beckoned to her. "Get in." It was Private First Class Lori Ann Piestewa, her best friend. The sergeant hopped in another truck, and they rolled on. A Hopi from Arizona who had been Jessica's roommate at Fort Bliss, Texas, Lori was recovering from an injured shoulder and had been given the choice of whether or not to deploy with her unit to Iraq. She went because Jessi did. A 23-year-old mother of two, Piestewa knew that her roommate was nervous, and she did not want her to face the desert, and war, on her own. "She stopped," said Jessica. "She picked me up. I love her."

--MISSING ROUTE JACKSON

The directions had seemed simple. After moving overland across the Iraqi border, the convoy would proceed north on Iraq's Highway 8, code-named "Route Blue." At the intersection of Highway 1, called "Route Jackson," the convoy would turn left, avoiding Nasiriyah. The convoy would take Route Jackson until it intersected again with Route Blue, then turn again onto Blue. On his map, Captain Troy King had only highlighted Route Blue--a straight line to Nasiriyah. There was a fail-safe in place, or at least it had been. A checkpoint at the crossing of Route Blue and Route Jackson had been manned by soldiers to direct stragglers to the detour, to safety. But by the time the 507 finally got there, it had been abandoned.

Later, the soldiers saw lights winking ahead. They were happy. They thought it was the main convoy. They had caught up. They were safe. But the closer they got, the clearer it became that something was wrong.

The sun came up on the city of Nasiriyah.

Instead of turning around, King led the soldiers through. The city was beginning to come to life. One Iraqi soldier at a guard post looked at them and waved. King "believed in error that Blue was his assigned route," wrote the Army in its report. "A navigational error caused by the combined effects of the operational pace, acute fatigue, isolation and the harsh environmental conditions." In the cabs of the trucks, the soldiers knew only that someone had messed up.

The convoy lumbered all the way through downtown. There was no gunfire, no real sign of hostility. But in the houses and behind the walls, Saddam's soldiers and militia were reaching for their AK-47s and rocket launchers and heading into the morning, into the bounty that had been laid before them. King finally noticed his mistake.

He turned the convoy around. But a company that had had no luck at all so far did not have any now. As the big machines made their slow U-turn, one of the trucks ran out of gas. The convoy stopped, and Jessi, Lori and others piled out of the humvees and trucks and formed a guard around the truck as another soldier poured gas into it.

Jessi and Lori stood back to back, because it just felt safer that way. They joked, or tried to, because they were so scared. As hard as she tries now, Jessi cannot remember what they said. It was something silly, something about not getting shot.

She heard Sergeant Robert Dowdy give the order to lock and load. Jessi grabbed the slide on the side of her M-16, tugged it back and tried to chamber a round. It jammed. She had cleaned it every day, but the grit had swirled in through the truck's windows all day and clogged it again with grime. She snatched at it, trying to eject the jammed cartridge.

She handed the rifle to Dowdy, who tried to fix it, but he failed and just threw it back to her in frustration. She held it like a soldier would, but she might as well have been back in West Virginia, playing war with pop-guns. They had just crawled back to the humvee when Jessi heard a single, sharp gunshot, then silence, then the gunfire began to chatter, coming closer.

"We got to get out of here," Dowdy said.

The bigger trucks, their drivers standing up to grind their boots onto the gas pedals, could not get above 40 miles per hour. One of them bogged down in the roadside sand, another broke down, and running soldiers leapt into the thin cover of other trucks as large-caliber bullets shattered windshields and bored through sheet metal, as dead and dying trucks began to block the road.

One soldier, left behind, was not picked up as the vehicles swerved away.

He was surrounded and shot down.

"They were killing us," Jessi said. "I saw it."

They scuttled everywhere, a hundred, two hundred, more. They flowed from the doors and windows and swarmed along the rooftops and into the street, and the AK-47s bucked in their hands as they fired on full-automatic at the slow-moving trucks. The Iraqis, most of them in loose-fitting, soiled civilian clothes, did not seem to aim at all, but to just shoot and scream and shoot. They sprayed bullets at the convoy and waited for the Americans to drive into their own death.

"Chaos," Jessi said. "It was like being in a bad dream. You just want to wake up and have everything back like it was. But you can't wake up." Jessi remembers dark, bearded faces and words she could not understand, and the clattering sound of the AK-47 and the deafening crack of the American assault rifles in the cab of the humvee as Dowdy, Sergeant George Buggs and Specialist Edward Anguiano returned fire.

Squeezed between them, her own weapon still useless as anything except a club, Jessi could only watch. "They were on both sides of the street, and we were trapped in the middle, and they were hurtin' us bad," said Jessi. The Iraqis used rocket launchers to cripple the trucks. The grenades exploded against sheet metal or blew up geysers of sand. "I didn't kill nobody," Jessi said. She seemed ashamed. "We left a lot of men behind."

In the humvee, the soldiers fought back. Buggs and Anguiano also had an M249 machine gun, and they fired it into the Iraqi soldiers. "I heard the first sergeant say, 'Piestewa, speed up,'" Jessi said, and now they were running for it, for their lives. "Everybody was trying to talk at once, and there was all this yelling, but Lori was quiet. She knew what she was doing. I could hear bullets hitting the other vehicles, and I looked at her and I knew she hadn't given up.

"And we kept going faster and faster, and I thought it might all be all right. But it wasn't going to be all right," Jessi said. It had been about an hour since the battle began, maybe a little longer. In fear and resignation, she could not look anymore. "I lowered my head down to my knees, and I closed my eyes."

Just ahead of them, Iraqi soldiers had used a truck to block the road. An American tractor trailer rumbling just in front of Jessi and Lori's humvee came under heavy fire and, swerving to miss the Iraqi truck, ran off the road just in front of them. In the mass of Iraqi fighters, one raised a rocket-propelled grenade launcher to his shoulder and sighted on the speeding humvee. He squeezed the trigger.

Jessi, crouched in the middle, her arms around her own shoulders, her forehead on her knees, did not feel the round that finally punctured Lori's control and sent the humvee bouncing off the road, straight at the tractor trailer.

The last thing she remembered was praying.

"Oh, God, help us.

"Oh, God, get us out of here.

"Oh, God, please."

The rocket-propelled grenade had rocked the humvee, sending it into a swerve that carried it into the just-stopped tractor trailer with enough force to crush Sergeant Dowdy. He died, it is believed, on impact. Specialist Anguiano and Sergeant Buggs, who had fought off a small army of Iraqi fighters for what had seemed like forever, were killed, either on impact or soon after by Iraqi soldiers. Jessi and Lori lay in the wreckage. None of the American soldiers saw what happened to them.

The humvee crashed sometime after 7 a.m., but Jessi and Lori were not taken to the hospital, a military hospital, until about 10 a.m. The hospital was only minutes away.

Both Lori and Jessi were unconscious when Iraqi soldiers dropped them off at the hospital. Lori had suffered a serious head wound. The Iraqi doctors said that they tried to save her, but that brain surgery in the opening days of the war, as their emergency rooms filled with wounded, was impossible. She died before Jessi came to.

Jessi lost three hours. She lost them in the snapping bones, in the crash of the humvee, in the torment her enemies inflicted on her after she was pulled from it. It all left marks on her, and it is those marks that fill in the blanks of what Jessi lived through on the morning of March 23, 2003. But her memory just skipped, like a scratched record, from the last few seconds inside the speeding humvee to a blurred circle of faces staring down at her in what she slowly began to recognize as a hospital bed. The language she heard told her that she had awakened in a hospital under the control of her enemies, and that meant she was a prisoner of war. She had been left behind after all.

It was a slow Sunday, winding down from a slow Saturday, in Palestine, W.Va. Cody, the old dog that had never been quite the same after being shot by a hunter some years before, played dead on the front porch. Inside the white A-frame house that had been built on a foundation of 100-year-old logs, Deadra and Greg Lynch, Jessi's parents, watched the television news. In the afternoon, CNN said a maintenance convoy had been ambushed. The network showed a video image of a truck, its doors blown away, blood running down its side. CNN said it was the 507th, and Greg told Dee not to panic, even as something like an icepick gouged at his chest. But people here have sat up late with a lot of wars, and they know that the Army usually tells bad news in person. As darkness dropped on the hollow, the only visitors were friends and kin, as word spread as if by magic through the trees that one of their own was in peril.

--"DON'T HURT ME"

She remembers the first few minutes of coming to, but this too she can tell only if she closes her eyes. "I felt like I was chained to the bed," she said, but there was nothing holding her down except the weight of her own ripped, shattered body. She could not feel her legs, could not move her feet, her toes. In the parts of her body she could feel, there was nothing but pain. It was as if the bones themselves had been sharpened and were stabbing her from the inside.

She tried to move. Nothing.

She thought, dully, what that meant. "I'm paralyzed." But that couldn't be right, could it? Do paralyzed people hurt so much?

It was not just her limbs but her back, her insides, her head. She was too weak to scream, and she was scared, as scared as she had been in the humvee. She tried to focus her eyes, but a blur--enough to tell people from furniture --was all she could manage.

Were her eyes injured too?

No, she had just lost her glasses.

From the circle of faces, she heard English. One of the faces leaned in closer.

"Don't hurt me," was the first thing she said.

"I am not going to hurt you," the face said.

She did not believe him.

She was awake for only a few minutes off and on at the military hospital in Nasiriyah. It is hard to tell how long because of the pain. She had been in shock when she was carried in, and now she slipped in and out of consciousness, convinced that the Iraqi doctors and nurses who hovered over her intended to hurt her worse, not heal her. Over about two hours, they bandaged and sutured her wounds, removed splinters of bone and placed the shattered bigger pieces into rough alignment inside her arm, legs, foot and chest.

That afternoon, the Iraqis loaded Jessi into an ambulance and drove her away from the military hospital. The door opened on the Saddam Hussein General Hospital, the public hospital, a place that would be awash in blood from early bombings, where children screamed and doctors treated wounded in the packed hallways. After doctors stabilized her, she was given her own room and an armed guard, an Iraqi intelligence agent, who took up station outside her door. Doctors said that when she got there she was in shock.

Later, the most famous patient of the war lay under a sheet, three of her limbs in bandages, and cried. It was not so much the pain but the feeling, the desolation, of being alone and helpless. She had never been alone. She had slept within reach of her baby sister. She was from a family where her mother would pull one of her teenage daughters into her lap and hold her just because it felt nice. Even after she had left home there had been Lori and Ruben.

She knew that her family would miss her, that they would be worried. But she would have been amazed at what was happening in the place where she grew up, where it seemed that no one could drink a cup of coffee, eat a piece of pie or pump a tank of gas without talking about her and wondering if she was alive or dead. That night, a nurse, an older woman, came to the room and sang her a lullaby, and even though Jessi did not know what the words meant or what it was for, the woman's voice was warm and soothing and loving, and it calmed her, for a while.

The orderly did not say anything as he rolled her down the hall. She asked the orderly where they were going. He wouldn't answer. Then he pushed her into the operating room.

At Saddam General, surgeons had continued the treatment begun in the military hospital. They inserted a steel rod to stabilize the bones in one of her shattered legs and tried to keep her wounds clean of infection. It was delicate work, done even as their emergency room and hallways began to fill with casualties.

There were doctors and nurses in the operating room, waiting for her. Jessi was confused. She had thought that they were through, that they had done all they could.

Why was she here? "We are going to have to amputate your leg," one of the doctors said. They lifted her onto the table.

"No! Don't!" she screamed.

A nurse tried to cover her face with a mask. She fought. She whipped her head from side to side, to keep them from clamping the mask down on her nose and mouth. It slipped from her face again and again, and all the time, an unseen child screamed and screamed. Jessi screamed with him as the nurse tried to put her to sleep. "Stop," she heard one of the doctors say. The nurse lifted the mask from her face.

"Don't do it," the doctor said.

The nurse put the mask down and walked away. The doctors wheeled her gurney back to her room. She does not know why they stopped. Maybe it was pity. Later, she would hear that the doctors tried to cut off her leg so she could be more easily transported to Baghdad, probably for a propaganda video; that her pieced-together legs would be too cumbersome--and could become infected if Iraqi soldiers tried to transport her by ambulance. She does not know if that is true or not. She just knows she was afraid to sleep, afraid to be awake. Sleep was her friend and her enemy, and she had no place else to go.

She was afraid Saddam's agents would bang through her door and torture her, or strap her to the gurney, mutilate her and carry her off to Baghdad. But even though Iraqi men she did not believe were doctors came into her room and stared down at her as they spoke to her caregivers, she was never beaten. "No one even slapped me," she said.

She was never interrogated. "No one even asked me anything about our troops. I couldn't answer anyway." Jessi said all she could have told them was that she was a clerk, in charge of pencils, packs and toilet paper.

--"I'M GOING HOME"

In the last few days of Jessica's captivity, one of

the doctors spotted an American soldier on a nearby rooftop. The nurses slid Jessi's hospital bed over to the window so it would be in plain sight. "They wanted them to see me," Jessi said.

Rumors had trickled in for days of a female captive in the city, of a soldier with blond hair. "As the situation developed over time, we began to get some indications...that there may be an injured U.S. military member held in this hospital," said U.S. Air Force Major General Victor E. Renuart, Centcom's director of operations. Then, on about March 27 or 28, Mohammed Odeh Rehaief, a lawyer in Nasiriyah, approached some Marines just outside the downtown area and told them of a blond captive inside Saddam Hussein General Hospital.

Around midnight on April 1, a small group of Black Hawk helicopters and fearsome AC-130 gunships came in low over Nasiriyah's dark skyline. Army Rangers and Marines moved quietly into place, encircling the hospital's walls. Other Marines rolled into Nasiriyah in tanks and personnel carriers in a noisy diversion, to draw attention, to draw fire.

Inside, Jessi lay sleepless, her blood pressure dangerously low, her heart rate high. From her bed she could not see a thing, but she could hear the thump, thump of the helicopters. She thought the Iraqis had come for her by air, to take her to Baghdad or to kill her. She felt the panic again.

From the hallway, she heard her name.

The commandos, made up of U.S. Army Rangers, Navy SEALS, Marines and Air Force combat controllers, went hard into Saddam Hussein General Hospital. Armed with machine guns, they kicked down doors even as a hospital administrator tried to give them a master key, the doctors would later tell television reporters.

On the perimeter the Rangers and Marines took fire, and returned it. But inside Saddam General, there was no resistance--and no one to resist. There were about 200 patients and a skeleton staff, but no soldiers, no militia. The commandos did not know that, their officers would later say, and they treated their assault on the hospital as if it was still being used as a hiding place for heavily armed Iraqi fighters--to do anything else would have been foolish. The commandos shouted that they wanted to know where to find Jessica Lynch, and one of the doctors told them he would take them there. The doctor led them up to a second-floor hallway. As the commandos moved down the hallway, one of them yelled her name.

"Where is Jessica Lynch? Where is Jessica Lynch?" Inside her room, Jessi cowered under her covers. What if it was Saddam's people, come to get her again? It didn't matter that the words were in English; so many Iraqis spoke English. "Oh, God," Jessi thought, "don't let it be them." She could not see the door clearly because of the curtain. She lay, her good hand clutching the sheet to her chin, and refused to answer. There was some light in the room, enough to see a man's form as he walked in. And then, just like she had wished it, a soldier was standing there by her bed.

He took off his helmet so she could see him better. "Jessica Lynch," he said, "we're United States soldiers, and we're here to protect you and take you home." She did not know what to say, was still too afraid even to think, so she said the first thing that popped into her head.

"I'm an American soldier, too."

The soldier reached to his shoulder and ripped a patch from his uniform and pressed it into her free hand. "And I held on to that patch and held on to his hand, and I was afraid to let go." They laid her gently but quickly on a stretcher and carried her down the hall and into the stairwell. They passed quickly into the courtyard, and Jessi felt the wind from the rotors wash over her. Someone was still holding her hand. The helicopter lifted off, its rotor blades slicing through the dark.

"O.K., this is real. This is real," thought Jessi. "I'm going home."

--A FAMILY REUNION

The first few seconds of the fuzzy, long-distance phone call still haunt Greg Lynch. In Jessi's voice, he had his first hint that his daughter had been through more than a battle, that she had survived something that could not be covered over with a flag or pinned back together with a medal.

"Daddy?"

The voice was sleepy, drugged and so weak it broke his heart.

"Jessi? Baby?"

"Daddy, they broke my arm."

It was Jessi's first telephone call home after she was rescued from the hospital in Nasiriyah, and the first and only time that she would hint at what had happened to her.

"You'll be all right, baby. You'll get over this."

"The Iraqi man broke my arm."

He wishes sometimes that he had pressed her on what she meant just then, that he had asked her to tell him more, but he was afraid to push, because Jessica sounded so strained, so barely there--and he let the moment, and the opportunity, pass.

She would later say she did not remember saying it, and she would never say anything like it again. Greg believes, like his wife Dee, that Jessi had begun to remember what happened to her and just picked it from her mind like a splinter--along with the rest of it--and that made the hurt disappear.

Dee spoke to the doctor that day, and it had scared her to death all over again. It was the first time she had a rundown of Jessi's injuries, and as the doctor went through the litany of Jessi's damage, Dee kept wishing that he would stop, but he just kept going.

The American doctors would applaud the efforts of the Iraqi doctors, saying they did a good job with the little they had to work with, Dee said. But it would become more evident, she said, that the commandos had not only freed Jessica, they had saved her.

Nine hours [after they took off from America], their jet touched down at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. They were taken to the hospital, and they walked down a hallway where heroes lay inside every half-open doorway. The Lynches stopped just outside Jessi's room, a tiny, intensive care room that, from the outside, seemed to be mostly machines, with one small, bandaged bit of flesh and blood in the middle.

There was silence in the room for a few seconds. Jessi was much thinner than they remembered, and her head had been shaved so doctors could better treat her head wound. Dee stood transfixed by the sight of so many machines, so many tubes and wires, by the bag of blood that hung near her daughter's bed. "Oh my God," she said, inside her head. Greg could not talk either, nor did her sister Brandi. Jessi looked at them and smiled. Brother Greg Jr. took a step into the room.

"Poomba," she said.

The family moved carefully around the bed. "We just wanted to touch her," Dee said. She looked right into her daughter's face and lied. "You look good," she said.

Dee asked her to open her mouth. "I just wanted to make sure she still had all her teeth," Dee said. "They were fine."

They talked, gently, about what had happened to her. Dee said Jessi talked about the battle at Nasiriyah and about the civilian hospital, but did not talk to her at all about Lori or about what had happened between the ambush and her awakening later in the military hospital.

A few days after the family arrived in Germany, Jessi's psychologist, Army Lieut. Colonel Sally Harvey, met with Greg and Dee in Jessi's room to tell them what she could about what had happened in those lost hours.

"She wanted us to be there when she told Jessi," Dee said. Dee stood beside Jessi's bed and held her good hand, and Greg stood on the other side of the bed, his hand resting on her. Harvey told them that Jessi had been assaulted and of the injuries resulting from that savagery.

Jessi's face did not change.

"She just lay there, and her face was blank," said Dee. She thought Jessi might at least grip her hand harder, something, but her hand was limp.

Jessi acted as if it were something that had happened to someone else, someone she didn't know.

"I don't remember," she said, turning her face up to look at her mother. "I don't know."

Dee kept waiting for her to just break down.

She is still waiting.

For Jessi, it was simple. She wanted back what she had before. She did not want to dance ballet or play concert piano. She wanted to walk to the movies through a mall, wanted to press a gas pedal and steer herself to the Taco Bell drive-through. She wanted to go to college and be a kindergarten teacher and hold babies. She also had another picture in her mind. She would walk down an aisle and get married, though Ruben had not worked up the nerve to tell her father that they had talked about marriage and that he had given Jessi a promise ring. In her mind Jessi could see the wedding. "I really wanted to be able to walk at that," Jessi said.