(Body of War - documentary - 87 min - produced and directed by Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue - starring Tomas Young, Cathy Smith, Brie Young - 2008)
Inspired by George W. Bush's promise to catch the "evildoers" as he stood atop the rubble of Ground Zero, Tomas Young of Kansas City, Missouri decided to quit his job at K-Mart and called up an army recruiter on September 13, 2001. Tomas assumed he'd be sent to Afghanistan to hunt down Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, but in March 2004, he found himself in Iraq. Just days after arriving, he was riding in an open-top, unarmored personnel carrier when a bullet severed his spinal cord, paralyzing him from the chest down. Tomas had never fired a shot. He was 24 years old.
Tomas's paralyzed body is the subject of Body of War, a new documentary from co-producers/co-directors Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue. But Tomas's wounded, malfunctioning body is both a symbol and evidence of so much more: the lies that led the US into the Iraq war; the failure of Congress to exercise its duties and judgment to prevent this historic blunder; a broken and neglected system for taking care of wounded veterans; and the destructive toll inflicted on the tiny percentage of Americans who are doing virtually all of the sacrificing in this conflict. It is a sad reminder of what happens when a nation, or a young man, rushes to war. But it's also about how, with the benefit of hindsight, a person or a nation crippled by a criminal war can emerge from tragedy to demand accountability and change.
The focus on Tomas and his body is what sets BOW apart from other documentaries about the Iraq war. With sometimes excruciatingly intimate detail, viewers are introduced to virtually every aspect, function, and failure of Tomas's body. At one point, Tomas points out that when you see someone in a wheelchair, they often have more problems than not being able to walk, and this was the part of the movie that I found most fascinating. For example, as a result of his wound, Tomas can't regulate his body temperature — he is forced to wear a vest with ice packs on hot days or risk overheating. During a speech before a church group, Tomas repeatedly gets dizzy and must drop his head between his knees to get more blood to his head. Viewers are shown every aspect of Tomas's life, from the small pharmacy of pills he takes every day to his efforts to learn how he might someday get an erection again.
The film also examines the effect Tomas's body and the Iraq war takes on his family. The film opens with Tomas, already paralyzed, marrying Brie, a woman he met at a bar while on leave. Brie becomes Tomas's live-in caregiver, but in doing so, also loses him as a husband, and even as a friend. Tomas's mother, a liberal married to a conservative, must also learn to deal with the demands of Tomas's body and mind. Tomas's younger brother is also a soldier, which puts Tomas's family in the horrible position of trying to be supportive of a son's decision to fight for a lie that nearly killed his big brother and an administration that refuses to provide adequate care for him.
But Tomas's physical transformation is matched by his emergence as a vocal anti-war activist. For his honeymoon, Tomas and Brie go to Crawford, Texas to join Cindy Sheehan in her vigil at Camp Casey. He tries to spread awareness of both his condition and the lies that led to it by attending rallies and speaking with the media. And by talking to other activists and sympathetic politicians, Tomas tries to understand how he and his country were led to war and how the US can prepare for the coming wave of physically and mentally wounded soldiers that will be flooding the system that served Tomas so poorly.
The power of Tomas's story, along with his humor, passion, and honesty carry the movie over some fairly significant flaws. The film is somewhat rambling, simply following Tomas around to learn about his condition, then following him as he goes to hospitals, events, and to meet with various people until the film ends with little or no resolution. BOW is framed around the congressional vote to give Bush the unilateral, unconstitutional authority to take the US to war, and the film repeatedly, almost obsessively pulls you out of Tomas's story to revisit this vote and the speeches given for and against it, with a running tally and narrator to count the votes. I got tired of this pretty quickly, and it probably could have been addressed as a few short scenes, not a constant theme. What was most interesting about it was the certainty with which virtually all Republicans and some Democrats described the danger Saddam Hussein posed to the US and the world, and the fact that many of the republicans used virtually identical language to do it, parroting proclamations coming from the Bush administration.
Democratic senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia is particularly forceful and prophetic in his opposition to rushing into war, and he meets with Tomas later in the film to discuss the “immortal” 23 senators who had the courage and foresight to oppose the resolution giving Bush the authority to take the US to war. And while I’m glad that many congressmen opposed the war resolution, I’m not going to pat them on the back too hard because they didn’t approve the worst foreign policy decision in US history — that’s what they were supposed to do. In addition, I’m not sure what happened to those congressmen who voted against the war since there’s been virtually no substantial congressional opposition to the war since it started.
But BOW is Tomas’s story, and the film is undeniably powerful for every second he and his battered body are on screen.
To find out more about Body of War and how you can help wounded veterans, visit bodyofwar.com
