Ms Lynch, 22, told Time magazine: “I think I provided a way to boost everybody’s confidence about the war . . . I was used as a symbol. It doesn’t bother me anymore. It used to.” Ms Lynch says that her book, I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story, will “set the record straight”.

Ms Lynch said that the television movie of her life was inaccurate. Ms Lynch said that she hopes to become a teacher. In a few weeks she begins classes at West Virginia University, where her tuition fees have been paid for by the state.

Ms Lynch, from Palestine, West Virginia, was a private in the US Army when she was captured in Iraq on March 23, 2003, near al-Nasiriyah, a crossing point over the Euphrates River. She suffered two spinal fractures, nerve damage and a shattered right arm, right foot and left leg when her Humvee crashed during a firefight.

Eleven other soldiers in her unit were killed in the ambush. She was rescued from an Iraqi hospital by US forces on April 1, 2003 — the first rescue of an American prisoner of war since the Second World War.

However, accounts of Ms Lynch’s rescue were contradictory and it was claimed that the rescue was staged.