The Tillman Story (2010)

The significance of the title The Tillman Story is in the absence of the well-known first name. This heartbreaking documentary is about the life and death of Corporal Pat Tillman, but it’s also about the Tillman family, all of whom were wounded by “friendly fire” just as surely as Pat was killed by it.

To refresh the memories of those who remember his name only as a famous casualty of war, a decade ago Pat Tillman was a talented football defenseman, first at Arizona State, then with the Arizona Cardinals. He was a well-liked, fun-loving, intelligent young scholar-athlete whose humility in the spotlight may have masked a degree of mistrust for the media–and such mistrust would be justified in hindsight, given the media’s insatiable greed and ability to spin and manipulate stories to suit both its own and the government’s agendas.

Among the details of Pat’s tragically short life, we learn that he (and his family) knew the meaning of commitment. After the September 11 attacks, Pat married his high school sweetheart and finished out the 2001 Cardinals football season, then announced that he and his brother Kevin were enlisting in the Army. He never explained this decision to the media, but a Cardinals PR interview recorded the day after the attacks later surfaced and was widely assumed to be his explanation for leaving the NFL to go to war. The George W. Bush administration already knew they were getting a potential golden boy hero, because Tillman received a personal note from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld congratulating him on his enlistment. A fellow soldier called him “the most famous enlisted man in the Army.”

Pat and Kevin were dismayed by the government’s shift of focus from the initial war in Afghanistan to Iraq, which is where they spent their first combat tour. The brothers expressed their misgivings to friends and families while home on leave, but even though Pat was offered the chance to be discharged early with honors and return to pro football, he declined, citing his desire to fulfill his three-year commitment to the military, and he and Kevin were redeployed to Afghanistan. There, on April 22, 2004, a tactical blunder–which no one ever took responsibility for–split Tillman’s convoy into two separate groups. In a cascade of confusion and miscommunication, Tillman and several others came under fire from fellow soldiers. Pat was dead for ten minutes before his brother, at the rear of the convoy, arrived at the scene; this movie reveals that in those ten minutes, a cover-up had already begun, with soldier eyewitnesses instructed to say nothing to Kevin, who was subsequently quarantined.

But in their rush to manufacture a fallen hero during a re-election year, Bush, Rumsfeld, and their fellow warmongers mistakenly assumed Tillman’s family would be humble and easily manipulated in their grief. An especially despicable example occurred the day after Pat’s death, when three soldiers arrived at the Tillman home, in full view of the media already camped outside, to officially inform his wife Marie of the terrible news. Marie says the real reason for their visit was to get her, in a grief-stricken and vulnerable moment, to sign off on a full-scale military funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. But she knew that was not what her husband had wanted, and he had expressly declined such a send-off on his induction forms. Then the military publicly revealed their fictitious cover story and awarded Pat a posthumous Silver Star, though in truth his actions did not merit that medal. But the revelation that came later–that Pat was killed by our own troops–moved Pat’s mother, Dannie, and the rest of the Tillman family, from grief into action.

The Tillman Story is, like many tales, about a search for truth, but director Amir Bar-Lev (My Kid Could Paint That) seems to realize that some truths cannot be fully known in a cover-your-ass culture that emphasizes avoidance of blame and responsibility. Interviews with Tillman’s comrade Russell Baer reveal the guilt he felt in knowing the truth about Pat’s death but withholding it from the family (at the prompting of the military). Pat’s family wanted to learn the truth, but they were brushed aside, lied to, and even publicly vilified by the Army’s own investigator as amoral atheists who couldn’t let go.

At one point in the film, the Tillmans assert that the Army tried to characterize the friendly-fire confusion of Pat’s death as part of “the fog of war.” In Errol Morris’ Oscar-winning documentary of the same name, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who himself was widely and justifiably vilified, asserted that he never knew any military leader who didn’t make mistakes. McNamara tried to study and learn from his own mistakes and from those of others above and below him in command. The family is not exploiting Pat’s death for financial gain by participating in The Tillman Story, as some have erroneously complained; but much like the eleven lessons McNamara imparted in The Fog Of War, this proud family shares what they’ve learned in dealing with a duplicitous, media-obsessed government, all over the memory of a brave young man who was indeed an American hero.