06/09/16 – Mark Wilkerson – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Mark Wilkerson.
He's the author of the new book, Thomas Young's War, and it turns out he was in the U.S. Army and was there for the Blackhawk Down debacle in Somalia back in 1993, and then he came to know Thomas Young.
Some of you longtime fans might remember we talked with Thomas Young back in, I think it was 2009.
In fact, I talked with him at Camp Casey in Iraq back in 2004.
He was one of the early and prominent members of Iraq Veterans Against the War.
Welcome to the show, Mark.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
I'm good, thanks.
Good deal.
I really appreciate you joining us here, and the article is Batman in a Hospital Bed.
That's running at Tom Englehart's site, tomdispatch.com, and will run on antiwar.com tomorrow, Friday.
Batman in a Hospital Bed, about Thomas Young, and I almost said it, but I didn't want to say it wrong.
He died when was it again?
It was the day before Veterans Day in 2014.
Okay, 2014.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
So a couple of years ago now, and now when I met him, it was what I guess just a little more than a year after he was wounded at the Camp Casey protest, Cindy Sheehan's protest near George Bush's so-called ranch in Crawford, Texas back then, and yeah, physically broken, but at least at that point, not yet an emotionally broken man, but I guess why don't you tell us about your role in this, how you came to know Thomas Young and decide to write this story about him?
Okay, yeah.
I think that the article you were talking about that just came out today does a good job of explaining a little bit of my background.
I was in the Army for eight years.
I was a helicopter crew chief, and I think that might have set the stage for all this a long time ago, even though I wasn't really aware of it, but it kind of helped align my sympathies and my emotions towards the things that Thomas was aligned with, too.
But what kind of materially got me involved was getting in touch with Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam to write the forward to a book that I was working on back in 2007.
At the time that he was writing the forward to my book, he was also recording a song for Phil Donahue's movie about Thomas called Body of War.
So that's how I got to know of Thomas's story.
I watched the film when it came out the following spring.
Didn't hear anything about Thomas for about five years until the, quote, last letter came out in the beginning of, like, March of 2013.
At the end of the Body of War film, Thomas is paralyzed, of course, but he has found a purpose.
He's a very effective activist.
He's nationally known.
He was on 60 Minutes.
He was on the Today Show.
He'd been to Camp Casey.
He'd been to Seattle.
He'd been to Florida.
He'd been to New York.
He'd been all over the place speaking out against war in Iraq and speaking out for veterans issues.
So it was a reasonably upbeat end to the film.
He had figured out how to deal with his disability.
He was living on his own, and he had a purpose.
Fast forward to the beginning of 2013 when the last letter came out, and here's a different person.
It was only five years later, but he looked about 20 years older.
He had long hair and a beard.
He looked, you know, like I said, about probably 45, even though he was only 33, something like that.
He was on hospice care.
He had a feeding tube.
His voice sounded different.
He'd had a brain injury, couldn't use his hands very much at all, basically quadriplegic, and he was on a pain pump, and he wanted to end his life, and it just floored me when I read the last letter and read about Thomas, what had happened to him, and I wanted to find out what the rest of the story was.
It became very apparent at that point that Body of War was just Act I in this tragedy, and I wanted to know the rest, and I got in touch with Thomas, and he had wanted to tell his own story, but at that point, he was just physically unable to, so he welcomed my approach.
Yeah, that's really great.
I'm glad you picked it up where you did.
I remember when that letter came out, and for those of you who've never read it, go and spend the five minutes, really, to sit inside this guy's mind for a minute.
I guess what happened at that point was he actually decided not to kill himself after all because of all the outpouring of support and everything he got, but he ended up dying of natural causes not much after that.
How much later was it before he finally died?
I got to know him, the letter came out in May of 2013.
I'd met him for the first time within a few weeks, and he passed away about 18 months later.
Yeah.
I mean, man, it's such a story, and you know what?
I'm sorry, it's my fault.
We kind of skipped it.
We should talk about how he got wounded, and what really happened, and how he ended up joining the Army, all this stuff, too.
Yeah, so Thomas was just a kind of regular Joe, middle-class kid from Kansas City.
He didn't have a bunch of options when he got out of high school, which is quite similar to me.
Joined the Army, in part, because he didn't have many options, and he wanted to go to college.
He wanted to use the GI Bill for college, but really, at the time, the primary reason he signed up was 9-11.
He signed up just a couple days after 9-11, so he was very patriotic, very passionate, and wanted to go in exact retribution for the 9-11 attacks, and fully expected to go to Afghanistan.
He spent about a year at Fort Hood before he shipped out, actually a couple of years at Fort Hood before he shipped out.
During the time that he was at Fort Hood, the Bush Doctrine became apparent, the preemptive war doctrine against the Axis of Evil, of which Iraq was like the nucleus, and it became very apparent that he was going to wind up going to Iraq, and Thomas had, as many of us do, and many more of us at this point have no idea what Iraq had to do with any of this, Thomas spoke out against it, but he went, and they deployed in March of 2004, he got to Baghdad, to Sadr City, right on the outskirts of Baghdad on March 31st, I believe, and five days later, the first time he ventured out into Sadr City, he was shot.
It was called Black Sunday, it was Palm Sunday, 2004, and a patrol had been pinned down in an alley, and it turned ugly really quick, there was about 10,000 militia members out there in Sadr City, and not much had happened in the months preceding, so they really weren't ready for it, but they sent out a quick reaction force that got bogged down, and then Thomas was one of the successive quick reaction forces, which consisted basically of them in the back of an open truck, just a flatbed truck, not even canvas covering, no armor, no nothing, so Thomas was just jammed in the back of his truck, didn't even fire his weapon, and was shot from above, and it went through his, shot through the spine, so he was paralyzed after just five days.
Yeah, and notably, I guess, I don't know importantly necessarily, but notably, this is the same battle where Casey Sheehan lost his life, setting Cindy on her path of being such a great anti-war activist all these years since too, and she's of course never given up.
And I want to dwell on this part of the story for just a minute, because as you said, the whole Iraq war, the whole thing was just a ridiculous waste, and none of this should have happened at all, but even on the much smaller view of the situation, as you put it, they weren't ready to fight, because they hadn't been fighting the Shiites, they were fighting for the Shiites, and specifically, they were fighting for Muqtada al-Sadr and his political alliance with the Supreme Islamic Council, which was known then as the United Iraqi Alliance, and so here, they had picked a fight with Sadr by closing his newspaper, and then when there was a minor uprising, they went and overreacted to that, and then as you describe it, sent in flatbed trucks full of soldiers penned in like sardines in there, I mean Thomas told me himself he couldn't move, it was a truck designed for 8 or 10 people, and there were 28 or 30 or whatever, anyway, and they were just basically sitting ducks, and had no business, even in the context of the Iraq war, had no business picking a fight with Muqtada al-Sadr, and they weren't the only ones, I mean they replicated this exact idiocy in the year 2007, there's a whole book about it called The Good Soldiers by Finkel, about how these guys, they went and fought and basically did tours of duty out there in Sadr City for a year, in the middle of a war for Sadr, they're on this ridiculous diversion, killing people and dying, and there's hardly any recognition even of what role they're playing in the war, all they know is they're going out on patrol today, but what they're doing is completely inane, I mean it might as well have been Rumsfeld's idea itself that was so ridiculous.
And so, anyway, I just think that if you sign up to join the army, you know that you might get shot, but you don't necessarily sign up for a war that your country's going to start, and then, even if you're fighting in one of those, you'd like to think that your lieutenant colonel even knows who is who and which side you're fighting on, and won't get you killed fighting against your allies, for Christ's sake.
Right, right, exactly.
I mean, it's just ridiculous, the whole damn war.
But anyway, I'm sorry, I have to go on that tangent because most people really know nothing about them, I'm sure you go into that a bit in your book there, sounds like you're familiar, but that to me is a real important point, like why are they fighting Sadr anyway?
He's their guy, or they're his guy anyway.
Yeah, yeah, I stay focused, I keep the focus on Thomas, I do give a little bit of backstory, but not into that level of detail, but in a broader sense, Thomas said a couple of times, you know, if I would have been shot and paralyzed in Afghanistan, you would never have heard of me, because I wouldn't be, you know, speaking out about, you know, it was the fact that he was in Iraq, the fact that he was, that he had no idea why he was there, and that there was no, nobody could draw a line from 9-11 to Iraq that made any sense, that really, that's what created the sense of betrayal that really powered Thomas.
Yeah.
All right, so tell us more about his activism and how it was he made himself busy, I mean, you really, I think it's probably apt the way you divide it up into sort of the body of war time, and then the last letter time, and that kind of thing, if you want to talk about those different eras, because he really did accomplish a lot, he really did wake up a lot of people.
Yeah, well, Thomas was, he, you know, you said you'd seen him at Camp Casey, and that was just, it was August of 2005, I believe, he had just a little more than a year recovered, and that was right towards the beginning of the filming of the Body of War film, and Thomas was a really sharp guy to begin with, very engaged in events, current events, very opinionated, and then you add in the fact that somebody is making a film about him, so that kind of emboldened him and gave him some more confidence, and then he went down to Camp Casey very early on in his kind of activist career, and met a whole bunch of like-minded people, and really that's what gave him the real boost to his activism, he discovered a voice, discovered he was really good at it, you know, Phil Donahue said that, and also Ellen Spiro, who co-directed the film with Phil, they both said that Camp Casey was the turning point, and he really blossomed into a very effective speaker and activist, and he traveled the country, he went to conventions, you know, like I said, as far apart as Seattle and Florida, he went to Lollapalooza in Chicago and talked on behalf of Iraq Veterans Against the War, he was on their board for a time, he went to New York, he went all over the place and spoke out against the war, but of course, the irony is that Thomas, right after the film came out, the film underwent public release in the spring of 2008, and within just a couple of weeks of the film coming out, he suffered pulmonary embolism, and that's what took away effectively the use of his hands, and took away his speech, he couldn't speak clearly after that for the rest of his life, and it began a whole avalanche of just horrible health complications that ultimately led to his death, so the film captures the kind of blossoming of his activism career, but it also really pretty much captures the end of it, too, because right after the film came out, it was over, as far as, well, we thought it was, and then 2013 comes around, and somehow this kid who's on a hospital bed, under hospice care, on a pain pump, with a colostomy bag and all this other stuff, somehow spits out this letter that gets global attention, you know, so he, that's one of the things that blew me away about Thomas, he just, he overcame so much, and he was able to still make a lot of noise, despite all this physical stuff that he had going on.
Yeah, yeah, it's a real sad thing, I guess, really, any time somebody dies and it's at least half a relief, that kind of is an extra tragedy there, but, you know, I'm really glad that he didn't actually commit suicide the way that he had planned when he did plan it, I mean, if I remember right, God, I hope I'm not screwing this up, but that was what the last letter said, right, was he was going to go ahead and end his life?
He was, you know, it was a letter addressed to Cheney and Bush to kind of air his grievances about the war, but it also said, you know, he called it his last letter, he said he was going to end his life, his wedding anniversary was April the 20th, and he wanted to, and that would have been his, that was his first wedding anniversary, April 20th, 2013, and he wanted to celebrate that, and then after that he was going to stop taking nutrition through his feeding tube, but I think the support that he got after the letter came out really took him by surprise, and it gave him a really, you know, it gave him a boost, and the time that he got to spend with Claudia, his wife, he enjoyed that, and I think he, for a time there, he was able to manage the chronic pain that he was in, that was kind of a roller coaster, but there was a time there after that last letter came out where I think things stabilized for a little while, but, so yeah, it was, it was quite a, you know, the first time I met him was right after the last letter came out, and things really brightened up that summer and fall, so it was encouraging to see, and it really just took me by surprise when I got the news from his brother that he had passed away in November of the following year.
And I'm sorry, I think you may have said at the beginning, but what was it that he actually finally died of?
Well, the official cause is, and I have no medical background at all, so I'm not going to be able to use whatever words I use, just because I can't remember them, but it was a combination of these just very, very heavy drugs that he was on.
At the time that he died, he was on a combination of methadone and morphine, two really, really heavy-duty drugs, and he was also taking probably 20 or so other drugs for a whole variety of ailments, and some drugs were to counter the side effects of the other drugs, so it was just toxicity created from all that crap in his system, you know, so it was, you know, it was just, I mean, it was over 10 years of paralysis, and over 7 years or 6 years of basically being a quadriplegic, and 3 or 4 years of having a colostomy, and just all these tubes, and just, you know, horrible physical condition, and just a ton of drugs being pumped through his system, and his system just gave up.
Yeah, and not exactly natural causes, but unavoidable synthetic ones, right?
I mean, what was he going to do?
He had to take his pills, and yeah, you could see how his body just wouldn't be able to withstand that for too long.
Yeah, and you know, I talked to Claudia, his wife, a few days after he died on the phone, and she was trying to figure out how to pay for him to be cremated, because the VA wouldn't pay until it was determined that his death was, quote, service-connected.
Like, normal people just die of, you know, they just die when they're 34 years old, which just, you know, amazed me.
Well, did they get that solved?
They got that solved, right?
Yeah, but she had to lean on a celebrity friend to take care of the cremation.
That's a nice little end note to the story, the government's attitude towards him, till the end.
Yeah.
You know, not just at the end, but to the bitter end there.
All right, well, listen, I'm sorry I didn't have a chance to read the book, Mark, but I really appreciate that you wrote the thing.
It's obviously a tremendously important story of a real American hero.
I mean, as you said, this kid, he saved a lot of lives.
I mean, kids' lives is what I meant to say.
This man saved a lot of kids' lives going around and doing the activism he did in the time that he had to do it.
And, you know, this letter that he wrote will be world-famous forever, you know, so.
And the thing is, some of the thing that really amazed me about Thomas, all the way through the time I knew him, which wasn't that long, it was less than two years, and the time that I knew him, he was under hospice care the whole time, taking Dilaudid for a while, which is a really heavy-duty drug, and then switching over to methadone and morphine.
He was in a fog of these really heavy drugs the whole time I knew him.
And somehow, through all of that, his character and his sense of humor and everything still shone through.
He still was super sharp, he was sarcastic, he was funny, and he really felt very strongly that he needed to share his story and that he had to be brutally honest.
You know, he was still a complete person with a great sense of humor and character, like I said, and that just blew me away, considering everything that was going on with him.
But it's a pretty incredible story, just of what happened to him, the effect it had on his family, you know, how he fell in love with his wife, and some of the help he got along the way with Phil Donahue and some of the other celebrities that became good friends with him, some of the experiences he had.
And just the overall message that this is what happens when we send people off to war.
People come back like this, and we don't.
The war doesn't end when the soldier leaves the battlefield.
For Thomas, that's why I called it Thomas Young's War.
He was only in Iraq, you know, after he'd been, he was only there for five days, basically.
He fought, his war was more than ten years back here, with really not many people paying attention to him.
Well, it is really important, I think, as you say there, as you emphasize, that even though it's a tragedy that he died, it really is good that he was on an upswing, that he wasn't as despondent and broken as he had been at the time of the letter.
That he was kind of doing all right and got to have some good last days, if they had to be his last days, right?
Yeah, yeah, it was a rollercoaster for sure, but he was still, you know, he was still very funny, loved talking about music and video games, and, you know, he was just a regular guy just like the rest of us.
And hopefully I captured that, too.
Well, I think you did a good job capturing it here on the show today.
I'm sure the book is much better than that.
Thank you very much for your time.
I really appreciate it, Mark.
Yeah, no problem.
Anytime.
Thank you.
All right, y'all, that is Mark Wilkerson, himself a veteran of the U.S. Army, was there for Blackhawk Down in 1993.
You can read about that, that's part of the article today, maybe another interview for another day.
But his book is Thomas Young's War, and you can find his article, Batman in a Hospital Bed, which ran at Tom Englehart's site, TomDispatch today, and it'll be running on AntiWar.com tomorrow.
Thanks, y'all.
All right, y'all, Scott Horton Show, ScottHorton.org for all the archives, sign up for the podcast feed, iTunes, Stitcher, et cetera like that, ScottHorton.org slash donate to help support, and follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
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