By Chris Hedges
October 05, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- I flew to
Kansas City to see Tomas Young. Tomas was
paralyzed in Iraq in 2004. He was receiving
hospice care at his home. I knew him by
reputation and the movie documentary
Body of War. He was one of the first
veterans to publicly oppose the war in Iraq. He
fought as long and as hard as he could against
the war that crippled him, until his physical
deterioration caught up with him.
“I had been toying with the idea of suicide
for a long time because I had become helpless,”
he told me in his small house on the Kansas City
outskirts where he intended to die. “I couldn’t
dress myself. People have to help me with the
most rudimentary of things. I decided I did not
want to go through life like that anymore. The
pain, the frustration.…”
He stopped abruptly and called his wife.
“Claudia, can I get some water?” She opened a
bottle of water, took a swig so it would not
spill when he sipped, and handed it to him.
“I felt at the end of my rope,” the
33-year-old Army veteran went on. “I made the
decision to go on hospice care, to stop feeding
and fade away. This way, instead of committing
the conventional suicide and I am out of the
picture, people have a way to stop by or call
and say their goodbyes. I felt this was a fairer
way to treat people than to just go out with a
note. After the anoxic brain injury in 2008 I
lost a lot of dexterity and strength in my upper
body. So, I wouldn’t be able to shoot myself or
even open the pill bottle to give myself an
overdose. The only way I could think of doing it
was to have Claudia open the pill bottle for me,
but I didn’t want her implicated.”
“After you made that decision, how did you
feel?” I asked.
“I felt relieved,” he answered. “I finally
saw an end to this four-and-a-half-year fight.
If I were in the same condition I was in during
the filming of Body of War, in a manual
chair, able to feed and dress myself and
transfer from my bed to the wheelchair, you and
I would not be having this discussion. I can’t
even watch the movie anymore because it makes me
sad to see how I was, compared to how I
am.…Viewing the deterioration, I decided it was
best to go out now rather than regress more.”
Tomas was crippled for a war that should
never have been fought. He was crippled for the
lies of politicians. He was crippled for war
profiteers. He was crippled for the careers of
generals. He bore all this upon his body. And
there are hundreds of thousands of other broken
bodies like his in Baghdad, Kandahar, Peshawar,
the Walter Reed medical center, and hospitals in
Russia and Ukraine. Mangled bodies and corpses,
broken dreams, unending grief, betrayal,
corporate profit, these are the true products of
war. Tomas Young was the face of war they do not
want you to see.
On April 4, 2004, Tomas was crammed into the
back of a two-and-a-half-ton Army truck with 20
other soldiers in Sadr City, Iraq. Insurgents
opened fire on the truck from above. “It was
like shooting ducks in a barrel,” he said. A
bullet from an AK-47 severed his spinal column.
A second bullet shattered his knee. At first, he
did not know he had been shot. He felt woozy. He
tried to pick up his M16. He couldn’t lift his
rifle from the truck bed. That was when he knew
something was terribly wrong.
“I tried to say, ‘I’m going to be paralyzed,
someone shoot me right now,’ but there was only
a hoarse whisper that came out because my lungs
had collapsed,” he said. “I knew the damage. I
wanted to be taken out of my misery.”
His squad leader, Staff Sgt. Robert
Miltenberger, bent over and told him he would be
all right. A few years later Young would see a
clip of Miltenberger weeping as he recounted the
story of how he had lied to Young.
“I tried to contact him,” said Tomas, whose
long red hair and flowing beard make him look
like a biblical prophet. “I can’t find him. I
want to tell him it is OK.”
Tomas had been in Iraq five days. It was his
first deployment. After being wounded, he was
sent to an Army hospital in Kuwait, and although
his legs, now useless, lay straight in front of
him he felt as if he was still sitting
cross-legged on the floor of the truck. That
sensation lasted for about three weeks. It was
an odd and painful initiation into his life as a
paraplegic. His body, from then on, would play
tricks on him. He was transferred from Kuwait to
the U.S. military hospital at Landstuhl,
Germany, and then to Walter Reed in Washington,
D.C. He asked if he could meet Ralph Nader.
Nader visited him in the hospital with Phil
Donahue. Donahue, who had been fired by MSNBC a
year earlier for speaking out against the war,
would go on, with Ellen Spiro, to make the 2007
film Body of War, an account of Tomas’s
daily struggle with his physical and emotional
scars.
In the documentary, he suffers dizzy spells
that force him to lower his head into his hands.
He wears frozen gel inserts in a cooling jacket
because he cannot control his body temperature.
He struggles to find a solution to his erectile
dysfunction. He downs fistfuls of
medications—carbamazepine, for nerve pain;
coumadin, a blood thinner; tizanidine, an
anti-spasm medication; gabapentin, another nerve
pain medication; bupropion, an antidepressant;
omeprazole, for morning nausea; and morphine.
His mother must insert a catheter into his
penis. He joins Cindy Sheehan, whose son was
killed in Iraq, at Camp Casey in Crawford,
Texas, to protest with Iraq Veterans Against the
War. His first wife leaves him.
“You know, you see a guy who’s paralyzed, and
in a wheelchair, and you think he’s just in a
wheelchair,” he says in Body of War.
“You don’t think about the, you know, the stuff
inside that’s paralyzed. I can’t cough because
my stomach muscles are paralyzed, so I can’t
work up the full coughing energy. I’m more
susceptible to urinary tract infections, and
there’s a great big erection sidebar to this
whole story.”
In early March 2008 a blood clot in his right
arm—the arm that bears a color tattoo of a
character from Maurice Sendak’s Where the
Wild Things Are—caused his arm to swell. He
was taken to the Kansas City Veterans Affairs
hospital, where he was given the blood thinner
coumadin before being released. One month later,
the VA took him off coumadin, and soon afterward
the clot migrated to one of his lungs. He
suffered a massive pulmonary embolism and fell
into a coma. When he awoke from the coma in the
hospital he could barely speak. He had lost most
of his upper-body mobility and short-term
memory, and his speech was slurred.
It was then that he began to experience
debilitating pain in his abdomen. The hospital
would not give him narcotics because the drugs
would slow digestion, making it harder for the
bowels to function. Tomas could digest only soup
and Jell-O. In November, in a desperate bid to
halt the pain, he had his colon removed. He was
fitted with a colostomy bag. The pain
disappeared for a few days and then came roaring
back. He could not hold down food, even pureed
food, because his stomach opening had shrunk.
The doctors dilated his stomach. He could eat
only soup and oatmeal. Three weeks earlier his
stomach stretched. That was enough.
“I will go off the feeding tube,” he said,
“after me and my wife’s anniversary,” April 20,
the date on which he married Claudia in 2012. “I
was married once before. It didn’t end well. It
was a non-amicable divorce. At first, I thought
I would wait for my brother and his wife, my
niece, and my grandparents to visit me, but the
one thing I will miss most in my life is my
wife. I want to spend a little more time with
her. I want to spend a full year with someone
without the problems that plagued my previous
marriage. I don’t know how long it will take
when I stop eating. If it takes too long, I may
take steps to quicken my departure. I have saved
a bottle of liquid morphine. I can down that at
one time with all my sleeping medication.”
Tomas’s room was painted a midnight blue and
had a large cutout of Batman on one wall. He
loved the superhero as a child, because “he was
a regular person who had a horrible thing happen
to him and wanted to save society.”
Tomas joined the Army immediately after 9/11
to go to Afghanistan and hunt down the people
behind the attacks. He did not oppose the
Afghanistan war. “In fact, if I had been injured
in Afghanistan, there would be no Body of
War movie to begin with,” he said. But he
never understood the call to invade Iraq. “When
the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, we didn’t
invade China just because they looked the same,”
he said.
He became increasingly depressed about his
impending deployment to Iraq when he was in
basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. He
asked the battalion doctor for antidepressants.
The doctor said he had to meet first with the
unit’s chaplain, who told him, “I think you will
be happier when you get over to Iraq and start
killing Iraqis.”
“I was dumbstruck by his response,” Tomas
said.
He had not decided what would be done with
his ashes. He flirted with the idea of having
them plowed into ground where marijuana would be
planted but then wondered if anyone would want
to smoke the crop. He knows there will be no
clergy at the memorial service held after his
death. “It will just be people reminiscing over
my life,” he said.
“I spend a lot of time sitting here in my
bedroom, watching TV or sleeping,” he said. “I
have found—I don’t know if it is the result of
my decision or not—it is equally hard to be
alone or to be around people. This includes my
wife. I am rarely happy. Maybe it is because
when I am alone all I have with me are my
thoughts, and my mind is a very hazardous place
to go. When I am around people I feel as if I
have to put on a façade of being the happy
little soldier.”
He listened, when he was well enough, to
audiobooks with Claudia. Among them have been Al
Franken’s satirical book Lies and the Lying
Liars Who Tell Them and Michael Moore’s
The Official Fahrenheit 9/11 Reader. He was
a voracious reader but can no longer turn the
pages of a book. He found some solace in the
French film The Untouchables, about a
paraplegic and his caregiver, and The
Sessions, a film based on an essay by the
paralyzed poet Mark O’Brien.
Tomas, when he was in a wheelchair, found
that many people behaved as if he was mentally
disabled, or not even there. When he was being
fitted for a tuxedo for a friend’s wedding the
salesman turned to his mother and asked her in
front of him whether he could wear the company’s
shoes.
“I look at the TV through the lens of his
eyes and can see he is invisible,” said Claudia,
standing in the living room as her husband
rested in the bedroom. An array of books on
death, the afterlife, and dying is spread out
around her. “No one is sick on television. No
one is disabled. No one faces death. Dying in
America is a very lonely business.”
“If I had known then what I know now,” Tomas
said, “I would not have gone into the military.
But I was twenty-two, working various menial
jobs, waiting tables, working in the copy
department of an OfficeMax. My life was going
nowhere. September 11 happened. I saw us being
attacked. I wanted to respond. I signed up two
days later. I wanted to be a combat journalist.
I thought the military would help me out of my
financial rut. I thought I could use the GI Bill
to go to school.”
Tomas was not the first young man to be lured
into war and then callously discarded. His story
has been told many times. It is the story of
Hector in
The Iliad. It is the story of Joe
Bonham, the protagonist in Dalton Trumbo’s 1939
novel
Johnny Got His Gun, whose arms, legs,
and face are blown away by an artillery shell,
leaving him trapped in the inert remains of his
body.
Bonham ruminates in the novel:
He was the future he was a perfect
picture of the future and they were afraid to
let anyone see what the future was like. Already
they were looking ahead they were figuring the
future and somewhere in the future they saw war.
To fight that war they would need men and if men
saw the future they wouldn’t fight. So they were
masking the future they were keeping the future
a soft quiet deadly secret. They knew that if
all the little people all the little guys saw
the future they would begin to ask questions.
They would ask questions and they would find
answers and they would say to the guys who
wanted them to fight they would say you lying
thieving sons-of-bitches we won’t fight we won’t
be dead we will live we are the world we are the
future and we will not let you butcher us no
matter what you say no matter what speeches you
make no matter what slogans you write.
For Tomas, the war, the wound, the paralysis,
the wheelchair, the anti-war demonstrations, the
wife who left him and the one who didn’t, the
embolism, the loss of motor control, the slurred
speech, the colostomy, the IV line for narcotics
implanted in his chest, the open bedsores that
expose his bones, the despair—the crushing
despair—the decision to die, came down to a
girl. Aleksus, his only niece. She would not
remember her uncle. But he lay in his dimly lit
room, painkillers flowing into his broken body,
and thought of her. He did not know exactly when
he would die. But it had to be before her second
birthday, in June. He did not want to mar that
day with his death.
He asked me to help him write a last letter
to George W. Bush and the politicians and
generals who sent him to war. It was March 2013,
on the 10th anniversary of the start of the
U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. He could not hold a
pen. I took dictation. He planned to kill
himself by cutting off his feeding tube. After
issuing the letter, which was widely circulated
and translated into several languages, Tomas
changed his mind about committing suicide. He
decided he wanted more time with his wife,
Claudia. But he and Claudia knew he did not have
long. The couple moved from Kansas City to
Portland, Oregon, and then to Seattle, where
Tomas died on November 10, 2014, at the age of
thirty-four.
Over the last eight months of Tomas’s life,
Veterans Affairs reduced his pain medication,
charging he had become an addict. It was a
decision that thrust him into a wilderness of
agony. Tomas’s existence became a constant
battle with the VA. He suffered excruciating
“breakthrough pain.” The VA was indifferent. It
cut his thirty-day supply of pain medication to
seven days. Tomas, when the pills did not arrive
on time, might as well have been nailed to a
cross. Claudia, in an exchange of several emails
with me since Thomas’s death, remembered hearing
her husband on the phone one day pleading with a
VA doctor and finally saying: “So you mean to
tell me it is better for me to live in pain than
die on pain medicine in this disabled state?” At
night, she said, he would moan and cry out.
“It was a battle of wills,” Claudia told me
in an email. “We were losing. Our whole time in
Portland was spent dealing with trying to get
what we needed to be at home and comfortable and
pain free. THAT’S ALL WE WANTED, TO BE HOME AND
PAIN FREE, to enjoy whatever time we had left.”
They left Portland for Seattle to be closer
to a good spinal cord injury unit. Also,
Washington was one of the states that had
legalized marijuana, which Tomas used
extensively.
“Last week I called because his breakthrough
pain started happening throughout the day,”
Claudia wrote in an email. “I was using more and
more of the morphine and Lorazepam. I was
running out of pills. He had a high tolerance
for pain, but it was getting bad. I called to
report to the doctor that it was getting bad
fast. I would not have enough pills to bridge
him to the appointment on the 24th. The doctor
was unsympathetic. He gave me a condescending
lecture about strict narcotics regulations. I
said, ‘but my husband is in pain what do I do?’”
Tomas tried to take enough sleeping pills to
sleep away the pain. But he was able to rest for
a prolonged period only every few days. The pain
and exhaustion began to tear apart his frail
body. He was dispirited. He was visibly weaker.
He felt humiliated.
“Maybe he got so exhausted by the enduring of
it all that he took a last sleep and never came
back,” Claudia wrote. “My conclusion is that he
died in pain from the exhaustion of having to
endure it. Early morning Monday, when I thought
he was sleeping, I heard a silence I had never
heard before. I couldn’t hear him breathing. I
was scared, but I knew. The first thing I did
was liberate him from all the tubes and bags on
his body. I cut off the feeding tube. I took off
the Ostomy Bags. I removed the Foley Catheter. I
cleaned his body. I played music. We smoked a
last joint together. I smoked for him. I started
making calls.”
“The funeral home instructed me to call the
police,” she wrote. “They arrived and concluded
that there were no issues, but because of his
young age they had to refer this to the Medical
Examiner. The Medical Examiner came. He made the
determination that due to his age that they
would have to perform an autopsy. I said, ‘Hey
look at his body don’t you think he has been
mutilated enough? Are you going to desecrate his
body even further?’ So, he was cut open some
more.”
The VA called her to ask for the autopsy
report.
Tomas’s final days, Claudia said, were often
“hopeless and humiliating.”
This is his “Last Letter” to Bush and Cheney:
I write this letter on the 10th
anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my
fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on
behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who
died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of
the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have
been wounded and on behalf of those whose
wounds, physical and psychological, have
destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely
wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush
in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an
end. I am living under hospice care. I write
this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who
have lost spouses, on behalf of children who
have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and
mothers who have lost sons and daughters and
behalf of those who care for the many thousands
of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I
write this letter on behalf of those veterans
whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they
have witnessed, endured, and done in Iraq have
led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty
soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a
suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of
the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of
the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter
on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war
has left behind those who will spend their lives
in unending pain and grief.
You may evade justice but in our eyes you
are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of
plunder and, finally, of murder, including the
murder of thousands of young Americans—-my
fellow veterans—whose future you stole.
I write this letter, my last letter, to
you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney. I write not
because I think you grasp the terrible human and
moral consequences of your lies, manipulation
and thirst for wealth and power. I write this
letter because, before my own death, I want to
make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands
of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my
fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions
more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who
you are and what you have done. You may evade
justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of
egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally,
of murder, including the murder of thousands of
young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future
you stole.
Your positions of authority, your
millions of dollars of personal wealth, your
public relations consultants, your privilege,
and your power cannot mask the hollowness of
your character. You sent us to fight and die in
Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in
Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your
National Guard unit. Your cowardice and
selfishness were established decades ago. You
were not willing to risk yourselves for our
nation, but you sent hundreds of thousands of
young men and women to be sacrificed in a
senseless war with no more thought than it takes
to put out the garbage.
I joined the Army two days after the 9/11
attacks. I joined the Army because our country
had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at
those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow
citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq,
a country that had no part in the September 2001
attacks and did not pose a threat to its
neighbors, much less to the United States. I did
not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to
shut down mythical weapons-of-
mass-destruction facilities or to implant what
you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and
the Middle East. I did not join the Army to
rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us
could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues.
Instead, this war has cost the United States
over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the
Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive
war is illegal under international law. And as a
soldier in Iraq, I was, I now know, abetting
your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the
largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It
obliterated the balance of power in the Middle
East. It installed a corrupt and brutal
pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented
in power through the use of torture, death
squads, and terror. And it has left Iran as the
dominant force in the region. On every
level—moral, strategic, military, and
economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr.
Bush, and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It
is you who should pay the consequences.
I would not be writing this letter if I
had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against
those forces that carried out the attacks of
9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be
miserable because of my physical deterioration
and imminent death, but I would at least have
the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a
consequence of my own decision to defend the
country I love. I would not have to lie in my
bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life
ebbing away, and deal with the fact that
hundreds of thousands of human beings, including
children, including myself, were sacrificed by
you for little more than the greed of oil
companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks
in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of
empire.
I have, like many other disabled
veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often
inept care provided by the Veterans
Administration. I have, like many other disabled
veterans, come to realize that our mental and
physical wounds are of no interest to you,
perhaps of no interest to any politician. We
were used. We were betrayed. And we have been
abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of
being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t
murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition
sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the
Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to
the least of your brothers you finally do to
yourself, to your own soul.
My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours
will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But
mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the
moral courage to face what you have done to me
and to many, many others who deserved to live. I
hope that before your time on earth ends, as
mine is now ending, you will find the strength
of character to stand before the American public
and the world, and in particular the Iraqi
people, and beg for forgiveness.
You can order
The Greatest Evil
is War
here.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning
author and journalist who was a foreign
correspondent for fifteen years for The New York
Times.
https://chrishedges.substack.com
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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