‘The Tillman Story” pur ports to be an exposé of the cover-up of the death by friendly fire of the Army Ranger and one time NFL star Pat Tillman. But, provocative and colorful as the film is, it does the very thing it denounces — massaging the facts to seize Tillman for a political agenda.
Amir Bar-Lev’s Michael Moore-praised documentary does do Tillman justice in all his many-sided glory, interviewing friends and family members about his fierce independent streak, his opposition to the war in Iraq (which he called “f – – – ing illegal”) and the sense of duty that called him away from a huge contract as an Arizona Cardinals safety to enlist in the Army after 9/11. He became a Ranger and hoped to fight in the canyons of Afghanistan — where he would die in 2004.
Tillman’s life ended at the hands of his own platoonmates, who fired hundreds of rounds in his direction while mistaking him for Taliban. This information was held back by the Army for five weeks.
The documentary is outraged — by an alternate reality in which the Army, on orders from civilians in DC, manufactured a story about Tillman dying at the hands of the Taliban, covered up the truth and reversed itself only because Tillman’s determined mother dug up the real story.
That is not what happened, for all of the movie’s thrillingly suspicious optics — redacted pictures, files with names blacked out, congressional hearings that (like most congressional hearings) accomplished nothing except grandstanding.
Motive matters. Both “The Tillman Story” and Jon Krakauer’s book “Where Men Win Glory” use the fact that Tillman, on his Iraq tour, was nearby (though otherwise uninvolved) when Jessica Lynch was captured to obsess over the fairy tale released to the public about Lynch’s nonexistent heroism.
Does the Lynch fiction prove that a similar propaganda mission was launched after Tillman’s death? No. You might argue that the Army would have pulled a Lynch on Tillman if it could have gotten away with it, but “would have” is not a scandal.
The movie fumes over details such as whether a vehicle was moving when the soldiers on it were firing, and about which names of involved troops fit into which redacted spaces in transcripts of interviews with the Rangers. It brings in bizarre, startling episodes, like the burning of Tillman’s uniform and effects (ordered by a captain for no good reason).
But all of this is ultimately irrelevant. The Army knew Tillman’s death was probably a fratricide. So it released a vague statement about his demise while it checked the facts. It ordered up an official investigation and told the soldiers to keep their mouths shut while it was ongoing. Tillman’s brother Kevin, a fellow Ranger in the platoon who was just down the road when he was shot, was deliberately kept in the dark.
The investigation turned up horrible news. So the Army ordered another inquest. It dragged its collective feet, agonized and finally released the cause of death. This isn’t a Woodward and Bernstein story; as with Abu Ghraib, Army investigators themselves dug up the truth, though they did no honor to themselves in the speed with which they did so.
The pols and Pentagon didn’t lionize Tillman as a hero for propaganda purposes (the news media did that) — and in any event, Tillman’s boldness in running up a hill to counter a Taliban ambush (which had happened moments earlier and may have continued as he fell) did make him a hero. At one point in the film, Tillman’s family seems outraged that he was posthumously awarded a Silver Star. The officer in charge had already ruled that fratricide did not disqualify Tillman.
The film dances around this point, but Tillman’s mother, who is still unsatisfied after being given 3,000 pages of documents from the Army investigation, is a George W. Bush hater. Like many before her (such as Cindy Sheehan, who said her soldier son “was murdered . . . to benefit Israel”), she found sorrow curdling into something more dynamic and satisfying: political rage. A military organizational chart that is topped by a photo of the then-commander in chief (cue scary music) is as close as the movie gets to painting a picture of an evil cabal headed by Bush. But fratricide, when you clear away the fog of war, is simply a gruesome
accident.