Life Will Never Return to Normal for an Injured Vet Like Tomas Young

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted May 1, 2008.

In the opening minutes of Body of War, we find a 25-year-old man struggling to put on his pants. He is wiry and tattooed, sitting shirtless on his bed, his thick eyebrows furrowed in concentration. His face is weathered beyond its years. He works to get one leg into his jeans, then the other, moves on to his sneakers and finally, his wheelchair.

Three years after this scene was filmed, paralyzed Iraq war veteran Tomas Young admits that dealing with his personal day-to-day challenges on camera took some getting used to. But "eventually it dawned on me that the more graphic and in-depth [the documentary] got into my life, the more people would see the consequences and ramifications of making an impetuous decision." The decision he refers to is the U.S. government's rush to invade Iraq in 2003; from the opening moments to the end, Body of War interweaves scenes from Tomas' life as he learns to live with his paralysis with C-SPAN footage of the October 2002 congressional vote that is responsible for it. As senator after senator parrots the lies of George W. Bush in a drumbeat for war, a sick sense of dramatic irony sets in. We all know how the vote will play out. But few could imagine what it means to be Tomas Young, one of the tens of thousands of veterans who have returned from Iraq with life-altering injuries after being betrayed by the government they enlisted to serve. Tomas Young feels that betrayal acutely. He lives with the consequences every day.

Tomas joined the army right after 9/11. As he tells it, he saw President George W. Bush standing atop World Trade Center rubble on TV and knew he wanted to help hunt down Osama bin Laden. He called his local recruiter on Sept. 13. "I joined to go to war with Afghanistan and with al-Qaeda," he tells me over the phone, from Kansas City, Mo., his hometown. But when it came time to deploy, he was not sent to help smoke out the "evil-doers" from their caves as Bush swore to do. Instead, he found himself in Sadr City, Iraq, questioning the premise for the war. ("When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, we didn't go and attack China," he says.) And, in 2004, he did not see any terrorists, nor did he fire a single shot. ("All I saw were women and children running away from gunfire.") Less than a week after arriving in Sadr City, on April 4, 2004, Tomas was riding in an unarmored Humvee with no covering when he was shot, hit just above his left collarbone. "All of a sudden my body just went completely numb," he recalls. He was paralyzed from the chest down.

Tomas spent nearly three months being shuttled between hospitals, ending up at Walter Reed Medical Center in April 2004. Reeling from his injury and hopped up on painkillers, it was there that he first encountered former talk show host and producer Phil Donahue -- who'd recently lost his MSNBC program because, as a leaked memo would eventually reveal, he was "a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war." The young, paralyzed veteran made a profound impression on Donahue. "Every time I look at Tomas, I think about the president. 'Bring it on,'" he tells me in a phone interview from his home in New York. "There he was, 24 years old, lying in bed, in the prime of life … This is what we call catastrophic. This is a hugely consequential injury." Tomas' condition, Donahue decided, was exactly what Americans needed to see to truly understand the human costs of the what he calls "the most sanitized war of my lifetime."

The struggle of recovery

Body of War is anything but sanitized. "The movie was filmed during the first two years of my injury, which is the roughest recovery time," Tomas explains -- and it shows. When we first meet his wife-to-be, Brie, she's at the computer, on an Internet message board, looking for advice on Tomas' "bowel problems." Their wedding is approaching, and they're concerned about him having an accident while he is in his tux. It's just one of the ways his body fails him. He relies on "puke pans" for his morning nausea and, in part thanks to the catheter he wears, his frequent urination leads to constant urinary tract infections. And then, of course, as Tomas puts it, there's "a great big erection sidebar," i.e. the problem of erectile dysfunction.

When his wedding day arrives, on a rainy afternoon in August 2005, the couple looks young and happy. He is wearing black Converse All-Stars. Walking down the aisle after declaring their vows, Brie's dress gets caught in his wheelchair. "Damn your big dress," he laughs.

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Liliana Segura is an associate editor and staff writer at AlterNet.