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Betrayal of an all-American hero
When American football star Pat Tillman died in 'friendly fire' in Afghanistan, the US Army tried to cover it up. A new documentary tells the story of his family's fight for the truth
By Mick Brown
Published: 9:00AM BST 07 Oct 2010
Pat Tillman, who was shot by his own comrades in AfghanistanPhoto: PA
Tillman, standing second from the left, with his squad in Afghanistan
Tillman with his wife, Marie
Pat Tillman's mother, Mary, at her home in San Jose, California, with some of the papers relating to his case. The family spent four years trying to uncover the truth about Pat's death
When Pat Tillman and his brother Kevin enlisted in the US Army in 2002 it was a source of both pride and apprehension for his family. America was still reeling from the attacks on the World Trade Center. 'We were at war,’ their father, Patrick Tillman Sr, says, 'and the idea that my kids would allow someone else to fight their battles for them… I don’t think that sat well with either of them.’
For the US military, Pat Tillman’s enlistment provided an opportunity of a different kind. Tillman was a celebrated sportsman, a professional footballer playing for the Arizona Cardinals who turned down a three-year, $3.6 million contract so that he could serve his country. No scriptwriter in the Pentagon press bureau could have devised a more persuasive poster boy. Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, sent Tillman a personal note commending the 'proud and patriotic’ thing that he was doing.
When Tillman died in Afghanistan in April 2004, shot three times in the head, the news was greeted with an effusion of grief and patriotic pride. A Pentagon press release described him as having made 'the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror’, a spokesman for the White House talked of him as 'an inspiration both on and off the football field’, while the senator for Arizona, John McCain, spoke of how Tillman’s death would be 'a heavy blow to our nation’s morale’.
Tillman was awarded the Silver Star, the third highest military decoration in the US Army, given for 'gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States’. The citation described how he had 'put himself in the line of devastating enemy fire’, and how 'while mortally wounded, his audacious leadership and courageous example’ had inspired his men to fight, driving back the enemy and resulting in his platoon’s safe passage from an 'ambush kill zone’.
But Pat Tillman did not die as a result of enemy fire. The three bullets in his head had been fired by his own comrades. The saga has now been told in an extraordinary new documentary, The Tillman Story. The fruit of three years’ work by the producer John Battsek and the director Amir Bar-Lev, the film examines how the US army attempted to cover up the fact that Tillman died from so-called 'friendly fire’ and, in the words of one former soldier, 'pin a recruiting poster on his coffin’, and his family’s struggle to find out the truth.
At first glance Pat Tillman seemed every inch the quintessential American hero. Square-jawed, ruggedly handsome and powerfully built, he looked like a cross between an action movie star and the archetypal testosterone-fuelled 'jock’. But Tillman was a much more complicated figure than that. A few weeks after his death, at a memorial service held in his home town of San Jose, California, a friend described him as a man 'on a constant quest to improve himself’.
The eldest of three sons of a lawyer, Patrick Sr, and a special-needs teacher, Mary, Pat Tillman was an outstanding scholar as well as an outstanding athlete, graduating summa cum laude, the highest academic honour, from his college in Arizona before being drafted into professional NFL football in 1998 with the Arizona Cardinals. Tillman, his father says, 'pushed himself on just about every level’. As a boy, he would carry around a book of quotations – Churchill, Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln – circling and memorising the ones he found most inspiring.
As a professional footballer, he owned neither a mobile phone nor a car, and would cycle to training in a T-shirt and flip-flops, a paperback book in his pocket. His reading ran from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau to Noam Chomsky. On the day after 9/11, Tillman gave an interview in which he talked about freedom, patriotism and 'what the flag stands for’. 'A lot of my family has… gone and fought in wars,’ he said, 'and I really haven’t done a damn thing as far as laying myself on the line like that.’ Six months later, having completed the last game of the season and returned from a honeymoon in the South Pacific with his childhood sweetheart, Marie, Tillman and his brother Kevin announced that they were enlisting in the army.
Tillman was the first NFL professional since the Second World War to voluntarily leave the game for military service, and his recruitment was a public relations gift for the army. Rumsfeld, after sending Tillman his personal letter of congratulations on June 28 2002, emailed the Secretary of the Army, Tom White, noting that Tillman 'sound [sic] like he is world-class. We might want to keep our eye on him.’ But Tillman refused to play the role of poster boy. He declined to explain why he had enlisted, turning down all interview requests from the media and asking family members not to comment. He was quietly offered a 'safe’ posting at home, but turned that down too.
After basic training, Pat and Kevin were assigned to the US Army Rangers, an elite combat corps, with the rank of 'specialist’ – between private and corporal – and in March 2003 they were among the first US forces deployed in the invasion of Iraq. Doubts soon began to set in. At 25, Pat was older than most of his platoon, and according to his mother he grew frustrated at the lack of intellectual stimulation. 'It disturbed him that the military didn’t use people to their full potential and that things were done that seemed to make no sense.’ He also began to question the prosecution and legality of the war in Iraq.
Returning home after his first tour of duty, Tillman told his mother that the war was 'pretty much bullshit’. Among the things they discussed was his concern that he seemed to undergo more psychological evaluations than other soldiers in his platoon. 'I said, “Maybe it’s because they’re curious about you,” ’ Mary recalls. ' “Why would you give up so much to join the military?”’ In the years following his death, the family were eventually able to obtain two of these evaluations under the Freedom of Information Act.
'They said things like, he didn’t respect authority, all kinds of stuff…’ Mary says. 'Pat didn’t suffer fools gladly, that’s for sure. But when there was authority to respect, he respected it.’ Whether the army was concerned about Tillman’s views or felt he had served its purpose, he was offered an honourable discharge and the chance to take up a new football contract. He refused. 'Pat had signed up to fight for three years, he was going to fight for three years. That was the deal,’ his father says – and in early April 2004 Pat and Kevin were redeployed with their 'Black Sheep’ platoon to Afghanistan.
On April 22 Tillman’s platoon was engaged in a 'clearing operation’, sweeping villages for Taliban fighters in a region of south-eastern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan, when one of the platoon’s Humvee vehicles broke down. A request by the platoon leader, Lt David Uthlaut, to his command centre 65 miles away in the city of Khost to airlift the vehicle was refused. Instead, it was ordered that it should be towed to safety behind a civilian truck that had been hired locally; at the same time the platoon should proceed with the mission to have 'boots on the ground’ in the village of Manah before dusk.
The only way to achieve this was to split the platoon in two: 'Serial 1’ pushing on towards Manah, while 'Serial 2’ took responsibility for the broken Humvee. Serial 1, including Uthlaut and Tillman, set off towards Manah, passing along the road through a canyon, while Serial 2 turned back along the road towards Khost. They had travelled only a short distance when it became apparent that the civilian truck would be unable to continue on the rocky terrain. Instead, they then followed the route that Serial 1 had taken through the canyon.
It was at this point that Serial 2 came under attack from what the soldiers thought were either rocket-propelled grenades or mortar and small arms fire. They returned fire, blitzing the higher ground with mortar and machine-guns. The sound of explosions and gunfire alerted Serial 1 at the far end of the canyon. Uthlaut tried, and failed, to make radio contact with Serial 2, while Tillman, another soldier, Bryan O’Neal, and an Afghan militiaman named Thani set off up the hill for a position on the ridgeline overlooking the road.
The lead vehicle of Serial 2 came into view. Seeing the Afghan militiaman, the squad leader, Sgt Greg Baker, opened fire. Hit by eight bullets, the Afghan died instantly. Following Baker’s lead, others in the lead vehicle now began spraying the ridgeline with machine-gun fire. Tillman frantically waved his arms, yelling, 'Cease fire! Friendlies!’, as he and O’Neal scrambled to take shelter behind some rocks. He then threw a smoke grenade as a signal that they were 'friendlies’. There was a lull in the fire. When Tillman broke cover, the soldiers in Baker’s vehicle opened fire again.
Machine-gun fire struck the body armour on his chest and he dropped to a squatting position. According to O’Neal, Tillman continued yelling, 'I’m Pat Tillman! Cease fire!’ But the firing continued. He was hit three times in the head. His last words were 'I’m Pat ----ing Tillman’. The death of America’s most famous soldier came at a particularly critical time for the US military. In early April 2004 American forces had suffered a humiliating setback in the abortive attempt to capture the Iraqi city of Fallujah, and the 131 US casualties that month would be the highest in nine months. America was fast growing disillusioned with its 'war on terror’.
On the day that Pat Tillman was killed Donald Rumsfeld was addressing the Newspaper Assoc_iation of America, imploring them not simply to write about 'the attacks and setbacks’ but to 'give context’ to the events in Iraq and Afghanistan. What was required, it seemed, was something positive. What was required was a hero. On the evening of April 22 Tillman’s family were informed of his death. 'We were told Pat had been shot in the head getting out of a vehicle,’ his mother remembers. 'That’s all we knew.’
On April 30 – only two days after the first images of the abuse of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison had been shown on American television, with public faith in the prosecution of the war sinking to its lowest ebb – it was announced that Tillman had been awarded the Silver Star, and posthumously promoted from specialist to corporal. The army wanted to give Tillman a full military funeral with honours, but his wife, Marie, refused. Apparently mindful of how the army might continue to use him in the event of his death, Pat had given Marie written instructions that 'I do not want military involvement’ at his funeral. But Pat Tillman was too public a figure for his death to be allowed to pass quietly.
On May 3 3,000 people attended a memorial service in San Jose, which was televised nationally. Among the army officers who gathered around to comfort his family was Lt Gen Philip Kensinger, the head of the army’s Special Operations Com_mand, which oversees all special combat corps. Only later would it emerge that even as he was consoling Tillman’s family, Kensinger was fully aware that their son had died from friendly fire. Four months later, at the beginning of the new football season, the NFL would mount its own day of commemoration, with all teams wearing a memorial decal on their helmets in Tillman’s honour.
In Arizona, his number 40 shirt was 'retired’ in a ceremony at a Cardinals game. President Bush appeared on a video screen offering tributes. In Afghanistan, a series of highly unusual steps had been put in train in the immediate aftermath of Tillman’s death. Other members of the platoon were ordered to say nothing of the incident, and phone and internet connections at the base were shut down. His brother Kevin, who had not witnessed the incident and knew only that Pat had been killed but not how, was put in 'quarantine’, and within days would be sent home with Pat’s body, accompanied by another soldier who was under strict instructions not to tell Kevin or the family what had happened.
In contravention of army protocol, which stipulates that the uniforms of fallen soldiers be returned to America, Pat’s uniform, helmet and combat vest were destroyed, along with his notebook. Within hours, an army captain, Richard Scott, was ordered to prepare a report on the incident. His draft investigation, prepared in a matter of days, was condemnatory. Tillman’s death, Scott concluded, was fratricide – the military term for friendly fire – and the result of an act of 'gross negligence’ by soldiers in Serial 2. He recommended to headquarters that there should be a further investigation by the army’s Criminal Investigation Command to establish whether there had been 'criminal intent’ in the killing.
But Scott’s conclusions were not, it seemed, what the army wanted to hear. Instead, another investigation – to be known as a '15-6’ – was ordered at battalion level. (It would be a further two years before it emerged, in yet another inquiry, that Scott’s initial report had been quietly buried, his references to 'negligent homicide’ and the recommendation for a criminal investigation excised.) In a subsequent investigation two years later, another high-ranking officer, Brig Gen Howard Yellen, would describe how the 15-6 report was received among the chain of command.
It was 'sort of like, “here is the steak dinner, but we’re giving it to you on this, you know, garbage can cover”. You know, “You got it. You work it.”’ Mary Tillman is in no doubt about what she thinks Yellen’s statement meant: 'We’ve got Abu Ghraib, all this other stuff [the garbage], but this soldier [the steak] who is very high profile has been killed; we can use this to our advantage. Unfortunately, he was killed by friendly fire. That means we’re going to have to spin it. You’ve got it, you work it. It’s a grotesque way of saying it. And yet that’s what he says.’
Sitting in the lounge of a San Jose hotel, Mary Tillman has a serene and thoughtful demeanour that does not immediately suggest the moral indignation that has driven her in her quest to establish the truth of what actually happened to her son. 'To lie is the most horrible thing, and we have been lied to,’ she says. 'It’s an atrocity that they would take a young man with honourable intentions who’d served his country and then lie about how he died to promote a war. To use him as a propaganda tool, basically. That is immoral.’ The first Mary Tillman learnt of her son having died from friendly fire was on May 28 2004 – five weeks after his death – in a telephone call from a reporter for the Arizona Republic newspaper.
The army, apparently fearing that the information was about to be leaked, had decided to release it officially. The following day, Lt Gen Kensinger issued a terse statement that 'while there was no one specific finding of fault’ an investigation (the 15-6) had concluded that Tillman had 'probably’ died as a result of friendly fire in the course of 'an intense firefight lasting approximately 20 minutes’, during an ambush conducted by '10 to 12 enemy personnel’. When Mary was first shown the results of the 15-6 investigation in June 2004 she was immediately struck by all the unanswered questions that remained.
She drafted a list of her concerns to Senator John McCain, along with a request for her son’s autopsy and the field hospital report into his death. It was the beginning of a paper trail of some 6,000 pages of military documents, most of them heavily redacted, the names of officers and soldiers blanked out, that she would follow over the next three years, attempting to piece together the truth of what had happened to her son. The more Mary read, the more the anomalies began to stack up. According to witnesses on the ground, there had been no 'intense firefight’ with the enemy.
No one in Serial 2 nor any of their vehicles had been hit by enemy fire. At worst, it seemed that they had been subject only to harassing fire at a distance from a handful of Taliban. It emerged that the driver of the lead vehicle had recognised Tillman, O’Neal and the Afghan soldier as 'friendlies’ and had yelled at his fellow soldiers to stop firing, but his shouts had gone unheard, or been ignored. Another soldier in the vehicle acknowledged that he too had seen 'arms waving’, but maintained that he did not think that they were trying to signal cease fire. 'Others were firing and I wanted to stay in the firefight,’ he said.
A third said he had seen two figures and just aimed where everyone else was shooting – apparently a clear breach of the US Army rules of engagement that require 'positive identification’ of a target before opening fire. To Mary this suggested not so much soldiers confused by the fog of war as driven by 'a lust to fight’. Official accounts suggested that the lead vehicle in Serial 2 was moving when the shots that killed Tillman were fired. But Specialist Bryan O’Neal, who had been beside Tillman when he died, explicitly stated that the vehicle 'stopped, re-engaged us, drove forward and re-engaged us again’.
'When you start reading things and they just don’t add up, it’s very disturbing,’ Mary says. 'You begin to think that anything is possible.’ In November 2004, as a result of pressure from Mary Tillman and Senator John McCain, the acting Army Secretary, Les Brownlee, ordered a further investigation into Tillman’s death. Conducted by a brigadier general, Gary M Jones, the report – made up of 2,100 pages of transcripts and detailed descriptions of the incident – concluded that the army had known almost immediately that Tillman had died of fratricide but maintained that there had been 'no reluctance’ to report the facts of the incident, and that any failure to immediately notify the family had been born of a desire to avoid giving them 'an inaccurate or incomplete picture’ before a full investigation.
The destruction of Tillman’s uniform, body armour and combat vest may have contributed to perceptions that 'the army was trying to hide that this was fratricide’, but 'nothing could be further from the truth’: the items were permeated with blood and posed 'a biological hazard’, and retaining the physical evidence 'could have had a significant negative impact on the morale of Cpl Tillman’s unit’. Among the most telling witnesses in the report were Capt Richard Scott, who had conducted the initial investigation within days of Tillman’s death. He told Jones that elements of his report had been excised, and that sworn statements given to him by soldiers on the ground had later been changed, 'to, I think, help some individuals’.
This had made it appear that Tillman had died in a single volley of gunfire in a matter of seconds, rather than in three separate bursts that had taken place over some minutes – a critical distinction in arguing that this was negligence rather than simply 'the fog of war’. But Scott’s observations were ignored in Jones’s final conclusions that repeated the story that Tillman had been shot from a vehicle travelling at a speed of '25-30mph’ and that the occupants 'had visibility of and directed fire at’ him 'for only 4-5 seconds’.
Brig Gen Jones further concluded that Lt Gen Kensinger, the senior army representative at the memorial service, was not aware of the possibility of fratricide until after the service was over. It would later emerge that this too was not the case. When Patrick Tillman Sr attended an army briefing in June 2004 about his son having died from friendly fire, his response took aback everybody who was present. 'Why then,’ he asked, 'did you give him a Silver Star?’ 'They said something like, “We gave him a Silver Star for attitude,” ’ Tillman Sr tells me. 'I have an uncle who got one in the Second World War, and I know what it takes to get one, and that just didn’t make any sense to me.’
Tillman Sr has the steely, no-nonsense manner of a man who does not take kindly to being lied to. 'They gave him a medal and he didn’t deserve it. And that’s no insult to Pat to say that. He didn’t need a decoration. He was an outstanding human being and an outstanding soldier.’ In April 2005, after Tillman Sr received his briefing from Brig Gen Jones and Jones’s report into his son’s death, he wrote Jones a scalding letter. Picking apart the assertion that the shooting had happened in '4-5 seconds’, Tillman Sr pointed to the evidence that his son had actually been fired on from at least two separate locations while the shooters were stationary.
He was hit first by machine-gun fire to his body armour, knocking him down. Two further rounds fired by another weapon took off the back of his head. Then a third – in army jargon – 'kill shot’ entered the top of his head as he fell. He and O’Neal were standing only 40 yards from the shooters – close enough for whoever had shot him to clearly identify him as a 'friendly’. This was no 'fog of war’. Turning to the cover-up, Tillman Sr went on that rather than fratricide having been 'suspected’, it was known instantly. Fourteen people had witnessed it, and a colonel had been at the scene within hours.
'Telling us the truth about how Pat died was the least you could do,’ Tillman Sr wrote to Jones. 'Every one of you have disregarded your duty, acting deliberately and shamelessly to kill my son and lie about it.’ He concluded his letter: 'In sum, ---- you… and yours.’ By now the Tillman case was becoming a national cause célèbre, avidly reported in the media, and pored over in the blogosphere. In March 2006 the Defence Department Inspector General’s office published its own inquiry into the army’s handling of the affair. This declared the killing of Tillman to be 'an accident’, but found that there had been 'critical errors’ in reporting his death that had led to 'inaccuracies, misunderstandings and perceptions of concealment’, but that there had been no cover-up.
At the same time, a report by the army’s Criminal Investigation Command concluded that there was no evidence that Tillman’s death was 'anything other than accidental’, and that the soldiers in Serial 2 who killed him had not committed the offences of negligent homicide or aggravated assault: 'Under extreme circumstances and in a very compressed time frame, the members of Serial 2 had a reasonable belief that death or harm was about to be inflicted on them and believed it was necessary to defend themselves.’ To Tillman Sr, the Inspector General’s report was just one more serving of 'the ration of crap’ that he believes the army has dished out since his son’s death.
'I will not assume that there was some mistake made, or some fog of war and that this was simply an unfortunate accident,’ he says. 'I won’t do it. The reports all say this was done improperly, or this was an oversight. It was just one screw-up after another. But if you start from the top and work your way down, it makes perfect sense: everything was done in accordance to plan. People don’t burn evidence; you don’t destroy a soldier’s diary, it’s just not done. Some very serious people were involved in falsifying several homicide investigations and issuing my son a Silver Star.
And when you look at some of the communications – [Brig Gen Yellen’s statement] “we handed you the steak…” – it’s painfully obvious this thing was choreographed.’ Just how far up the chain of command the alleged cover-up ran would finally become apparent in March 2007, when a confidential army memo was leaked to the Associated Press news agency. The memo had been sent by Major Gen Stanley McChrystal of Joint Special Operations Command to Gen Kensinger, Gen John Abizaid, the head of US Central Command, and Gen Bryan Douglas Brown, the head of the US Special Operations Command.
It was dated April 29 2004, the day before the army released the fictionalised account of Tillman’s death in the Silver Star citation – which had been approved by McChrystal himself. In the memo McChrystal warned that the army investigation then nearing completion would find it 'highly possible’ that Tillman was killed by friendly fire, and that 'Potus’ – the President of the United States, George Bush – should beware of any comments he might make 'about Corporal Tillman’s heroism and his approved Silver Star medal in speeches currently being prepared’.
