How Jessica's war brought the reality home to US public

It has been called Bush's war, Rumsfeld's war and Tommy Franks's war. But, for a while in recent days, the war belonged to a 19-year-old called Jessica Lynch, from West Virginia. Jessica's war began when a joint team of army rangers, special forces, navy seals and marines snatched her from a hospital in Nassiriya where she was being held after being caught in an ambush with other members of a maintenance unit that lost its way in the first days of the war. It continued even when the American advance on Baghdad resumed last week, her rescue amazingly persisting at the top of the television bulletins.

It is an extraordinary thing that the most important news of the war since its inception, that the so-called "pause" was over and that two American divisions were speeding toward the Iraqi capital, took second place for some hours to Jessica's tale. Since then, news of her has featured every day - her transfer to military hospital in Germany, the celebrations in the little town of Palestine, her family setting off to Germany to see her, details of her injuries, and what she said to her rescuers. The recent discovery of her army identity tag in an abandoned building near Nassiriya was excitedly announced as a television exclusive, the reporter holding up the little metal oblong to the camera as if it were a sacred object.

How to explain this concentration of attention? It goes beyond the fact that a young woman's ordeal and survival against the odds, and the daring that plucked her out of danger, are real life drama of the first order. The answer can be sought in part in America's need to make the war real by finding understandable stories in a high technology onslaught that reduces soldiers to what Curzio Malaparte, in the second world war, called "frightened machine-minders".

But perhaps the most important explanation is that Jessica's story brought together America's two armies - the army of fighters and professionals, motivated by the idea of adventure and attracted by combat, and the army of ordinary folk trying to get on in life. In a sense, when the cream of the special units of all the services gathered to go in and pick up Jessica, one army was rescuing the other.

They have named it precision warfare, and it strikes even more precisely at home than it does in the field. It arches over the Americas to deliver its missiles of grief on to a modest clapboard house in West Virginia there, an apartment in a Baltimore suburb here, or even a shack in a barrio outside Guatemala City. Many of these blows are followed by televised rituals of bereavement. Bewildered, tearful, sometimes strangely assured, parents, wives, sisters and brothers appear before the cameras to answer questions, some inane, and to make their careful statements - "He knew the risks", "The army was his life", "He always wanted to be a marine".

For the families of the men and women killed, wounded, or missing in the war in Iraq, this is the cruellest of lotteries. For Americans at large it has been an introduction to the human realities of an institution which, large and expensive though it is, many these days do not know at all well. They have learned, or been reminded how many women serve in the armed forces (16%) and how many foreigners, the "green card soldiers," are from Latin America (3%).

Above all, what has been apparent, as the backgrounds of a good number of the casualties make clear, is how many in the armed forces are workers rather than warriors, people for whom service in the army or the marines was a way to escape unemployment, gain a skill, rescue themselves from failure at college, get themselves into college, or simply lead a regular sort of life.

It seems peculiarly unfair that such modest projects of personal advancement should end so abruptly in the sands of Iraq.

It is this kind of hapless tragedy which the story of Jessica, the only survivor of an ambush in which nine other soldiers died, illustrates so well, and which her rescue may seem to redeem.