This Is the ‘Thanks’ They Get

“Something happened out there” in the desert, Sen. Donald Riegle (D-Mich.) told U.S. senators at a hearing. One-hundred thousand veterans were sick and some were dying.

I didn’t believe him at the time--and I wasn’t alone. No one was writing about it, no one was admitting it. We’d won the Gulf War in 1991. We’d stuck it to Saddam Hussein. Hoo-ahhh. That was that. Enough said. End of story.

For me it turned out to be the beginning of the story of “Thanks of a Grateful Nation.” More than three years and 200 interviews and a series of truculent Pentagon admissions later, the numbers have been verified and the movie is at last complete.

Along its bumpy journey, you could make a pretty good comedy with the headlines that have eeked their way out, first in smaller papers in Alabama and Connecticut, and finally in the New York Times and Washington Post: Pentagon Denies Chemical Exposure, Pentagon Admits 1,500, Pentagon Admits 5,000, Pentagon Revises Number to 20,000, Pentagon Indicates Now 100,000 Troops Were Exposed . . .

Or how about chemical alarms going off? Apparently 1.7 million did, according to expert testimony, and all were false, according to the Department of Defense.

Already people are asking me how I concocted such stuff, or whether I intentionally portrayed the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs as villains. The answer is: Not at all. I simply copied transcripts of congressional hearings and transferred quotes from interviews and placed them into actors’ mouths. I let them paint themselves. My real journey was to dig after what happened and why, and into the scorched lives of the veterans.

I have written a great deal about Vietnam: a miniseries (“A Rumor of War”), a series (“China Beach”), a novel (to be published by Random House). We all have our haunted places, and the last thing I wanted or thought could catch me up was another war.

Vietnam was our longest war (1965 to 1972, or 1945 to 1975, depending on how you’re counting). Desert Storm was our shortest war (100 hours or 100 days, depending)--perhaps partly because of the way Vietnam haunted us. In such a short time span, in such a simple victory, how many stories could there be to tell?

What I had learned before but had to learn again is that ... there is war and there is aftermath.

I have a friend whose father recently broke silence about his experience in World War II. At the family dinner table, without warning, he started talking about his GI buddy laughing next to him one minute and blown to pieces the next. For 55 years it has been festering inside, and for 55 years the man’s been trying to make sense of it and can’t, and probably never will.

In some ways we can understand this trauma. The inexplicable, horrible lottery of war. But what did the vets in Desert Storm suffer? Maybe some wind and sand burn, an oil fire or two. Very few sucking chest wounds. And, really, no buddies standing whole one minute, smithereens the next.

Besides, what do all of us do, especially vets? We bitch.

The nasty reality that’s leaking out is: No matter how short or sweet or clean or fine a war, there are consequences. After their wildly victorious homecoming, a neurological holocaust has ensued. As minor as oozing sores, sleeplessness or endless fatigue. As wracking or fatal as tumors or cancer or ALS, Lou Gerhig’s disease.

In our time, it turns out, we can injure, maim or kill not just with a smoking gun or a dropped bomb. The human immune system can be set awry in ways that we are just beginning to fathom and can’t yet defend against, and that we may never be able to set aside.

Worse, in our present rampant economic heyday, this era of faux feeling, who wants to hear such stuff? “Messages are for Western Union.” Pick the exact phrasing you like and give credit to whom you care to (Humphrey Bogart, Jack Warner or Samuel Goldwyn)--it’s never been more true.

When you write for movies or television, the paramount goal is to “open,” or “get numbers.” Within these knotty restrictions--what’s becoming the eye of a needle--you try to tell a story, entertain, bat about some juicy characters, motor into some unexplored emotional territory, stealthily drop in some food for thought. “Bring to the surface,” Pauline Kael wrote, what “in newest forms or fashions is just below the surface.”

There is an extraordinary tradition of films that find a way to possess their times, or newly capture a piece of history. Many are serious works like “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “On the Waterfront,” “All the President’s Men” and “The Killing Fields” in movies; “The Missiles of October,” “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and “Playing for Time” in TV. Others are comic: “Dr. Strangelove” or “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom.” Together, they form some of the strongest and most lasting work in both mediums.

But the rules and regulations are changing. The lines between fact and fiction are collapsing. The melodrama of reality pales novels and the possible deeper propinquity of drama. In our fast-food, pentium-chip, sound bite, Jerry Springer, Andy Warhol world, we could well guillotine such a tradition. What a loss it would be.

For such television and movies can give voice to those who haven’t one, and help us make sense of what is little known and well worth discovering. Inform and incite us, shake up our systems, show us where we are and, for me in the case of “Thanks of a Grateful Nation,” make clear that something did happen out there--and that, even more than in the war itself, amid the casualties of the consequences, there is a remarkable, struggling heroism in the everyday lives of many of those who served.

John Sacret Young is the writer and an executive producer of “Thanks of a Grateful Nation,” which premieres Sunday at 8 p.m. on Showtime. It stars Ted Danson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Marg Helgenberger, Steven Weber, Brian Dennehy and Matt Keeslar.