Posted on 03/04/2006 1:15:22 PM PST by Glenn
Edited on 03/04/2006 1:43:51 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. Defense Department inspector general has directed the Army to open a criminal investigation into the death of former NFL star Pat Tillman, CNN learned on Saturday.
Tillman was killed on April 22, 2004, during a ground convoy assault not far from Khowst, Afghanistan, near the eastern border with Pakistan. Two other coalition soldiers were wounded in the ambush and an Afghan militia force soldier was killed.
The Army in May of 2004 determined that Tillman, 27, was probably killed by gunfire from his own unit during the intense firefight.
You disgust me. I hope they zot your a$$ back to DU where you belong.
Don't know what you are talking about, it was an accident. What do neo-cons have to do with anything?
I love how they shout it out all over the internet! (/sarc)
The troops of his contingent must be infuriated and demoralized...(assuming of course this is just a bunch of bull, which I think it is). But even so, this isn't something that should be out on the internet and in the papers. What the family must be thinking right now...?!
Was this willingly given or was it leaked? And it would be horrible if it turned out to be a normal case of friendly fire.
For those who remember the My Lai mess, this is a preemptive strike to keep the media off of their collective ass.
Otherwise, we'd be seeing media flaps like that and more, deserved or not.
If the military does not break the story, they will be accused of a "cover-up" by the MSM.
Artvoioce, however is looney-left. And I'm the guy who thinks NPR is reasonably fair-and-balanced.
I still say you don't have a clue about what you're talking about. What about a poster boy for recruitment? I'm talking about someone that fit the image the Army wants to portray so well, that he was photographed for use in Army recruitment posters and pamplets. Is it any less tragic when he dies, burned alive inside a Bradley that was hit by a IED? What about the other soldiers in that Bradley that died along with him, screaming so loud they could be heard by soldiers on the outside, trying to get the rear door down to rescue them? Are their deaths less tragic than Tillman's?
You throw words around without truly feeling the full weight of their meanings. Tillman's death was tragic to you, because his celebrity status as an athlete gave you knowledge of his existance. You sorta knew him. Having that identity to grab onto makes it seem more real to you. All these other guys, they are just numbers, statistics, names glimpsed in news articles.
I pulled the zipper closed on way too many body bags during my 13 months in Iraq, and every single one of them was the same. There were none more tragic than the others. The Captain that had been in Iraq for 5 days before I had to spend an hour walking around with Ziploc bags collecting his remains, or the Staff Sergeant that was shot and killed in a drunken brawl by his best friend the day before he was supposed to get on the freedom bird home. None was any more tragic than the others.
I know it because I was there. I was helping unload the wounded from the ambulance while the driver was receiving a ticket.
Java, I'm sorry you and I seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot. I honor your service and grieve for the loss of all our boys. Insulting me is not necessary.
Surely you realize that from a PR perspective, the loss of a famous soldier used in a PR campaign is worse for the Army than the loss of another soldier?
I'm not suggesting that it's right, or the way it should be. But you can't deny that, from a PR perspective, it's true.
Actually, we didn't know until a while later that it was friendly fire. The initial story was that he was killed by the enemy.
The Petagon embellished the story for no reason. Tilman was a hero regardless of how he died, and would have been treated as such by most Americans. Instead, they treated his death as something it wasn't, and got themselves into trouble.
I thought his brother gave an anti-war speech at his memorial service.
What it's done for!
Tillman was Spec Ops.
I know the guy who runs Spec Ops. He is a totally dedicated and moral American.
There is no way that he would ever knowingly allow such a thing to happen to one of his men. EVER. He truly is the type of commander who'd die fighting for his troops.
Unless he was on the ground in Afghanistan, I'm not convinced that he'd be in a position to prevent someone with more nefarious motives from doing this. Of course, as a civilian, my knowledge of the military is rather limited.
I know that Clancy, Higgins, and others write novels about things like that, but it's a different world out there. Tillman's being against the war -- which I doubt -- would not have that great an impact. He died, and I didn't know who he was until I read about it.
Our special operators know an awful lot.
You nailed it.
You speak gibberish too, Gondring? Good, maybe you can translate what Archangelsk said.
I was detained by MPs in Qui Nhon, Viet Nam for not having a regulation uniform after coming out of the field one day.
It happens.
Seems like a ranking officer in your command should have had the balls to put a stop to that once and for all.
I'm sorry if you feel like I'm insulting you, because that really isn't my intention. I really feel that you think Tillman's death is more tragic, because it's someone you knew, in a sense. Maybe you weren't fishing buddies with him, but you knew who he was, knew he existed, before he became another statistic in the GWOT.
I felt that the soldiers I knew who died was somehow more tragic than the ones I saw for the first time as they lay in front of me, dead or dying. In reality, there was no difference. Maybe this individual soldier's death didn't mean as much to me, because I didn't know him, or maybe because it was just one of many I saw on a particular day. But other people did, and I can assure you that they felt his death was as tragic as I felt my best friend's death was.
If you want to measure the level of tragedy in a soldiers death by how widely they were known, then yes, the death of a psuedo famous person such as Tillman is probably more tragic.
I just don't see it that way. Whether 5 people grieve his death, or 5000 do so, there really isn't any difference in the level of tragedy. It still equals a family with a triangle shaped flag instead of the soldier they said goodbye to.
If a memorial similiar to the VietNam Memorial is ever erected for the GWOT, I can assure you that Tillman's name will be listed in the same format as every other soldier's name. His won't have a special gilded frame around it. It will be another name on the wall. Some will see it as just a statistic, others will be able to touch his name and hear his voice.
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