Pat Tillman, American Hero

I found this via dailykos and Cunning Realist. The original text is here at the San Francisco Chronicle.

The gist of the article is that the Tillman Family is looking for some straight answers from the Pentagon about the death of the former NFL star, Pat Tillman.

First off, the Pentagon lied when they first described how he died, then they covered up that it was friendly fire, etc etc etc.

We've read that before. The NEW stuff is absolutely fascinating. Check this out:

Interviews also show a side of Pat Tillman not widely known — a fiercely independent thinker who enlisted, fought and died in service to his country yet was critical of President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq, where he served a tour of duty. He was an avid reader whose interests ranged from history books on World War II and Winston Churchill to works of leftist Noam Chomsky, a favorite author.

Noam Chomsky?

Then, much later in the piece there's this:

Yet other Tillman family members are less reluctant to show Tillman’s unique character, which was more complex than the public image of a gung-ho patriotic warrior. He started keeping a journal at 16 and continued the practice on the battlefield, writing in it regularly. (His journal was lost immediately after his death.) Mary Tillman said a friend of Pat’s even arranged a private meeting with Chomsky, the antiwar author, to take place after his return from Afghanistan — a meeting prevented by his death. She said that although he supported the Afghan war, believing it justified by the Sept. 11 attacks, “Pat was very critical of the whole Iraq war.”

And this:

[Spc. Russell] Baer, who served with Tillman for more than a year in Iraq and Afghanistan, told one anecdote that took place during the March 2003 invasion as the Rangers moved up through southern Iraq.

“I can see it like a movie screen,” Baer said. “We were outside of (a city in southern Iraq) watching as bombs were dropping on the town. We were at an old air base, me, Kevin and Pat, we weren’t in the fight right then. We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so f— illegal.’ And we all said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s who he was. He totally was against Bush.”

Another soldier in the platoon, who asked not to be identified, said Pat urged him to vote for Bush’s Democratic opponent in the 2004 election, Sen. John Kerry.

Wow. That is new.

How long do you think it will take for Ann Coulter (or Sean Hannity or Michelle Malkin or Rush Limbaugh) to wonder aloud whether the Chomskyite Tillman may have actually snapped and started all that "friendly fire" in a fit of crazed liberal protest? If he did, then the return fire was all in self-defense. And if that's true, then he would be completely responsible for his own death.

How long before the rabid right starts a posthumous court martial to strip him of his Silver Star?

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