Jessica Lynch has arrived in New York, but one wonders whether she is aware of that. She sits in an NBC television studio in front of an artificial window, a magical forest of trees covered in autumn splendor visible through the window. It is seven a.m. and the light is soft. From here she can watch the news from the real world on TV monitors. According to the monitors, the trees outside have already lost their leaves. A heavy rain is falling in Manhattan, the tunnels and bridges to New Jersey and Brooklyn are clogged with cars, and yesterday yet another soldier died in Iraq.

But the best news of all is that the girl who lost an arm to a tiger shark near Hawaii is feeling better.

"More about that later," says Katie Couric, who moderates NBC's breakfast program, the "Today Show." Now its time for Jessica Lynch and her story. At the moment, no one can really say whether she's good news or bad news and, most of all, for whom.

"I know it's early," says Couric. Perhaps her apologetic smile is intended for Lynch' small, white face, or perhaps for the large, unshaven face of Rick Bragg, who sits down next to her. Bragg is a reporter who wrote Lynch's story. It's called "I am a Soldier, Too," and 500,000 copies have already been printed. Bragg looks like the manager of a British heavy metal band who was just kicked out of bed five minutes ago. He is Jessica Lynch's most important ally in the world of New York's three-letter television stations.

Last night she was on ABC, telling her story to Diane Sawyer, who looks uncannily like NBC's Katie Couric. The day after tomorrow she'll be on CBS' David Letterman Show. The book is now in stores, and that's why this young woman has traveled to the big city for the first time. She always wanted to get out of the small town in West Virginia where she grew up. She always dreamed of seeing the ocean, the beach. At 17 she saw a large shopping mall in West Virginia for the first time, at 18 a U.S. Army base in west Texas, and at 19 she went to war. She saw the desert in Kuwait, the desert in Iraq and a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. So this is New York.

She doesn't get to see much. On this morning, she is once again transported back to the Iraqi desert, where there was nothing but sand.

This is how her book begins: "Sometimes she saw a tree, which made her happy. Trees made sense. She had grown up in the woods, where hardwood trees had pushed their roots deep into the soil of the mountains. All that empty space and loose sand made her dizzy and confused. She felt lost."

The ill-fated odyssey of the small group from the 507th Maintenance Company is described yet again. In the night before March 23rd, they missed an exit because their company commander had marked the wrong route on his map. They drove around the southern Iraqi city of Nasariya, woke up the enemy, and were attacked. They were cooks, mechanics, truck drivers. None of them had ever fought in a war. Eleven American soldiers died that morning and six were captured. One of them was Jessica Lynch. She spent eight days in a hospital in Nasariya, from which she was rescued in the night before April 2nd by special units of the US Army.

She was the first bit of positive news in a war that had gotten off to a bumpy start. She became a symbol of America's resolve.

"America doesn't leave its heroes behind," said Vincent Brooks, a spokesman for the American troops. Baghdad fell eight days later. And somehow Jessica Lynch was a part of it all.

Speaking slowly and in monosyllables, Lynch lets the moderator take her through the story that made her America's most famous prisoner of war of the last 50 years.

Do you blame your company commander?

"Oh, no. We were all tired. It was dark and no one knew what to expect," she said. Apparently her tanker was disabled and she climbed into a girlfriend's Humvee. Two other soldiers climbed in later. The enemy fire kept increasing. Her weapon was jammed and she was unable to shoot. She said she crouched between the soldiers on the gearbox and prayed.

"And then?" asks Katie Couric.

America has spent half a year waiting for an answer to that question. Immediately following her rescue, an unnamed military source was quoted in the Washington Post as saying: "Jessica Lynch fought fearlessly. She did not want to be captured alive."

When her father was asked about this at the time, he said: "That sounds like Jessie."

She was a 19-year-old girl from a region in which 20 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, where the winters are harsh and where people are serious when they say that they serve their country. Perhaps it sounds like her, but most of all it's a sign of the times. There were pictures of American tanks in sandstorms, but none of weapons of mass destruction. The military never denied the story of heroism. And Lynch remained silent.

Perhaps there was too much pressure, or perhaps she simply did not trust her own memories. An Iraqi named Mohammed Odeh al-Rahajif, whom she did remember, was celebrated as her rescuer. He too has a book contract, and he and his family were flown to America. The governor of West Virginia considered introducing a holiday called Jessica Lynch Day. Neighbors helped renovate her parents' house. Perhaps it was one of those things that just couldn't be stopped. She was ill and weak, and her book contract probably included a clause stipulating that she should talk to no one.

And what happened then?

"There was a crash, and everything went black," says Lynch.

The moderator looks moved and the camera zooms in on the face of Jessica Lynch. But there isn't anything to see there, no tears, not even a flicker of emotion. The zoom shot cannot live up to expectations. And these expectations are enormous.

"Don't you have constant, strong pain?" Couric asks, filled with concern. The question seems to include the unspoken phrase "at least."

"No, not really," says Lynch. Again the camera zooms in for a close-up of her eyes. Not a flicker, not a tear.

She lost consciousness for about three hours, and she may have been raped during those three hours, writes Rick Bragg in his book. But now, on this morning, he says: "We can't say for sure. We just don't know."

"I have no recollection," says Lynch.

"Maybe its better not to remember certain things?" says Couric. America could have asked itself the same question. The Jessica Lynch story is falling apart in front of their eyes, but perhaps this is intentional. Perhaps everything should be forgotten.

"Well," says Lynch, "I don't know. Whatever happened, it wasn't my fault."

She woke up in a military hospital and a doctor was bending over her, she says. She could barely see him. She is very short-sighted and had lost her glasses.

The first thing she said was: "Please don't hurt me."

"I am here to help you," the doctor responded.

And that's exactly what he did. A little later, she was transferred to the municipal hospital in Nasariya, but she really has nothing but good things to say about it. The doctors and nurses there saved her life, she says. They did what they could. One nurse, she says, massaged her back and sang lullabies to her. She says she can remember voices but can barely recall faces. After all, she couldn't see anything. Shadowy but well-meaning figures approached her and spoke to her.

Once, she believes, they wanted to amputate her leg, but then decided not to when she protested. She says she was never beaten, as her supposed rescuer Rahajif claims. Never.

She says she dreamed of Taco Bell and McDonald's as she was lying there. She was hungry but she didn't trust the hospital food. They brought her sealed packages of crackers and orange juice, unwrapping the crackers in her presence.

In the end, the Iraqis even tried to bring her closer to the advancing Americans in an ambulance. But a patrol fired on the vehicle, probably out of fear that it could be on a suicide mission. The story is exactly the same as the story that was told by the doctors and nurses from the Iraqi hospital. It was always their story, but they were only Iraqis, after all.

A 20-year-old girl from West Virginia has written down her memories for millions of American readers.

When we was rescued by special forces, there was no resistance. She didn't know that she was being filmed.

"I also don't think it's good that they used me to symbolize all this stuff," she says. Rick Bragg looks down at his shoes.

The heroine of Nasariya is a half-blind, pale girl who ate nothing but packaged crackers and dreamed of Taco Bell. She lay still for eight days. She hardly cried, and that's certainly something. A simple story, and perhaps it isn't all that different from the story that was told at the time. But now it seems unusually plain, after all the flags and receptions. And it seems a little undramatic, if you think about all the things that happening in Iraq every day now.

Jessica Lynch was awarded three medals. She was on the cover of Newsweek and People. As a hero.

"I'm not a hero," she says.

But how could it have come to this misunderstanding about her true role?, asks Katie Couric.

Bragg and Lynch look at each other for a moment.

"Jessica had no control over it. The war needed good news. The country needed good news. The image of Jessica seemed somehow perfect for that," says Bragg.

And that is the topic of his book.

He probably discovered very quickly that there wasn't much to say about Jessica Lynch in the war. Her capture and rescue only takes up a few pages. Bragg spends a lot of time writing about her childhood. He describes her father, a short, stocky day laborer, and he describes the cold that crept into their small wooden house in the winter. He writes about how Jessica Lynch fell asleep in a movie theater on her first date, and about her longing to get out of the hills of West Virginia and see the world. That was also the reason she joined the military, he says. She wanted to see the world, see the ocean. She had not expected all that sand in Iraq, and she missed the trees.

He describes a country girl who stumbles into a foreign war.

That's how he saves her.

"A few people believed that Jessie, who was lying in a hospital with horrible injuries, created her own myth and tried to deceive others," wrote Bragg.

"That's ridiculous," says Bragg. He spent many years working for the New York Times, and he knows that nothing upsets journalists as much as their own mistakes. Topless pictures of Jessica Lynch are already starting to circulate. Larry Flynt bought the pictures for Hustler magazine, just to show that there are no "pure" American heroes. The families of other captured and fallen soldiers have complained that they're not getting any attention. Shoshana Johnson, for example, the black cook who was captured with Lynch on March 23, had her PR agent announce that she had not authorized the NBC docu-drama about Jessica Lynch's fate (with actress Laura Regan). Her father believes that his daughter was ignored for racist reasons. Perhaps this is true, but it seems more likely that the short, heavily made-up PR lady he hired for his daughter just isn't as clever as journalist Rick Bragg.