I forgot to link this piece when it was published in the NYT last week, and now - thanks to the Times' new archiving policy - it's too late. But the IHT was kind enough to publish this great piece by Mark Bowden about the BBC's attempt to discredit the U.S. military about the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch (see here for a roundup of links debunking the BBC's effort):

But if the Pentagon was really attempting to sell a Hollywood scenario, they fell badly short. At his briefing, Brigadier General Vincent Brooks said that Lynch had been "retrieved," not rescued. He showed a videotape consisting of a brief muddy clip through a green night vision lens showing special operations soldiers carrying her on a stretcher from a Black Hawk helicopter.
If the Pentagon had wanted to manufacture a bogus firefight surely they could have done better.
In fact, Brooks acknowledged at the first briefing that there was no resistance inside the hospital. He said there had been gunfights going in and coming out, but did not characterize them as fierce.
There is no doubt that the American media took these bits and pieces from the fog of war and assembled them into a heroic tale. This is how the media works today, for better or worse. It happens without any prompting from the Pentagon.
It will be a while before what really happened to the ill-fated 507th is known. War is like that. Until then, we'll have to settle for the tendency to weave what little we know into a familiar shape - often one resembling the narrative arc of a film.