Tomas Young, veteran and critic of the Iraq war, dies at 34
Tomas Young, an Army veteran who was paralyzed after being shot in the spine in Iraq and who later publicly denounced the war and the Bush administration officials who sent him to fight it, died Nov. 10 in Seattle. He was 34.
His wife, Claudia Cuellar Young, confirmed his death. An investigator with the King County medical examiners office said the determination of the cause is pending further tests.
Mr. Young belonged to the group known as Iraq Veterans Against the War and was featured on CBS Newss 60 Minutes, ABC News and Bill Moyerss public-affairs program. His story also was chronicled in Body of War (2007), a documentarydirected by talk-show host Phil Donahue and filmmaker Ellen Spiro.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Donahue described Mr. Young as an anti-war warrior who had the credibility of serving.
Mr. Young was a Kmart employee in Missouri when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Days later, Mr. Young enlisted in the Army. I wanted to go to Afghanistan, he said on 60 Minutes, to seek some form of retribution on the people that did this to us.
Less than three years later, Mr. Young shipped out to Iraq. On April 4, 2004, the fifth day of his deployment, he was riding in what has been described as an unarmored, uncovered Humvee when his convoy came under attack in the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City.
A bullet struck Mr. Young near his left collarbone, severing his spinal cord. He recalled dropping his weapon and trying, without success, to move.
I spent the next few seconds trying to yell for anybody that was within earshot to take me out, he said, to make it so I wasnt going to be paralyzed for the rest of my life. But unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it all that I could get out of my mouth was a very tiny, hoarse whisper. And so, nobody heard me.
Mr. Youngs wounds had left him paralyzed from the waist down. Several years later, complications from a pulmonary embolism would further erode his mobility and impair his speech.
Donahue met Mr. Young in a hospital bed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center during a visit to the military hospital with Ralph Nader, the consumer-rights advocate and independent presidential candidate who had opposed the Iraq invasion.
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Tomas Young, veteran and critic of the Iraq war, dies at 34