The Pat Tillman Story: Same As It Ever Was

The Pentagon has now launched a criminal probe into the friendly fire incident that killed Pat Tillman, and the sense is this has become something ugly. I even saw one newspaper headline that read, “Deception turns Tillman’s death into sad mockery.”
Sure, it’s aggravating reading about the parents’ additional pain as the military tried to capitalize on a fabricated story for PR reasons, but I don’t think anything has changed about the essential facts: The guy had it made with an NFL career that was paying him millions, when he heard the call of duty to his country, and ended up getting killed on foreign soil for us. That’s still the real story of what happened here and it isn’t diminished one bit by the actions of others.
I felt the same way about Jessica Lynch. Sure, it was annoying that the military fabricated details of her capture and subsequent rescue, but does it change the fact that she was over there, hurt badly, and then captured by the enemy? The detail that crystallized it for me was when the stories came out that the hospital they were holding her in, wasn’t really a dangerous location when the helicopter went to pick her up. Listen, if you’re flying in a war zone in a helicopter, it doesn’t need anything else to make it dangerous, and certainly the dramatized reports of the rescue, could do nothing to amplify that essential point.
That was what was so galling about the Bush administration's attack on John Kerry – the so called “swift-boating.” Here we had a bunch of officials from Washington, D.C. talking tough, when they had gone out of their way to avoid Vietnam. You had President Bush putting on the jumpsuit and landing on the aircraft carrier off the coast of California, yet, the Bush team of chicken hawks had the nerve to challenge John Kerry’s service in Vietnam. The man still has shrapnel in his leg.
If you believe the troops in Iraq are heroes just for being there, how did the sleaze balls in the Bush campaign, turn the fact that John Kerry was in Vietnam against him? It was one of the more despicable acts of a long list of Bush smears, including another disgusting smearing of a Vietnam-era soldier named John McCain. Before it was over Kerry’s service to his country was portrayed as a negative. He was in Vietnam, wasn’t he? He did go up rivers in a swift boat during a war, didn’t he? That’s good enough for me.
You occasionally here the Sean Hannity set try and attack critics of the Iraq War on the basis of the soldiers: Are we saying their service is diminished because the war was for the wrong reasons? Once again this sleazy, right-wing spin machine tries to deflect criticism of President Bush, by hiding behind the troops.
The answer is no – and the Pat Tillman story becomes a microcosm of this bigger concept. Nothing about what Tillman did in Afghanistan is diminished by the ugly behavior of those around him. The fact that there is a criminal probe into the circumstances of his death, doesn’t taint his individual story one bit, just as a criminal probe into what Bush and Cheney did to sell the Iraq war, wouldn’t take away from the contributions of our servicemen and women there. Pat Tillman’s death wasn’t a sad mockery of anything. And just because George W. Bush is a sad mockery of what a President should be, it doesn’t change the sacrifice of our soldiers in Iraq.
Look at it this way: Pat Tillman saved another person’s life by joining up. Somewhere in America there could be another grieving family of another dead soldier, but Pat Tillman volunteered to take that young man’s place himself.