Words that Palestine, West Virginia, dared not hope for: your Private Jessica is safe

Nobody in the tiny town of Palestine, West Virginia, had dared believe they would see 19-year-old Pte Jessica Lynch alive again. But as news of her rescue from a hospital in Nasiriyah spread around the farming community, the deepening gloom of the past nine days gave way to whoops of joy and just a few tears.

"Fireworks started going off, and the local volunteer fire department had every truck they had out there, horns a-blowing and sirens blazing," the headmaster at the local high school, Kenneth Heiney, said. Friends and relatives rushed around spreading the good news. A crowd of 70 well-wishers gathered outside the home of Pte Lynch's parents, Greg and Deadra Lynch.

"You would not believe the joys, cries, bawling, hugging, screaming, carrying on," a cousin, Pam Nicolais, said.

Her great-uncle, Ira Lynch, added: "It is wonderful how the Lord has worked in this."

For nine days, Pte Lynch was listed as missing in action after an ambush on a supply convoy outside Nasiriyah. She was one of five soldiers paraded on Iraqi television in one of the first, and most shocking, propaganda coups of the war, the whites of her eyes flashing like beacons in what appeared to be sheer terror.

Her family clung to the hope that she would survive, but knew nothing for sure until they received the good news from her base commanders in Fort Bliss, Texas, at 6pm on Tuesday.

"We're gonna wait until she's home and we're gonna have one of the biggest bashes Wirt County, West Virginia, has ever seen," Mr Lynch said.

The excitement in Palestine, a mere dot on the map near the state border with Ohio, was echoed across a country anxious for even a sliver of good news amid the mayhem and uncertainty surrounding the war in Iraq.

The happy ending to Pte Lynch's ordeal made the front page of just about every newspaper in the United States.

Although she is only one of more than 20 US soldiers reported missing or captured, her rescue was seized on by military and political leaders as an opportunity to boost the nation's morale. President George Bush was informed immediately in a phone call with Donald Rumsfeld, his Defence Secretary. "That's great," the President was reported to have said.

According to US military sources, special Delta Force troops stormed the hospital compound after receiving inside information from two or three sources. It took them several days to work out how best to extract Pte Lynch.

With a decoy attack distracting the Iraqi forces still holed up on the western side of town and helicopters providing cover from above, they whisked her away almost before her captors realised what had happened. Her codename during the operation was Dust One – short for "Duty Status, Whereabouts Unknown".

Video footage showed a four-man unit carrying her on a stretcher towards a Black Hawk helicopter. Pte Lynch was conscious, with her eyes open. "America doesn't leave its heroes behind," said Jim Wilkinson, a US army spokesman. "Never has and never will."

Last night she arrived at the US military's Landstuhl Regional Medical Centre in Germany where a spokesman said she would be examined immediately. US officials said she is believed to have broken legs, a broken arm and at least one gunshot wound.

It appears the woman was treated during her captivity as a patient rather than a prisoner. An Iraqi pharmacist, who apparently acted as one of the intelligence sources, said he was allowed to treat her daily for injuries to her legs. "She kept saying she wanted to go home," he said. Her father said last night that she was "in good health", although it was unclear exactly what injuries she suffered, and how.

Pte Lynch had never been abroad before the war and, like many recruits, joined the army to help pay for her education. Her ambition is to become a primary school teacher.

A British Royal Marines officer, Major Mike Tanner, played a vital role in her rescue. On a two-year secondment to the 1st Battalion 2nd Regiment of the US Marines, his job was to run the decoy battle to provide cover for the Special Forces who led the rescue.

It started, he said, when a JDAM bomb was dropped on to a Baath party office just south of the hospital. "The idea was to let the Iraqis think that we were making a major push," said the 33-year-old officer from Berkshire, who was directing the operations from the tented command centre south of the city. The Delta force, supported by US Rangers and Navy Seals, moved in soon afterwards.

Pte Lynch now faces a lengthy debriefing by US intelligence officials, who hope she can help them rescue her missing colleagues.

The soldiers who rescued Pte Lynch from a hospital in Nasiriyah also made an unpleasant discovery: 11 bodies, found either in the hospital mortuary or buried in shallow graves in the compound grounds. Last night, those bodies had not all been formally identified, although it is believed that at least two are Americans. They could be US Marines killed in a firefight on the same day that Pte Lynch was captured. A number of are believed to be Iraqis.

The Independent was told that soldiers also took a prisoner of war who was wearing the name-tagged T-shirt of one of Pte Lynch's colleagues, who was seized by the Iraqis. He is still missing.

The troops also found ammunition, mortar rounds, maps, and a "terrain model" of the region in the basement of the compound – proof to commanders that the hospital was being used for military purposes. Pte Lynch was part of a supply convoy that took a wrong turn and came under attack on 23 March.

Pictures shown the same day on Iraqi television indicated that a number of the members of the 507th Maintenance Company had been killed, their bodies lying on the ground in pools of blood.

Five soldiers, including Pte Lynch were shown undergoing interrogation. At least two of them were wounded. At the time, US commanders speculated openly that the Iraqis had executed some of the captured soldiers, although that remains to be determined.

Such reports had a devastating effect on the families of the captured soldiers.

A friend of the Lynch family, Gladys LaDeaux, told her local paper after Pte Lynch's dramatic rescue: "You wonder, is she being abused? When you wake up, you think about her. You wonder if she's had water ... I had almost given up hope. I thought she was gone."