In the Body of a Soldier

Twenty-two year-old Tomas Young called his Army recruiter on September 13, 2001. He wanted to go to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Instead, his unit was sent to Iraq in March 2004. Less than a week after arriving, Young suffered a shot to the collarbone that left him paralyzed from the chest down.

While Young was recovering at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington DC, he met former talk-show host Phil Donahue. “I didn’t know then that I was going to make a movie,” Donahue said last night at a Reel Progress screening of the film. But upon hearing Young’s story, he wanted to show the human costs of war to a larger audience.

Donahue had never made a movie, so he partnered with documentary filmmaker Ellen Spiro. The resulting film, “Body of War,” follows Young from his 2005 wedding, through his daily struggles with physical disability, to his involvement in Iraq Veterans Against the War, all set against the backdrop of the 2002 congressional debate over whether to authorize the president to use military force in Iraq. The past year has seen a glut of films about the Iraq conflict, but none so pointedly from the perspective of a returned soldier.

Young cannot cough, nor can he control his bowel movements or body temperature. He has to wear a vest packed with ice when in warm environments. When Young tells Bobby Muller, a similarly paralyzed Vietnam veteran and president of Veterans for America, that he was only in the hospital for two or three months after his injury, Muller is shocked at the VA’s impetuousness.

When Muller was injured, he spent almost a year in the hospital, and another nine months as an outpatient. As Eddie Vedder sings in a song inspired by Young’s experience, “Nothing is too good for a veteran, so nothing’s what they’ll get.”

“Why do the American people tolerate this?” asked Donahue, referring both to the broken system of care for returning veterans and to the continued devastation the war is causing to families like Young’s and the U.S. military.

But, said Young, “The majority of families don’t feel the sting or sacrifice” for this war. “Until they do feel that sting, we will not have a strong enough groundswell to stop it.”

Young appeared after the film with Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), whose 2002 filibuster against the Iraq war resolution features prominently in the film, in contrast to other members of Congress who parroted White House talking points about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Byrd christened himself and the 22 other senators who voted with him the “Immortal 23,” those who will go down in history as having stood up for their conscience.

For Tomas Young, meeting Sen. Byrd again as the focal point of a movie theater was an awe-inducing experience. He was in the presence of an American hero. And Byrd, it seemed, returned the sentiment.