David D. Robbins Jr. | The Fade Out
For me there were two indelible images I will always take away from this documentary, “The Tillman Story”, a film about the son, husband, soldier and famed Arizona Cardinal football player Pat Tillman, who died by friendly fire in Afghanistan. One is former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld cheerily shaking hands with his co-conspirators after dispensing with a useless Congressional hearing into the death of Tillman. It’s a sickening image, that should make anyone who watches it want to throw up. Sad thing is, these images didn’t seem to make anyone do anything about it — as nearly everyone with a military title continues on with their lives just as they’d always been — leaving the Tillman family as the only people who really lost anything. The second image and most enduring is that of a tough mother being forced by the U.S. military to walk through broken glass just to get close to a real explanation of the day her son was killed.
How determined was Tillman’s mother? Imagine this: She learned her son died and had to fight the military in order to get any information. Against Pat Tillman’s wishes they tried to make a symbol out of him by telling the family to allow a military funeral. (Unknown to the military, Tillman foresaw this possibility and gave his wife a photocopy of a form that vehemently expressed not wanting his death used for promotion if he were to die.) Mrs. Tillman called as many people as she could to get help, much during her downtime working as a school teacher. She gets the runaround. Adding insult to injury, the military uses her family’s tragedy as a way to promote their war. Eventually, she finds help from a retired career soldier. The military gives her a box of over 7,000 papers resulting from an investigation into her son’s death — over half of it redacted and the rest in military speak, unintelligible interviews, military abbreviations, and all the names obscured.
No human being on the planet can possibly go through this stuff, right? At least that was the military’s intent. Present the mother with a task so difficult she’d just give up and accept the military’s heroic description of her son’s death. But little did they know that Mrs. Tillman would not rest until she could do all that she could. She painstakingly went through the 7,000 pages trying to figure out the dashes left in place of names and events — counting the redact dashes to see if their number would match any names she knew. She formed a narrative piece by piece, like the most difficult and heartbreaking puzzle a mother could ever imagine putting together. Meanwhile, all the top brass were reading memos about how to cover up the situation, including then-President George W. Bush and Rumsfeld. Make you sick to your stomach yet? The military burned every piece of evidence. Sick yet? A row of generals lied on national television without repercussion. Sick yet? Mrs. Tillman put up a valiant fight, one that would have made her son even more proud of her than he surely already was. In the end, she fights the good fight but nearly everyone of standing gets away with hiding the information, except for a few lower-level individuals who were thrown under the bus.
Amir Bar-Lev has created a beautiful documentary, fair and reasoned. It will make you mad. It will make you sad for the family. They simply want their son to be remembered for who he really was — not some patriotic falsity invented by the U.S. government. It’s a story about a shameful military system run by one of the most corrupt administrations in United States history. It’s a film about a family just like any other American military family. It’s about a family that wants answers and finds the door shut in their face time and time again. The irony of this whole tragic situation is this family, steeped in the military tradition, seems like one that understand the perils of war. This is a family that would have accepted the truth. But instead, not only did the government lie, and sell a phony story just as they did in Iraq, but they put up roadblocks for the mother and let all the bad guys get away.
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