May 16, 2004 By Vicki Smith Associated Press Writer 4 min read

FORT ASHBY, W.Va. (AP) – Two weeks ago, this was a friendly town where folks were more likely to smile than scowl at a stranger. Now, three words – “reporter” and “Lynndie England” – are enough to send people scurrying from the Family Dollar, the ice cream stand and the bait shop.

“They trashed us,” says a woman at the pharmacy, smile fading as she backs away. “Just look at the Internet.”

“Nobody’s going to talk to you because they don’t think the media’s going to tell the truth,” says barber Joe Godlewski.

Pfc. England’s leering poses with Iraqi inmates have become the most notorious images of the prison-abuse scandal at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. She is among seven soldiers from the Maryland-based 372nd Military Police Company charged with mistreating Iraqis at the prison.

Privately, many people here support the 21-year-old reservist who used to bag their groceries at the IGA. The infamous leashed-inmate picture, they say, was clearly staged.

“Somebody told her to take those pictures to humiliate those men,” Godlewski says. “Everybody I talk to believes that.”

Not everybody will say so.

About 1,300 people live in Fort Ashby, and despite the image that television cameras might project, only a few live in the tiny trailer park where England’s family lives behind a sheep farm.

The middle-class town along Patterson Creek is full of modest, well-kept homes. Only about 100 miles from Washington, D.C., it’s a place where children play safely and people leave doors and cars unlocked.

“This is a wonderful town filled with lovely people,” says Laura Sours, who has lived here for 25 years. “What’s happened is just horrible, and I hope to God it doesn’t reflect on what the world thinks of us.”

At the height of the media onslaught, the owner of the trailer park where the England family lives banned TV crews, then all media interviews.

“They’re making this place look dirt poor!” she said.

Yellow signs stand at the entrance and in the yards, the same kind of signs used to keep hunters off private property.

England’s picture was removed last week from a display of locals serving overseas at the courthouse in Mineral County, home to Fort Ashby and the highest percentage of veterans in West Virginia.

In the local paper, letters to the editor have shown mixed feelings. One writer complained his hometown of Cumberland, Md., just 15 miles up the road, has been portrayed as a home to savages.

Reporters came “to see what kind of masochistic freaks we are,” wrote Bob Leasure, now of Abingdon, Va. “The city of Cumberland does not owe any of these wannabe journalists an explanation for what a few of our soldiers did in a time of battle.”

But a member of the 82nd Airborne had harsh words for England and her unit in his letter to the Cumberland Times-News. Like England, paratrooper Christopher Toey is now at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

“Military personnel all over the U.S. are walking with their heads down,” he wrote. “The terrorists just may have what they need to turn the people of Iraq against us now. We have no one to thank but Pfc. England and friends.”

In Fort Ashby, people just hope time will erase any stain.

“It’s like where Jessica Lynch grew up – what was it again?” says Larry Rafferty, a track coach at nearby Frankfort High School.

He meant Palestine, the hometown of the war’s most famous ex-prisoner, about 145 miles away.

“A year later, and everybody has forgotten the name,” Rafferty says. “People won’t remember this place, either.”

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Associated Press writer Gavin McCormick contributed to this report.