‘They Were Lying’

It later emerged through various military reports and investigations that fratricide was the suspicion, really, within hours of Pat's death.
Well, the young man next to him, Pvt. Bryan O'Neal, knew. There were soldiers on the ridgeline behind Pat, they were pretty sure it was this vehicle behind him that killed Pat because there was no enemy fire at that point. And of course one of the colonels wanted us to believe that it was like "Saving Private Ryan." That's what he wanted to use as a comparison.

In early May 2004 a huge memorial was held for Pat, attended by thousands of people, televised nationally. Do you think that getting through that memorial service with the story that Pat had been killed by the enemy while leading a charge was part of the reason the Army didn't notify your family?
Well, I think so. Originally the casualty report indicated that Pat got out of a vehicle, he was shot in the head, and that he died an hour later in a field hospital. The casualty report stipulates that he was killed by enemy fire. The story was so contrived, it was like it sounds like something out of a movie. And that was kind of disturbing to us. And not that Pat wasn't heroic—he was extremely brave, physically and morally—but there was still something eerie about that, just the way that it played out. It sounded like something out of a movie.

When did you start to suspect that something wasn't right in the version your family was originally given in Pat's death?
I don't think we suspected anything was amiss. We did kind of feel like the story was awfully convenient for the military, but nobody really said it out loud. When we learned about the fratricide we were very disturbed by it, of course, but that happens in war, so it's not like we just came unglued. It's just that when we learned about so many blunders that took place, that was very aggravating … The humvee broke down, it had to be towed, the platoon was split into two serials—when you usually don't split your troops, especially when you're in a dangerous place when you could lose communication. Pat was in the lead serial, Kevin was in the second serial, and the two serials got separated and one ended up firing on the other. The tragedy happened in large part because the two serials couldn't communicate with each other. That's one of the reasons during the Civil War you weren't supposed to split your troops if you're going to lose contact with them. So this was a very crucial error.

You write that the timing, the context of the war in Iraq in April 2004 was important to the way that Pat's death was handled, even though he was killed in Afghanistan.
That was the week the Abu Ghraib [prisoner abuse] scandal was breaking in the mainstream media, and in Fallujah the situation there was not good. [Also,] the most casualties of the war thus far were in the month of April 2004. All of that was atrocious for the military and for the administration—Bush's approval ratings were very poor at that time. The other interesting thing was that that was the same week that the photographer took the pictures of the coffins coming out of the plane, the flag-draped coffins, and there was all this criticism and there was all this uproar over that, yet the administration and the military didn't have a problem taking Pat's death and magnifying the story and embellishing the story for that because it served their purposes.

What is it like for families of fallen soldiers who didn't have Pat Tillman's celebrity and whose cases didn't pose the colossal embarrassment that your son's does to the military?
This grandiose narrative wasn't created for our benefit or for the benefit of Pat's legacy; this was created to dupe the public, and that's crucial. And that's what I think a lot of people don't understand. Because there are people that say, "Oh, why doesn't she just be quiet? Why does she keep pushing this? The Army's already apologized …" I mean, the point is that no, they haven't apologized. They've apologized for making mistakes. They have not admitted that this was an actual attempt to deceive the public.

Congressman Tom Davis, a Republican member of the House committee that investigated Pat's death, said that the truth falls somewhere between screwup and cover-up. Do you buy that?
Yeah, I think there's a combination of screwup and cover-up. At every path along the way every protocol was broken, and every mistake they could have made they made. It's just like the 9/11 report: "Oh, we were negligent, we were negligent, we were negligent." Yet there's no accountability ever.