Arms' Race: Why's Lynch a hero and Johnson a zero?

Remember Army Spec. Shoshana Johnson? She is one of five POWs captured in Iraq in March and put on TV, visibly terrified after having been detained, beaten, and held for 22 days. You might not recall her because another of the five captives, Jessica Lynch, seems to be generating all the publicity (like last night's lackluster appearance on David Letterman). But while Hollywood, seemingly undeterred by the factual inaccuracies of the Pentagon's rescue fable, can be dismissed as fickle and biased, why is the US government treating Johnson so shabbily?

While Lynch gets movie and book deals, plus an 80 percent disability benefit, the African American Johnson gets only a 30 percent benefit for her injuries (a difference of between around $700 per month). Jesse Jackson blames racism: "Here's a case of two women, same [unit], same war; everything about their service commitment and their risk is equal. . . . Yet there's an enormous contrast between how the military has handled these two cases."

Alternet's Farai Chideya invokes a poem by Nuyorican Poetry Slam winner Kahlil Almustafa in a story on the discrepancy:

There are no lack of
affirmative action programs on the front lines
of the U.S. military, there is full equality
in killing and in death...

Yr coming home
has been covert, quiet
sneaking back into the country
beneath media radar. Yr life as a single, Blk mother
will not make any front page news.

Perhaps there is a codicil: Yr life as a single, Blk mother
will not make any frontpage news
until people wake up, and raise hell.

Earlier: Minorities in the Military: The Bitterness of Sgt. Akbar.