Now that General Petreaus and Ambassador Crocker have left us -- or at least those of us who continue to wonder at how our generals (for that matter, all our officers) managed to win all those medals when we haven't had a war for more than 30 years -- the war in Iraq can now continue to be viewed as something other than a political issue. One way, one hopes, is that it will continue to be viewed as a tragic spectacle in which thousands of young Americans -- not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqis -- have been killed and wounded and returned home to desperate lives without the use of limbs or other body parts (including portions of the brain) and, worst of all, without anything resembling adequate medical care or support from the government they thought had promised it.
One such ex-soldier is Tomas Young, the central figure in a moving and chilling documentary film now available to Americans though the willingness of Phil Donahue to devote substantial sums of money and time to tell Young's story --and that of his emerging sense his sacrifice was in vain. The film is called Body of War and is currently available in cities across America -- wherever a Landmark theater is available, and others as distribution comes on line. There are a number of really good films about Iraq, some of them documentaries, now on view but none, I think, reaches the compelling rank of Body of War. Here, in the story told by Donahue and his filmmaker colleague Ellen Spiro, is the all-too-modern tale of a small-town American man called to the colors by the terrible events of September 11 (he enlisted two days later), believing he would be able to fight the people who had struck at the Twin Towers and who believed wholly in the glory talk of President Bush.
But Young wasn't sent to Afghanistan, where he expected -- and had been trained -- to fight the enemy, but to face an entirely different enemy -- one who had nothing to do with 9/11, Iraq. By his own account, disillusionment began for Tomas Young the day he arrived in Iraq, without preparation, and took a sniper's bullet to his neck just five days later, while riding in a truck with no roof and no armor. That, after weeks in a coma and a few weeks of treatment in Germany and America, left him paralyzed from the chest down -- for the rest of his life.
In Body of War, that life begins to take place. The documentary unsparingly treats of his physical -- and mental -- problems, with breathing, with prosthetic legs, with a fluctuating body temperature, with his sex life, and with the inevitable unraveling of his new marriage, as his wife discovers she must deal not just with his permanent pain, but her own emotional pain as well, as the role of perpetual nursemaid and a life among the bedpans begins to take on its oppressive meaning.
And intermingled with the story of Tomas Young is the crucial debate, and vote, in the United States Senate over the resolution authorizing President Bush to start the war with Iraq. The votes of the Senators -- 77-23 for the war -- almost all echoing eerily the very phrases written for them in the White House, are juxtaposed against the arguments for the Constitutional language requiring a Congressional vote to declare war, mainly in a heroic speech by 90-year-old Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia.
All in all, Donahue and Spiro have produced a bitter tale of a young man's fight to live, as well as a useful civics lesson. Not your usual documentary, Body of War is a superb example of how film can illuminate human lives.