new version

It was a pretty good movie, the saga of Pat Tillman, multiple acts spanning multiple years, but just like the living dead, the longer it keeps moving, the worse it starts to smell. So... Tillman was selected as the 227th pick in the 1998 draft by the hapless Arizona Cardinals, where he played his position (Safety) reasonably well. No pro-bowl player, but good enough to receive a 1.2 million per annum renewal offer in 2002. Pat chose instead to join the Army, and being a macho guy, he wanted to be a Ranger. He was deployed to the Middle East for the invasion of Iraq, but for some reason, redeployed on down to Afghanistan a few months later. Now even though he wasn't all that famous (I watched the Cards play the Redskins twice a year and don't recall him), he was a heckuva lot more famous than anybody else serving over in the war zone. And since he was only a wee bit famous, he proved to be a lot more valuable for propaganda purposes once he was killed in April 2004. Initially, Tillman was killed by a barbarous, sub-human enemy throng, ambushed outside the village of Seperah. Later, it was revealed that he was killed by friendly fire in the midst of the aforementioned furious battle. After a year or so, the commanders were saying that even though that even there was no enemy present at the time of the enemy attack, someone had tripped over an unexploded mine, and in all that confusion, Tillman looked an awful lot like a Taliban fighter, and what the heck, the boy was a genuine hero anyway, and the Cardinals proudly retired his number (which means they only have 99 left to choose from). Well, damn it all, along with that unseemly death scene, a lot of other bits and bytes have appeared over the past couple of years, some of which would suggest that maybe Tillman was not so much a hero as an unpatriotic asshole. A morale buster, if you want to know the God's honest truth. Take this anecdote from a 9/25/05 piece in the San Francisco Gate, about when he was still in Iraq with his fellow Rangers. “I can see it like a movie screen,” Baer said. “We were outside of (a city in southern Iraq) watching as bombs were dropping on the town. We were at an old air base, me, Kevin and Pat, we weren’t in the fight right then. We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so f— illegal.’ And we all said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s who he was. He totally was against Bush.” Tillman was telling people in his unit that they should vote for John Kerry. He read poetry, and subscribed to 'The Economist'. How's this for the ultimate in horror? Tillman had a get-together scheduled with Noam Chomsky. (Check this short Hannity and Colmes video where Ann Coulter reacts to the news). And Pat's last words: "Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat fucking Tillman, damn it!" Rather petulant if I do say so myself. I guess, given the man's fall from grace, that it's no surprise at all that none of the major papers are fronting the latest updates on Tillman's death. The one's that say there was no friendly fire, that instead the man was murdered. Three quick shots in a nice tight pattern, all fired from close range. Not a big story. Not something John Gibson would cover. Tillman was not a very sympathetic character. There's one more stop for this shape-shifting tale, set in the future, X months away. That's the one where the story moves from being a murder to an assassination, a trick that's already been turned on his reputation. Forget the old last words, here are the new last words, relayed by Chaplain NameNotGiven, where Tillman speaks his last words to a frantic comrade who collapsed by his side and was crying out to god. "Would you shut your fucking mouth? God's not going to help you; you need to do something for yourself, you sniveling ..." Not a very sympathetic character, was he?