Pfc. Jessica Rips Rescue Hype

Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her capture and dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.

The 20-year-old private said in an interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.

"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview.

"It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.

She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. "It's wrong," she said in the interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer.

The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.

Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn't shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.

Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. "I'm not about to take credit for something I didn't do," she said.

"I did not shoot, not a round, nothing…I went down praying to my knees. And that's the last I remember."

Lynch said she was terrified and feared for her life during her time in the Iraqi hospital, and didn't believe she was being rescued until she was being evacuated in a U.S. helicopter. Then, Lynch said, she felt, "My God, this is real. I'm going home."

Footage of the rescue was aired repeatedly on television networks reporting how a special forces team bravely fought into and out of the hospital.

"I don't think it happened quite like that," Lynch said.

But she praised the soldiers who rescued her. "They're the ones that came in to rescue me. Those are my heroes…I'm so thankful that they did what they did. They risked their lives. They didn't know, you know, who was in there."

Military public affairs officers emphasized the romantic aspects of the rescue, which came during a difficult part of the war. They showed film of the rescue mission and a still photograph of Lynch laying in the rescue helicopter with a folded American flag on her chest.

"There was not a fire fight inside of the building, I will tell you, but there were fire fights outside of the building, getting in and getting out," a Central Command spokesman, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, said the morning after the rescue. "It was a classic joint operation done by some of our nation's finest warriors, who are dedicated to never leaving a comrade behind."

It has since emerged that there were no Iraqi forces at the hospital, and that Iraqi doctors had tried to return Lynch to American forces but were forced to turn back when U.S. soldiers fired at them.

On Thursday, newspaper reports revealed Lynch had been raped during her capture. The assault was revealed in Lynch's authorized biography — "I am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story." The 207-page book will be released by publisher Alfred A. Knopf on Tuesday, Veterans Day.

Lynch told Sawyer she has no recollection of the attack. "Even just the thinking about that, that's too painful," she said.

Lynch is winning admiration in her hometown all over again for the courage to reveal she was raped.

"Can you imagine the humility it takes to tell the world you were raped?" Palestine, W.Va. resident Leah Eberbaugh said. "That's not a secret that a woman likes to tell."

Lynch returned to her Wirt County home in July to recover from her injuries. She receives two hours of physical therapy and takes 18 pills a day and still has not regained feeling in her left foot. She plans to marry Army Sgt. Ruben Contreras in June.