The Tragic and Unsolved Killing of Army Ranger Pat Tillman

The thing I remember most about Pat Tillman is that he was a great football player. After graduating from the University of Arizona, Tillman played four seasons in his adopted home state with the NFL's Arizona Cardinals. Tillman dominated as a college player, and he excelled as a pro. In his second pro season, Sports Illustrated named Tillman to its All-Pro defensive team.

The second thing I remember about Tillman is that he was loyal. After his brilliant 2000 season, the Bears offered him $9 million to leave the Cardinals, but Tillman turned them down, and has been cited as saying that he did so because his loyalty lay with Arizona.

Tillman was still an NFL defensive back when the planes hit the buildings on September 11, 2001. In fact, at the time, the Cardinals had offered Pat a three year contract that would have paid him close to $4 million. But after witnessing the 9/11 carnage, Tillman felt that he had another calling. A self-professed patriot (and a world class bad-ass), he turned down the lucrative football contract and signed up as an enlisted man with the U.S. Army.

After he completed basic training, Tillman underwent specialized training with the Army Rangers, a group of elite fighting men renowned for their physical and mental toughness, incredible conditioning, and most of all, their unique survival skills. As he had done in football, and in school (Pat graduated Arizona in 3 years with a 3.84 GPA), Tillman excelled as an Army Ranger.

After finishing his Ranger training, Tillman and his brother Kevin (who had followed Pat into the Army and then to the Rangers) were flown off to Iraq. They were deployed during the original 2003 invasion.

By all accounts, Tillman's military performance in Iraq was first class. But there is growing evidence that, as he observed more and learned further about his bosses' motives and plan for invading Iraq, he grew suspicious about the war's legality. In a September, 2005 article about Tillman's behavior during that summer of 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle confirmed that Pat's mother had scheduled a meeting between her son and famed anti-war intellectual Noam Chomsky, which was to occur soon after Pat returned from duty. The Chronicle further reported that Tillman had been critical of the war and the president, and had urged some of his fellow soldiers to vote against Bush in the coming 2004 election.

No one is sure what Tillman intended to discuss with Chomsky, and although Chomsky has confirmed that the meeting was going to take place upon Pat's arrival back home, he won't say what the two were going to talk about (although one thinks it probably wasn't the finer points of covering NFL wide receivers).

But the meeting never took place because Pat Tilman never made it back home.

When the Taliban began its resurgence in early 2004, the Army transferred many elite soldiers back to Afghanistan. Pat and Kevin Tillman were two such men. Tillman had only been in Afghanistan briefly, however, when on April 22, 2004, he was killed in what the Pentagon first reported was a "firefight with the enemy."

Tillman's loss put a public face on troop deaths. Here was a guy who had given his all for his country. For a week or more, the Army and the White House held Tillman out as the perfect war hero, and wept in public as the family mourned its loss and laid him to rest.

It was a moving memorial to a fallen hero, and it made some Americans (especially the fans who had seen him play) stop and think about what it means to be a good American.

There was, however, only one problem with the whole scenario. It was a lie.

Tillman was not killed by the Taliban, or Al Qaeda, or any other alleged enemy combatant of the United States. Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire, and high-ranking members of the Military and Executive Branch knew that fact by the day after he'd been killed. But they didn't tell the Tillman family, and they didn't tell the American people, until 36 days later that U.S. bullets had killed Pat Tillman.

Some reasons for that delay have been made public and will be set forth below. The possible motives for the delay (and indeed perhaps the kiilling itself) are matters that are currently being investigated by the United States Congress.

Immediately after Tillman's death, the local army base dispatched Captain Richard Scott to investigate how and why Tillman had been killed. In the ten days immediately following Tillman's killing, Scott spoke with the men who had been present when the killing occurred, and also spoke with the doctors who had examined Tillman immediately after his death.

His fellow soldiers claimed that one of their own had shot Tillman. They said that they had mistakenly believed that their convoy was under attack because a roadside bomb had detonated and caused a great deal of chaos, which led to shooting and the death of Tillman. They said it was an accident. The soldiers also said that Pat had been shot from 70 yards away during much confusion and was thus mistaken for the enemy.

The doctors who examined Tillman immediately after he'd been killed disagreed. They told Scott that they believed Tillman had been killed with "criminal intent" -- that he had been shot on purpose. Not accidentally. They noted that Tillman's mortal wounds were three closely and evenly spaced bullets through the forehead. The doctors told Scott that such wounds must have come from as close as 10 yards away, not 70 yards. They also said that such precise "kill" shots could not have been fired in a state of confusion as had been described by the soldiers.

When Scott submitted this report to his commanding officer, he was taken off the case. The report was destroyed. Two days later, Tillman's uniform and personal belongings, which contained a personal diary, were burned by some members of his unit. This is very unusual in such cases; investigators like to hold all a soldier's personals as evidence until the case is closed. This case was far from closed.

That's right. While the Army and the White House wept publicly for Tillman, they were aware that their underlings were destroying the earliest and most comprehensive report of his death, burning his uniform and burning his diary, and denying the real manner in which the soldier had met his fate. (The only reason the very existence of Scott's report became known was because Scott met and talked with Kevin Tillman about its contents several months later)

I'm not making this stuff up. It's all in Army and Congressional records which have been made available to the public (thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit; the Connecticut Cowboy's minions wouldn't release it voluntarily).

With the Scott Report now out of the way, the Army appointed a new investigator, Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, who quickly concluded that although Tillman was killed by friendly fire, his death was the result of the confusion of his mates caused by the "fog of war." When Captain Scott read the Kauzlarich report, he said that several key witnesses had changed their testimony dramatically from the time when they had originally talked with him.

As the Tillman family learned more (and suspected more) about their son's killing, they began to publicly question the accuracy of the report and hired their own investigator to look into the matter, Brigadier General James Jones.

Kauzlarich responded to the Tillmans suspicions about his report with a comment that is pretty fucking disturbing. Attacking what has been referred to as Tillman's alleged atheism, he said:

"When you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don't believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt. So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more - that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don't know how an atheist thinks. I can only imagine that that would be pretty tough."

What atheism has to do with a suspicious assassination-like killing in the complete absence of enemy soldier is anyone's guess. Although one could conclude that Kauzlarich was esentially saying: Sit Down, Shut Up and Be proud that your son is in a better place."

General Jones, the investigator hired by the family, prepared a 2,000 page report of his investigation. Most of the document, however, has been so heavily redacted ("blacked out") by the Army that it is almost impossible to glean any new information from it.

By March of 2007, Tillman's family was so dissatisfied with the Army's continuously-changing story about her son's death, that they demanded Congress hold hearings on the matter.

Amidst all of the confusion now surrounding Tillman, Congress conducted hearings in April, 2007 to investigate his killing. On April 25, 2007, Army Specialist Bryan O'Neal, who was the last man to see Pat Tillman alive, came forward and divulged that the Army had forbidden him from discussing what he had seen in Pat's last minutes on earth. When the last soldier to see Pat alive spoke out on April 25, 2007, he said:

"I wanted right off the bat to let the family know what had happened, especially Kevin, because I worked with him in a platoon and I knew that he and the family all needed to know what had happened," O'Neal testified. "I was quite appalled that when I was actually able to speak with Kevin, I was ordered not to tell him."

Asked who gave him the order, O'Neal replied that it came from his battalion commander, then-Lt. Col. Jeff Bailey. "He basically just said ... 'Do not let Kevin know."

Also speaking at the hearing was Pete Geren, acting Secretary of the Army, who acknowledged that, yes, the Army had stalled in coming forward with the true cause of Tillman's death. He stated: "We as an Army failed in our duty to the Tillman family, the duty we owe to all the families of our fallen soldiers: Give them the truth, the best we know it, as fast as we can."

After the hearings, the Congressional committee in charge moved to conduct a more thorough inquest into the death of Pat Tillman that would include a look at the possibility that his killing was not accidental.

The investigation is still under way.

Friendly Fire, that cruelest of oxymorons, is a fact of warfare. It's a tragedy. Not only is the victim killed by one of his own men, but the shooter must live with that awful knowledge for the rest of his days. I shudder at the thought. For that reason alone, one should be very slow to claim that a case of friendly fire was anything more than a tragic accident.

But this case is different. There are already too many things don't make sense about any of the official Army versions of what happened that day. There is too much inconsistency between the eyewitness testimony and the physical evidence. There is also all of this cloak and dagger shit going on within the Army's investigative branch. There are those three little holes, spaced evenly on the forehead. There is also the fact that Tillman was the only soldier killed amidst all of the "confusion."

In fact, he was the only soldier killed that month in Afghanistan.

There was his celebrity and his high-profile image as an American Hero. But there was the alleged anti-Bush speech and the planned meeting with peacemonger Chomsky on the horizon. Could this war machine have tolerated its most visible recruiting tool coming home and protesting the invasion of Iraq?

Just some questions that I have. Let's hope Congress makes a real effort with its ongoing investigation into the death of Pat Tillman. Let's hope. I might even pray.

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