03/19/09 – Tomas Young – The Scott Horton Show

It's 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
It's March 19th, 2009, the sixth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and our next guest on the show is Thomas Young from the Iraq Veterans Against the War.
He's the subject of the award-winning documentary, Body of War, directed by Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue.
He was shot through the spine in a battle in Sadr City in April of 2004.
Welcome to the show, Thomas.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Thank you.
How are you?
I'm doing really good.
Thank you very much for joining us on the show today.
I only just got a chance to watch the documentary this week.
It came on TV, and it's a powerful thing.
I'm sure you don't remember, but we actually met in person at Camp Casey back in 2005, very briefly.
I was impressed then, and I remain so.
I guess, first of all, can you tell us how it was that you joined the U.S. Army, when, and why, and what happened?
Well, I saw the attacks on September 11th and was stirred to act after I heard the President give his four-horned speech that we're going to go smoke them out of their caves and bring them to justice.
But I guess that was all just him resuming his Yale days as a cheerleader.
Yeah, pretty familiar with that megaphone.
So, but you believed him.
You thought you would go and fight the Al-Qaeda network that had launched the attack, huh?
Yeah, I think I'm guilty of watching too many episodes of Law & Order, where I see the EU follow the evidence and go actually catch the right people that we were lied to.
And on the way to Afghanistan, we took a sharp left and headed to Iraq instead.
Well, so did you know that everybody was basically being fooled before you even went to Iraq?
Did you understand that you'd been kind of hoodwinked?
Uh, not for a while.
I mean, I was in the military and you're supposed to believe what the Commander-in-Chief says, but as the news organizations later found his reasons for going to be false, I became very disillusioned and despondent and wasn't quite the, say, I was more insubordinate as a soldier when I found out we weren't going to Afghanistan.
And at what time, what month or year did you show up finally in Iraq?
March of 2004.
Oh, so really just a couple of weeks, a few weeks before you were injured?
Right, I was only in, we spent two weeks in Kuwait waiting for our gear, and then I did say a total of five days in Iraq before I got out.
Geez, and can you tell us about that day in April?
Set the scene for what the battle was about and how it was that you were wounded?
Well, what I had heard was that it was a Humvee pinned down by some Iraqi Army soldiers or citizens or whatever they were, who went to provide security to get them out.
So it was a rescue mission, basically?
We were to provide security for the medics to rescue the guys.
They got the guys rescued.
I thought that was the end of the mission, but apparently sometime during that day we had shut down their newspapers.
And so they were protesting peacefully.
The problem was Iraqi law states that every family can have one AK-47 per household.
And they were bringing these to the protest.
And so the American, the occupying force thought that this was going to be a violent protest.
So we decided to all go towards that.
And it was during that ride that there were rooftop gunmen just shooting at any thing that looked American.
And if I remember the story right, you were packed like a sardine in the back of a truck.
And this was the same day that Cindy Sheehan's son Casey was shot.
Was he in the same truck with you?
Oh no, he was in the same unit, but he was in a different company.
But he was basically in the same situation as you, right?
Kind of packed in the back of an open air flatbed truck?
I don't really know the specifics of Casey's story.
But I know for myself, the vehicle we were in had a maximum load of 18 soldiers with gear.
But there were about 25 of us crammed in there.
Couldn't move at all, hardly.
So you guys were all packed in the back of the truck.
And then after you had gone on the mission to help the medics extract the guys, that part of the mission was successful, right?
Yes.
But then, so you guys just turned around to leave and got shot at on the way out of there?
Or how did it happen?
We got directions to follow on to this other protest.
So while we were heading there, that was when I got shot.
I see.
And, you know, it's interesting.
I remember at the time watching on TV former Congressman Bob Dornan defending the decision to shut down Muqtada al-Sadr's paper, I guess the night before you got shot, and saying, well, this is going to save American lives because this newspaper is writing anti-occupation or anti-liberation or whatever editorials.
And so by shutting down this paper will save American lives.
And yet this is what precipitated the violence that took.
How many American soldiers died that day, do you know?
Six.
And how many were wounded like you?
Six that I knew.
I don't know exactly how many died or exactly how many were wounded.
In my truck alone, I had gone with the idea that I was one of three or four people that had gotten shot.
But I would have found out most of the people in the back of the truck had received some form of injury.
And now what exactly happened to you?
You were shot where in the spine?
High or low?
I was shot in the left collarbone.
And the round traveled downward diagonally to sever my spinal cord at the chest level.
So does that mean that you have trouble breathing and those kind of very basic functions?
Heart rate and that kind of stuff?
I don't really have a lot of trouble breathing.
But I have no control over bowel and bladder functions.
I can still move my hands and arms.
Other than that, there's no sensation and no real movement below my nipples.
Thank God you can still use your arms, I guess.
Yeah.
Wow, so then how long after you got home did you join up with the anti-war movement?
As I said, I met you back in 2005, so that was a little more than a year after this had happened.
Yeah.
I can't pinpoint an exact date, but probably early 2005, maybe late 2004.
I was extremely depressed and just fucking in my bedroom for the most part.
Then my mother told me about a group called Military Families Speak Out.
And then she directed me to a group called the IVHW, Iraq Vets Against the War.
And I decided this is where I needed to exorcise my demons, so to speak.
And you've been doing that since then.
You've been publicly speaking, and of course you're the subject of this excellent documentary, Body of War, which I don't know why I didn't see it two years ago.
I kind of feel bad about it.
I guess I'm interested to know how well the government is taking care of you now that they put you in this situation.
Are you getting good medical care at the VA?
It's getting a little better.
It used to be pretty bad, but they've taken great steps to improve the VA, or so I've been told.
And what about the mental trauma?
Of course, the reports are that at least hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, especially the guys doing tour after tour, have these problems with what they now call post-traumatic stress disorder, shell shock.
Do you suffer from that kind of thing as well?
A little bit.
Not as severely as some of the cases you may have seen on TV.
I mean, I get agitated a bit easier, and when things don't go well, I think they should.
I tend to get a little more pissed off than I would have before, so I have mild PTSD.
Well, in the documentary they explain how your relationship with your wife deteriorated as part of the consequences of your injuries, but I read something on the internet this morning that said that you now have a new live-in girlfriend, and things are looking up on that front for you.
Is that right?
Yeah, I do, and she's a good girlfriend.
That's good.
You know, one thing that Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro mixed in with your story in the movie Body of War is footage of Senator Robert Byrd, who, of course, you're meeting with him, but also clips of many other senators and a catalog of the votes.
It really struck me, in watching that compiled C-SPAN footage, how well so many of the opposition in Congress spoke of the issue, and the clarity of their warnings, of their dismissals of the phony intelligence, of their anticipation of what negative results could be.
There really was no excuse, was there, for any of the congressmen or senators who voted for this war to have done so, in the face of their own colleagues telling them the plain truth to the contrary?
Well, what you have to realize is that the debate took place three weeks before an election, and the country as a whole wanted blood in some form or fashion.
So, if you came out against the war at that time as a senator or congressman, you might lose your Senate seat.
Well, that must be a nice consolation to you, right?
That some congressman got to hang on to their seat, and you just had to pay with your spinal cord.
They get to keep working their cushy offices, and 5,000-plus American soldiers dead.
And you know, it's interesting, too, you bring that up, that fear of losing their congressional seats.
My favorite congressman, Dr. Ron Paul, is a Republican from Texas, and he voted against the war and still walked right back into his House seat, because he had the courage of his convictions.
And even though the people of his district favored the war and favored the president, they also knew that Ron Paul meant what he said and said what he meant, and so they sent him back to Congress anyway.
So, maybe the rest of these congressmen didn't really have anything to fear but fear itself.
See, there was a Republican senator named Lincoln Chafee who voted against the war and didn't have a job anymore because he was a Republican who voted for the war.
He voted against the war.
Yeah, well, there are certainly examples both ways.
And then, jeez, they went after that one congressman who'd lost his arms and legs in Vietnam and put him on TV next to Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to get rid of him.
I forgot his name, I'm sorry.
Yeah, it's Max Kluge.
Right, right.
Well, now, tell me about your meeting with Senator Robert Byrd.
He really did give a heroic speech on the Senate floor before this war, didn't he?
Yes, he did.
And what was it like meeting him?
How did that go?
It was a great experience.
It was like, I guess, if I were in a fantasy type movie, being the wise old wizard that's in the movie.
He was just...
Within the first five minutes, I wanted him to be my adoptive grandfather.
He was just a very nice man, very compassionate about the things he believed in.
And he was just an all-around great guy.
Well, and so, I guess, tell me about your work with the Iraq Veterans Against the War.
Are you still doing a speaking tour there?
Yeah, in fact, tomorrow in Columbia, Missouri, in Mizzou, Saturday, actually, I will be giving a speech at an anti-war rally.
And what can you tell people about Iraq Veterans Against the War in general?
There may be some veterans listening.
Well, we're a non-profit group made up of both Democrats and Republicans.
And we just want to end the occupation in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
And we're just trying really hard through different actions and flyers and anything we can do to try to change public sentiment.
Well, and there's a lot of kind of support between veterans.
They're taking care of each other, right?
Right.
Because, you know, I don't really know about this.
I'm not a veteran myself.
But I've read many times that veterans feel that citizens who have not been to war just cannot relate.
And they just don't know.
They feel like they just can't talk to people who aren't also veterans about the things they're going through, that kind of thing.
So having something like Iraq Veterans Against the War and, you know, Iraq Veterans for War and whatever, all those organizations, whatever the rest of them are called, that help these soldiers out with their personal problems when they get home I think is important to emphasize that those things are available to people.
Yeah.
Can you give some advice to young people listening?
Chaos Radio in Austin has a pretty young audience.
And there may be some people, you know, who think that, well, never mind honor and glory and valor and all those things.
That's all worn pretty thin.
But at least, you know, they'll make a man out of you and be all you can be and all that kind of great stuff from the TV commercials.
You'll get to play with remote-controlled planes all day, that kind of stuff.
Can you address those youngsters and what they might need to know about war that they might not know yet?
The most important advice I can give to any young man or woman thinking about enlisting is to wait.
The military is a very honorable place to be as long as it is used properly.
So wait until what?
The Iraq War is over?
Yeah, wait until this ridiculousness has died down and we're finally in a place where we're not fighting arbitrary wars and go back to defending the Constitution instead of trying to create democracies where democracy doesn't necessarily want to be.
All right, well, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you joining me on the sixth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Thomas.
Thank you.
All right, everybody, that's Thomas Young from Iraq Veterans Against the War.
It's the subject of the award-winning documentary Body of War directed by Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue.
And this is Anti-War Radio.
We'll be right back.