Michael Moore is a selfish pig.

G.I. pans '9/11' role

Hurt in Iraq accident, he rips cameo in flick

BY RICHARD SISK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU


Sgt. Peter Damon at mother's house in Brockton, Mass. Damon is angry about his involuntary appearance in "Fahrenheit 9/11."

WASHINGTON - Sgt. Peter Damon, who lost his right arm and left hand in Iraq, never set out to be a bit player in presidential politics and is furious at Michael Moore for making him one in "Fahrenheit 9/11."
"It ticked me off," Damon said of the 10-second clip in the Bush-bashing documentary that shows him being treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

"I just feel it was wrong and I was violated in some way, seeing myself up there on the screen," said Damon, 31, of Brockton, Mass.

"I think [Moore] should be ashamed of himself," added Damon, who was severely injured in October in Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, when a tire on a Black Hawk helicopter exploded as he was changing it. The blast killed Pfc. Paul Bueche, 19, of Daphne, Ala.

Damon said he has no regrets about his service with the Army National Guard or doubts about the U.S. mission in Iraq and resents his unwanted link with a film offering a contrary view.

"I'd like to go to the Republican National Convention and speak out about it," Damon said. "I agree with the President 100%. A lot of the guys down at Walter Reed feel the same way."

Moore's camp denied any intention to demean the service of U.S. troops through the film, which has become fodder for both sides in the race between President Bush and Democratic nominee John Kerry.

Joanne Doroshow, associate producer of "Fahrenheit," said, "Anybody who has seen the film knows we have nothing but the deepest respect for the soldiers who were wounded. One of the purposes of the movie was to examine the impossible situation they were put into and to raise questions about why they were sent there."

The brief video clip of Damon used by Moore was licensed from an NBC News segment that focused on the treatment of amputees at Walter Reed using a new regimen to block the excruciating "phantom pain" of limb loss, in which the patient still feels the pain of the missing limb.

Lt. Col. Chester Buckenmaier, the anesthesiologist who treated Damon at the 21st Combat Support Hospital in Iraq and later at Walter Reed, said he also was angered at the Moore film after he took Damon to see it in Bethesda, Md.

"I was appalled. This was Joseph Goebbels-type propaganda," Buckenmaier said, referring to the Nazi propaganda chief.

Moore took "a very positive thing we're doing for soldiers" who lost limbs and "used it to tell a lie," Buckenmaier said.

Lila Lipscomb, whose own appearances in the documentary are the emotional apex of "Fahrenheit 9/11," said she sympathized with Damon's distress, but disagreed with him on Moore's motives.

"Personally, I think it brings tremendous awareness to the world on what our soldiers have gone through," said Lipscomb, 50, of Flint, Mich., who lost her son, Sgt. Michael Pedersen, a 26-year-old Black Hawk crew chief, in Iraq.

"I don't see it as demeaning in any way," she added.

Her son was a seasoned soldier, Lipscomb said, who "knew what was going on and did not understand why we had to go." Her son told her before he left for Iraq, "'There's no reason for us to go over there,' but he knew his responsibilities and what he had to do," she said.

Both Damon and Buckenmaier said they were most incensed at what they felt was the depiction of soldiers as naive, underclass "children" forced to pay in blood for the geostrategic whims of callous politicians.

"The whole movie makes soldiers look like a bunch of idiots," Damon said. "I'm not a child. We sent ourselves over there" as volunteers for a cause, he said. "It was all our own doing. I don't appreciate him calling us children."

So! Welcome to the mythical "lively debate". (It apparently isn't rocket "science" either.) But "Hey!" as they say.
Let's see: by now Little Mikey Moore is wrapping up his latest fictional film entitled: " Hurricane Charley:Cheap Republican Trick".