The Tillman Story

Movie Review: The Tillman Story

Remember Pat Tillman? He was the NFL star for the Arizona Cardinals who gave up a $3.6 million contract and enlisted in the Army after 9/11 and served in Iraq, and later Afghanistan. Tillman was killed by fellow troops in a canyon in Afghanistan in 2004, although we only know that fact after an investigation debunked an official military report that Tillman had been shot in an enemy ambush. Before the truth caused a major embarrassment for the military, Tillman was awarded a posthumous Silver Star, and celebrated publicly by no less than George W. Bush.

When Tillmans family demanded that the truth be told and the government be held accountable for what actually happened, it was, as they say, Charlie Foxtrot. The story has been the gift that keeps on giving.

Amir Bar-Levs documentary, The Tillman Story, (which premiered at Sundance in January) takes us back to those days when the hardworking over-achieving Tillman chose service over sports and became the poster boy for self-sacrifice in a war fought by a tiny fraction of the US population. He was even more of a poster boy once he was dead, hence the official government story. He was the hero on which you could build a war. Or so some thought.

Beyond the fury of Tillmans family and the flight from accountability of generals who develop amnesia when asked questions by a congressional committee investigating the killing, the film shows us that camera-ready Pat Tillman was not the hero that the Army thought it had.

Tillman was raised by atheist counter-cultural parents in California – not a culture in which orders are obeyed without question. Tillman also saw through the “rescue” of Private Jessica Lynch in Iraq, a staged operation in which an injured soldier being treated in an Iraqi hospital was “freed” as the cameras rolled to fuel a national pep rally for the war.  It was war as a photo-op for the home front.

There have been two books on the Tillman case – “Boots on the Ground by Dawn,” by his mother, Dannie Tillman, who spent years prying the truth out of the military (see her interview on C-Span) and “Where Men Win Glory,” by Jon Krakauer, who contrasted the Tillman familys brash candor with an official cover-up that was inept, but successful enough to enable most of those at high levels to walk away with their careers intact.

The family got far enough to put military leaders under oath, but not to close the deal and hold then responsible. A lower-level general is hung out to dry. Sounds a lot like Abu Ghraib. Denial is persistent when the truth is inconvenient.

Pat Tillman wasnt the hero the Army needed. He was too much of a free-thinker. His entire family used obscenities instead of pieties. The approach didnt always work. Just before he was shot, Tillman shouted to the soldiers firing at him, “Im fucking Pat Tillman.” (That was bar-Levs original title for the film.) At Pats memorial service, Tillmans brother tells the crowd honoring the non-believer that “hes fucking dead.” In the documentary, his father closes an angry letter to the Army with “Fuck You and Yours.” Are we seeing the emergence of a new genre, the “fuck-you-mentary”?

The soldiers who shot Tillman, also enlistees, certainly werent the heroes that the Army wants for recruiting posters. Some of them told investigators they just wanted to be in a firefight. The author and special ops veteran Stan Goff reminds us not to expect too much from 19-year olds.  And were asking them to save the world.

Pat Tillmans death was a tragedy. Hes the least of the militarys problems now, as generals and officials scramble to put an encouraging face on the US war in Afghanistan. Just last week, on Charlie Rose, Richard Holbrooke (the State Dept. official in charge of Afghanistan) told the ever-obliging Rose that things were improving there. “Ive seen the intelligence,” said Holbrooke, the man mocked by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the recently booted military commander there. “Give War a Chance” once again. It could have been a trailer for The Tillman Story.

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