The Tillman Story [dvd 2010]
And still. After seeing documentary after documentary on the perfidy of the powerful, after living through decades of history, it is still as if I forgot to take my reality pills and so I am once again astonished at the rulers’ audacity, at their capacity for deception. This story, which focuses on Patrick Tillman but is about his entire family, begins with suggestions of dire news to come yet takes time to celebrate the life of a son, a brother, a husband, a young man whose joy of living in an athlete’s body is irrepressible.
The basic story is well known: Pat Tillman was a rising star in the NFL who set aside his football career in order to join the army rangers with his brother after 9/11. First sent to Iraq, the Tillman brothers were then transferred to Afghanistan where Pat was killed. The first reports were that he died heroically and was awarded a silver star, but reports were later amended to state that he was killed by friendly fire. A thoroughly tragic event to be sure but not appearing all that weighty with import.
The first realization that the Tillman family is blessed with a gift for truth came for me at the scene of the memorial service for Pat Tillman which opens with a platitudinous eulogy by John McCain who solemnly states that everyone will meet again in heaven. Pat’s youngest brother takes the podium and, speaking from a heart you know is broken, calls this bullshit, that his brother never believed in heaven and is just dead. Later in the film, after the army realizes that the Tillmans, particularly Pat’s mother Mary, want the truth of his death, the full and honest truth, an army recording emerges that has one voice referring to atheism as “religious” and saying that it is perhaps this religious difference that won’t let the Tillman family just let go. In an often chilling film, I found this one of the colder episodes and I am still pondering all the implications. Another moment came when I paused my dvd player in order to read from an M-4 report shown on-screen that the truth of Pat Tillman’s death should be kept from the public so that POTUS and the Secretary of Defense would not be embarrassed for making untrue statements when they used the young man’s death to whet the nation’s appetite for more war. That would be George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.
By the time he reached Afghanistan, Pat had become more than disillusioned with the war, he planned to speak out against it when he was out of the army. That position has been taken by his brother, Kevin, who has published a small book with a very big message: The Transparent Pillage.
While watching generals and congressmen at the hearing on the Tillman coverup, I was reminded of a cartoon I saw years ago which showed a drawing of a very bland, suited man and was captioned something to the effect: Often the predator evolves to appear indistinguishable from its prey. Today, I have difficulty believing that the rulers are the same species as the rest of us, that they use words like honor and integrity as anything other than bait.
Gem rating: Obsidian
