Democracy Now: Dying Iraq War Veteran Tomas Young Explains Decision to End His Life

Exclusive: Dying Iraq War Veteran Tomas Young Explains Decision to End His Life
Democracy Now

In the week marking the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we spend the hour looking at the remarkable life and imminent death of Iraq War veteran Tomas Young. Citing his overwhelming physical pain from wounds that left him paralyzed in Iraq, Young recently announced he has decided to end his life by discontinuing his medicine and nourishment, which comes in the form of liquid through a feeding tube. Young joins to explain his decision from his home in Kansas City, along with his wife Claudia Cuellar. We’re also joined by Phil Donahue, the legendary TV talk show host, whose 2007 documentary, "Body of War," follows Tomas’ rehabilitation and his political awakening to become one of the most prominent antiwar U.S. veterans speaking out against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. "I am, on one hand, sick and tired of being sick and tired," Young says. "And on the other, I don’t want to watch my body waste away." Donahue calls Tomas’ announcement "a very unusual act of moral courage. He wants people to see this, because he came home from the most sanitized war of my lifetime. We don’t see this. But less than 5 percent of us, maybe 1 percent ... have made a personal sacrifice for this war. And Tomas is one of them."

Guests:

Tomas Young, Iraq War veteran and the main subject of the documentary, Body of War. On April 4, 2004, his fifth day in Iraq, Young’s unit came under fire in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad. Young was left paralyzed, never to walk again. Released from medical care three months later, Young returned home to become an active member in Iraq Veterans Against the War. He recently announced that he will stop his nourishment, which comes in the form of liquid through a feeding tube — a decision which will hasten his death.

Phil Donahue, one of the best-known talk show hosts in U.S. television history, his show was on the air for more than 29 years. In 2002, he returned to the airwaves, but he was fired in 2003 on the eve of the war by MSNBC because he was allowing antiwar voices on the air. Along with Ellen Spiro, he directed the documentary, Body of War, which tells the story of Tomas Young, an Iraq War veteran paralyzed from a bullet to the spine. Now, at the age of 33, Tomas has decided to end his life.

Claudia Cuellar, the wife and primary caregiver of Tomas Young.

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Democracy Now: The Invisible War -- New Film Exposes Rape, Sexual Assault Epidemic in U.S. Military

[The Invisible War has been nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary this year.]

The Invisible War: New Film Exposes Rape, Sexual Assault Epidemic in U.S. Military
Democracy Now



On the heels of a new military survey that the number of reported violent sex crimes jumped 30 percent in 2011, with active-duty female soldiers ages 18 to 21 accounting for more than half of the of the victims, we speak with Trina McDonald and Kori Cioca, two subjects of "The Invisible War,” a new documentary that examines the epidemic of rape of soldiers within the U.S. military, which won the Audience Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. "Not only was I astounded by the numbers, but when I started talking to the women and men who had experienced this, I was just so devastated by their stories," says the film’s Academy Award-nominated director, Kirby Dick. "These are women and men who are very idealistic. They joined the military because they wanted to serve their country. They were incredible soldiers. And then, when they were assaulted, they had the courage to come forward, even though many people advised them not to," Dick says

Guests:

Kori Cioca, formerly served in the U.S. Coast Guard, where she was beaten and raped by her supervisor and then charged with adultery because he was married. Cioca is one of the main subjects of the new documentary, The Invisible War.

Trina McDonald, was drugged and raped repeatedly by the military police on her remote Naval station in Adak, Alaska. McDonald is one of the subjects of the new documentary, The Invisible War.

Kirby Dick, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker and director of The Invisible War, which just won the Audience Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

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Stephen Handzo: Going Through the Devil’s Doorway -- The Early Westerns Of Anthony Mann

Going Through the Devil’s Doorway: The Early Westerns Of Anthony Mann
by Stephen Handzo
Bright Lights Film Journal

...


Mann's 1950 threesome was the most auspicious quantum jump by an American director since John Ford's equivalent Americana triumvirate of 1939 (Stage Coach, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk) lifted him into the major phase of his career. Yet Mann's achievements seem destined to remain unappreciated and the director himself obscure.

Those who disdain lightweight entertainment and sugary optimism usually prefer the cynical derisiveness of a Kubrick to a vision as uncompromisingly bleak and austere as Mann at his best. If people do not actually like Bresson or Dreyer at least they respect them; Mann has the generic disreputability of Westerns going against him as well.

And yet the Western was the perfect form for Mann. As George Robinson has observed, the protagonists of T-Men and Border Incident incur a moral debt while watching helplessly as their partners are murdered. In Mann's Westerns, the dual roles are combined in a hero who is both martyr and avenger.

Given Mann's own pessimism and the developing ambiguity of the post-war Western, it was perhaps inevitable that Mann's first Western (and arguably his best film) should be a tragic epitaph for the West's ultimate loser, the Indian.

Pro-Indian sentiment had appeared previously on the screen. Long before the alleged discovery of Monument Valley by John Ford, its buttes and mesas were mute witnesses to the epic silent version of The Vanishing American (1926). In both this and 1934's Massacre, the setting was contemporary and the Indian was already humiliated, displaced and long since reduced to reservation chattel. Billy Jack, Flap, The Outsider (about Ira Hayes) are later examples of this type. The other major schools of pro-Indian Westerns, such as 1970's Soldier Blue or the made-for-television Massacre at Sand Creek (1956) are set in the period of the Indian Wars and engage liberal guilt by focusing on a single spectacular atrocity.

Mann's Devil's Doorway is possibly unique in that it calls the ideal of Manifest Destiny itself into question by portraying the colonization of the West from the point of view of the defeated before the doom of the Indian was sealed.

The film opens with Robert Taylor in a Civil War uniform riding into a Wyoming town in which everything — including him — is coated with dust. He is returning from the Civil War having distinguished himself by winning the Congressional Medal of Honor at Gettysburg. Like Richard Dix in The Vanishing American, he assumes that war service will result in improved treatment for the Indian. (Devil's Doorway closely follows a cycle of contemporary racially-conscious films — Crossfire, Gentlemen's Agreement, Home of the Brave, in which members of the armed forces were subjected to discrimination. These films and President Truman's 1947 desegregation of the military reflected the obvious irony in America's fighting Nazi Master Race ideology with a Jim Crow army.) Taylor has a drink in a bar where he is greeted as a hero by the sheriff (Edgar Buchanan). "In my army, we were particular who we let in" observes cigar-smoking lawyer Verne Cooley (Louis Calhern) whose presence in the scene Mann skillfully withholds. (Calhern in this period had become MGM's all-purpose character actor — a combined replacement for Lionel Barrymore, Edward Arnold and Lewis Stone — portraying all the Establishment figures not played by Walter Pidgeon.) "Ever notice how you can always smell 'em?" asks Calhern, unheard by Taylor who walks out of the bar with Buchanan. "The Union Pacific's going to make a lot of changes," is Buchanan's prophetic parting comment.

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Michael Dean Benton: Response to Jarhead (2005: Sam Mendes)

[Originally posted at the defunct website Bluegrass Film Society: November 6, 2005]



I went to see Jarhead on friday afternoon after reading the recent Harper's magazine profile essay on the film and the problems associated with anti-war films. I first became familiar with Swofford's memoirs about his service in the first Iraq War primarily because of Swofford's legendary party-session with University of Kentucky grad-students after a Lexington reading.

The setting:

I showed up at the 3:20 pm showing at the Regal theater (a typical shopping area multiplex). Arriving somewhat early, there were only two other people in the screening area and I thought that this might be a typical early-friday screening (the last afternoon showing we had experienced was The Constant Gardener which had only six people in the audience).

Slowly groups of 2-4 people filed into the theater until there was about 20+ people. At about 10 minutes before the showing three groups of 12+ people showed up, obviously, from overheard conversation and their collective-huddling, they were the local fraternities come to check out the latest war film.

The audience was easily 90% male and, as my companion noted, the testosterone blanketed the theater. One could sense that they were there for some action and some butt-kicking. In my imagination I heard them rallying the guys to go see the film: "Enough of the daily reports of violence and death in the current Iraq-war, lets go see a film about the one where we kicked some serious ass!"

The film (general comments because I don't want to ruin the plot):

This film is going to produce extreme reactions. It will be one of those polarizing films that will be an ideological litmus-test of the people who watch it (like Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing) because it doesn't make an explicit stand either way on this war, or war in general. It simply presents Swofford's personal story of training to be a Marine scout and his experiences in the first Gulf War.

A lot of commentary I have seen is that this film (and Swofford's book) is anti-military. I don't see it... yes it exposes the cruelties of collective male-bonding that is centered around the hatred of an "enemy-other," but is that really shocking to anyone? It portrays the insanity and dehumanization of contemporary warfare in which buttons are pushed and hundreds of people are immediately incinerated/blown-up, but is this unrealistic? It depicts the trauma experienced by those who serve in the military, but one only has to read studies of post-traumatic syndrome all the way back to WWI to realize this reality.

What I think is disturbing about this film for many of the people attacking it is that it de-mythologizes the glorification of personal combat--the individualistic hero-figure who rises above even the scewed-up absurdity of the military situation, bringing order to the madness. In this film there are no heroes. Even Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, perceived as anti-war films, allow us points of identification and characters we can "root" for in their quest to make sense of the insanity of war. In Jarhead, there are no places we can rest, we are kept disturbed, we are uneasy, we really don't know what is going on, perhaps the military terminology best suited to the atmosphere of the film is FUBAR.

The audience afterwards:

As we walked out you could sense the frustration of the bands of fraternity-boys who had sought the glories of represented warfare. They complained loudly that the film lacked the spectacle they had come to experience. I wondered, how many of these boys, from their fraternity-association and position of privilege in our society, would ever have to worry about serving in the military. Why, if they were so lucky to escape this service, unlike their less-fortunate peers in Iraq, Afghanistan and other parts of the world, was it so necessary for them to feel a part of the rituals of war, even if it was through the spectacle of a Hollywood film. As we walked out many of them were on phones planning the night's parties, their frustration so evident, I wondered how it would manifest in the night to come.
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Since we are coming up on a week devoted to the military film I assigned Jarhead as an extra credit opportunity for my students. I will post some of the more interesting responses:

Leanne Harvey

Lance Cutshall

Stacey Peebles: Stories from the Suck -- The First Wave of Iraq War Narratives

Stories from the Suck: The First Wave of Iraq War Narratives
by Stacey Peebles
Berfrois



War stories have been with us forever, but at some points in human history they demand our attention more urgently than at others. Now would seem to be one of those times, as the United States remains deeply engaged in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya, and—perhaps more importantly—welcomes home wave after wave of veterans whose military service has been quite different than that of their parents and grandparents. As a nation, we are only beginning to understand the nature of that service for the soldiers and how those combat experiences will shape the way our community as a whole thinks about the causes and effects of war.

A great deal of the way we think about war is the product of popular representations—the books, photographs, films, and (these days) online content that takes combat as its subject matter. Think of the Vietnam War, and you’re probably thinking as much (or more) about Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Philip Caputo, Michael Herr, and Tim O’Brien as you are about first-hand stories from friends and family members. In film and text, young men are drafted into service and find themselves tangled in thick jungle and guerrilla warfare, gradually descending into disillusionment and political cynicism to the sound of a rock-and-roll soundtrack. Contemporary war is a different story.

Welcome to the Suck focuses on the soldier’s experience in the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War as represented in prose, poetry, film, and new media. The war in Afghanistan predates the Iraq War and has officially outlasted it, as combat operations in Iraq were officially called to a close on August 31, 2010. But to date, that war has inspired fewer and less prominent war stories than the war in Iraq. This may change, as political and cultural attention shifts to Afghanistan during Obama’s presidency, and the ways in which this war blends with and differs from Iraq will be a compelling avenue of study in future years.

The American soldiers fighting in Iraq and represented in these new war stories have grown up in a culture of mediation, where it has been more acceptable than ever before to subvert or transcend traditional categories and norms of behavior, gender, and ethnicity. At the same time, new communications technologies have enabled people to experiment with virtual or alternate identities—in venues like blogs, forums, and more comprehensive online worlds like Second Life. Advances in battlefield technologies offer those interested in a military career the promise of a fighting self supplemented by things like GPS-guided Humvees, night-vision goggles, digital battle simulation, and robotics. As young people, these soldiers have been encouraged to revel in their individuality, challenge restrictive categories, and make ample use of technology to do so. Contemporary American culture traffics, after all, in identities that are cyborg, hybrid, avatar.

A film like Avatar, in fact, demonstrates this emphasis very well. The protagonist, Jake Sully, rises above the restrictions imposed on him by his nationality, his culture, his disability, and even his basic biology. It’s worth noting that he is a soldier, and that this is a war movie.

But it’s also a fantasy, and not just because of the blue skin and floating islands. The transcendence that Jake steps into like a warm bath proves to be frustratingly and even devastatingly elusive for soldiers fighting in Iraq. War—real war—enforces categorization even as it forces encounters across the boundaries of nation, the body, and technology.

Consider someone like Kayla Williams, who published her memoir Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army in 2005. Williams worked as an Arabic linguist and interpreter, a tough, smart soldier as eager for challenges as her male colleagues. She is female—and thus historically not typical American soldier material—but she has no doubts about her ability to do the job and do it well. What’s the currency of military masculinity, after all? Grit, brains, competence, and dedication to the group. Williams has all that in spades, and she goes to Iraq ready to take her place as a brother-in-arms. But it doesn’t work out as she’d like. Two instances of sexual assault shake her badly, but even more telling is her account of the fellow soldiers who treat her well. They pat each other on the ass to express acceptance and affection—a gesture called the “good game”—but they are extra careful not to touch her. “As a female,” she says, “I was not really a part of the ‘good game.’”

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