The following article first appeared in Rolling Stone in May of 2004. It is written by Osha Gray Davidson. I received permission from Mr. Davidson to reprint the article here to include in my series of "Native Americans in the U.S. Armed Forces". Due to the length of the article, it will be divided up into seven parts. To read the article in its entirety, please click on the link provided at the end of the article. Thank you. Phyllis Doyle Burns


A Wrong Turn in the Desert - Part Five
By Osha Gray Davidson
Rolling Stone, 27 May 2004


Piestewa arrived at her new home in Fort Bliss, Texas, in October 2001. She was assigned to the 507th, where she was responsible for keeping track of supplies and performing other clerical work. She quickly developed a reputation for being efficient, friendly and quick to stand up for herself. "Pi was just her own person," recalls Spc. Shoshana Johnson, a company cook. "People would automatically assume she was Hispanic. She was like, ‘No, no. Piestewa is Hopi.’ She’d correct them in a heartbeat. She’d break it down to them."

A few months later, Piestewa got a roommate: a shy, petite eighteen-year-old named Jessica Lynch, from the hollows of West Virginia. The two could have come from different planets. Piestewa was a natural athlete; Lynch surprised her family just by completing basic training. Though they were the same height, Piestewa had an extra thirty pounds on the rail-like Lynch. Lynch spent hours getting her bangs and makeup just right and color-coordinating her outfit; Piestewa would throw on baggy jeans and a T-shirt three sizes too large. Lynch didn’t care about music; Piestewa, who loved Tupac, would crank the volume on her boombox and strut around the room as he rapped: "You either ride wit' us, or collide wit' us."

Despite their differences, or maybe because of them, Lynch and Piestewa became best friends. They quickly dispensed with first and last names, calling each other "roommate" or "roomie." They stayed up all night talking about boys and doing "girl things," dyeing each other’s hair and getting Lori out of her baggy jeans and into something more stylish. "They were like sisters," says Piestewa’s mother, Percy, who made the nine-hour drive to Fort Bliss with Lori’s kids as often as she could. "Jessi was teaching her how to be a girl again."

When Piestewa and Lynch weren’t on duty, they drove Piestewa’s beloved charcoal-gray Mitsubishi Eclipse to the mall in El Paso and spent the day window shopping and going to movies. They didn’t usually watch war films, but Lynch remembers one they did see: Black Hawk Down, based on the 1993 firefight in Mogadishu, Somalia, that killed eighteen American soldiers and more than a thousand Somalis. "The film didn’t really bother us," Lynch says with a shrug. "We never actually thought we were going to Iraq. I mean, we’d always joke around and, you know, kid about it. But we never actually thought that we would end up in a combat zone."

In January 2003, when the 507th got word it was to deploy to the Middle East, Piestewa was expected to remain at Fort Bliss. She had severely injured her shoulder in a training exercise and was recovering from surgery. But Piestewa knew her roommate was nervous about going into a war zone. And there were the other members of her unit to consider. So Piestewa decided to argue her way into deployment. Her kids were safe in Tuba City. The 507th was her family now, and it was in danger. She told her brother Wayland she had a feeling that Lynch – or someone else in the company – was going to get into trouble in Iraq. She wanted to be in a position to help. Lynch told Piestewa it was OK, she didn’t have to go. But she had made up her mind. "You have to – I have to," Piestewa told her roommate. She went to her superiors and lied about her shoulder, saying it had healed. She was returned to active duty.

On February 17th, as the 507th was leaving Fort Bliss, a reporter with local television station KFOX did a short interview with Piestewa. On tape, surrounded by her family, she appears relaxed about the deployment. "I’m ready to go," she says with a smile.


Part six of this story will be printed May 11, 2008