Taking The Wraps Off The War

Talk-show host Phil Donahue made his career in front of the camera, but in his latest project, he goes behind it. As director and producer of a riveting new documentary, "Body of War," Donahue makes an unorthodox tribute to America's veterans through the eyes of maimed Iraq War vet Tomas Young, who is now an antiwar crusader. Young caught a bullet near his collarbone less than a week after arriving in Iraq, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down and burdened with grisly side effects. Donahue spares us none of his pain, or his outrage: shots of Young feebly using a catheter are intercut with the tally of the Senate vote for the war resolution and a clip of President Bush poking fun at the lack of WMDs in a gag-filled White House Correspondents' Dinner speech. Donahue spoke with NEWSWEEK's Sarah Ball ahead of the film's Veterans Day debut on the Sundance Channel:

NEWSWEEK: I've heard you met Tomas through your old friend Ralph Nader.
Phil Donahue: It was in a conversation with Ralph in January of '05, shortly after the election, that he said to me, "There's a mother at Walter Reed who wants to see you. Do you want to go?" And I said yeah, I'd never been. That's when I met Tomas Young, and I just felt that American people should see this. I couldn't get him out of my head. He can't walk, he can't even cough.

And what spurred you to take his story and make it into a film?
Well, this is the most sanitized war of my lifetime. It's just a big black hole—we are not seeing the sacrifices that these families are making, and there are thousands of them who've received sons or daughters back with catastrophic injuries that turn the whole family upside down. My inspiration was the picture of the naked child running—in Vietnam, napalmed—that won the Pulitzer Prize because you could see the pain. If you're going to see a nation to war, show the sacrifice that's being made by our fellow countrymen on our behalf. President Bush says you can't take a photograph of an American soldier's coffin, and the whole press establishment just says OK.

There's a very moving scene at the film's end that shows Young and Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia walking together and talking in the Capitol building. How did you put that together?
My original hope was to film [that scene] in the atrium of the National Archive, which is the location of the real Constitution. I was going to have Byrd and Tomas make their way across that great atrium with shafts of light coming down, and Byrd would lead him to the Constitution and talk. I got [the appointment] to film there, all to ourselves, but the following morning it was canceled. This was the Michael Moore effect. There's a real bunker mentality if you're in charge of a federal facility. You don't want your facility used in a film that disagrees [with the government]. Michael has scared the hell out of everybody. Among the administrative assistants on the Hill, they feel a need to protect the boss from cameras and reporters as much as possible. It's just amazing to see that in the land of the First Amendment, we now have a real effort underway to insulate the lawmakers from press inquiry.

How do you feel after the presidential election?
I am thrilled. I think Barack's smile alone could restore the United States to its former place as a member of the world family of nations. I think he's going to be a star—I see heads of state grabbing him with both hands, and at G8 meetings they're going to be fascinated with this man. I can't wait for Inauguration Day.

Does Bush leaving office mean that people will pay less attention to the cost of war?
We have 160,000 irreplaceable human beings in Iraq. He's [President-elect Obama] got to do something. I see us getting out cleanly, and we're going to expedite this process more than might be possible —as each month passes, it will get better.

Was it hard to see Young's father remain so staunchly pro-Bush and supportive of the war in the face of his maimed son?
That didn't bother us—what really got to us was being this close to this kind of injury. For four years we've had a front-row seat, and the closer you get to this kind of thing, the more it blows your mind. The American people just don't see this—that's why only 10 percent of us brought the war into the voting booth last week. This may certainly be the worst foreign-policy blunder of my lifetime, and we're not even thinking about it. Tomas and these people are invisible—invisible. I think that has been a huge failure of America's press, but it's not too late. Let's get with it. We should be televising every funeral. There are women who've had their faces blown off, kids who are blinded, paraplegic quads, those with severe head trauma—this is going to rattle around this country for the rest of the century. This could not be worse, and it's going to have a shelf life that will go on and on. These young people with three and four deployments to battle areas are going to be the ones who drink too much and beat up their girlfriends. Not all of them, but some—we have to recognize that there are many people who just will not be able to adapt. This is going to be a huge burden for this country, at a time when we're not meeting the other burdens.

In your film, we see Young's brother deploy to Iraq. How is he doing?
He comes back in the very near future. And no, he's not been injured.

How is Young doing these days?
He's doing very well. He had an episode since the film—a pulmonary embolism—and came out of a coma with some reduced movement in his arms. As you know, he has his arms. Now, he can scratch his nose but he can't hold his silverware. But he's working on that now. His speech is also somewhat impaired now, so he's slurring a bit, but he's working very hard on both these things. I saw him two weeks ago, and I was hugely impressed with his physical and emotional well being.

Will there be another film in your future?
I'd love to do another film, but if I do another film it will be with someone else's money. One film per lifetime is certainly my limit, but it's been a chapter of my life. It's become a matter of the heart for all of us who've worked on this, and we will never forget this experience. All of us have to count our blessings. When you start complaining that the stop light is too long—all right, just sit down and be quiet. The whole time standing there next to his bed, seeing his cheekbones and how thin and weak and sallow and loopy on morphine he was, I'd be thinking, "Why him and not me?"