As Ike gasped his last breath into Northeast Ohio, I found myself driving along Interstate 71 toward downtown Cleveland, heart seizing each time my van acquiesced to the 70 mph winds. I parked on a street littered with uprooted giants—maples, oaks, and chestnuts—and hurried to the Cleveland Institute of Art’s Cinematheque.  What was worth coming out for?

 Phil Donahue and his documentary, Body of War.

 A hometown boy, Mr. Donahue was here to receive The Ohio Citizen Action Howard M. Metzenbaum Award and promote his excellent but little known film about Tomas Young, an articulate Iraq War vet trying to make sense of his decision to answer the call of one George W. Bush standing on the pile of rubble that was the World Trade Center.

Body of War is heartbreaking. Devastated by a bullet to the spine less than a week after arriving in Iraq—“like a fish in a barrel,” he says, referring to his vulnerable position in the back of an unprotected Humvee—Tomas finds honor in protest, wanting to spare others his fate.

 A chance meeting on an airplane with Donahue resulted in Pearl Jam front man Eddie Vedder’s on-the-spot offer for an original antiwar song to accompany the movie, and his “No More War” ravages our emotions as we watch Young’s painful adjustment to life with a forever-wrecked body:

 [UPDATE: It looks like the video isn't working, so go here, click on "media room" and then click on "music video." It's worth it.]

The protagonists in Body of War are vibrant and unforgettable: the wry, reasonable, sympathetic Tomas Young; his smart and devoted mother—whose agonizing attempt to catheterize her son provides perhaps one of the most unsentimentally poignant scenes of any film I know—and Robert Byrd.

Yes, that Robert Byrd. I will never look at that man again without seeing him as he was in this movie, shaking with palsy, hands pointed in phantom accusation at the tractability of a legislative branch that would succumb to a bullying executive one. That he was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan is the shame of his past, the thing for which he claims he cannot apologize enough. His principled and full-throated—not to mention legacy-risking—stand against the Iraq War seems sufficient redemption and is masterfully interspersed with the painful rehabilitation of Tomas Young, whose plaintive admission of jealousy at people who can walk resonates deeply with us as the movie ends with the crippled, arthritic Byrd hobbling next to the wheelchair-bound veteran of the war he so strenuously opposed. 

As it turns out, Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich were sitting behind me during the movie. During a question and answer session afterwards, Senator Kucinich treated us to an impassioned reminder of the complicit role of the corporate media in the run-up to the war, including the ousting of Phil Donahue from MSNBC in 20003 because he presented “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war” and they worried that his show might become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.” (The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20030317/nichols)