Phil Donahue andTomas Young
Interview By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com
Last year, Hollywood got political, and the results weren’t pretty. So many Iraq-related films bombed at the box office that Jon Stewart even joked about it at the Oscars: “If we stay the course and keep these movies in the theaters, we can turn this around. I don’t care if it takes 100 years, withdrawing the Iraq movies would only embolden the audience!”
From a business perspective, it seems like a risky time to put out a documentary about an injured Iraq veteran. But it’s refreshing, almost freeing, to know that the filmmakers and their subjects are motivated not by business or fame, but by passion: they’re only mining this territory because they feel there’s a story that needs to be told. Urgently.
After seeing Body of War, it’s hard to disagree with them. The main subject of the film is Tomas Young, a young man who enlisted in the military on September 13th, 2001, in what he admits was a “knee-jerk reaction” to the September 11th attacks. Planning on hunting down terrorists in Afghanistan, he instead was sent to Iraq, where he was promptly shot in the spine and paralyzed.
Some time after his hospitalization, he happened to meet talk show legend Phil Donahue, who had the idea for the documentary and brought on board filmmaker Ellen Spiro as the co-director and cinematographer. We had the opportunity to sit down and talk to both Donahue and Young about the film.
“I met Tomas at Walter Reed Army Medical Center,” Donahue says, “and I just learned about the nature of his injuries and how serious they were. Now Tomas not only can’t walk, he can’t cough. His respiratory system is kind of knocked a little bit into whack. He overheats because his neural system doesn’t activate what you and I have, and that is body regulation. So many things like this.”
Young
“Oddly enough,” Young continues with a tinge of sarcasm, “since the documentary started to come out, my care at the V.A. [Veterans Affairs hospitals] has started to improve. I’ve been told that that’s the way it is across the board for all veterans, although I have been lied to by the V.A. before. I’m hoping this is not one of those times.”
The understandable acridity that one senses is laced among Young’s comments is also felt, though less palpably, by Donahue. To him, and to an ever-increasing number of Americans, the Iraq War is nothing short of a betrayal by the government to the American people – and especially to the troops.
“It’s beyond horrible,” Donahue says. “We just seem to, you know, be consistently convincing ourselves of our goodness. And it’s pretense, I’m afraid. We go and brag about democracy, democracy – less than half of us vote! And what we’ve discovered as we’ve made our way on this film and have gotten more involved in the [war protesters] who’ve been out there for a long time, alone often, speaking out against the war to a
Body of War‘s main target, though, is not the Bush administration but the Congress that authorized the war. The vote in the House of Representatives was 296-133 in favor; the next day, the Senate voted 77-23. The film intercuts scenes of Young’s experiences with these historic votes and the brief debates leading up to them, and singles out Senator Robert Byrd, a democrat of West Virginia, for being one of the lone voices against the resolution.
According to Donahue, “What Byrd said was, and he says it in our film. And as he says these words, you see Tomas being carried up the steps of the capital by fellow soldiers, the IVAW – Iraq Veterans Against the War. Byrd says, ‘This will be a blot on the Congress and the Executive forever.’ To take a political vote – and that’s what this was, three weeks before an election, imagine – to send our young men in harm’s way.”
The overwhelming support for the resolution is a stark reminder of how uncontested the war originally was. “Every major metropolitan newspaper in this country supported this war,” Donahue says. “That’s what you get with corporate media. Being against the war was not good for business. Now I think that’s a point largely forgotten by the American people. You want to be popular; if you own a television network, the last thing you want is some guy criticizing the president, especially at a time of war.” (Donahue should know that firsthand. His 2002-03 talk show was the top-rated show on MSNBC but was cancelled because of the network’s
I ask, almost jokingly, if during the making of the film, anyone had any revelations on how to end the war. Donahue defers the question to Young. “Well, there have been several Senators who have introduced plans to divide the country up into three separate areas, one for the Shia, one for the Sunni, and one for the Kurds, and then divvy up the oil revenue between the three. I think it may be the best idea for the country,” he says, though he quickly adds that he’s “in no position to tell another country what the best idea is.”
Young definitely does not think democracy is the fundamental answer, however. “It’s obvious in a lot of situations that democracy is not the best idea, because democracy was installed in Palestine, and they elected Hamas, [whose members are] not big fans of America. But Americans support democracy. Or at least the president and his administration support democracy where it’s politically expedient for them. I notice that our biggest ally in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, does not subscribe to the democracy idea, and yet the president is great friends with the princes and the kings and everything.”
For Donahue’s part, he offers only one idea: diplomacy. “I don’t think we’re ever going to feel safe in this nation, or be safe, until we’re brave enough to elect political leaders that are able to reach out instead of lash out,” he says. “We have no respect for diplomacy. We bombed Grenada for God’s sake. I’m afraid we’re really beginning to look like a warrior nation. $515 billion a year is the Pentagon budget, and that doesn’t include the war! The war is a supplemental! And the war is going for $12 billion a month, that’s about $145 billion a year.
All the while, American troops – not to mention an untold number of Iraqi civilians – continue to be injured and killed. In fact, Young’s brother is over there right now. “He’s doing well,” Young says. “He’s in Iraq for his second deployment. He’ll come home in December, roughly. We try not to, during our phone conversations, we try not to focus on anything too heavy or depressing, we try to keep the conversation light.”
The immediate challenge for Donahue and Young is to get the word out about the film. “What I’m going to be doing now is trying to tap dance real fast to let people know that this film is out there,” Donahue says. “We are rolling out in Landmark theaters in major cities. We open in Washington, then we go to New York, then to Boston, then I believe to San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, and L.A. So what we’re about now, is proving what we believe, and that is: people will be compelled by this movie. We’re not saying we’re better than the other Iraq movies, but we do believe we are different.”
For Young, the reason why the American public seems largely indifferent to anti-war efforts is simple. “The reason people are more concerned with what’s going on in their daily live is, there lacks a simple five-letter word in our daily existence from the government, and that’s ‘draft’,” he says. “The American people [are] not feeling the sting and the sacrifice of the war. To them it’s just a number crawling across the bottom of the screen on a 24-hour news channel while they’re watching a story about Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan or whoever. And if they’re not paying
Our time is up, but before we finish the interview, Young relates an anecdote about a former roommate friend of his who was also injured and sent to a veterans hospital in San Antonio. It’s pretty funny, at least in a 1984 sort of way. “It was around Easter weekend, and the president and his gang, his group, were all down at the ranch. And he decided to set up, as a photo op, a trip to an army hospital to hand out some Purple Hearts. So that day, Secret Service came through and said that the President was going to be visiting but he wasn’t going to be visiting that floor. And I guess plans changed.
“The nursing staff came around to all the patients on that floor with an extra dose of painkillers. And so my former roommate has a picture of the president handing him a purple heart, and he looks extremely happy, to say the least. So if you’re prone to conspiracy theories, the extra dose of pain medication was given not only to put the soldiers in a sleepy sort of mindset so they wouldn’t ask any searing questions, but also for any photo opportunities that may arise. Those soldiers look very happy to meet the president.”
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