On March 23rd, 2003, private first-class Jessica Lynch was captured during the Iraq War.

She was badly injured and held in an Iraqi hospital for nine days.

News of her capture and subsequent rescue gripped America.

Former POW Jessica Lynch is recovering today at a military hospital in Germany.

She's aware of her overnight celebrity.

But Jessica was not the only soldier captured on that day back in 2003.

Other Americans were held in captivity, including US Army Specialist Shashana Johnson,

who had recently joined the military.

While the media found over Lynch, a young blonde white woman from West Virginia,

Shashana Johnson, a black woman born in Panama and raised in Texas, went largely ignored.

That's despite the fact that military service is in her bones.

I actually just came back from visiting my great uncle Al, 90 years old, still kicking.

And we talk, you know, veteran to veteran.

And he talks about the struggle coming to the US, being a black man, and serving,

yet still being held back, simply for the color of your skin.

Black people like Shashana, her great uncle and other members of her family,

have been serving in the US military for centuries.

There was the first Rhode Island regiment, the all black unit who fought in the Revolutionary War.

And in the Civil War, the black soldiers in the Union Army helped turn the tide against the

Confederacy, and despite Lincoln getting all of the credit, these black men helped free their

own people from bondage. Black soldiers have always been there, hundreds, thousands of them,

both free and enslaved, risking their lives and winning battles for America before this country

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