Kodee Kennings

Kodee Kennings is the name given to a fictitious 8-year-old girl, supposedly the daughter of a U.S. Army soldier named Dan Kennings in post-invasion Iraq. Kodee's plight was detailed in letters published in the Daily Egyptian, a student newspaper for Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois, beginning in 2003.

The story was concocted by Jaimie Reynolds, a woman who claimed to be Colleen Hastings, caregiver of the fictional Kodee. Reynolds allegedly passed a letter supposedly written by "Kodee," to Michael Brenner, who was then a sports editor at the Egyptian which prompted a feature story published May 6, 2003. In the article, "Kodee" told how upset she was by an anti-war protest at the university campus, and of her worries about her father "Dan" who was shipping off to Iraq with the 101st Airborne. Kodee's mother was said to be dead.

Over the next year, the Egyptian would publish, unedited, notes and letters from "Kodee", liberally strewn with misspellings and phonetic English, to update their readers about Dan's Iraq service or Kodee's daily life. A young friend of Reynolds, Caitlin Hadley, the daughter of a Nazarene minister, was recruited to play the part of Kodee for photographs, and a nurse, Patrick Trovillion, played Dan. Both believed that they were playing parts in a movie. "Kodee" was taken to the Egyptian newsroom and other Carbondale locations. "Dan" was photographed wearing camouflage, sitting on a tank, and meeting with school children in Michigan. "Dan" also called the newsroom and maintained an e-mail address at Yahoo! "Dan" was even portrayed as having been injured in a December, 2004 explosion in a mess hall at a base near Mosul, Iraq. He reportedly returned to duty just weeks later, and was later injured by an roadside bomb which struck a Humvee in which he was traveling.

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