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flyrep
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Posted: Fri Nov 21st, 2008 10:14 pm |
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Montini left out many facts about Tillman's death. He forgot that the army lawyers
sent congratulatory emails to eachother during the cover up. He forgot that
the army doctors were suspicious of his squad's version of what happened. Minor
details.
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circa
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Posted: Tue Nov 18th, 2008 03:21 pm |
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E.J. Montini, The Arizona Republic
Nov. 18, 2008
When I decided to do a column about Kevin Tillman, Pat's brother, and the thin, quirky, serious new book that he's written, I thought that the toughest part would be writing about a guy who doesn't talk “on the record” with reporters.
But that's not it. The toughest part was recognizing that I'd need to provide some background on Pat and Kevin Tillman.
It doesn't take long these days for what scientists call our “episodic memory” to go fuzzy. We may know that Pat was a pro football player who gave up his career to enlist in the army and got killed. But the chronology and the details are no longer clear, perhaps because computer technology has accommodated our natural laziness to the point where we don't need to remember anything that can be “Googled.”
One place to start refreshing our memory might be Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when Pat said in an interview, “At times like this you stop and think about just how good we have it, what kind of system we live in, and the freedoms we are allowed. A lot of my family has gone and fought in wars and I really haven't done a d**n thing.”
From there we could skip to 2002, when Pat and his brother, Kevin, then a minor league baseball prospect, decided to enlist and become Army Rangers. Neither brother spoke publicly about their reasons, refusing all interviews.
In 2003 they were sent to Iraq. In 2004 they were in Afghanistan. On Apr. 22 of that year, Pat was killed by that most inappropriately named “friendly fire,” when some of his own guys mistook him for the enemy.
That isn't how the government spun the story, however. For weeks after his death, including the nationwide TV broadcast of his memorial service, officials of the U.S. government perpetuated the fiction that Pat died at the hands of the enemy, using him as a propaganda tool.
Even after the fratricide became public, it took years for the family to root out the truth about what happened. During those days I spoke several times for publication with Tillman's mother, Mary. And like every other writer with an interest in the story, I tried to reach Kevin. But he maintained the posture that he and Pat took from the start: Silence.
It wasn't until October, 2006, that the public “heard” from Kevin. He wrote an essay for the web site truthdig.com that read in part, “Somehow lying is tolerated. Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense… Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.”
Kevin, like Pat, is a student of history, philosophy and current events. But he's also a pragmatist, recognizing that people today are disinclined to read lengthy tomes on any of those subjects.
That seems to be the motivation for his 21-page illustrated book called “The Transparent Pillage,” now available on Amazon.com for $12.99. It looks like a children's book, but reads like a follow-up to Tillman's truthdig essay. Through text and illustrations, Kevin argues that we should hold legally accountable those responsible for “a war based on lies.”
The idea being, I suppose, that a change in administrations is not the same thing as justice.
Most authors would happily trade a little free publicity in exchange for an interview. Not Tillman. He agreed to let me use a quote or an illustration from the book, but offered nothing else.
He isn't interested in having his words filtered through media types like me. He'd rather that you did your own reading and made up your own mind. It's a type of stubbornness mixed with optimism.
His brother was like that, too.
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