May 3, 2004 - You have seen her picture or at least you have seen it described in print. She poses with a big grin on her face giving a thumbs-up gesture to the camera with one hand while with the other she points to the obscured genital area of an apparently nude Iraqi prisoner. The text tells us that the nude Iraqi is masturbating. She looks like the girl next door and the juxtaposition of her smiling face and the scene that the President has described as “disgusting” is incongruous. Who is she?

She is Specialist Lynndie R. England, 21, who, according to the Baltimore Sun, “grew up in a trailer down a dirt road behind a saloon and a sheep farm” in Fort Ashby a tiny town in Mineral County, West Virginia. Her father worked on the railroad and Lynndie made the honor roll in high school. She used to hang out at the Dairy Dip in Fort Ashby with the other local girls eyeballing the local boys in their cars as they cruised by eyeballing the girls.

She enlisted in the 372nd Military Police Battalion to get away from her small town and earn money for college. When her Reserve unit, based in nearby Cumberland Maryland, was activated last year and sent to Iraq her picture was hung with pride at the local Walmart and under a banner saying “We’re Hometown Proud” at the Mineral County Court House in Keyser. She sent another picture home to her mother showing her riding a camel somewhere in the Middle East. Her prewar story is remarkably similar to that of another hometown West Virginia girl that we read about just a year ago. She was the “girl next door”.

Now there are these new pictures, the ones that disgusted the President. She poses alone and with another member of the 372nd, Charles Graner with his arm around her while they watch the prisoners being humiliated. Graner is her fiancée and faces criminal charges in connection with the torture of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. England was busted down to Private and reassigned to Ft. Bragg. She is reportedly pregnant. What happened to Lynndie England in her months in the service? How did the small town girl next door and her Hometown Hero comrades in arms become what we see in these pictures?

In 1992 Christopher Browning published his study of the 101st Reserve Police Battalion titled “Ordinary Men”. He used reports and photographs from Nazi archives and transcripts of interviews of the men of the unit taken in the course of a postwar investigation by the Hamburg Public Prosecutor to find out how ordinary citizens of Hamburg, Germany became the inhuman executioners of Hitler’s Final Solution. Most, he concluded, were not members of the Nazi party. Most were not rabid anti-Semites before the war. Most were not even police officers in civilian life. They were ordinary men with ordinary occupations. How did they become so desensitized to the humanity of their victims that they could engage in the slaughter that became the Holocaust?

How did Lynndie England, Charles Graner, Chip Fredrick and their buddies become the torturers of Abu Ghraib? They left home as ordinary Americans. They are coming home as something we don’t want to recognize. Are they the “rotten apples” that their commanders say that they are or are they something else entirely? Are they ordinary Americans who became casualties in a war in which the President makes up the rules as he goes along? Are they casualties of a policy that denies humanity to an “enemy combatant” to facilitate interrogations by contractors to whom the rule of military law does not apply? Six, seven if you count Lynndie, are coming home broken men and women – just as much casualties as if they had been wounded in combat. They face the power of military justice while the higher-ups and civilian contractors plead the transparent Sgt. Shultz defense,”We just did not know.” That has become “ordinary” in George W. Bush’s America.