Brother of Pat Tillman accuses military of deception

Seattle Times | Apr 25, 2007

The brother of Pat Tillman bitterly accused the U.S. military Tuesday of deceiving the public and the family of the football-star-turned-Army-ranger to promote a story of heroism that suited its purposes.

Kevin Tillman, who served in the same platoon in Afghanistan as his brother and was nearby when he was killed, told a House committee that the military was going through a particularly rough patch when Pat Tillman died in a “friendly-fire” incident on April 22, 2004.

“Revealing that Pat’s death was a fratricide would have been yet another political disaster in a month of political disasters,” said Kevin Tillman, who gave up a minor-league baseball career to enlist with his older brother in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. “So the truth needed to be suppressed.”

Tillman added, “The least this country can do for him in return is to uncover who was responsible for his death, who lied and covered it up, and who instigated those lies and benefited from them; then ensure that justice is meted out to the culpable.”

The Army portrayed the specialist’s killing as the result of a heroic firefight with enemy fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan, and the Silver Star was awarded to Pat Tillman, 27. But it turned out Army officials had been aware almost immediately that Tillman was probably killed by fellow U.S. soldiers.

Kevin Tillman, who has since left the Army, spoke at a hearing that dealt a double blow to the U.S. military’s public-relations machinery.

Jessica Lynch, an Army private who was captured in Iraq soon after the 2003 invasion, also testified about the early accounts depicting her as a “girl Rambo from the hills of West Virginia” who had emptied her gun as enemy soldiers closed in. In fact, she was captured without firing a shot.

Every war has its stories of heroism, and those of Tillman and Lynch have perhaps been the two most dramatic tales of the current campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. They were told and re-told as examples of the bravery and resourcefulness of ordinary Americans in the face of a callous enemy.

In both cases, the early official accounts have long been challenged as additional facts have come out bit by bit. But the sight of those directly involved, speaking with anger and puzzlement about the inaccuracies of those stories, helped demolish them in a particularly human way.

“The bottom line,” Lynch said, “is the American people are capable of determining their own ideals of heroes and they don’t need to be told elaborate lies.”