Bryan O’Neal has spent two decades grinding his way up the U.S. Army ranks, from lowly private to command sergeant major — the highest rank for a non-commissioned officer. He could write a textbook on modern warfare history — and his own unique place in it — but much of what he’s seen and done could be hard for anyone to hear. Significant numbers of the men and women under his command weren’t even born until after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that inspired him to enlist.
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In the spring of 2004, perhaps the last thing President George W. Bush’s administration needed was another war-related PR problem. No one could find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which the administration had used to build a case for war. Less than a month before Tillman’s death, four contractors for the Blackwater private security firm in Iraq were ambushed and dragged through the streets, and their corpses were hung from a bridge. In April came shocking images of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison.
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The NFL, The Military, And The Hijacking of Pat Tillman’s Story
Tillman enlisted expecting to join the fight against Al Qaeda and the effort to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. Instead, he was sent to Iraq. All available evidence indicates that Tillman loathed the Iraq War. A voracious reader who consumed many of the world’s great religious texts even though he considered himself an atheist, Tillman was a student of history and formed his own opinions. Shortly after arriving in the country, he confided in his brother and their friend, Russell Baer, that he thought the invasion and occupation were “fucking illegal.” He had loose plans to meet with Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist and antiwar intellectual Noam Chomsky once he got out of the military. Still, as much as Tillman resented the Bush administration’s war of aggression, he refused to walk away from the military until his commitments were met, even after conversations between the NFL and the Defense Department presented an opportunity to do so.
Early on in their deployment, Tillman and his brother were called upon to join a quick reaction force providing back-up for the rescue of Jessica Lynch. The 19-year-old private’s capture and rescue was one of the most famous and widely reported stories of the early stages of the Iraq War. It was also an egregious exercise in official lies and government propaganda. In an account fed to the Washington Post and regurgitated far and wide, the American public was told that Lynch engaged in a “fight to the death” with Iraqi forces before being overrun and thrown into the darkest depths of Iraqi captivity. While it was true that Iraqi forces ambushed the convoy Lynch was part of, and that 11 American troops lost their lives, many of the events described in the sensational account did not actually transpire. Iraqis on the ground had in fact worked, at great personal risk, to return the young private back to the Americans once she was taken captive. And while she had indeed suffered substantial physical and emotional trauma as a result of the ordeal, Lynch herself blasted the fabrications about her experience in testimony before Congress in 2007. “I’m still confused as to why they chose to lie and try to make me a legend, when the real heroics of my fellow soldiers that day were legendary,” she said.
Inside Pat Tillman’s Life, and the Bush Administration’s Cover-Up of His Death
Perhaps the most incredible aspect of the book is its extensive excerpting from Tillman’s diaries, granted to Krakauer by his widow Marie, and stories about his time deployed overseas, where he read The Odyssey and “Self-Reliance,” and was shocked by the youth and immaturity of his co-enlistees. Tillman expresses his doubt about the Iraq War from its onset: “It may be very soon that Nub [his brother Kevin] & I will be called upon to take part in something I see no clear purpose for… I believe we have little or no justification other than our imperial whim,” he wrote. On another occasion, he calls Bush a “cowboy.”
His other entries are eerily wise: Of Jessica Lynch, whose staged rescue he and his brother provided support for on their first tour of duty, he wrote, “As awful as I feel for the fear she must face, and admire the courage I’m sure she is showing, I do believe this to be a big Public Relations stunt…” He had faced an essential truth about the Lynch incident that it would take months for the American media to sort out. Of his brother Kevin in Iraq, he said “If anything happens to Kevin, and my fears of our intent in this country prove true, I will never forgive the world.” Of course, the inverse ended up being true, with Kevin the surviving, disillusioned sibling. On his own account, Tillman confided in a friend his fear that if he were killed the army would parade him in the streets.
This ended up being the most prescient of all. After being sent to Afghanistan, Tillman was shot in the head by a machine-gunner from his own unit, which had been split up to make time. His shooter thought he was the enemy and his unit sprayed bullets wildly across the slope where Tillman was perched (one of his comrades recalls him yelling I’m “Pat fucking Tillman!” shortly before his death). His uniform and most tragically his notebook, where Krakauer tells us he’d scribbled thoughts on gender in Afghanistan, were put into a trash bag and burned, a blatant violation of protocol. And that was only the beginning of the secrecy. Even the book’s less enthusiastic critics agree that with the evidence Krakauer’s amassed and compiled, there’s no way to deny the most horrible aspects of the cover-up, including orders to Tillman’s comrades telling them to lie to his family at the funeral and another official cruelly explaining away the family’s pursuit of the truth as a folly attributable to their atheism. Krakauer demonstrates that the willful deception went all the way up to the White House, when an email from an army official exhorted President Bush not to mention the manner of Tillman’s death, lest it prove “embarassing” should the incident prove to be friendly fire (something the official already knew). This deceit, Krakauer notes, led one Tillman friend to leave the army and another to go AWOL, losing their faith in the institution they’d signed up for.
Review of Matters Related to the Death of Corporal Patrick Tillman, U.S. Army (PDF)
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