From Wednesday’s Today show:
Couric: “You say you’re not a hero…”
Lynch: “No.”
Couric: “…you’re a survivor.”
Lynch: “Exactly.”
Couric: “But, Rick, you think Jessica Lynch is a hero.”
Bragg: “Yeah, we’ve argued about this, too, a lot. But, you know, I’ve said this before, I think that every soldier there, every sergeant with two children at home, every soldier like Lori Piestewa who have the guts to crawl into the cab of a truck and go into a war while the rest of us sit at home watching it on the news, I think they’re heroes. I think they have to be. And I don’t — obviously, there are soldiers who were the dramatic hero, though, the ones who attack mortar positions and more of what we think of as the pure American hero, but I think it takes a certain amount of heroism to just go.
Couric: “And survive.”
Bragg: “Yeah.”
Note that when Lynch uses the term “survivor,” she’s downplaying her own accomplishment, which, let’s be frank, amounts to respiring, albeit under harrowing circumstances. Lynch thus showed herself to be far more morally astute than Couric or Bragg.