The Life and Death of Tomas Young

By Phil Donahue, Moyers & Company

17 November 14

first met Tomas Young at Walter Reed Army Medical Center shortly after he arrived there in 2004 from Sadr City via the US Medical Hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. He was thin and semi-conscious on morphine. His mother explained his injury.

Tomas sustained a T-4 spinal injury, the spot between the shoulder blades. His paralysis, from the nipples down, was total. Tomas would never walk again. In a flash from the rooftop of a sniper’s rifle Tomas lost his ability to walk and lost bowel and bladder control. Tomas would never again be able to cough and — not so insignificant for a 24-year-old — he lost his sex life. This is what is quaintly referred to as the harm in “harm’s way.”

Tomas sustained this catastrophic injury while fighting for America in the most sanitized war of my lifetime. The press was admonished not to take pictures of flag-draped coffins, and the press said, “Okay.” It is shameful enough that only 5 percent of us made any personal sacrifice, worse that those sacrifices are unseen. The story of Tomas’s life after returning home is told in the film I made with Ellen Spiro, Body of War, available on Netflix. It is a close-up family drama, one that is playing itself out in thousands of other American homes occupied by severely wounded veterans whose physical and mental burdens have turned their whole house upside down. To the American populace, they are not there.

Tomas Young’s story is the somber movie behind the heroic parade music accompanying the Veteran’s Day flag waving on Main Street America. Tomas has lived through 10 of these holidays. I have often wondered if he could hear that music outside his bedroom window. Did he watch all those stories on TV that celebrated the grit and spirit of the paraplegic skiers, blade runners and wheel chair basketball players? Was he happy for those fellow wounded soldiers? Was he jealous? Angry? I never asked him. And now it’s too late.

Tomas died this weekend. His blindingly monotonous life has finally come to an end but America’s gingoism rolls on.

“The brave troops of the last remaining superpower, God bless the troops, the greatest troops from the greatest nation on earth!”

The deified troops come home to “the nation that is the only hope for peace,” and the VA doesn’t call them back. The pretense is choking. Does the exalting of our soldiers bespeak a deep guilt abiding in the American soul? A guilt we feel for having sent them into an unnecessary, under-armed, under planned, unconstitutional war — a war that is and always was unfair to them?

As Tomas’s widow, Claudia, accepts a folded flag on behalf “of a grateful nation” — war drums will be heard again. And the laptop bombers on the cable TV shout shows will be urging the “leader of the free world” to send his county’s young adult children into “harms way.” The nation’s heavy breathing will return, and — as in April of 2003 — all the major metropolitan newspapers will get behind the commander in chief and thousands of Tomas Young’s and sister soldiers will don the Army boots of our “exceptional” warrior nation. When our soldiers get bogged down, John McCain will call for more troops. When the casualty toll rises, Lindsey Graham and Sean Hannity will blame President Obama.

And when these “brave, courageous” troops come home, the VA won’t call them back.

Awaiting the Grand Jury, Dread in Ferguson and America

By V. Gene Robinson, The Daily Beast

17 November 14

It sure appears that this grand jury has been run so as not to return an indictment. It will be hard to blame people if they’re angry.

here's not a lot of dread in my life. A few worries, to be sure, but not that cousin of depression and anxiety, dread. Oh, like everyone else I dread root canals, sitting in holiday traffic that delays a reunion with family, and waiting on the lab report from a biopsy. Dread is the feeling I get when something bad seems to be on the way, and I know that there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

These days, I find myself heavy with dread over what looks to be coming down the pike in Ferguson, Missouri, in the next few days, and I feel powerless to stop it. And if indeed, as I fear, the grand jury in St. Louis County decides not to indict Darren Wilson, the cop who shot unarmed Michael Brown, Jr. in Ferguson this summer, what will I, as a white man, do about it?

Much as they did immediately after the shooting of Mike Brown and the demonstrations that followed, local police appear to be preparing for war, rather than keeping the peace. We saw how such provocative actions only inflamed passions and escalated the unrest. The use of military-style protective gear and combat vehicles purchased from the Pentagon, along with embattled attitudes that are appropriate to real war, if employed, will once again bring increased conflict, not peace in Ferguson. Its citizens will feel assaulted, not protected.

The grand jury process, managed by St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch, has not inspired confidence. The point of a grand jury is quite simple, really: to determine if there is enough evidence pointing toward a crime having been committed to move forward with a trial. Its purpose is not to try the case, seek both sides of the argument, or weigh the relative merits of each. Its purpose is to answer one question: Is there enough evidence to warrant a trial?

Robert McCulloch’s job as Prosecuting Attorney is to make the case for an indictment and, having obtained an indictment, to proceed with a trial. He is, after all, the Prosecuting Attorney, whose job is to seek a prosecution of the case. Instead, as he has managed the grand jury process, he has gone far beyond what a prosecutor is supposed to do – the most egregious example of which is the appearance and testimony before the grand jury by the accused! This almost never happens, because the accused will have his day in court, and the grand jury hearing is not that day!

Allowing the accused to appear and tell his story, without the prosecuting attorney being present or able to cross-examine him, gives the grand jury a one-sided (the accused’s) view of what happened. It is not the grand jury’s place to hear that evidence/testimony, nor is it the grand jury’s job to try this case. Experts agree that the appearance of the accused before a grand jury is at best an effort to confuse the jury and distract them from their real task, and at its worst, an outright effort to dissuade the grand jury from bringing an indictment, and the resulting trial. It is an effort to overwhelm the grand jury with the complexity of the case, bolstered by sympathy for the accused, generated by his appearance and testimony before them, with no one present to call his account into question.

The parents of Michael Brown, Jr. and the citizens of Ferguson were right to question McCulloch’s ability and/or willingness to seek aggressively an indictment from the grand jury, given his long and acknowledged ties – both professional and personal – to the police force personnel of that city. The subsequent process used for this grand jury investigation confirms that those citizens had every right to be concerned and to demand that McCulloch recuse himself. And the tragedy is that if these grand jurors decide not to hand down an indictment of Wilson, no one will ever know how they were led to such a decision.

Let’s be clear: I am not saying that Wilson is guilty of a crime. Indeed, it is possible that the evidence points to aggressive acts on the part of Brown unknown to the public at this time. That would be determined in a court of law. The question is whether there will ever even be a trial. For Wilson to be excused from the scrutiny of a trial – transparent and held in the light of day for all the world to see – is to consign the judgment of his guilt or innocence to the grand jury back room, rather than to a public courtroom, where observation of the legal process is not only appropriate but helpful to the healing of a community.

If the grand jury decides not to hand down an indictment of Wilson, huge numbers of people will be legitimately outraged, and I will count myself among them. Only time will tell whether that outrage is expressed in peaceful, but angry, protests, or whether some will choose more violent ways to express their anger with a system that feels unjust. Probably, we will see lots of the former, and precious little of the latter – but you can be sure we will hear about the violence 24/7, with only a passing mention of the peaceful, angry protest, the right to which is guaranteed by the Constitution.

There are two Americas – one for white people, and one for everyone else. I believe that the future prosperity and leadership of America in the world is dependent on our bringing those two Americas closer to one another, so that “freedom and justice for all” actually means all. The process for the St. Louis County grand jury investigation, managed by Prosecuting Attorney McCulloch, is full of questionable practices, and wide open to legitimate charges of manipulation and bias. If no indictment is handed down, it will be taken by the African-American community – and by a lot of us white people – as confirmation of a less just America for people of color than for its white citizens.

If the outrage over no indictment is accompanied by violence, it will be the result of generations of injustice for people of color, which have festered over time and produced cynicism and profound anger in its victims. If there is blame for outbreaks of violence, it will be shared by the perpetrators and the white majority society alike. We’re all in this together. We will work together to stop this injustice, or it will destroy all of us. And may God have mercy on us in the days to come.