Hey all. Capone in Chicago here, with yet another story related to a Pearl Jam show I went to (much like the one I related to you last week in my SONG SUNG BLUE review).

As I did the two summers before, last August I went to Lollapalooza and stood among the tens of thousands of others on the final night watching Pearl Jam rip shit up with the Field Museum behind them. Late in the show, singer Eddie Vedder brought out man in a wheelchair named Tomas Young, who had been paralyzed from the mid-chest down from a bullet that pierced his collarbone and ripped though his spine. When this happened, Young was on his first mission in Sadr City, Iraq in an unarmored Humvee that didn't even have a canvas covered the bed. As Young puts it, "It was like shooting fish in a barrel." Tomas had been in Iraq five days when he was wounded; he was 22. Vedder heard about Young after watching a rough cut of a film called BODY OF WAR, and he ended up contributing two songs to the soundtrack, including one, "No More," that he played that August night with the young vet at his side. The song is Tomas' story set to a simple acoustic guitar backdrop, and you hear pieces of it throughout BODY OF WAR, one of the bravest examinations of the day-to-day struggle it is to be in disabled veteran in America, especially one who realizes that the reasons he enlisted were a lie and decides to make it his mission to end the war in Iraq from the confines of a wheelchair.

Tomas enlisted two days after September 11, 2001, after he saw President Bush standing atop the rubble of the Twin Towers. He wanted to go to Afghanistan to find the evil doers. But by the time he made it through training, Bush & Co. had its sites set on Iraq. BODY OF WAR cuts back and forth between Tomas' life and the speeches and votes that led to the conflict. Most fascinating is listening to portions of speeches by the 23 U.S. Senators who opposed the war back in 2002. But the heart and soul of this film is Young's life story. He was luckier than most in his condition. He had a fiance (they were married soon after he got out of the hospital), and he had a support system with his mother and brother, who was himself preparing to ship off to Iraq. But the filmmakers Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue (yes, that Phil Donahue) give us an unflinching look at Tomas' life, frustration, and failures that lead him to become a leading anti-war advocate. If you've ever wanted to see a man's mother put in a his catheter, look no further. Tomas is disturbingly forthcoming about his limits and pains. He can't cough because he has no access to the stomach muscles necessary to do so. He talks a great deal about his nonstop battle with erectile disfunction (apparently injecting some wonder drug into your penis is one potential solution).

For a man who has trouble sitting up straight without feeling dizzy, Tomas gives a remarkable number of speeches in a given year. Not surprisingly, his condition takes its toll on the relationships with his wife and family. Tomas is afraid that his wife's role as housekeeper and nursemaid to him will make them hate each other, a price he's not necessarily willing to pay. He gets made when she goes to work or out with friends, but they fight constantly when she's around. It's painful to watch and hear about; I can only imagine what it must be like to live through. I haven't seen a film with this much raw honesty about post-war recovery since BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, and even that effort didn't capture the inner torment quite as convincingly. It's wonderful to see Tomas' first meeting with the Iraq Veterans Against the War and his journey to join Cindy Sheehan in Crawford, Texas. Regardless of your views on the Iraq War, this is going to a tough film for anyone to watch. But it's a thoroughly moving and fulfilling work, and one of the most powerful documentaries I've seen in a year that has already given us so many strong docs. The movie has been slowly opening up one city at a time over the last few weeks, and will continue to do so for the early part of the summer. Look for it.

Capone