Taking a truly honest look at a brutally honest hero
E.J. Montini
Republic columnist
Mar. 26, 2007 11:21 PM
To know the man that Pat Tillman became, you had to have known the boy that he was. And no one knew him better than his mom. That's why Mary Tillman was telling me the story about her son and the homemade cookies.
This was a few years ago. Already the Army had conducted a couple of investigations into Tillman's death by "friendly" fire in Afghanistan, though never adequately (at least to Tillman's family) explaining the lies that followed. I asked Mary why the family persisted in trying to get the unvarnished truth.
"It's like when Pat was a kid and I'd make cookies," she said. "He was a very big-hearted person. And honest to a fault. When he was little, he wouldn't even steal a cookie. He just harassed me into giving him one.
"I used to think, let me be the good parent. Just steal the cookie. But . . . "
Honesty is not always understood or appreciated. It can be confused with arrogance and insensitivity. Tillman didn't let that stop him, however. And neither has his family.
"They (the military) could have told us upfront that they were suspicious that it was fratricide, but they didn't," Mary told me. "They wanted to use him for their purposes. It was good for the administration. It was before the elections. It was during the prison scandal. They needed something that looked good, and it was appalling that they would use him like that."
It's not as if the administration didn't know who Tillman was. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote a letter to the former pro football player after he enlisted, congratulating Tillman on his patriotic spirit.
"Pat was just a delightful human being, and it is such a tremendous loss," Mary said during one of the several interviews we've done over the years. "We're not trying to get him special attention. But the fact that this happened to him indicates that it's happening to others. What's disturbing is that they made Pat's actions suspect. They didn't look into what he really did, which was equally heroic. It makes my heart break because he was such an honest person and he was doing things for such noble reasons."
Back in 2005, I asked the Army if it would alter the wording in the Silver Star award presented to Tillman, which said that he "put himself in the line of devastating enemy fire" and was killed. I was told at the time that no changes to the citation were planned and that the award would not be rescinded.
At Monday's news conference, the Defense Department's acting inspector general said, "We concluded that responsible officials failed to comply with Army military award regulations when they submitted a Silver Star recommendation that included inaccurate information and a misleading citation that implied that Corporal Tillman died by enemy fire."
When I asked Tillman's mom about the citation two years ago, she said, "For anybody who knows Pat, this has been heartbreaking. He was an extremely honest person. I don't think the kid ever lied. He would have wanted all the truth to come out. The bad and the good. He deserves that much."
I don't know that we'll ever get a satisfactory explanation for what happened after Pat Tillman died, but I suspect that his brother, Kevin, summed it up in an essay he submitted last October to the online Web site called Truthdig.com. He wrote, in part:
"Somehow lying is tolerated. Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense. Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world. Somehow a narrative is more important than reality."