Aa a girl, Private Lynndie England had ambitions of becoming the kind of meteorologist who inserts herself in the eye of a tempest, or a tornado: a storm chaser.
She found herself there this week, captured on camera tugging at the leash of one naked Iraqi prisoner and pointing a trigger finger at the genitals of another, the grin on her triumphant face making England the symbol of the sadistic practices at Abu Ghraib prison.
PHOTO: AP/WASHINGTON POST
Thanks to her willingness to pose for the camera with cowering and humiliated Iraqi men, the 21-year-old with the pixie haircut has become the most notorious of the six US army reservists expected to face courts martial for the abuse and humiliation of prisoners.
England's evident taste for cruelty has been met by bafflement in her hometown in Fort Ashby, West Virginia, a hamlet in the hardscrabble Appalachians, and disbelief from her friends and family.
"Scapegoats -- that's what they are being used for," Destiny Goin, her best friend, told reporters.
The pictures brought shame to Fort Ashby. Many members of England's reserve unit, the 372nd Military Police, live in the area.
Until the scandal erupted, England had been a hometown heroine, with her photograph on display with all the other US military personnel serving in Iraq at the courthouse, and the local Wal-Mart store. By Thursday, her family had fled their mobile home, seeking respite from a media barrage.
Before they left, they told reporters their daughter had been demonised. England's mother, Terrie, said she had spoken to her daughter while watching the images on television.
"You're on every channel," she was quoted as telling her. "There you are, and there's a naked Iraqi, and there's you with your thumb up."
England replied: "I just can't believe this ... mom, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Her parents are insistent that is all there is to tell. But it is unclear they know the whole story. According to the Pentagon, England was romantically involved with one of the men at the heart of the scandal, Specialist Charles Graner, 35. The Pentagon also says England is pregnant, although she has yet to tell her family. The soldier was brought back to Fort Bragg in North Carolina because of the pregnancy, where she is performing desk duties.
Graner remains in Iraq. He appears in several of the photographs, most memorably standing with tattooed arms folded, lording it over a heap of naked Iraqi men. A reservist following a stint in the Marine corps, in civilian life Graner worked as a guard at a maximum security prison in Pennsylvania.
In 1998, two years after he went to work there, more than 20 guards were demoted or reprimanded for abuse that included beatings, or forcing inmates to play a form of Simon Says, with punishment for those who failed to follow instructions. Prison officials did not tell reporters whether Graner was involved in the scandal.
England's life before she put on the uniform showed no predilection for violence, her friends and family say. She grew up in a close-knit outdoorsy family that liked sport and hunting.
England joined the army reserves as a teenager in high school -- against her parents' wishes. She told them she wanted to pay her own way through studies as a meteorologist, though her parents had been prepared to pay.
That impetuous streak came out once more at the age of 19 when she married a co-worker at the chicken processing plant where she worked the nightshift. The marriage lasted about a year.
But within the military she was known as an obedient soldier. In Baghdad, she told her family she was assigned to register prisoners at Abu Ghraib -- essentially a clerk. "She shouldn't have been processing prisoners in the first place," her father, Kenneth, told the Baltimore Sun. "She was trained as an administrator, a paper- pusher."
He admitted that at night she would regularly walk across the prison yard to see Graner and other friends, who were involved in interrogations.
But the family had no inkling of what went on during those night visits until January when England telephoned from Baghdad and told them to expect trouble. And they still refuse to believe the images of their daughter that have travelled around the world.
"She has more values than that," Terrie England told CBS News. "She's a good girl."
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