Pat Tillman

How do you define a hero?

Last night on the Tonight Show I heard an excellent description from Bill Maher. He was talking about what happened at Virginia Tech. He said that those people were victims. They were put in harms way. He went on to say that those people who decide to put themselves in harms way are heroes. He added why aren't the pictures of soldiers killed in Iraq displayed on TV like those from Virginia Tech. A very good question.

Which leads me to Pat Tillman. He is a hero. There are no other words with which to describe him. He gave up a very lucrative career in the NFL to join the army after 9/11. He joined the military with his brother to fight against terrorism. He went to Afghanistan where he was killed. Killed not by the enemy but by friendly fire. A terrible awful tragedy. And what did the army do. It was covered up what happened. Tillman died in the mist of the Abu Ghraib scandal. So I guess they decided the army didn’t need more bad news. The family was lied to. The public was lied to. The people who covered up what happened can only be called one thing cowards.

This from Tillman’s brother:

"The least this country can do for him in return is to uncover who was responsible for his death, who lied and covered it up, and who instigated those lies and benefited from them; then ensure that justice is meted out to the culpable,” Kevin Tillman said, adding: “Anything less than the truth is a betrayal of those values that all soldiers who have fought for this nation have sought to uphold.”

Here’s a link to the story.

Click on the video to hear some of Kevin Tillman’s testimony. It is heart wrenching. Here’s also a story from USA Today.

The USA Today story states:

Last month, the military concluded that nine high-ranking Army officers, including four generals, made critical errors in reporting Tillman’s death but that there was no cover-up of the facts.

What a load of crap. I hope the committee continues to investigate into what happened. People need to be held accountable for what happened. When a soldier pays the ultimate sacrifice for this country his or her family deserves to be told the complete and total truth about how they died. No they don't deserve to be told; they have the right to know.