Understanding Lynndie

By Richard Cohen, National Post, May 5/05

Yesterday, a U.S. military judge entered a not-guilty plea on behalf of Lynndie England -- "the pointer," as some have called her, the soldier holding the leashed Iraqi prisoner, the one with the smirk, pointing at the genitals of the naked men. She said she was talked into it. I believe her.

It's odd whom history chooses for fame or infamy. For a while, there was no more famous person in all the world than the then-anonymous Lynndie England. She was some sort of anti-Statue of Liberty, the female personification of what some people insisted America had become. There she was holding the dog leash or posing with the pathetic nude men or climbing on them with her alleged lover and ringleader, Cpl. Charles Graner Jr., since busted to private and serving a 10-year sentence in a military jail.

There is no end to the sadness of Lynndie England. There is no excusing what she did, but explaining it is a different matter. She is that rare genuine article, the cliche, the stereotype that turns out, upon investigation, to be true. She lived with her family in a trailer in West Virginia. She's only a high school graduate. She married when she was 19 -- on a lark, she told her friends, and then only for two years.

She joined the Army Reserves not for patriotic reasons, but for college money (she wanted to be a meteorologist and chase storms). She had an affair or something with Graner in Iraq and has a baby by him. He apparently encouraged her to abuse prisoners. He also married another woman.

A psychologist from her home area testified that England had been a blue baby, born also with a malformation of the tongue that gave her a speech impediment. Apparently, she often chose not to talk at all. She had a learning disability as well. And you can see -- can't you? -- what no one will testify to: She's homely, and that matters for a woman in America. She posed for pornographic pictures with Graner. The discipline of the Army apparently meant she no longer had to have any herself. This is why fascism can be so (sexually) exciting.

In 1995, Bernhard Schlink, a German law professor and novelist, published The Leader -- a powerful and erotic tale of a relationship between a teenage boy and the illiterate woman he reads to. The two have an affair and it is only years later that the man discovers his former lover was a guard at Auschwitz. It was a job she fell into, something she could do and not have to reveal that she could not read. She was a victim, pathetic, but she was also a beast. To understand is not necessarily to forgive.

It is the same with Lynndie England. She is the sort of woman who gets used by men -- as there are, for sure, men who get used the same way. Powerless everywhere in life except on her end of the leash, she just had to come night after night to the section of Abu Ghraib where Graner held sway. She was admonished for this -- her real work was suffering -- but Graner drew her. She knew what she was doing was wrong -- "I could have said no," she told the military court. "I knew it was wrong." But in all likelihood, only theoretically could she have said no. Some women always say yes.

How sad, how ironic, that this wee woman should have become the personification of supposed American arrogance. Like all those convicted for the abuses of Abu Ghraib, she is one of America's little people -- not an officer, not even regular Army, but a collection of nobodies just trying to get somewhere better. Lynndie England was one of them and she is being punished accordingly -- officially for abusing prisoners, actually for being a loser. In her case, the sentence is life.