The Bastards Who Killed Pat Tillman

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
H Hello everybody. I'm Robert Evans, and this is once
again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you
everything you don't know about the very worst people in
all of history. Now today we're actually talking about a
pretty good guy, but we're talking about all of the
terrible people who sort of surrounded his death and uh
kind of made it their own. So that's that's the

(00:20):
story today. It is the story of Pat Tillman. Now,
I grew up in a very conservative family, and from
the time I was eleven or twelve, I lived in
you know, deep in the heart of Texas. My parents
love George W. Bush, who had been the governor before
he was the president. They were big proponents of the
Iraq War. My childhood memories of Pat Tillman are sort
of fawning segments on Fox News about how he'd turned
down a multimillion dollar NFL contract to serve his country.

(00:44):
I remember hearing that he'd been killed in Afghanistan bravely
charging up a hill. That that's at least how I
remember it as a kid in my head. Um. Now,
I think across all forms of conservative media that I
was aware of at the time, the portrayal of Pat
was the same. He was an all American hero, the
perfect symbol of the sacrifice their brave soldiers make for freedom.
I remember hearing about Pat Tillman a lot, and then
suddenly people stopped talking about him at all, At least

(01:07):
people in the right wing media bubble that I had
been inhabited stopped talking about him. Now. My guest today
is Joe Kasabian. He's a co host of the Alliance
Led by Donkeys podcast, which is a military history podcast.
I recommend uh and Joe. You are an actual veteran yourself,
and you served in Afghanistan as well. Is that correct? Yes?
I did. I did two tours of duty in Afghanistan,

(01:28):
and I regret both of them. Yeah. Um, so tell
me about I know, I think cost is where Tillman
was stationed when he died. Like, where does that relate
to sort of where you were in country? I was
a little bit further north than where I was. I
spent well, my first first store I was in the
northeast and a little bit north of Kabul, outside of Bogram,

(01:50):
and then my second one I was in Kandahar, So
that definitely further north than Kanadahar. But gotcha in a
country that that like fracts this and everything that that
kind of resistance and fighting that you deal with his
night and day. Really that's interesting. I don't know all
that much, or I didn't when I got into this,
know all that much about what had actually happened to

(02:10):
Pat Tillman. I didn't know much about Pat Tillman. Like
I said, he was sort of this, uh, kind of
like movie poster looking guy like he if you've seen
the pictures of it, you've probably seen the one of
him in a uniform where he's got this almost unbelievably
white neck and he looks like a g I Joe. Yeah,
he looks he looks like what every recruiter wants to
put on a poster, Like, he looks like an action star. Yeah,

(02:32):
he's like the platonic ideal of the American soldier. Like
you couldn't have cast him better. Yeah, he's like he
looks like his face is like carved out a granite. Yeah,
I know, what when were you over? There was a
two thousand nine or so my first tour of two
thousand and eight, two thousand nine on my second was
Susan eleven to twelve, So you were there about four
or five years after Pat, right, Yeah, right right, and

(02:54):
his his mythos so so I mean it's definitely not
a ranger like he was, but you know, his mythosis
so incredibly steeped in everything that I didn't know anything
about Pat tillman Um when I joined the army, but
then you see his face everywhere and especially nowadays, and
so how was it. Can you talk a little bit

(03:14):
about that, about how he was sort of talked about
and viewed when you were in the military and when
you were in Afghanistan, like and when he comes up, like,
how was he portrayed? Oh man um? Like he should
have had the Medal of Honor. You know, he gave
up his giant football contract, which I didn't know much about.
It wasn't a football fan at the time, um, and
it gave up everything and to go make you know,

(03:35):
shitty specialist paycheck and go fight in Afghanistan. And I
mean this is years after everybody knew what really happened
when he died, and everybody just kind of glossed over
that fact. Yeah. I think it's interesting you say that
because I suspect a lot of people still don't really
know much about the actual Pat Tillman, because I realized

(03:56):
when I started researching this that I didn't know much
about the actual Pat tone because I had kind of
assumed that he was that living human embodiment of like patriotism,
that he was sort of portrayed as as a young
man and or portrayed as when I was like a
kid watching stuff about him and coming across some pictures
of him when he was younger. His like really twisted

(04:17):
that a little bit, because like, we've got a couple
of pictures will have him up on the site, one
of him just like shirtless and flip flops, taking groceries
on a or on a bicycle and looking like a
beach bum. And another of him with like, I mean,
I gotta say, like a really dumb haircut, but like
long hippie looking hair, Like he's still this gigantic, very

(04:37):
muscular man. But you get a really different sort of
picture of him looking at those Yeah, he had like
this longer flowing, almost mullet like hair all the way
when he like you see the it's even part of
like the statue they have him, and I think it's Arizona, Yeah,
where you know he's he's like throwing his golden locks back. Yeah,

(04:57):
which is a better look for him than sort of
the aaved head because he looks like he looks like
he belongs in the Gears of War video game, and
a lot of the pictures you'll see when he's over
in Afghanistan because he's just all shaved headed and covered
in you know, body armor and and ammunition and stuff.
And anyway, it was interesting to me to learn as
I read more about him that the kind of long haired,
hippie looking kid was probably more give you a better

(05:19):
depiction of like his actual personality than the pictures of
him in his uniform. Yeah, And that's one of the
things so that I have a couple of sources for
this book. One of them is the crack Our book
Where Men Win Glory, which is a pretty good book,
although it talks about a lot of high school football,
So you've gotta be really ready to read about high
school football if you're gonna get into this story that

(05:40):
will be popular in Texas then Yeah. And there's a
there's a number of articles too on on the Intercept
on Sports Illustrated that all talked about Pat Tillman, and
they all paint a picture of a guy who's not
what I expected going into this, who was really sensitive,
who was constantly reading a book, always had a book
in his hand, read you know, the Koran and the Bill,
but was not himself religious and in fact identified as

(06:03):
an atheist. He wasn't the guy you'd think. And one
of the things I learned about him is that he
had a brief at least set of email exchanges with
Noam Chomsky and was planning on meeting with Chomsky when
he got out of the Army Rangers because he was
interested in Chomsky's philosophy and anti war views and wanted
to talk with him, which is again not what I
expected when I started reading about sort of the platonic

(06:25):
ideal of a meathead soldier. Yeah, and I think that
has a lot to do with um, that's what the
current narrative kind of wants us to think about soldiers,
and especially people like Pat Tillman. Is like, they don't
want you to look at his life because then he's
humanized and he's not that statue out front or the
poster that's shared through Facebook. So yeah, we're gonna be

(06:46):
talking about a bit about his life today and then
we're gonna be talking about sort of what was done
after his death, um, because that's really where the bastardry
enters into in this story. But I want to get
through some stuff about Pat's life. First. He grew up
in the Bay Area. He was an affluent kid. The
only black mark on his record as a young man
was a fight he got into outside of a pizza

(07:07):
restaurant that seemed to be like a case of mistaken identity.
He thought some guys were going after one of his friends,
and he wound up just really beating the hell out
of one of these guys, um and doing like thirty
days and juvenile attention and a bunch of community service
for it. He had to pay a bunch of money.
But then he graduated high school and he went off
to Phoenix to play for Arizona State University. Obviously, he

(07:28):
was really good at football, good enough that after he
got out of Arizona State, he was picked for the NFL.
After he graduated, he was I think the last pick
of the year. So his salary was low by NFL standards,
which is still like a hundred and fifty eight grand
a year. Um, it was like a decent little signing bonus,
but after his first year he got offers to leave

(07:48):
Arizona and get more money. But he was the kind
of guy who was really loyal to his coach and
loyal to his team, so he wound up staying at
the league minimum for most of his career, which you
know raises every year. So he was making like five
hundred grand a year after a while. But his his
motivation in football wasn't just financially. Seemed to have a
strong sense of loyalty and really want to Uh, I
don't know, you just seemed to be the kind of

(08:09):
guy like a challenge himself. There's all these stories about
him jumping off of high things into in the lakes
and taking a lot of really physical risks, so that
seems to have been this guy is like one of
his north Stars as a young man, which makes a
lot of sense considering what happened later. Yeah, he's he
seems like the person that the Rangers would be looking
for us for sure. Yeah yeah, now, um, one of

(08:30):
the things I learned about Pat is that as an adult,
he was an outspoken gay rights advocate, and he was
seems like the kind of dude who if he were
still in the NFL, would probably have supported Colin Kaepernick
and taking a knee. He was a pretty woke sounding guy,
like there's a lot of his journals and diary passages
that are quoted and where men win glory, and he
in general seems like a pretty progressive and not like

(08:54):
reflexively patriotic dude, which is why it was kind of
frustrating on September seven, ten when President Donald Trump retweeted
a post from the Twitter names user is j Maga
forty five. Um, so, yeah, you know what you're getting
into here, and I've sent a picture over to you.
Two will have it up on the site. But it's
a picture of Pat Tillman looking like a g I Joe,

(09:15):
and it just says NFL player Pat Tilman joined US
Army in two thousand two. He was killed in action
two thousand four. He fought for letter four our country,
slash freedom, hashtag, stand for our Anthem, hashtag boycott NFL,
and Donald Trump, the President, retweeted that, um yeah, And
then there there was outcry from people who knew Pat

(09:37):
because they don't think he would have supported this idea,
and in fact, his wife, I mean didn't Pat Tillman's
sister come out and say something about like, please shut
the funk up about my brother or something along those lines. Yeah,
and his wife has been very vocally anti Trump and
been very vocal about the fact that Pat Tillman had
no desire to die for the kind of rhetoric that
Trump has has supported. So she, like pretty much everyone

(10:00):
knew him and was close to him, has been a
real big critic of the current administration, which is why
it's so gross when they kind of you can see
them trying to co opt his legacy even now, which
is sort of the pattern with Pat Tillman. Yeah. Yeah,
I mean, he was the all American fucking hero. I mean,
that's they you can tell they truly support the troops
by dragging them out the grave for whatever political points

(10:22):
they need to make that leak. Yeah, it seemed like
for a little while during the Obama years, we'd stopped
hearing that done to him, but it does seem to
be coming back since he's you know, tied to the NFL,
and that's one of the big cultural issues right now,
which is frustrating. Yeah, it's kind of absurd that the
two are even connected. Yeah, you know, Pat obviously joined
the army after nine eleven and because of nine eleven,

(10:44):
but it wasn't something he did immediately. It was a
decision he deliberated on for quite a while after the
towers fell. One driving factor in it was that he
felt his job in the NFL was now empty in
the wake of the attacks, and one interview at the time,
he said, quote, it's hard because we play foot ball,
you know, it is so unimportant compared to everything that's
taken place, which is a fair statement when you realize

(11:05):
that you're playing football and the forever war is just
kicked off. Sure. Yeah, and especially at the time those wars.
I grant, I was in middle school, but you know,
those wars seemed like the right thing to do, So
I could hardly blame him for thinking that. Yeah, he
was like responding to this big attack and his his
whole desire was to go over and fight in Afghanistan,

(11:26):
And it seemed like it was more a desire that
other people not be fighting in his place in Afghanistan.
And this is something I think a lot of people
on the left have trouble understanding, is like, coming from
a military family, that kind of pressure to like, well, Okay,
now there's something going on. This is what my family does,
and it's my responsibility to get in there and like
do my part. Yeah. Absolutely. Um A lot of people

(11:48):
don't like get the kind of pressure that comes down
on people who are raised in military families to following
somebody's footsteps. It's kind of like, unless you become a
doctor or you know, and sent a longer lasting light
ball or some ship, you're still a failure because you
can go and list or get a commission or whatever. Yeah,
And I think that's sort of how Pat felt about it,

(12:08):
Like if he didn't do this now, and I think
he was thinking, you know, we would be out of
Afghanistan in a couple of years, which is not to assumption,
but I think that was his assumption. And I think
he just didn't want other people to be at risk
in him not to be, which, in my opinion, that's
an admirable way to feel about something like that. I

(12:29):
don't fault him a bit for that. Um. I kind
of felt the same way Grant as a couple of
years later. But you know, why not. You know, he's
he was an incredibly healthy individual and could do pretty
much anything in the arm and would ever want him
to do so. I could see why he wanted to
go down that route, and in none of our minds

(12:49):
and we ever think almost two decades later, we'd be
sitting here and there's still be people in Afghanistan. Yeah,
that one snuck up on everybody, didn't it. Yeah, those
those quagmire as a really sneak up on you. So
at the time, Patent wrote in his journal sort of
about his headspace when he was making the final decision
to join the army. He noted that quote, my life

(13:11):
at this point is relatively easy. It is my belief
that I could continue to play football for the next
seven or eight years and create a very comfortable lifestyle
for not only Mary but myself, but be afforded the
luxury of helping out family and friends. Shouldn't need ever arise.
The coaches and players I work with treat me well,
and the environment has become familiar and pleasing. My job
is challenging, enjoyable, and strokes my vanity enough to fool
me into thinking it's important. However, these last few years,

(13:33):
especially after reefs and events, I've come to appreciate how
shallow and insignificant my role is I'm no longer satisfied
with the path I've been following. It's no longer important.
So yeah, Pat joined the army with the eventual goal
of becoming an Army ranger. Now you mentioned earlier, this
guy was clearly physically qualified to do everything the Army could.
Last Um, he hated boot camp. He thought it was boring,

(13:55):
and he was, you know, he was in his like
mid twenties at this point, so he it was like going.
I imagine, and if you're six and you go to
boot camp, it's like being put around a bunch of
high school seniors. Again, like it it's frustrating, and that
seems to be his act. Could not imagine doing that.
I would have lost my fucking mind. Yeah, because like

(14:16):
the whole I mean, it seems to me that a
whole big part of the training is to get people
who are literally high schoolers ready to do something serious.
So you're you, you have to deal with people who
are frustrating. Yeah, I mean I joined I was seventeen.
I mean, grant, that's not the most intelligent thing I've
ever done. But I was in training with people who
are in their forties and they were so sick of

(14:37):
my ship within like two weeks. Yeah, and he was
also like, it's really I'm glad that he was a
journal er because now we have sort of through his
own mind how he looked at a lot of this stuff,
and again his his perspective on things really surprised me.
One of the notes he wrote during boot camp was
one thing I find myself despising this is the sight

(14:59):
of all these uns in the hands of children. Of course,
we all understand the necessity of defense, it doesn't diminish
the fact that a young man I would not trust
with my canteen is walking about armed. It speaks so
much to my experience as well. Yeah, you see a
lot of people doing very dumb things with with firearms

(15:20):
in the military, which is not something that's ever sort
of replicated in our fictional depictions of it. But it
is a bunch of eighteen year olds being handed machine
guns for the first time. Absolutely. I was seventeen year
old and I was in a tank. I mean there's
I was not legally allowed to rent a car, but
I could fire ay millimeter cannon at whatever. You know,

(15:42):
It's the whole practice is it's not well thought out. Yeah,
when you when you sort of apply outside world standards
to the military, a lot of things make a lot
less sense when you're just like looking at like you
are nineteen years old. What are you doing with that?
Like who gave you get? Yeah, there's there's no way that.

(16:04):
I mean, granted, I understand that drill sergeant start around,
and they're for the most part, all the ones I
have ever worked with, even when I got out of
basic training and end of running into them later down
the line, they all were good soldiers. But I mean,
I've heard so many horror stories of people like they're
at the grenade range just dropping the grenade instead of

(16:24):
like after they pull the pen, they just drop it
from nerves and ship have to be like pushed to safety.
Oh man, wait, no, that's possibly there. So if you
pull the pin out, there is actually like a safety
you can engage, not really like you there's like a
little safety switch like a piece of metal that you
pull off, and then you pull the pen and the
spoon goes flying. You can hold on to like the

(16:47):
spoon itself, but sometimes they'll cock their arm back to
throw it. Spoon will come off, arming the grenade, and
then they'll just drop it. I've never done it myself,
but I have seen have done oh man. Uh see. Yeah,
so Pat found it frustrating. You know. He it took
a while before he felt like more comfortable with the

(17:08):
people he was around, which I think did happen once
he went to ranger school, you know, than people were
a little bit older and had been through a little
more ship. But you know, he was already a guy
who had, you know, quite a lot of discipline. So
I think he was frustrated at the early stages of
his boot camp experience. Now, he did enlist with his
younger brother, Kevin, who was with him the entire time
he served, so that was kind of his like social
circle in the army. He had his brother, he had

(17:30):
a couple of friends, um, but it was a rough
period of time for him. He didn't like the drill instructors.
He didn't like the way that they yelled a him.
He didn't like being treated like he was, you know,
and I think some of that may have been getting
a little bit of an ego from being an NFL star,
But he just he found it a frustrating experience. Yeah,
I could see that not meshing. Well, I mean, he

(17:51):
went from being most effectively the top of the world.
I mean, what's what's more popular in America than like
an NFL star flowing golden law box and chiveled good
luck to being yelled at and called a piece of
ship by a drill sergeant. Yeah, and it does seem
like he got a lot of extra pushups from people
who had been in just a little bit longer than him,
and we're like, well, this is my chance to like

(18:12):
order around the famous NFL guy, Which I get. Why
you would you know, why you would jump at that?
Oh yeah, I may or may not have done the
same thing. Uh. Now. The Bush administration obviously made a
huge deal about Pat Tillman's enlistment, as did the army.
In the NFL, he became the poster child for the
entire War on Terror, heroic young man who tossed aside

(18:33):
wealth and privilege to fight a righteous war. But Pat
did not want to be a poster boy or a
recruiting tool. One of the first things he stated when
he made the decision to enlist is that he was
going to refuse all interviews after enlisting, which he did.
He didn't talk to any press while he was in
the army. This actually wound up being a good thing
for the Bush administration because if he talked to the press,
he might have accidentally revealed what he thought about the

(18:54):
impending Iraq war. Oh yeah, I can't have that. No, no, no, no.
His first tour of duty was a rap and he
was really furious that he was sent to Iraq and
not Afghanistan. Sports Illustrated interviewed Russell Bear, who was a
ranger that was a Pet's friend during both of his
deployments and spent a lot of time with him. And
here's how Bear portrayed to them Tillman's attitude towards the

(19:15):
invasion of Iraq while he was actually in Iraq. So
this is like one of the first nights when they're
in country during the invasion. That night, as Pat watched
another orange and white flash bang shutter in the distant town,
he shook his head and said, this war is so
fucking illegal. Rust for the first time realized how wobbly
a tight rope Pat was walking between his integrity and
his duty. Even later in their three and a half
month deployment in Iraq, as it began to appear that

(19:37):
they had been sent on a NUX and biochemical weapons
wild goose Chase Russ never heard Pat go further than
this is all bullshit, which I don't think is an
uncommon statement to hear out of a soldier's mouth, but
probably not one that would have been pretty common. But
it's definitely not something they want someone like Pat Tillman
saying publicly no, and in his diary he was more

(19:58):
explicit with his condemnation of war. Quote. My hope is
that the decisions are being made with the same good
faith that Kevin and I aim to display. I hope
this war is about more than money, oil and power.
I doubt that it is. If anything were to happen
to Kevin, I would never forgive myself. If anything happens
to Kevin and my fears of our intent in this
country proved true, I will never forgive this world. So
Pat Tillman is not the guy he looks like on

(20:20):
the outside. But we've got to go to some ads
right now sell some products and stuff. So we're going
to break for that, and then we get back. We're
going to talk about Pat's involvement in the rescue of
Jessica Lynch. If you remember that from seventeen years ago,
and we're back. We're talking about Pat Tillman. He's just

(20:41):
been sent to Iraq for a three and a half
month tour, which is like a weird ranger thing. They
only do really short tours, which ay um, sounds pretty
sweet compared to being there for eleven months. Kind of
like a double edged sword. They'll have them do really
short tours, but do a lot of them. Oh yeah, yeah,
so like a normal truth like myself, a do year on,

(21:02):
year off, sometimes less than a year off. But I know,
I mean there was that uh Special Forces sergeant who
died that that long ago, I believe in Afghanistan or Iraq,
I can't remember because I'm awful. And he had over
a dozen tours who died in a tour, right that
was Afghanistan, I think, Okay, yeah, thirteen tours. Yeah, that's crazy.

(21:26):
So during his first tour, Pat was one of the
rangers who was assigned to the bloodless rescue of Private
Jessica Lynch. Now, if you've forgotten, Jessica Lynch was a
private first class. She was nineteen years old when she
was captured after eleven of her comrades were killed in
a disastrous firefight. The Washington Post published an article on
the whole ordeal back in two thousand three, titled she

(21:47):
was Fighting to the death. Here's how it described your capture.
Private first Class Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital,
fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces
ambushed the Armies five or seven or its maintenance company,
firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition. US
officials said, yesterday. Yeah. The article went on to claim

(22:10):
that Lynch, who was a supply clerk, continued to fire
at Iraqis even after she had been shot multiple times
and was eventually stabbed until she lost consciousness. The story
notes that she did not want to be taken alive.
None of this is true. That was just a bunch
of lives. No. Jessica Lynch was injured in a car crash.

(22:30):
Her convoy was attacked, which caused the crash. But the
real cause of everything seems to have been that this
convoy mistook where they were and accidentally drove into a
town that was occupied by the Iraqi Army. Yeah they
got lost, Yeah, they got lost. It was a giant
clusterfuck Obviously, I don't think Lynch did anything wrong, but
she got into a horrible car crash and her gun

(22:50):
jammed and she lost consciousness from her terrible injuries, and
and it kind of does a disservice because there was
another soldier that was captured with her, know whatever hears
about her, No, no, And she was the first Native
American woman to die serving in the United States military. Right,
I think so will correct me, but yeah, I think

(23:12):
you're right. Yeah, it was like, yeah, when Jessica Lynch
was rescued, there were multiple other U S soldiers had
been captured in iraq Um, but there was no like,
there was no good media angle for any of them,
so we never heard about any of those rescues or
any of those cases. But Jessica Lynch was like a
young nineteen year old woman, Like this was one of
the first wars where a lot of women had been
near the front line. So it was just like this

(23:34):
immediate pr thing that the Bush administration just sort of
creamed into. Um, the war needed a fast hero, yeah,
it needed a really fast hero, and they thought they
had this story of like this young woman who had
like fought until her she was out of Ammo and
stabbed repeatedly. And there were even grosser stories at the

(23:54):
time about like suspecting that she had been sexually assaulted
by the Iraqis who captured her, which is not at
all true. Uh And in fact, several of the she
was taken to an Iraqi hospital Saddam Hussein Hospital, because
of course that's what the hospital was named. Um, but
they like they took really good care of names, Todam
Hussein Hospital. That gets really confusing. There's the Saddam Hussein

(24:16):
Hospital and the Saddam Hussein like daycare center and yeah,
you know Saddam Hussein Romance Library. Um. But yeah, she
was taken to this hospital and like several Iraqi doctors
and nurses donated blood to actually give her transfusions and
stuff like. She was treated very well after being captured
by the civilians who she wound up in the care of.

(24:37):
But none of that, none of that made for a
good story, like, oh, hey, our enemies are people too,
and they take care of a wounded person. Would not
be Yeah, I mean, the situation probably would have been
different if she was captured by like, but she wasn't she.
I think she was captured by the Republican Guard of
all units, so they're like the best soldiers she could

(24:58):
have been captured by. Yeah, and they pretty much were
immediately out of the picture, Like they dropped her off
at the hospital and then they got the funk away
from that hospital because they knew the Americans were going
to come. Um yuckers. Yeah, so it was, it was,
it was. The whole rescue operation was a pr opportunity.
They got several different ranger units and a bunch of

(25:19):
different like special forces units, like it was, they had
a bunch of gun ships. Like it was a way
larger operation than you would ever call in for like
a single pow in the middle of an invasion. Like
maybe now, like you know, when uh, I forget the
name of the guy who was at Bergdal who like
this post in Afghanistan, there was a big search for him.
But that was because this was a weird disruption to

(25:40):
a war that had hit like a pretty stable pattern.
This is like the middle of the invasion, So it's
weird that they devote this many forces to like rescuing
a single private from an undefended hospital. Um. And yeah,
normally you would just be written off. It's it's kind
of cold. But unless you're a pilot or I don't know,

(26:02):
someone that knows something, probably probably shouldn't be giving to
the enemy like some kind of Special Forces soldier. You're
going to be written off. Yeah, especially when like the
country hasn't fallen yet, you know, Saddam is still in
charge theoretically of part of the country. Um. Pat seemed
to know at the time that it was a kind

(26:22):
of bullshit. Uh, he wrote in his diary quote, the
mission will be a pow rescue a woman named Jessica Lynch.
As awful as I feel for the fear she must face,
and admire the courage I'm sure she is showing. I
do believe this to be a big public relations stunt.
Do not mistake me. I wish everyone in trouble to
be rescued, But sending in this many folks for a
single low raking soldier screams of media blitz, which it was.

(26:42):
The operation was actually delayed by like a day so
that a camera crew could follow along and film it.
Um And I didn't know they had Special Forces camera crews.
But they have Special Forces camera crews. Yeah, they're are
combat camera guys. We had them pop up from time
to time. When I was there, there well the l
element for the most part, but they're all right. Yeah,

(27:03):
I I can empathize with being out of your element.
It does feel weird to have a camera when everybody
else has a rifle. I can't imagine, that's for sure.
I I mean, there wasn't any enemy in the hospital,
was there. No, No, no, no, no, no. They they
had left quite a while before that happened. Some doors
got kicked in. I think there were some shots near

(27:25):
people's heads to sort of keep them down or whatever,
but there was no actual fight that happened. It was
a bloodless rescue. Wow, the alien good zalis an entire hospital.
Well yeah, yeah, I mean they really did funk up
that hospital. But you're not gonna not funk up the hospital, Like,
what are you doing with all these fancy fucking up
equipment if you're not going to fuck some stuff up.
I mean, also, that's a pretty big violation of the

(27:48):
Geneva Convention targeting a hospital like that. But you know,
whatever were the US, it doesn't really apply to us, right, Yeah,
I mean, I don't know what the Geneva Convention says.
If somebody's being held there or whatever. I really I
I haven't read it recently, although it certainly has been
taking a little bit of a pounding in Syria right now.
It seems like a lot of people get away with
bombing really in hospitals and like mosques, uh any religious

(28:13):
building things like that. You can target them if you're
taking fire from them, like if the enemy is using
them to uh to actually like a defensive position, you're
good to go. But as far as the pow thing, nah,
that doesn't really fly unless you have someone that can
really work into gray. Well, speaking of people who can

(28:33):
work in the gray, the whole rescue was staged by
a guy named Jim Wilkinson, who was on paper the
director for strategic Communications for General Tommy Frank's, but in
reality was George W. Bush's best pr man before and
he's he seems to be the guy who was like,
at the camera crew here, we need to have these
different units here because these are like the units they're

(28:54):
gonna look best going in on this mission that we
want to be able to like report on. He staged
managed this whole thing, and before the Iraq War, he
had worked with candidate Bush in the two thousand election
He's the guy responsible for spreading the myth that al
Gore claimed to have invented the Internet, so that's his
other claim to fame. Wilkinson also put together the famous
trip Bush took to Ground Zero right after the nine

(29:15):
eleven attacks. He was the kind of guy you would
call to put shine on stink. According to the book
Where Men Find Glory quote, Wilkinson was the President's man
on the ground at US Central Command headquarters in Qatar,
controlling and carefully shaping information about the war disseminated by
the international press. In this capacity, he adroitly stage managed
both the rescue of Jessica Lynch and the subsequent media

(29:37):
coverage of her ordeal. It was Wilkinson who arranged to
give the Washington Post exclusive access to classified intelligence that
was the basis for the now discredited she was fighting
to the death story that ran on the front page
of the newspaper. So Wilkinson basically co opted the Washington
Post to help write propaganda, which is neat. Thankfully that
doesn't happen anymore. No, this is the last time it

(29:58):
ever happened to any journalist. Yeah, yeah, thank god. Also,
I mispronounced cutter. I was hoping no one would notice,
but my conscious caught up with me. So the two
people in Cutter who are listening to this, I'm sorry
I pronounced your country's name wrong. There's probably less of
you demographic. Man. Well you know it's a critical demographic
because they're all rich oil shakes. So like you know,

(30:22):
you get all you sell a lot of T shirts
to that crew, is what I'm saying. I think you're
now bands from the World Cup. Preemptively your ship caned.
Oh yeah, well I don't think soccer is a real sport.
So there goes my Australian listeners. Everybody in Europe, most
of the Middle East, Spain just dropping like flies. And

(30:42):
this is the episode they listened to because we're the
bastards this time. Oh yeah, no, no, I but I've
been firm about my anti soccer stance and Sophie is
here staring at me. But it's not a real sport.
There are two real sports and neither of them are soccer.
And that's all we're gonna get into about sports today.
I just want to know what the two are. Well,
that's another episode today. We're talking about Pat Tillman, who

(31:04):
played a fake sport called football and then became an
army ranger. Now Pat was aware of all the pageantry
that had been injected into the Jessica Lynch rescue. He
knew it was all there to distract from a war
that so far had failed to deliver up any of
the w M D S American voters expected. Looking at
all this, he couldn't help but think about what the
Bush administration would do if something happened to him. Jade Lane,

(31:25):
a arranger who served with Tillman, recalled this. When we
were in Baghdad, our cots were next to each other.
Pat and I used to talk at night a lot
before we rack out. I don't know how the conversation
got brought up, but one night he said he was
afraid if something were to happen to him Bushes people
would like make a big deal out of his death
and parade him through the streets. And those were his
exact words. I don't want them to parade me through
the streets. It just burned into my brain him saying that,

(31:47):
which is pretty heartbreaking, because I think we all do
know what comes next, which is exactly that. Yeah, he's
not gonna like that statue much. No, Well, I mean,
that's a football thing. I guess that's okay. He likes
he's he's football pat in the in the statue. But
we all know why the statue is there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no,

(32:09):
that is a fair point. Um. The Lynch Rescue, though,
generated more than six hundred news stories, as well as
a nonfiction book that became a New York Times bestseller.
Jessica got her own made for TV movie released during
Sweets Week, which I don't think is a thing anymore,
but definitely was. Then the Rambo portrayal of her whole
ordeal got a huge amount of time in the sun
before anyone realized that it was all a lie. I

(32:30):
don't know if the Internet would have busted that lie faster,
you know, if this had happened more recently, or if
it would have made it even harder to dispel. But
people bought into the Jessica Lynch story for a long time.
I know I did when I was a little kid
paying attention to all the Iraq news. Now yeah I
did too, Oh yeah, because it was just this, like
it sounded like it was the story of this like

(32:50):
almost mad max story of this convoy getting ambushed and
she's like ramming people in her car and shooting a
machine gun. It's it sounded cool. Yeah, it turns out
it was just to garden variety tragedy which nobody wants
to hear about that and a made for TV movie.
You know, we want something now that's uh, that's more
of a comedy of airs and makes everybody just feel
sad inside. Yeah, although I do want to be clear,

(33:13):
there's no evidence I've ever heard that Lynch herself did
anything wrong. She was just a private in a vehicle
and a terrible thing happened. Uh right, you can't blame
a private. I don't know if she was a driver
or or not, because I know she was like her
a job, was a truck driver, but I don't know
if if she was actually driving the vehicles. Like, it's
not her fault she took the wrong turn. Private stuff control,

(33:33):
That just that her fault. She didn't man some Alamo
type defense private self control that either. You just happened
to be a colleg in a machine that got fucked up. Yeah,
And she has been pretty outspoken about wanting to correct
the records since and we'll be we'll be getting to that. Uh,
in a little bit here. But yeah, So now, in
the book Where Men Find Glory, crack Our alleges that

(33:55):
all of the hoop law around lynches, capture and rescue
was mainly intended by the Bush administration to distract the
American public from a major funk up a killing of
seventeen U S Marines by friendly fire of I think
it was a pair of aton Ward hogs um And
this had happened like four days into the invasion. So yeah,
having this story of like, you know, there's this woman
warrior being rescued and Pat Tillman, the poster boy of

(34:18):
the Army, is here, and it's like this great and well,
let's all pay attention to that and ignore the fact
that we bombed our own guys, which you know, not
a dumb strategy if you're the Army or the Bush administration.
And it clearly worked. So yeah, Pat did his three
and a half months in Iraq. When he got home,
he had officially completed a combat tour. This meant he
could have qualified for a special dispensation to end his

(34:39):
term of service early. In return to the NFL. Both
the NFL and the Army would have been totally down
for that because I think Pat was a lot more
valuable to the army as a recruiting tool than as
a single ranger. Um yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, And that's
I think that's what everyone but Pat would have preferred.
But Pat was not willing to take any special treatment,
and so in April of two thousand and four, he

(35:01):
deployed to Afghanistan with his brother Kevin and the rest
of his ranger unit. Now, a few days into their tour,
his unit was doing one of those missions that I
gather are pretty common in Afghanistan, where they're basically driving
around in the mountains for a few days, searching villages
for weapons caches and looking for taliban. Um. Oh yeah,
that's pretty much your existence. Yeah. I always make I

(35:22):
always make jokes that, like, you know, our grandfathers were
we're going to storm the beaches and take these pill
boxes or you know, take these hedgerows and we're just
let's drive around in circles until some rando tries to
fucking murderer. It does seem to be a step back
strategically from storming beaches and taking cities. Yeah, it's it's

(35:45):
the dumbest ship on Earth. And I mean, I'm sure,
it was much different in two elses before than when
I was there several years later. But you know, you
just drive round Wayne didn't get blown up or someone
take a shot at you, and you hope you survive
so you can try to kill them back. Yeah, and
that it does seem every description I've read about the
mission he was on, it does just seem like they
were driving around waiting for someone to start trouble with him. Yeah. So,

(36:07):
so that's the job these guys are doing. Um, they're
out in in the middle of no it looks if
you've ever been deep into like the California Desert, the
California Desert seems to look a lot like Afghanistan, which
I think is why they do a lot of training
there for it. Yet the other the national training centers
in the middle of Colorado. Oh cool. Um. So yeah,
it's like they're in this like dry high desert area

(36:29):
searching villages and one of their humvees gets sucked up
the axles, I think, break on it and they can't
use it anymore. Um. I think normally today they would
send in something like a chinook to pick it up.
But all of these spare air assets were in Iraq
because the invasion was still really fresh, so they didn't
have any spare like chinooks that they could send to
pick this thing up. So there were a couple of

(36:50):
different things they could have done Tilman's platoon leader, First
Lieutenant David Lot, wanted to take the gun off and
just blow up the humpy, but his commanding officer back
at base wasn't willing to let him do that because
it would look bad and be essentially seen as as
this guy wasting money. So eventually a Lot and his
men found a local truck driver who agreed to tow
the humby, but that created another problem. The platoons still

(37:13):
had more villages to clear on its list, and if
they didn't search all of the villages they've been arbitrarily assigned,
they'd make their lieutenant colonel look bad and slow up.
Like the whole time plan that everybody was working on.
How you can't make lieutenant colonel look bad? I think
of the outcome? No no, no no, So this guy
like yeah, and that's like the apparently there They spent
quite a lot of time with this lieutenant being like, look,

(37:35):
it's a really dumb idea to like split the platoon
in half. Why don't we just all take this thing
back and then we can head out, And he's really
adamant about like, no, there's a time frame. You're supposed
to have done these villages by this time, Like, we're
not gonna let this slow us down. And it should
probably be noted that the lieutenant colonel is definitely not
there with them, no no, no, no, no no. He

(37:56):
is on the phone with him, probably upping hot coffee.
So the the only option that they had after the
lieutenant colonel's orders was to split the platoon. Half of
it would go back with the broken humvy and the
other half would continue on its mission to search a
tiny village in the middle of nowhere. Specialist Jade Lane recalled,
nobody on the ground thought it was a good idea

(38:17):
to split the platoon. The pl didn't want to do it,
but in the army, you obey orders. If somebody with
a higher rank tells you to do something, you do it.
So a flat split the platoon. Now, the mountains being
what they are and technology being where it wasn't two
thousand four, the two groups couldn't really communicate very well,
so Tillman's group didn't realize when the second group with
the broken hum vy and the tow truck doubled back

(38:38):
behind them. Um. And this was apparently because when they
first tried to get back to the base, they realized
they're oute they wanted to take was two treasures for
the tow truck. So the driver was like, well, if
we just go through where they're heading right now and
drive ahead of your other buddies, there's another road that
we can use to get back into town. So while
this second group towing the humvy is like pulling up
behind Tillman's unit, they ambushed by some Taliban guys with

(39:02):
mortars and I think just like a K forty seven.
It's really debatable how much fire the unit was under
at this point. But somebody starts shooting and then all
of the rangers start shooting, and what happened next is
just a total clusterfuck. So the valley where this ambush
happened is like one of those it seems like a
classic Afghan kind of mountain feature where it's like I

(39:22):
sent the picture along in that dock I sent you,
but it's like steep walls raising up on either side
and really narrow. It's like a perfect place to ambush somebody. Yeah,
I mean, especially the only way to get through is
like tightly curled switchbacks. I mean, I've been on that
ambush before and it sucks. And i mean, like you're
talking about what its hard to communicate. That's two dollaran

(39:44):
for technology, and that's also just Afghanistan. Those valleys make
it almost impossible for our modern radio systems to work. Yeah,
So everybody's really confused and half of them are getting shot.
And Tilman is with the group that's not getting shot.
But he he realizes what's happened. He sees that his
comrades and unit that his brothers with is under fire.
So he and a couple of other guys run towards

(40:06):
the rangers that are under fire to try and and
they like kind of get up on top of this
ridge line to try and lay in suppression fire on
the dudes who are shooting at their friends. Um So,
Tillman and two other soldiers, a ranger and an Afghan
National Army guy scale this ridge line and start providing
suppression fire when a topless, doorless humvy filled with heavily

(40:26):
armed and panic rangers rolls towards them. Now this unit
was run by a sergeant named Greg Baker. He was
a guyota reputation for being a very good soldier, but
it seems like he he either made an error or
freaked out. So Baker is rolling forward on this jeep
with like three other guys in it, and they're all
just kind of shooting at the hilltops around them, and

(40:47):
Baker sees the Afghan National Army soldier who's standing next
to Pat Tilman, and he sees he says, he sees
his beard and his face and realizes that he's Afghan
and just shoots him dead right on the spot, not
noticing that he's wearing like the uniform of the a
n A. So Baker kills this guy, and then all
of the other rangers in his car start pouring fire

(41:08):
into Pat Tillman and Tillman's buddy. So we're gonna talk
about what happens next. But that's sort of how everything
goes to ship, right, Yeah. I mean I wish I
could say that isn't like on brand for soldiers everywhere
just to blindly shoot where everybody else is. But I
could see this happening tomorrow, and that's exactly the justification

(41:28):
everybody else in the car gives is they see their
squad leaders shooting in one direction and so they just
start firing. Yeah, it doesn't end well, but speaking of things,
that doing well adds and we're back. Uh, so we've
just gotten into Yeah, Tillman and his guys are up

(41:49):
on this ridge. Greg Baker, sergeant in a humpy with
three other guys, has just fired and killed the Afghan
National Army guy next to them, And now all of
the rangers in this humby start pouring fire into the
position where Pat Tillman is standing with you know, his
buddy and a guy named O'Neil, one of them in
shooting at them with Stephen Ashpole, a fifty caliber machine gunner.

(42:11):
When asked why he and the other rangers in the
jeep hadn't waited to ide their targets before shooting, he said,
you are drilled into as a private shoot where your
team leader shoots. We came around a curve. Sergeant Baker
then called fire, and I transitioned my weapon and saw
some quick shapes and fired where Sergeant Baker and the
other guys are firing. So that's exactly what happens. Um
the other guy O'Neill manages to survive, but Pat Tillman

(42:33):
is shot three times in the head by a fellow
army ranger with a saw squad automatic weapon. And yeah,
I mean he was he was killed immediately three times.
That that's yeah, this isn't sound really shitty. That's shocking
he was able to make that shot. Yeah, I mean
it does sound like they were all really good shots
in that humpy Yeah, they're they're simultaneously incredibly inepted where

(42:56):
they were shooting, but incredibly accurate. I mean, you know,
at least that's half of where they're supposed to be. Yeah. Yeah, so, uh,
it's it's somewhere between two and of American war casualties
come from friendly fire, which is such a broad range
that it's almost a useless statistic because it means it's
either almost nobody or a quarter of American war casualties.

(43:20):
UM imagine that studying literally any other topic. Yeah, it's
it's weird how bad the data on it is. And
I tried to find better information. I was not able to.
I found one article in two Doesn't Tend that said
that at that point, at least seven U S soldiers
had been killed in thirty four wounded in Iraq and
friendly fire incidents since the invasion, but that didn't count

(43:42):
like a dozen or so British soldiers who had been
killed by US friendly fire at that point. It seems
in general like the Army does not do a good
job of reporting friendly fire casualties, and that wouldn't do
a good job of reporting anything that makes them look bad. No,
and that's exactly what happened with Pat Tillman. There was
no doubt at the time that he had been killed
by members of his own unit, that it was fratricide,

(44:04):
but an investigation was ordered by the Army, which was standard,
but they used the investigation as an excuse to not
say anything about the fact that Pat had been shot
by his own buddies. So a bunch of ship like
this is really aware the bastardry starts to pile up
because um, for one thing, Lieutenant Colonel Hodney, who was
the guy who had ordered a lot to split his
platoons that they wouldn't you know, get off of the

(44:25):
time frame. The guy he put in charge of the
investigation was only a captain, which is according to like
military the regulations that they were doing the investigation under
Article fifteen Dash six. Um, the investigation was supposed to
be conducted by someone with a higher rank than anyone
he might have to investigate. So since the lieutenant colonel

(44:45):
put a captain in charge of it, that meant basically
no one in command could be investigated as having had
a role in Tilman's death from the start. So it
was like, yeah, I should have at least been a colonel. Yeah, exactly.
It should have been somebody who could have looked into
what Hodney had been doing and looked at, well, did
the shitty orders they were getting contribute to this soldier dying?
Which seems like a definite yes. Um. Yeah. So one

(45:08):
of those men most involved in hiding what happened to
Pat Tillman was a general named Stanley McCrystal. Uh now
at that point, uh huh yeah, um. At that point
he was the Joint Special Operations Command Commander Jay Sak.
McCrystal ordered the facts of Tillman's death to be concealed.
The justification at the time is that it would have
been irresponsible to say anything until the investigation was concluded. Uh.

(45:32):
Here is a quote from the book Where Men Find
Glory According to a federal statute and several Army regulations,
Mary Tillman, as next of kin, was supposed to be
notified that an investigation was underway, even if friendly fire
was only suspected, and be kept informed as additional information
about the cause of death becomes known. Instead, McCrystal and
the soldiers under their command went to extraordinary lengths to

(45:52):
prevent the Tillman family from learning the truth about how
Pat died. So they're not they're not telling Pat's wife
when they're supposed to tell her that there's an investigation
to the nature of his death. They've ordered all of
the members of Pat's unit to keep quiet about what's happened,
which means that the guys who killed Pat weren't allowed
to and or the guys who knew what had happened

(46:13):
and how Pat had died weren't allowed to tell Pat's brother, Kevin,
what had happened, even though he was in the same unit.
So there's this like really ghastly situation where Kevin's like
going to the gym and working out with the guys
who shot his brother to death and like doesn't know it,
which is just super gross. That's I didn't know this part. Yeah,

(46:35):
I actually had no idea that his brother was in
the army, but yeah, that's just fucking ghoulish. Yeah. Steven Elliott,
one of the rangers who was in the jeep you
know that Pat got killed by their fusillade, said he
and others were ordered quote not to discuss the incident
with folks outside the unit, and that it was mainly
because it was still under investigation. He says, I was
operating on a certain level of naivete. I believe senior

(46:58):
leaders were trying to protect the family, and I know
and I had no idea they were being deceived at
any point, but they were. Kevin was flown back with
Pat's casket from Afghanistan, and the one thing he asked
of the men he left behind was if they would
please find Pat's journal and send it back to him.
We've already read a couple of excerpts. Pat was a
really dedicated diarist, you know, uh, and it was important

(47:18):
for Kevin to read his brother's last few words. Of course,
the Army burned Pat's journal, They burned all of his
clothing and body armor, and they sent his body back
naked in the casket. This was not normal procedure. They
burned it. Yeah, they burned all of his clothing, they
burned his journal, everything that was on his body. Yeah,
that's yeah, that's not procedure at all. No, No, what
they did was completely illegal and not at all normal.

(47:41):
The sergeant who burnt the stuff was told it was
for quote security purposes, but there was never any real
good explanation given. So this is one of the first
like things that happened that's like clearly like this is
not just somebody trying to delay the truth getting out.
This is like a cover up. Now. Yeah, yeah, I
mean it should be noted like even if you're wounded
or killed, they don't even burn like your bloody clothing,

(48:01):
they send it back. Yeah. So that's it's really weird
that they would do this and really just shows like
a lack of concern for you know, like the one
thing this kid asks as he's being sent back with
his dead brother is like, find his journal. And I
don't even think that message gets to the guy who's
burning you know, Pat's clothes, and you know, the sergeant

(48:24):
who's in charge of burning that ship should have known
something was going on. They're like, hey, I've never done
this before, but weird that this is the only time
this has happened. Yeah, it's weird that these desert pattern
camouflage to contain secrets that I'm not aware of. Um
so stupid. Yeah, fratricide is a type of homicide. So

(48:45):
General McCrystal and his men were obligated to inform c
i D off what was suspective. They didn't do this
and said they sent in an army lawyer, Major Charles
kirch Meyer to basically muddy the waters enough that c
I D would decide they weren't needed. Kirch Meyer was
thanked for bea email by Crystal's legal advisor for quote
keeping the c i D at bay. So those are
the guys that you watch in your favorite old people
shows about army detectives. So it's like the army equivalent

(49:08):
of n c I S. Right, Yeah, that's the exact
same thing. They They normally investigate any fifteen six investigation,
like not necessarily a real investigation, but like a cursory glance. Yeah,
and so basically Mcrystal sends this guy Kirchmeyer in to
try and smooth over even that, so that they're really
not looking at this case at all at first, and

(49:29):
like I think they know at some point it's going
to get investigated, but they're just trying to slow things down. Um,
And I think it will become clear why in a
little bit so the army hid the fact that Pat
had died from friendly fire from his family for more
than a month. This seems to be because the Bush
administration wanted to ring every drop of good pr out
of Tillman that they possibly could. So here's how krak

(49:51):
Our describes what followed and like. The day after Tillman
died in the Bush White House, approximately two emails discussing
the situation were transmitted to receive by White House officials,
including staffers from Bush's reelection campaign, who suggested to the
president that it would be advantageous for him to respond
to Tillman's death as quickly as possible. Genie Mammo, Bush's
director of media affairs, sent an email to Lawrence de Rita,

(50:12):
Rumsfeld's press secretary, asking for details about the tragedy so
she could use them in a White House press release.
By eleven forty a m. A statement about Tilman had
been drafted and forwarded to Press Secretary Scott McCullen and
Communications Director Dan Bartlett, who immediately approved the statement on
behalf of President Bush and then disseminated it to the public,
even though doing so violated the Military Family Peace of
Mind Act. So, basically, according to a policy President George W.

(50:37):
Bush had signed into law five months earlier, you were
supposed to give families of war casualties twenty four hours
to grieve in private before making a public announcement about
their family member's death. So George W. Bush and his
administration skirted the rule that they had put in place
because Pat Tillman was so famous that they wanted to
get out ahead of the story and release a statement early.

(50:58):
They wanted to get out ahead of his parents morning. Yeah.
Well you really, you really gotta you gotta pre empt
that ship otherwise it's just gonna it's gonna look bad.
Yeah yeah, nip all that crying right in the bud. Yeah,
and it's it's all gross. The guy who rushed out
the statement, or who the White House pinned the blame
on for rushing out the statement illegally and early, said

(51:19):
that he had done it because the story quote made
the American people feel good about our country and our military,
because again, at that point, the story was this war
hero had charged up a hill to save his comrades
and been you know, tragically killed in action being heroic,
rather than shot dead by his own men in a
in a terrible accident. So yeah, that's gross. It's really gross.

(51:41):
That's like snidely whiplash level of villainy. Yeah. Yeah, and
what comes next is even grosser because Stanley McCrystal puts
Pat Tilman up for a Silver Star um and in
the Silver Star Report they basically word it vaguely enough
that it's evident to anybody reading it who doesn't know
what really happened, that it would seem like Pat Tillman
was killed like heroically trying to save you know, his buddies.

(52:05):
But it's also written carefully enough that, like, it doesn't
leave out the chance that he was killed by friendly fire.
They don't state exactly who killed him. They just sort
of leave it up to you to decide as the reader. Oh,
they must be saying the Taliban killed him, but like
they don't quite go and say it not normal at all. No, No,
mccrystals knows that what he's doing is illegal and sketchy
as hell, but he also doesn't want to look bad

(52:29):
and figures that if they give this guy a medal,
his family won't ask any questions about what happened. Yeah,
I mean, I knew me Crystal is a fucking asshole,
but this is a whole new level. Yeah, this is
really his like piata of being a douche bag um
is like right here, it's it's pretty remarkable. So Tillman's
death was good news for the Bush administration and for

(52:50):
the Defense Department. The global warrant terror had started to
look like a quagmire by that point, and Tillman's story
was seen as having the potential to distract people. According
to a two thousand seventeen Intercept article on the matter,
Brigadier General Howard Yellen would later tell investigators that the
view among the chain of command was that Tillman's death
was like a steak dinner, albeit delivered on a garbage
can cover, which is again a really gross way to

(53:14):
talk about a man who just died. I mean, where
the fund do they find people who talk about recently
killed people like in this manner? Go on, I do
want to be in that conversation when you're like talking
about a man who's died under your command and you're like, well,
it's like a steak dinner on a garbage can, and
like how does everyone else in the room not be

(53:35):
like what are you talking about? I want to be
in a room full of people that are so inherently
terrible that when somebody gets killed, you know, whether it
be by the enemy or or by their own guys like, wait,
how can we make this work for us? What's the spin? Yeah,
supply side tragedy. Yeah, it's gross. I like that term. Also.

(53:56):
Um So, Pat Tillman's memorial ceremony was hosted at the
sand hoose A Rose Garden, which is very big venue,
and the memorial ceremony was a huge event, lots of
lots of cameras, lots of photo opportunities between famous people.
John McCain was there, He gave a little speech. Um.
A Navy seal who was a friend with Pat Tillman
gave a speech at his memorial service based on lies.

(54:18):
So the the Army lied to a Navy seal who
was Pat Tillman's buddy about how he had died so
that he could give a speech full of lies at
this televised memorial service about how Pat Tilman had died.
So it's just like this rivoros of grossness that keeps
getting grosser and grosser and grosser. The further down we get,
um like a layer of onions, except every new layer

(54:38):
is also ship yeah yeah, yeah, And one of the
layers in this ship onion is John McCain. He gave
a speech at Pat Tillman's moral service and did not
know at the time that Pat had been killed by
friendly fire. He was angry when he found that at too,
but afterwards he was shaking hands with the family after
the service, and when he was talking with Pat's brother, Richard,
his other brother, he noted that he he thought Pat

(55:00):
was in a better place. And this really piste off
Richard because Richard, like Pat, and like the rest of
his family, was an atheist. So there was alcohol at
this gathering um, and it was obviously an emotionally charged time.
So when it was Richard's turn to yeah yeah, so
Richard gets up and looks at John McCain and says,
Pat's a fucking champion and always will be. Just make

(55:23):
no mistake, he'd want me to say this he's not
with God. He's fucking dead. He's not religious, so thanks
for your thoughts, but he's fucking dead. Later, Richard wound
up on the Bill Maher show and explained why he'd
reacted that way quote, I found it offensive. It's like,
I don't go to church and say this is bullshit.
So don't come to my brother's service and tell me
he's with God. He's simply not with fucking God. Now,

(55:43):
if you just have that bit of info, it maybe
sounds like Richard's overreacting a little bit because he's, you know,
he just lost his brother. There's a lot of reason
that Richard and his family have to be pissed about
religion being shoehorned into Pat tillman postmortem, because that's exactly
what some asshole in the army did right after Pat died.
So yeah, yeah, there was a tiff between Kevin Tilman

(56:06):
and Lieutenant Colonel named Ralph Kasarlitch or Coslar Rich Jesus,
that's a weird last name. Anyway, I'm gonna I'm gonna
read a quote from Where Men Find Glory about this
little sort of debate that was sparked after Pat's death.
Shortly before the second range of Italian sent Pat's remains
home from Afghanistan. He coslar Rich was arranging a repatriation
ceremony when a sergeant approached him and said, hey, sir,

(56:27):
Kevin Tilman doesn't want a chaplain involved in his repatriation ceremony.
When koslar Rich, an evangelical Christian, asked why, the sergeant replied, well,
evidently he and his brother are atheists, that's the way
they were raised, to which coslar Rich angrily declaimed, well,
you can tell Specialist Tillman that the ceremony ain't about him.
It is about everybody in the Joint Task Force bidding
farewell to his brother. So there will be a chaplain

(56:48):
and there will be prayers. So they may have been
a little bit piste off about that. Yeah, yeah, cosl
Rich is a real piece of ship. Uh And we'll
be hearing from him just a little bit more and
the rest of this story, so of course. Yeah. The
fifteen six investigation into Pat Tillman's death was delivered exactly
one day after his memorial service, which is fun timing.

(57:11):
It noted that quote leadership played a critical role and
greatly contributed to the fratricide incident that killed SPC. Pat Tillman.
It noted that the rangers in the g who had
killed Tillman quote never received effective enemy fire throughout the
entire enemy contact, and as officially, Tillman's cause of death
was the result of gross negligence. Now, this result was

(57:32):
a real problem for the army because they had already
awarded Tillman a Silver Star for courage in the face
of enemy fire, and while he had shown courage, the
fire had not come from any enemies. This was also
a problem for General Stanley McCrystal because now everyone knew
that he had lied about how Pat had died. So
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted to mitigate the damage
from this bad pr so he scheduled the public disclosure

(57:53):
of all of this, of the information about, like, you know,
the gross negligence behind Pat's death. He scheduled the actual
drop of that to the press for Saturday May twenty nine,
which means he dropped it the Saturday before Memorial Day.
So basically, the report that finally officially let everyone know
Pat had died from friendly fire was released at the

(58:14):
start of a three day weekend, Assuming that all of
the journalists would be too drunk to write anything about it.
There was a formally the case they do like some
kind of weekend dump to try to Yeah, I mean,
that's that's just general press wisdom. If you've got shitty news,
you try to put it out where no one's going
to know. You would just hope that the military would
be above that when releasing information about the death of

(58:37):
a human being. But I mean, who knows. You know,
history says otherwise, History says otherwise. So there was a
press conference and a Ranger spokesman did announce Pat's death,
you know, by friendly fire, openly, but he took no questions.
And after the press conference, Pentagon officials emailed each other

(58:57):
congratulations on limiting the damn it of the results of
the fifteen six Way to Go guy, we did it.
We covered up the death of one of our own. Yeah.
An Army colonel noted in an email that quote the
story will run hot today and diminish over the weekend.

(59:17):
A sitcom public affairs officer said that a recent terrorist
attack that had happened in Saudi Arabia would also help
to dilute the story of how Pat had really died,
So that was good. It was really worked out for
the army um attack. Yeah. Yeah, And you would think
at this point that after all that Army funk ups
had cost the Tillman family, the least that the Army

(59:38):
could do was not funk up delivering the news of
how he had been killed to the family. What are
the odds that they would make the same basic mistake
twice and let the press know before letting, say, Pat
Tillman's own mother know crucial detail about how her son
had died, which is exactly what's happened. Yeah, yeah, Yeah,
she found out that her son had died by friendly
fire when a reporter called her asking for a comment.

(01:00:01):
Army just didn't get to her in time. So yeah,
it really had to you know, get in front of
that story. And by the story, I mean his morning
parents again. Yeah. One of the things that's really impressive
about this is that it really took everything misfiring at
once that could have misfired to really make this as
offensive a co option of a human being's legacy is possible. Like,

(01:00:23):
that's one of the things that's most remarkable about this.
I think misfire is not the right term, because all
of these steps were completely on purpose. Yeah, yeah, you're right.
You right, the only accident was his actual death. Everything
after that, everything else is just people being actively fucking
terrible to one another. Yeah, you're right, it's weird. I
even like, I don't know, it's that like sort of

(01:00:44):
attitude towards the military that I grew up with, where like,
even when I know how fucked up a story like
this is, I keep trying to find ways that it's
not quite as bad, and like, no, it's really bad.
Like if I hadn't spent almost a decade in the army,
I would assume that they had the best intention and
the just kind of sucked it up along the way.

(01:01:06):
But I've kind of learned that they are just assholes.
For for the most part, it's not obviously not everyday people,
but when you get further and further up, it's like
being in a room full of politicians, good things don't happen.
It's the same thing as like you go into a
Walmart or whatever and you talk to a person who
works there and you can make a human connection and

(01:01:26):
like talk to a human being, But like the people
up at corporate like it's just once your job is
so abstract from the human beings that your job is about.
You do ship like this because it makes sense. You're
not like co opting a human beings. Yeah, exactly, there's
a way to rationalize it. And this thing got rationalized,
all to Helen back. Um. So, the first several investigations

(01:01:49):
into Pat Tillman's death were very sloppy and incomplete. The
third investigation was conducted by that guy Kaslo Rich who
we talked about earlier. Um. It was apparently very very
sloppy and did not answer a lot of important questions
like why did you burn my son's armor and clothing
and stuff? But you know, why are you burning the
evidence of an investigation? Why was the evidence lit on fire?

(01:02:10):
But it did lead to some discipline. Seven rangers were
disciplined for their part in Pat's death, most of them
lost rancor were kicked back into the regular army. That's
what happened to the saw gunner who killed Pat. But
none of these investigations did much to help explain why
four highly trained rangers and machine gun to comrade from
twenty feet away. More troubling to the Tillman family, nothing

(01:02:31):
yet released explained at all why Pat had been shipped
home nude, his notebook and clothing burned. Why they hadn't
been told that he died from friendly fire until a
month later? Uh? And why he had been nominated for
a Silver Star, presumably as a method of like covering
up what had happened. None of this was explained, so
eventually the Defense Departments Inspector General agreed to carry out
a fourth investigation. According to Sports Illustrated Quote, the Army

(01:02:54):
finally admitted it had violated its own regulations by waiting
more than a month to inform the Tillmans that their
son had diet as a result of suspected friendly fire,
but only out of a desire to wait until it
had gathered all the facts. As for the burning of
the uniform and body armor that might have shown bullet evidence,
the Army counter that it was done only because the
bloodied gear was considered a potential bio hazard and hygiene
issue that they might stir emotion, and because officers in

(01:03:16):
the field had already determined that fratricide was a foregone conclusion,
which is about as bullshit and answer as you can
get for that. Um yeah, I mean they knew its
fratricide within an hour, I'm willing when they went over
there and found his dead body next to the guy
that was alive and said, hey, you shot him. Yeah,
it's just gross. Um. And it took four investigations for

(01:03:38):
the family to start to get an idea of how
gross it was. And there's this guy, caused the Rich as,
I he's not a huge part of this, but I
want to keep drilling back on him because he's a
real piece of shit. Because the general who conducted that
fourth investigation actually questioned Cousler Rich about his shitty investigation,
and during it he whined that the Timan family wouldn't
stop asking questions about how their son had died because

(01:04:00):
they were atheists, and he thought that, like, that's why
they just they're just angry that they don't have any
peace and so they're they're taking it out on the army.
And not only did he say that angry that they're
asking questions about how their son died because their godless seasons. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's that's basically what's what's exactly what happened. And he
went on ESPN in two thousand six and continued to

(01:04:20):
say this ship like so in an in an ESPN interview,
This lieutenant colonel is like talking smack about the family
of a dead soldier for wanting to know how their
son had died. He said, Yeah, Well, if you were
an atheist and you don't believe in anything, if you die,
what is there to go to? Nothing? You're worm dirt.
So for their son to die for nothing and now

(01:04:41):
he is no more, that's pretty hard to get your
head around that, you know. So, I don't know. I
don't know how an atheist thinks. I can only imagine
that would be pretty tough. Well, it's harder with guys
like you, Kasler Rich. Yeah, it is harder for you know,
any human garbage people like him like him to empathize
with other people. Yeah, it's it's yeah. So Pat's mother,

(01:05:03):
Mary is the real hero in all of this. She
spent the next four years of her life investigating Pat's
death and the cover up behind it. Uh Mary felt
that the Bush administration had used her son as a
recruiting tool when he was alive and a patriotic distraction
once he died. She told Sports Illustrated, they attached themselves
to his virtue and then threw him under the bus.
They had no regard for him as a person. He'd

(01:05:24):
hate to be used for a lie. I don't care
if they put a bullet through my head in the
middle of the night. I'm not stopping. So Mary kept
up the pressure, gradually forcing the military to conduct three
additional investigations for a total of seven. His death became
about more than just one incident a friendly fire. It
was tied to a pattern of behavior among Bush administration
officials and army officials, a pattern of self serving deception,

(01:05:44):
using the real tragedies experienced by individual soldiers in order
to deflect criticism from the disastrous war that embarked on.
This culminated in a series of congressional investigation starting in
two thousand seven. Rumsfeldt took the stand during these investigations,
and when he was asked when he'd learned how Toman
died at Rumsfeld said, I don't recall when I was told,
and I don't recall who told me. I know that
I would not engage in a cover up, which is

(01:06:06):
interesting because Rumsfeld had taken the time to write Pat
Tilman a personal letter when he had enlisted, and the
Secretary of Defense had kept regular tabs on Pat's career.
Pat's mother, Mary, believes that heads would have rolled if Rumsfeld,
a notorious micromanager, hadn't been in the loop about Pat's death,
which seems likely, especially since his office was involved in
all these email conversations about how to spend his life

(01:06:26):
and his death. When he spoke to Congress, Pat's brother, Kevin,
was notably less polite. He said, quote, the fact that
the Army, in what appears to be others attempted to
hijack his virtue and his legacy is simply horrific. The
least this country can do for him in return is
to uncover who is responsible for his death, who lied,
and who covered it up, and who had instigated those
lies and benefited from them, then ensure that justice is
meeted out to the culpable. So Mary did eventually get

(01:06:49):
something approaching the truth about what had happened to her son.
It took like seven investigations and two congressional inquiries, but
she got more or less most of the information she
was looking for. The investigation revealed that one day before
the Secretary of the Army had certified Pat silver star,
General McCrystal had learned from Rumpsfeld's office that President Bush
planned to talk about Pat Tillman at the White House

(01:07:09):
Correspondence Association dinner. Crystal was scared that the President would
say something about Pratt's bravery under enemy fire because he
knew that the truth would eventually come out and make
the President look like a liar, So he sent a
memo to sent Com Commander General John Abizad, who sent
the memo onward to the White House. Which means, of
course that Rumsfeld and Bush and everybody else from pretty

(01:07:31):
much the beginning knew that this was a friendly fire
issue because Bush changed the line in his speech to
leave out enemy fire. So yeah, it's gross. It's a
gross story. It's gross all the way down. Like, you know,
the second I heard you say, Rumsfeld and says that
he didn't know. You know, Rumsfeld is widely known for
being a trustworthy guy, so you know, I was gonna
give him the benefit of the doubt. Um, But I honestly,

(01:07:55):
up until now, I had no idea that Bush personally
was involved. Oh yeah, I mean, we don't know what
he himself did, but we know that his speech writers
changed a speech he was supposed to give as a
result of this. I mean, I guess he probably would
have asked something about the famous guy who he had
been planning to talk about why the line was suddenly different. Um,
maybe not. Maybe he wasn't that curious a guy, but

(01:08:18):
it seems really yeah, I mean, I don't know, Tillman
was pretty famous. It seems pretty clear that at least
Rumpsfeld knew what was going on, and Stanley McCrystal sure
as hell knew what was happening. In July two eight,
the Congressional Oversight Committee investigating Tillman's death issued its report.
It noted that while the White House had been intensely
interested in the first reports of Tillman's death after it

(01:08:40):
became clear he died a friendly fire quote, the White
House could not produce a single email or document relating
to any discussion about Corporal Tillman's death by friendly fire.
The intense interest that initially characterized the White Houses and
Defense departments reaction to Corporal Tillman's death was followed by
a stunning lack of curiosity about emerging reports of fratricide
and an incomprehensible carelessness in incompetence in handling the sensitive information.

(01:09:03):
So in the end, there was a tiny bit of
justice done. The hammer wound up falling on a general
named kin Singer, who had been part of the cover up,
but not really a major part. Crack Hour suggests that
this was because kin Singer was already retired at the
time of the investigation. No one involved though that much more. Yeah, yeah,
you picked the retired guy and you yell at him,
and then it's fine, it's fine. And uh, I'm going

(01:09:27):
to assume all these lieutenant colonels they didn't even get
a letter of reprimand or anything. No, No, I think
most of them were full bird colonels within a year
or so of this all going down. Ah, yes, of
course yea. And mccrystal's career definitely didn't get hurt by
this at all because I end up being under his
command Afghanistan. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He wound up
being in charge of the entire war effort in Afghanistan
for a little bit, and then he stopped being in

(01:09:49):
charge of the war in Afghanistan when a Rolling Stone
reporter was there for both of those things. Oh yeah,
what was that like when the fucking story came out
that he was talking smack about Barack Obama I thought, personally,
I thought it was hilarious. Yeah, not not that he
was shipped talking the president as a as you know,
a field grade officer, but how much he must have

(01:10:10):
thought of himself to think he could get away with that, Yeah,
because he was basically attacking the entire civilian leadership back
in Washington in front of a reporter for Rolling Stone, Like, yeah,
it's like he was trying to do a MacArthur in Korea.
But like Obama slapped his dick and fired him, and

(01:10:32):
his leadership of the war in general is fucking terrible.
So I was kind of glad to see him go. Yeah.
So he's he's about as close as we get in
this story to an individual who got some sort of justice.
So that's good. Nobody winds up looking good about this.
Like even like John McCain, when he found out that
the death had come from friendly fire, briefly took an
interest in like trying to figure out what had actually happened.

(01:10:54):
But Mary Tillman says that he kind of stopped talking
to him after he ran for president in two thousand eight,
because you know, that would have been bad for his
presidential runs. So like the the story of Pat Tillman,
from beginning to end, is a story of like a
nice guy trying to do the right thing and a
bunch of people trying to co opt his legacy in
whatever way they can and then running away as soon

(01:11:17):
as you know any threat to their own careers is posed.
It's just like so much grossness and cowardice in this
little story. I had no idea. I think that's one
of the thing that pissed me off the most about
the whole thing when he became a poster boy recently. Again, yeah,
I think we're going to continue to see that if
the NFL continues to be at like the center of

(01:11:37):
a big cultural issue in this country. Is like people
bringing up Pat Tillman. So the next time you see that,
remember Pat Tillman wasn't a big fan of the Army,
hated George Bush, thought the War on Terror was mostly bullshit.
So yeah, it's a gross story. But the next time
you see someone you know trying to bring Pat Tillman
up a sort of an argument against why football players

(01:11:58):
shouldn't kneel whenever the hell they want to, um, just
slap him in the face. But with this podcast and
not your hand because yeah, it's it's kind of disgusting.
It's not even just the NFL, it's like literally anything,
Like Kaepernick hasn't been in the NFL in years, Yeah,
and he still gets trotted out because apparently soldiers have

(01:12:19):
a monopoly and what sacrifices. Yeah, and you can't possibly
sacrifice if you're not dead, Yeah, and you can't. Like
it's this. I think the thing that frustrates me most
about the Tilman story is just like the lack of
respect of like, Okay, this guy had his own beliefs
and own reasons for doing things, and like we can't
even let him be remembered the way he would want

(01:12:39):
to be remembered or for the things he actually believed.
We're going to turn him into a political prop whenever
we need a political prop, because everybody remembers his name
and his g I Joe phase. It's it's frustrating, Yeah,
it's we talk more about Pat Tilman, and obviously now
we're guilty of that because we're talking about Pat Tillman. Um,
we talk more about Kaepernick kneeling for a fucking magical

(01:13:00):
song that makes the freedom come. But like, we talk
more about this ship than we do like the fact
that we're still fighting the war in Afghanistan. Yeah, we've
had this conversation more than is seventeen years too long
to be at war? Which maybe maybe find out more
next year when we have our first child younger than

(01:13:21):
the war he's fighting in, which that's going to be
an exciting moment for this whole country. List now, because
I mean you can list at seventeen with your parents signature.
I did. Well, if you're seventeen right now, go and
list and get yourself to Afghanistan and uh send me
a message when you are officially in a war that
you're younger then and we'll I think all those guys

(01:13:46):
who who wanted to deploy so that and and fight
the enemy away from home so his kids didn't have
to fight them really feels like an asshole. Now. Yeah,
that was that Onion article like young man like marches
same pass that his like dad marched in two thousand
six or something like yeah, oh man, Yeah, do you

(01:14:06):
follow the army's social media accounts? Oh no, no, not
since they posted those gross pictures of the eight in
Wardog firing a bunch of stuff, and we're like they
recently accidentally onion themselves, like they posted this picture of
like father and son in Afghanistan like it was a
good thing. Oh no, that's really strategy. Well, and it's

(01:14:29):
also like it's such a bad idea to let that
happen because it's just a bad story waiting to happen,
like what happened with Kevin and Pat where it's just like, yeah,
these guys are brothers, will let him serve in the
same unit, and it's like, well, that's not going to
go well. Well, the whole keeping a country at war
for it almost two decades, I mean, it's doing irreferable

(01:14:50):
damage to our society as well, and our attitude towards
like it's perfect, Like nobody's processing like maybe we shouldn't
be in a war that is generational. Yeah, I mean
that's a conversation you would think we'd start having at
some point, um, but I don't think we are going
to because yeah, if we have the conversation, we hate

(01:15:13):
the troops. And if we have the conversation, then like
what else are we going to spend that money on healthcare?
Of course not? Yeah, no, no, have you tried picking
yourself up by your bootstraps? There alright, Joe, that's all
I got for us for today. You want to plug
some plug doubles, Yeah, if you want to hear about
a significantly less fucked up tour of duty in Afghanistan.

(01:15:34):
I wrote a book called The Hooligans of Kandahar, and
it's available wherever you get your books. On my podcast
lines Lent by Donkeys podcast or we talk about things
kind of like this and try to get some humor
out of the the fucked up aspects of military history.
I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at
I right, okay. You can find us on the internet

(01:15:55):
at behind the Bastards dot com or we'll have all
the sources and images for this episode. You can find
us on Twitter and uh Instagram at at Bastards pod
and you can find shirts that we make that you
can wear on ONTI public Behind the Bastards buy our shirts.
We don't give Joe any money. If you buy a shirt,
you can buy Joe's book and then a couple of shirts,

(01:16:16):
and you can dress the book up in a shirt
and you can have a good old fashioned shirt book.
Just don't burn the shirt, yeah, don't burn don't burn
the shirts unless it's well, I mean, you can burn
your own shirts. Unless it's evidence, we should probably get
rid of it. Yeah, yes, always get rid of evidence.
That's been our motto here from the start. Joe, thank
you for being on today. It was green great talking
to you and yeah, that's it for us today. I

(01:16:39):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Bastards Who Killed Pat Tillman