Pat Tillman Redux

A lot of people have been contacting me concerning the piece in the San Francisco Chronicle about Pat Tillman. (For those who have been hiding under a rock, Tillman was the former NFL football player who gave up a multi-million dollar contract to enlist in the army in 2002. He served two tours of duty, the first in the invasion of Iraq and the second in Afghanistan, where he was killed in a “friendly fire” incident the Pentagon tried to cover up.) According to the Chron, Tillman was far from the right-wing poster child the right–and the left, including me–took him to be. He regarded the Iraq war (although not the Afghan invasion) as illegal and read a lot of Chomsky.

“I don’t believe it,” Ann Coulter said in reaction to the revelation that the premier indicutee into the Bush Administration’s Post-9/11 Death Cult was a leftie. I admit it–I’m surprised too. Like Coulter, Bush, et al., I too bought the cartoon image: chiseled features, proud to wear the uniform, football player. We were all wrong, as it turns out.

Of course, I know that there are progressives in the military. Some have written books about their experiences. And I receive email from a lot of them. But they are, by and large, the exception. Tillman, said to have signed up in reaction to 9/11, seemed to fit neatly into the usual soldier = mook paradigm.

Except, according to his mother Mary as quoted in the Chron piece, he wasn’t. Which only adds to the confusion for me. Why would someone familiar with Chomsky, whose work is dedicated to the prospect that government and especially the military, lies as routinely as they breathe, agree to sign their life away with a blank check to an unscrupulous unelected gooney bird like George W. Bush? For that matter, how could someone who read The Nation and other left-of-center publications, fail to understand that the invasion of Afghanistan was every bit as unjustitiable and as much of a distraction from a real war on terrorism, as the looting of Iraq?

I wish all this stuff had come to light immediately after Tillman’s death–hell, immediately after his enlistment. It would have saved countless lives, both of American servicemen who joined the military after being inspired by him and the Iraqis and Afghans they and their comrades dispatched in the name of the World Trade Center. But it’s too late for that. As for me, this episode serves as an important reminder that you can’t always judge a book by its red, white and blue cover. And it redoubles the tragedy of his death, since it sounds like we lost one hell of an interesting human being in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.