Twenty years after Pat Tillman's death, his mom reflects on bad command decisions and false narratives.
GMs love to trade up in the NFL draft, but it's often a mistake: Why their reasoning doesn't match realityWhen former NFL star Pat Tillman was fatally wounded in Afghanistan, April 22, 2004, the military did not disclose to his family or the public that his death was due to friendly fire. Ever since, his mother has been on a search for truth.
Commanders at a remote base -- over the objections of the men and their leaders on the ground -- ordered the platoon split into. The first, with Pat, was to go through a narrow, steep and foreboding canyon, to arrive by dusk at a village and search the following day for enemy fighters and weapons caches. The second, with Kevin, was to follow just behind via a different route to transport a disabled Humvee.
Author Jon Krakauer reported, however, that McChrystal was among several high-ranking generals, including Gen. John Abizaid and Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger Jr., who were informed on the day of Tillman's death that he had been a victim of friendly fire. Investigators never pinned down McChrystal's precise role in allowing the false account to advance, nor was he disciplined. He declined our interview request, as did Abizaid. Efforts to reach Kensinger were unsuccessful.
"I asked him to find the truth, as close to the truth as he could get, and he promised he would," Dannie Tillman said. Regarding Pat Tillman's actions on the day he died, Blaber said,"One of the things that bothers me most about the false Silver Star they wrote is that if they had told the truth -- and wrote the real Silver Star narrative -- no one would ever have any doubt about him deserving it and earning it. They literally did not tell the true story of what Pat Tillman and how heroic he was that day.
There are the misrepresentations of what happened and the actual decision-making that led to Pat's death. How do you process, after all these years, those two separate things? It just sickens me that these people that made these horrible decisions could not go back to their men, at least, and say,"We really blew this. We caused this to happen because of our bad orders."Oh, yeah. They blamed it on those guys, those young kids. They're kids. And yeah, it's just horrific what they did to them.I do believe it was an accident. I believe that the guys in the vehicle were overzealous and scared. And face it, they're young guys.
The chain of command just threw it downwards. And a lot of these guys have been harmed with PTSD, with moral injury, moral trauma. It's because they've been betrayed. They've been betrayed by their leaders, who don't have the courage to admit they made a mistake. And of course people forgive mistakes. You may be angry at first. You may question. You may be upset.
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