Let the Ostrich Soar?
the human cost of the iraq war made visible
While the eagle is known for its keen eyesight, the ostrich is said to bury its head in the ground when it feels threatened. Given America’s blind handling of the Iraq War—what many consider the biggest foreign policy blunder in recent U.S. history—the latter bird currently seems a more fitting symbol of the nation.
With no evidence of wmds and the Bush administration’s efforts to hide the returning coffins of dead soldiers, it seems that America holds a myopic disregard for both the cause and the cost of the war. Now, five years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro’s must-see documentary Body of War offers an unvarnished account of one critically injured young veteran’s experience, making the effects of the war palpable in a way that is noticeably absent from the nightly news.
“The costs of this war are hidden—we don’t see them,” says director/producer Donahue during an interview with The Eye. “We have, I think, an obsequious press. And the American people are not thinking about the thousands of people coming home in this condition.” Donahue, who sports spectacles and a shock of white hair, is a former member of the media establishment himself, best known as the father of the modern television talk show. “If it isn’t sanitized, then the coverage isn’t good for business ... So here we have this big black hole. The corporate media has left—it hasn’t really told us the whole story—and I thought, well, I’ll try.”
Donahue found his subject in Iraq War veteran Tomas Young, a lanky 25-year-old from Kansas City. In 2001, Young watched President Bush on television speaking from the rubble at Ground Zero and immediately responded to the call to defend his country by enlisting with the Army. While he expected to be sent to Afghanistan, he was instead deployed to Sadr City in Iraq in March 2004. Just five days later, while riding in an unarmored Humvee, his Army unit was ambushed and Young was shot just above the left collarbone, instantly paralyzing him from the chest down. In his very brief tour of duty, he had not fired a single shot.
“I remember constantly thinking this wasn’t where I signed up to go, and I realized that you don’t get to choose where you get deployed,” says Young, who appeares sunken and heavy-eyed throughout much of our interview. Young is still on a daily regimen of 30-odd pills a day, from anti-spasm medication to morphine, and while he maintains a quick wit and a level head, he often has to literally bow to the pain and dizziness of sitting upright. “As Americans, we are told that the military is to be used to defend the country and the Constitution, and all I can remember thinking was that down there in Iraq, we were doing neither.”
As the film agonizingly reveals, everyday activities are often humiliating endeavors for Young, who relies on the help of his mother, Cathy, and his fiancée, Brie. Tomas and the Young family were remarkably willing to open their lives to the camera—in one of many scenes shot with shocking candor, Cathy laughs nervously as she tries to insert a urinary catheter into her grown son’s penis. In another, while most brides-to-be fret over flower arrangements, Brie anticipates her wedding day on the computer researching ways to combat Tomas’ erectile dysfunction. Such brutally intimate scenes push not only the conventional bounds of Young’s relationships, but also our comfort zone as viewers. Yet it is this tension that makes the film so compelling, challenging us to behold the “body of war” in an attractive, well-spoken young man who should be in his prime and yet has been infantilized and made impotent.
In stark contrast to Young’s modest and immobile existence, Donahue and Spiro often cut to footage of the Washington elite. “Nope, no weapons of mass destruction here!” President Bush says as he mockingly searches under the Oval Office furniture in a skit during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Seeing the President pull faces at the posh affair, all too readily laughing at his own foolish charade while senators laugh and clink flutes of champagne, underscores this administration’s callous disregard for the young men and women serving in the war. “[They] are basically saying, ‘Yeah, it was a lie, but what are you going to do now?’” Young says, shifting his weight and straining to sit upright. “And it upsets me to the very core of my being.” The film interweaves Young’s story with historic footage of the House and Senate debates that led to the original Iraq War resolution.
By the end of the film, these two streams of footage merge when Young visits Senator Robert Byrd, the foremost voice against the war, at the Capitol, and together they read aloud the names of the “Immortal 23” who voted against the resolution to go to war. Between this and other moments in the film (such as Young speaking out with Cindy Sheehan at Camp Casey, the anti-war encampment down the road from Bush’s Crawford ranch), we witness Young’s evolution into an outspoken leader, finding his new voice and role as a self-described “political irritant.” At one of his many speaking engagements as a spokesperson for the non-profit organization Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), he is even able to find humor in his plight. “I might say ‘uh’ and stammer a lot,” Young says, “so forgive me for sounding a bit presidential.”
Meeting Young in person is a humbling experience. Despite his physical disability, he is able to quote Tennyson and drop statistics about the war with relative ease. “Right now, 100 percent of Americans support the troops, but only 5 percent of the population is in the Armed Forces,” Young says. “Most Americans do not serve and have no connection to people who do. And who makes up the 5 percent? Most in uniform are either minorities or come from lower economic classes.”
With the media’s oblivious coverage of the human cost of the war and a current administration of drumbeaters, most of whom seem to lack any real connection to the troops they send into harm’s way, Body of War pulls back the sanitized veil and artfully puts a human face on the Iraq War.
Clean-shaven and smartly dressed in a suit during our interview, Young’s sleeve only partially covers a large tattoo on his forearm. It featured an illustration from the children’s story Where the Wild Things Are, about a boy who is punished for journeying to an imagined land of fearsome monsters. In a war of imagined threats and all-too-real consequences, Tomas Young’s brave journey reminds us not only of the consequences of this unprecedented vote for pre-emptive war, but also of what it truly means to be a soldier. \\\