How Jay Glazer reunited a former prisoner of war and the marine who rescued her

The woman’s face disappeared from the Zoom screen the second the man’s face popped up. He was older than she remembered, bald now, with the wrinkles of fatherhood starting to form on his face. 

But that face was unmistakable.

All that the rest of the Zoom could hear were the woman’s tears and the words she kept repeating.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Jay Glazer, FOX Sports’ NFL Insider and the host of the Zoom teleconference through his charity Merging Vets and Players (MVP), started to cry. So did most of the over 100 military veterans also on the call.

Glazer chats daily with NFL stars, coaches and power brokers and counts his “FOX NFL Sunday” castmates — some of the most recognizable sports commentators in the world — among his best friends. But he remembers feeling something else in that moment, something he rarely feels: starstruck.

On March 23, 2003, in the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Army Spc. Shoshana Johnson was part of a convoy that was ambushed by Iraqi troops in Nasiriyah, a city in southeastern Iraq. Nine of her fellow squad members died in the ambush, while she and eight others were captured. Two more would soon die of their injuries while in captivity.

Johnson and the remaining six soldiers were then taken nearly 250 miles north to Baghdad, which was under heavy attack from U.S. forces.

“They would stop in different cities and show us off,” Johnson recalled recently on “Unbreakable,” Glazer’s podcast. “We’d get spit on, we’d get slapped and so forth, as they took us from Nasiriyah to Baghdad.”

The hostages were also medically cared for — Johnson had been shot in both of her ankles during the ambush, and underwent surgery on her wounds while in captivity. They were also fed regularly. 

There was another benefit to being near a war zone as hotly contested as Baghdad at the time — the constant sounds of gunfire and bombs going off nearby were signs that American troops — and possible rescue — were close at…

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Publish date : 2024-04-08 13:11:09

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