May 28, 2006

Healing The Wounds Of War

New Population Of Wounded Veterans Emerges

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By Daniel Schorn

Play CBS Video Video The Wounds Of War
A new generation of veterans is emerging, many of whom suffered traumatic injuries on the battlefield. Mike Wallace talks to some of the resilient survivors.

Video Wallace's Reporter's Notebook
Mike Wallace talks about wounded soldiers who've come back from Iraq and the hardships they encounter as they rehabilitate their bodies and their lives. (Recorded in Feb. 2006.)

- Jessica Clements had been a model in Akron, Ohio, when she left high school to join the Army. (CBS)
- Melissa Stockwell is studying to be a prosthetist. (CBS)
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Interactive Iraq: 4 Years Later
The conflict wears on as the nation struggles to rebuild.
Interactive Battle For Iraq
The government, the insurgency, key players, background and photos.
Interactive American Heroes
Profiles of U.S. soldiers who've died in Iraq, a look at the war's toll and pictures of mourning.

(CBS)
But you don’t get that from everyone. Another vet, Tomas Young, told 60 Minutes that he wants to keep more soldiers from getting wounded in the first place. Tomas became an anti-war activist after he was paralyzed in Iraq. He was shot while riding through Baghdad in the back of a truck.

"I was shot underneath the left collarbone," he explains. "The bullet exited and severed my spinal cord at about the chest high level."

Asked what it felt like, Tomas says, "I remember going completely numb and dropping my M16. I could remember seeing myself trying to move my hands. But at that at that moment in time, I couldn’t move anything. I was just in shock. Then I figured I was probably going to be paralyzed. I spent the next few seconds trying to yell for anybody that was within earshot to take me out."

When he said "take me out," Tomas says he meant to end his life. "Make it to where I wasn’t 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."

Tomas says he is paralyzed from the nipple level down, but that he can move his arms completely fine.

Is he glad he is still alive?

"My body’s not the most cooperative thing in the world to me anymore," he says. "But for the most part, yes, I’m glad I’m still alive. I have people around me who make me glad to be alive."

His wife, Brie, is especially glad Tomas is alive. The couple married after Tomas was paralyzed.

Asked why he joined the Army, Tomas says, "I called my recruiter on Sept. 13, 2001. Because I saw our president standing on the rubble of the World Trade Center with a megaphone saying that we were going to find the people that did it and smoke them out of their caves and all that rah rah. And so I wanted to go to Afghanistan to seek some form of retribution on the people that did this to us."

But instead of Afghanistan, he found himself in Iraq, which he considers the wrong war in the wrong place.

"I just don't think this war was necessary," he says.

Tomas also says speaking out against the war "helps to give me an outlet to get that the anger I feel from the war out."

He rejects the allegation that he is undermining our troops by criticizing the war.

"I have a brother who's over there right now," says Tomas. "It bothers me to think that people, I guess, try to undermine my patriotism and what not when I have a brother who’s over there that I really don't want to see anything bad happen to."

"Had you not been shot, paralyzed, is it conceivable do you think that you wouldn’t have been speaking out against the war?" Wallace asks.

From his wheelchair, Tomas replies, “I have friends who died unnecessarily. In this war. So I would still speak out, although I probably wouldn't have as firm a leg to stand on, or a chair to sit in, if I hadn’t been shot."

Continued