Recovering from a debilitating cold yesterday I read the last two hundred pages of Jon Krakauer’s highly contextual biography of Pat Tillman, Where Men Win Glory. Reading Krakauer’s crisp, intelligent prose I found myself reliving some of the horrors of the eight years that unspooled after Al Gore took the high road and stepped aside after the one-off, party-line Bush v. Gore decision stated that as the recount it stopped on December 9 could not now be concluded before the rarely observed certification deadline of December 12, that Bush, leading by 154 votes and falling, was the winner of Florida’s 25 electoral votes and the presidency.
Some may take offense at my characterizing those eight years as filled with horrors. “Horrors,” they will say, “caused by Islamic fascists who still want to kill us. That’s why we can’t have a president who is weak on terror, or hesitates to use torture, or wants to tax job creators, or forces people to have medical insurance.”
I was thinking about the shadowy nature of what we call history the other day. I’d received a series of emails directing me to a debate between rival conservative historians about whether or not Jefferson believed in Christ or accepted the Gospels, or possibly even had a child by a slave.
As to the child by a slave, one wrote that this was a lie. He cited the so-called DNA evidence of 1998 and how the dramatic claim had been trumpeted, then quietly retracted, as Bill Clinton feebly tried to use it as a defense against the serious charge that he’d lied about getting a blowjob. I offer a footnote on dat in the next post, along with what the conservative historian himself had to say (as represented on Pat Robertson’s website).
The Bush administration invaded Iraq and redefined torture to make it permissible against those suspected of perpetrating evil a) out of a sincere patriotic belief it was doing God’s work; b) for cynical and miscalculated geopolitical and financial reasons; c) for brilliant and lucrative geopolitical and financial reasons; d) because they honestly despised the idea of “International Law”; e) in defense of our freedom; f) to fight them over there so we wouldn’t have to fight them here; g) to secure cheap oil so the war would pay for itself; h) to weaken Iran and intimidate the rest of the Axis of Evil; i) because we can; and so forth down the alphabet.
If people have such divergent views of the present and recent past, how can we expect history to emerge with clarity unclouded by partisanship? Particularly as we live in a world where perception managers are paid top dollar to make sure that what we perceive is what is most helpful to their paymasters’ cause.
Pat Tillman emerges in Krakauer’s important book as a remarkable, likable, very intelligent man. Full of passion, and ruled by loyalty, he turned down a contract worth almost ten million dollars to stay with a last place team, the only NFL team to see his potential and draft him, close to the end of the final round. His agent (who stood to make a lot of money) was flabbergasted, telling Tillman he’d be offered the league minimum of $512,000 by Arizona. Tillman told him he was staying with Arizona, the only professional team who showed faith in him in the draft, and signed a contract for $512,000.
When Wahabi suicide bombers killed thousands on September 11th, Pat Tillman was stunned, like most Americans. Unlike most Americans he thought long and hard about the best way to serve his country, turned down the $3.6 million contract Arizona was now offering him, and signed up for a three year hitch as an Army Ranger. In this elite unit he figured to be in on the hunt for Bin Laden and other fanatics. Motivated by doing the right thing, he and his brother Kevin, who enlisted with him, soon found themselves in an untenable situation.
The Tillmans’ were among the first boots on the ground in Kuwait before the invasion of Iraq. Pat knew at once the Iraq war was a cynically launched illegal war that would have disastrous effects. Krakauer includes a few gloating remarks Bin Laden made about this American blunder, which clearly delighted the murderous jihadist. It was exactly the trap Bin Laden had hoped to lure the Americans into.
On the third day of the Iraq war, when Americans were unaccountably not welcomed with flowers and candy in a Shiite area President G.H.W. Bush had encouraged to rebel against Saddam, and then promptly abandoned to their fate, an erroneously called in air strike killed 17 Americans pinned down in Nasiriyah. This “friendly fire” fratricide was quickly covered up by Bush Administration perception managers who recognized it for the public relations disaster it would have been. A story was concocted about the heroism of a private named Jessica Lynch, captured earlier in the day of the fratricide, and the war machine went marching on in sure-footed spin control mode.
Tillman was among the 1,000 American soldiers mobilized for the rescue of Jessica Lynch, seriously injured in a car crash as her Humvee was fleeing a firefight after her convoy made a wrong turn into what would soon be named “Ambush Alley”. The reality was that the injured woman had not fired her gun, which had jammed, and had been treated well by Iraqi hospital staff and doctors after her capture. The Iraqi hospital treated her and, once her condition stabilized, sent her in an ambulance to the nearest American checkpoint to return her to American care. The Americans at the checkpoint, fearing a trap, waved the ambulance away.
A few days later they arranged the dramatic rescue of a female soldier they claimed had valiantly shot at the enemy down to her last bullet. She’d been seriously wounded during the firefight, stabbed, tortured and raped after her capture and had bravely stood up to all of it. She was a hero, in the invented story, rather than a victim of a series of American fuck-ups during the first days of an ill-planned, unjustifiable war that was quickly becoming the disaster many had warned it would become.
At the time of her rescue Private Lynch was lying in a sporadically guarded hospital in Nasiriyah, the commandos who rescued her met little resistance. Tillman noted in his journal after the staged rescue that he thought the size of the rescue force excessive, but wished the girl, Jessica, well and was glad they had rescued her. Several other Americans captured with Ms. Lynch (at least one later killed) were not rescued, but the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch was front page news for weeks. The made-for-the-movies best-seller made everyone feel so much better than the truth.
A year later, having completed his Ranger training, Pat Tillman finally found himself in the mountains of Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border area where bin Laden, Haqqani and some of the worst of the bad guys were hiding out. This was the duty the Tillmans had signed up for. They were deployed as part of Operation Mountain Storm for just over a week, and had yet to engage the enemy, when one of the platoon’s Humvees was disabled and needed to be removed from the rugged terrain for repairs.
The best way to do this was with a Chinook helicopter, which would lift it in a huge sling, but most helicopters were deployed in Iraq at this point. Because of the four day wait for a transport helicopter in Afghanistan the Ranger commanders back at headquarters ordered Tillman’s platoon to transport the disabled Humvee to the nearest paved road for transport by truck.
The platoon leader was also ordered to conduct a sweep through a nearby village, a village at the end of a long, twisting canyon pass ideal for ambushes. He was ordered to divide his men into two groups, one to tow the disabled Humvee, the other to search the village.
He urged his commanders to reconsider the orders. His commanders consulted Rumsfeld’s orders, and an arbitrary timetable for having boots on the ground to search villages in each sector, and denied the request. The platoon leader split the platoon, with the assurance that his half platoon (including Pat Tillman) could camp outside the village to be searched and wait for the second half of the platoon (including Kevin Tillman) to arrive the next day before actually conducting the search.
The order made no fucking sense, split the Ranger force for no reason, and wound up costing Tillman his life, but what are you going to do? Ours is not to question why, ours is but to do or die.
The facts emerged several years after Tillman’s televised memorial service portrayed Tillman as a Silver Star recipient cut down by enemy fire while valiantly saving his fellow Rangers during an ambush, rather than a man shot three times in the forehead by a trigger-happy American spraying bullets in an adrenalized panic after the ambush was over.
The facts only came to light after a super-heroic several year-long effort by Tillman’s family, most especially his mother and his brother Kevin. The Army conducted several detailed investigations into the incident over the course of several years. The initial investigation told most of the story, but it was deemed unsuitable, as it pointed the finger at the arbitrary and idiotic command to split the platoon. Years, and thousands of pages, later the simple truth could eventually be discerned, though, for the most part only the lowest ranking men involved were assigned any blame for Tillman’s accidental death.
Tillman arrived with half the platoon at the tiny village. No men were present, which struck everyone as odd. It turned out the men, who’d been paid, were waiting on the ridge to fire on the second part of the split platoon, inching through the narrow pass with the disabled humvee. When the firing started moments later Pat Tillman raced to the top of the ridge to see what he could do to help the men under fire, including his brother Kevin.
Tillman, a Ranger named Bryan O’Neal and an Afghan named Sayed Farhad took positions on the ridge. Twilight was coming on, the shots from the ambush behind them in the canyon had died down. Experienced Squad Leader Greg Baker, in the first Humvee of the second half of the platoon, staring through the fog of war, saw the bearded Farhad on the hill and, even though he recognized him as wearing a uniform similar to the Rangers’ rather than the robes worn by all Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, took no chances and shot him dead. Two others in the Humvee swung their automatic weapons around and opened fire with their squad leader. Tillman was waving his arms, yelling out his name over the impossible racket of the machine guns.
He took three bullets in the forehead from a gunner named Trevor Alders who squeezed off two bursts from his automatic weapon from about 120 feet away. The blast pulverized Tillman’s skull and pushed his brain out the back of his head where it fell, virtually intact, among the rocks. His brain was collected the following day, bagged in a ziplock, put into an ammo case, and disposed of.
News of Tillman’s death reached Washington just as the administration-imposed two week media blackout on the Abu Gharib torture story was about to end. It became necessary, therefore, to burn Tillman’s uniform and personal effects, including his last journal, order his colleagues to say nothing about the events of April 22, 2004, and ship his virtually headless body back to the US naked, decorated with a hastily stage-managed Silver Star for actions that did not actually take place, and conduct a televised service for an American hero who did not hesitate to give his life for his country.
