From The New Brothers Under The Bridge Series-The Iraq And Afghan War Brothers- Brother Tomas Young’s Last Stand
From
The Pen Of Frank Jackman:
A while back, maybe a couple of years ago now, I did a retrospective series of sketches about guys, about war veterans, Vietnam War veterans that I had started in the late 1970s and did not get a chance to complete since the publication that I was writing them for out in California, the East Bay Eye, like a lot of alternative media operations folded up as the 1960s went into a deep ebb tide and the audience went back to the professions, academia, and bourgeois politics. Those sketches centered on some groups of returning veterans who could not cope with the “real” world after Vietnam and build themselves an alternate “community” mostly down in Southern California and who by life’s circumstances got called the “brothers under the bridge.” Let me reproduce my motivation in part for that series because now for different reasons I am finding out stories about guys from the recent Iraq and Afghan occupations that also can’t cope with the “real” world and are forming, well, I don’t know exactly what they are forming but I damn well know it feels a lot like “brothers under the bridge.”:
“In the first installment of this series of sketches [Brothers Under The Bridge] space provided courtesy of my old 1960s yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, I mentioned, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod, that I had come across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (Frisco town, California East Bay, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a Great Depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramp camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”
The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy for fellow veterans since I had been in the military, grudgingly, during the Vietnam War period although not in combat were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and another down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me in on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.
After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who I had worked with after my own military service was over knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A while back, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives on the Internet, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them into shape.
The ground rules of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to hear, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this current series, have reconstructed this story as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said.
Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger. Most were, yes, in one way or another but some had no real desire to advertise their own hunger but just wanted to get something off their chest about some lost buddy, or some event they had witnessed. I have presented enough of these sketches both back in the day and here to not make a generalization about what a guy might be hiding in the deep recesses of his mind.
Some wanted to give a blow by blow description of every firefight (and every hut torched) they were involved in, others wanted to blank out ‘Nam completely and talk of before or after times, or talk about the fate of some buddy, some ‘Nam buddy, who maybe made it back the “real world” but got catch up with stuff he couldn’t handle, or got caught up in some stuff himself that he couldn’t handle, couldn’t handle because his whole blessed life pointed the other way…”
Now, after having recently as a favor to an old high school classmate tried to find his son, Jack, who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq and upon discharge got caught up in some stuff he could not handle, another generation of soldiers needs to be heard, need their stories told. In the old series I noted that I liked to finish up these introductions by placing the sketches under a particular sign; no question Brother Tomas Young’s sign is the sign of the last stand.
Unfortunately today this is all I have to be able to pass on. Tomas Young Presente!
Tomas Young, Iraq War Veteran And Activist, Dies At 34
A vocal critic of the Iraq war and the Bush administration has died. In 2004, Army veteran Tomas Young deployed to Baghdad, where a bullet left him paralyzed. Young passed away at his home in Seattle.
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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Now let's remember an American veteran, Tomas Young, paralyzed in the Iraq War, who became a critic of that war. He died in Seattle, as NPR's Quil Lawrence reports.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: Tomas Young joined the Army after seeing President George W. Bush speak at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "BODY OF WAR")
TOMAS YOUNG: And I wanted to go to Afghanistan and get the people that did this to us. But after I joined the Army, it became clearer and clearer to me that we weren't going to go to Afghanistan, that we were going to go to Iraq.
LAWRENCE: That's Young in the documentary, "Body Of War." The film tells how Young came home in a wheelchair. He began speaking against the war because Iraq had no connection to 9/11. His health declined. A blood clot left him quadriplegic, racked with pain and almost unable to speak. Young said last year he could no longer bear to watch the film.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
YOUNG: I'm glad that it came out and people saw the reality of war. But now I can't even watch it because it serves as a reminder of what I used to be able to do.
LAWRENCE: Contemplating suicide, Young wrote a letter to Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney labeled, a message from a dying vet. But last December, Young told NPR he'd changed his mind. He wanted to spend a little more time with his wife. She says he died in his sleep sometime Monday morning. Quil Lawrence, NPR News.
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