Behind the Bastards - The Bastards Who Killed Pat Tillman

Episode Date: July 23, 2020

Robert is joined by Joe Kassabian to discuss the death of Pat Tillman.FOOTNOTES: http://www.edgeofsports.com/2008-06-02-350/ https://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/22/mary_tillman_mother_of_slain_nfl https://www.c-span.org/video/?200236-1/army-ranger-tillman-death-investigation https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/pat-tillman-nfl-protest-death-army-disgrace/ https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/22/305969203/soldier-speaks-up-a-decade-after-pat-tillmans-friendly-fire-death https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/22/american-troops-friendly-fire-iraq http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/10791530/ex-army-ranger-speaks-first-former-nfl-player-pat-tillman-shooting-says-fired-fatal-shots https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002L6HE3W/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. About a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 kind of made it their own. So that's the story today. It is the story of Pat Tillman. Now I grew up in a very conservative family, and from the time I was 11 or 12 I lived in, you know, deep in the heart of Texas. My parents loved 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 multi-million dollar NFL contract to serve his country.

I remember hearing that he'd been killed in Afghanistan, bravely charging up a hill. That's at least how I remember it as a kid in my head. 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 sacrifices our 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 people in the right-wing media bubble that I had then inhabited stopped talking about him. Now my guest today is Joe Kasavian. He's a co-host of the Lions led by Donkeys Podcast, which is a military history podcast I recommend. 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, and I regret both of them. Yeah. So tell me about, I know I think Kost 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 tour I was in the northeast, and a little bit north of Kabul, outside of Bagram, and then my second one I was in Kandahar. So definitely further north than Kandahar, but in a country that like fractious and everything, the kind of resistance and fighting that you deal with is 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 Pat Tillman.

I didn't know much about Pat Tillman. Like I said, he was sort of this kind of like movie poster looking guy. Like if you've seen the pictures, 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 like what every recruiter wants to put on a poster. Like he looks like an action star. Yeah, he's like the platonic ideal of the American soldier. Like you couldn't have cast him better. Yeah, he looks like his face is like carved out of granite. Yeah, when were you over there? Was it 2009 or so? My first tour was 2008, 2009, and my second was 2011 to 12.

So you were there about four or five years after Pat, right? Yeah. Right, right. His mythos is so, I mean, I was definitely not a ranger like he was, but his mythos is so incredibly steep in everything that I didn't know anything about Pat Tillman 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 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 when he comes up, like how was he portrayed? Oh, man, 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. I wasn't a football fan at the time. And he gave up everything to go make, you know, shitty specialist paycheck and go fight in Afghanistan. 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 when I started researching this that I didn't know much about the actual Pat Tillman. Because I had kind of assumed that he was that living human embodiment of like patriotism,

that he was sort of portrayed as a young man or portrayed as when I was like a kid watching stuff about him. And coming across some pictures of him when he was younger has like really twisted that a little bit. Because like we've got a couple of pictures, we'll have them up on the site. One of him just like shirtless and flip flops taking groceries on a motorcycle and looking like a beach bum. And another of him with like, I mean, I got to say like a really dumb haircut, but like long hippie looking hair. Like he's still this gigantic, very muscular man, but you get a really different sort of picture of him looking at those. Yeah, he had like this long flowing almost mullet like hair all the way when he like you see the, it's even part of like the statue. They have them and I think it's Arizona where he's like throwing his golden locks back.

Yeah, which is a better look for him than sort of the shaved head because 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 body armor and ammunition and stuff. 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 depiction of like his actual personality than the pictures of him in his uniform. Yeah, for sure. One of the things, so I have a couple of sources for this book. One of them is the Crack Hour book where Men Win Glory, which is a pretty good book, although it talks about a lot of high school football. So you got to be really ready to read about high school football if you're going to get into this story.

That'll be popular in Texas then. Yeah, and there's a number of articles too on the Intercept and on Sports Illustrated that all talked about Pat Tillman. There's 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 the Quran and the Bible, but was not himself religious and in fact identified as an atheist. He wasn't the guy you'd think. 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 ideal of a meathead soldier.

Yeah, and I think that has a lot to do with that's what the current narrative kind of wants us to think about soldiers and especially people like Pat Tillman. It's 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 going to be talking about a bit about his life today and then we're going to be talking about sort of what was done after his death 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 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. And doing like 30 days in juvenile detention 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. And obviously he 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 158 grand a year, plus like a decent little signing bonus. But after his first year, he got offers to leave Arizona and get more money. But he was the kind of guy who was really loyal to his coach and loyal to his team.

But staying at the league minimum for most of his career, which raises every year, so he was making like 500 grand a year after a while. But his motivation in football wasn't just financial. He seemed to have a strong sense of loyalty and really want to, I don't know, he just seemed to be the kind of guy who liked to challenge himself. There's all these stories about him jumping off of high things in the lakes and taking a lot of really physical risks. And 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 seems like the person that the Rangers would be looking for, that's for sure. Yeah, yeah. Now, one of 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's a pretty woke sounding guy, like there's a lot of his journals and diary passages that are quoted in where men win glory. And he in general seems like a pretty progressive and not like reflexively patriotic dude, which is why it was kind of frustrating on September 25th, 2017, when President Donald Trump retweeted a post from the Twitter names user is JMAGA45. So yeah, you know what you're getting into here. I've sent a picture over to you two, we'll have it up on the site, but it's a picture of Pat Tillman looking like a G.I. Joe. And it just says NFL player Pat Tillman joined US Army in 2002. He was killed in action 2004.

He fought for letter for our country slash freedom, hashtag stand for our anthem, hashtag boycott NFL. And Donald Trump, the president retweeted that. Of course he did. Yeah, and there was outcry from people who knew Pat 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 fuck 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 supported. So she like pretty much everyone who 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, you can tell they truly support the troops by dragging them out of the grave for whatever political points they need to make that week. 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 9-11 and because of 9-11, 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. In one interview at the time, he said, quote, it's hard because we play football, you know, it is so unimportant compared to everything that's taken place, which is a fair statement when you realize that you're playing football and the forever wars 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. I can hardly blame them for thinking that. Yeah, he was like responding to this big attack and his whole desire was to go over and fight in Afghanistan. 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. A lot of people don't like get the kind of pressure that comes down on people who are raised in military families to follow in some of these footsteps. Like it's kind of like, unless you become a doctor or, you know, and spent a longer lasting light bulb or some shit, 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. 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 has not to be the case. 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 don't fault him a bit for that. I kind of felt the same way, Grant, as a couple of years later, but, you know, why not? You know, he was an incredibly healthy individual and could do pretty much anything the armed would ever want him to do. So I could see why he wanted to go down that route. And in none of our minds, if we ever think almost two decades later, we'd be sitting here and there'd still be people in Afghanistan.

Yeah, that one snuck up on everybody, didn't it? Yeah, those quagmires would really sneak up on you. So at the time, Patton 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 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 should a 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, especially after recent 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. He hated boot camp. He thought it was boring and he was, you know, he was in his like mid 20s at this point. So he it was like going, I imagine if you're like 2526 and you go to boot camp, it's like being put around a bunch of high school seniors again.

Like it's frustrating and that seems to be his attitude. I could not imagine doing that at 25. I would have lost my fucking mind. Yeah, because like the whole, I mean, it seems to me that a whole, a big part of the training is to get people who are literally high schoolers ready to do something serious. So you have to deal with people who are frustrating. Yeah, I mean, I joined when I was 17. I mean, granted, that's not the most intelligent thing I've ever done, but I was in training with people who are in their 40s and they were so sick of my shit within like two weeks. Yeah.

And he was also like, it's really, I'm glad that he was a journal or because now we have sort of through his own mind how he looked at a lot of this stuff. And again, his perspective on things really surprised me. One of the notes he wrote during boot camp was one thing I find myself despising in the site is the site of all these guns 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. That speaks so much to my experience as well. Yeah, you see a lot of people doing very dumb things with firearms 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 18 year olds being handed machine guns for the first time.

Absolutely. I was 17 year old and I was in a tank. I was not legally allowed to rent a car, but I could fire a hundred and twenty millimeter cannon at whatever, you know. The whole practice is not well thought out. Yeah, 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 19 years old. What are you doing with that? Like, who gave you grenades?

There's no way that, I mean, granted, I understand that drill sergeants are 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 up running into them later down the line. They 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 like after they pull the pen, they just drop it from nerves and shit. They have to be like pushed to safety. Oh, man. Wait, no, that's possible? So if you pull the pen out, there is actually like a safety you can engage?

Not really. 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. I mean, you can hold on to like the spoon itself, but sometimes they'll cock their arm back to throw it. The spoon will come off arming the grenade and then they'll just drop it. I have never done it myself, but I have seen it done. Oh, man. See, yeah. So Pat found it frustrating.

You know, it took a while before he felt like more comfortable with the people he was around, which I think did happen once he went to Ranger School, you know, then people were a little bit older and had been through a little more shit. 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 a couple of friends.

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 at 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 Vietnam meshing well. I mean, he went from being, was effectively the top of the world.

I mean, what's more popular in America than like an NFL star flowing golden locks and chiseled good looks to being yelled at and called a piece of shit 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 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. Now the Bush administration obviously made a huge deal about Pat Tillman's enlistment as did the army and the NFL. Pat came the poster child for the entire war on terror, a heroic young man who tossed aside wealth and privilege to fight in 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 impending Iraq war. Oh yeah. Can't have that. No, no, no, no. His first tour of duty was Iraq and he was really furious that he was sent to Iraq and not Afghanistan. Sports Illustrated interviewed Russell Baer, who was a ranger that was Pat's friend during both of his deployments and spent a lot of time with him.

And here's how Baer portrayed to them Tillman's attitude towards the 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 flashbang shutter in the distant town, he shook his head and said, this war is so fucking illegal. Russ, for the first time, realized how wobbly a tightrope 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 they'd been sent on a nukes 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 good for them.

It's pretty common. But definitely not something they want someone like Pat Tillman saying publicly. No. And in his diary, he was more explicit with his condemnation of the 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 prove true, I will never forgive this world. So Pat Tillman is not the guy he looks like on 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 when we get back, we're going to talk about Pat's involvement in the rescue of Jessica Lynch. If you remember that from 17 years ago. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in a good badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're talking about Pat Tillman. He's just 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 sounds pretty sweet compared to being there for 11 months. It's 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 troop like myself would do year on, year off, sometimes less than a year off. But I know, I mean, there was that Special Forces Sergeant who died not that long ago, I believe in Afghanistan or Iraq. I can't remember because I'm awful. And he had over a dozen tours. Oh, yeah. The guy who died in his 13th tour, right? That was Afghanistan, I think. Oh, OK.

Yeah. 13 tours. Yeah, that's crazy. 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 19 years old when she was captured after 11 of her comrades were killed in a disastrous firefight. The Washington Post published an article on the whole ordeal back in 2003 titled, She Was Fighting to the Death. Here's how it described her capture. Private First Class Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital, fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces, ambushed the Army's 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition.

U.S. officials said yesterday. Oh, boy. Yeah, yeah. The article went on to claim 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 lies. That's not true at all.

No. Jessica Lynch was injured in a car crash. 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 jammed and she lost consciousness from her terrible injuries.

Right. And it kind of does a disservice because there was another soldier that was captured with her. Nobody ever 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. I don't want to say for sure if someone will correct me, but I think you're right. Yeah, it was like, yeah.

When Jessica Lynch was rescued, there were multiple other U.S. soldiers who had been captured in Iraq. But 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 19-year-old woman. This was one of the first wars where a lot of women had been near the front lines, so it was just like this immediate PR thing that the Bush administration just sort of careened into. The war needed a fast hero. Yeah, it needed a really fast hero. And they thought they had this story of this young woman who had fought until she was out of ammo and stabbed repeatedly. And there were even grosser stories at the time about suspecting that she had been sexually assaulted by the Iraqis who captured her, which is not at all true.

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. But they took really good care of her. Saddam Hussein Hospital, they're named Saddam Hussein Hospital, that gets really confusing. There's the Saddam Hussein Hospital and the Saddam Hussein Daycare Center and the Saddam Hussein Romance Library. But yeah, she was taken to this hospital and several Iraqi doctors and nurses donated blood to actually give her transfusions and stuff. She was treated very well after being captured by the civilians who she wound up in the care of, but 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 the Fadeeen Saddam or something. Oh, sure, sure. But she wasn't. I think she was captured by the Republican Guard of all units. So they're like the best soldiers she could 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 fuck away from that hospital because they knew the Americans were going to come. Yeah, yeah, 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 different like special forces units. Like it was they had a bunch of gunships. 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 a I forget the name of the guy who was at Bergdahl who like Bergdahl post in Afghanistan, there was a big search for him. But that was because this was a weird disruption to 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.

And yeah, normally you would just be written off. It's kind of cold, but unless you're a pilot or I don't know, someone that knows something probably you 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. Pat seemed to know at the time that it was a kind of bullshit. He wrote in his diary, quote, the mission will be a POW rescue 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. The operation was actually delayed by like a day so that a camera crew could follow along and film it. And I didn't know they had special camera crews, but they have special forces camera crews. Yeah, they're combat camera guys. We had them pop up from time to time when I was there. They're a little other element for the most part, but they're all right. Yeah, 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 imagine. That's for sure. I mean, there wasn't any enemy in the hospital, was there? No, no, no, no, no. No, they had left quite a while before that happened. Some doors got kicked in. I think there were some shots near 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 doll is an entire hospital.

Well, yeah, I mean, they really did fuck up that hospital. But you're not going to not fuck 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 pretty big violation of the Geneva Convention targeting a hospital like that. But, you know, whatever, we're the U.S., 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 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 hospitals.

Generally in hospitals and like mosques, any religious building, things like that, you can target them if you're taking fire from them. Like, if the enemy is using them to actually like a defensive position, we're good to go. But as far as a POW thing, nah, that doesn't really fly unless you have someone that can really work in the gray. Well, speaking of people who can 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 Franks. But in reality, it was George W. Bush's best PR man. Before, and he seems to be the guy who was like, get the camera crew here, we need to have these different units here, because these are like the units that are going to look best going in on this mission that we want to be able to like report on.

He's staged managed this whole thing. And before the Iraq war, he had worked with candidate Bush in the 2000 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 9-11 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 U.S. 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 coverage of her ordeal. It was Wilkinson who arranged to give the Washington Post exclusive access to classified intelligence that with 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 ever happened to any journalist. Yeah. Yeah, thank God.

Also, I mispronounced Qatar. I was hoping no one would notice, but my conscience caught up with me. You know, the two people in Qatar who are listening to this, I'm sorry I pronounced your country's name wrong. There's probably less of you than there are. Really? That demographic, man. Well, you know, it's a critical demographic because they're all rich oil shakes. So, like, you know, you get a lot, you sell a lot of t-shirts to that crew is what I'm saying.

I think you're now banned from the World Cup. Preemptively, your shit can't. Oh, yeah. Well, I don't think soccer is a real sport. There goes my Australian listeners, everybody in Europe, most of the Middle East, Spain, just dropping like flies. And this is the episode they've listened to because we're the bastards this time. Oh, yeah. No, I know.

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 going to 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 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 WMD'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, a Ranger 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'd rack out. I don't know how the conversation got brought up, but one night he said he was afraid of something were to happen to him. Bush's 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, which is pretty heartbreaking because I think we all do know what comes next, which is exactly that. Yeah, he's not going to like that statue much.

No, well, I mean, that's a football thing. I guess that's okay. He likes football. He's a football pat in the statue, but we all know why the statue's there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that is a fair point. The Lynch Rescue, though, generated more than 600 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 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. Oh, yeah, I did too. Oh, yeah, it sounded like it was the story of this almost Mad Max story of this convoy getting ambushed and she's like ramming people in her car and shooting a machine gun. It sounded cool. Yeah. Turns out it was just a garden variety tragedy, which nobody wants to hear about that in a Made for TV movie. We want something cool.

No, that's more of a comedy of errors and makes everybody just feel sad inside. Yeah, although I do want to be clear, 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. Right. You can't blame a private. I don't know if she's a driver or not. I know she was like her job was a truck driver, but I don't know if she was actually driving the vehicle. It's not her fault.

She took the wrong turn. Privates don't control that. Yeah. Her fault. She didn't man some Alamo type defense. Privates don't control that either. No. She just happened to be a colleague and a machine that got fucked up.

Yeah, and she has been pretty outspoken about wanting to correct the record since. And we'll be getting to that in a little bit here. But yeah, so now in the book where men find glory, crack hour alleges that all of the hoopla around Lynch's capture and rescue was mainly intended by the Bush administration to distract the American public from a major fuckup, the killing of 17 US Marines by friendly fire. I think it was a pair of A-10 warthogs. 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 the army is here. And it's like this great.

Let's all pay attention to that and ignore the fact that we bombed our own guys. Right. 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 term of service early and 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.

Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Far away from any danger. 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 2004, he 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.

Oh yeah. That's pretty much your existence. Yeah. I always make jokes that like, you know, our grandfathers were going to storm the beaches and take these pillboxes or, you know, take these hedgerows and we're just, let's drive around in circles until some rando tries to fucking murder us. It does seem to be a step back strategically from storming beaches and taking cities. Yeah, it's the dumbest shit on earth. And I mean, I'm sure it was much different in 2004 than when I was there several years later. But, you know, you just drive around waiting to 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 them. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the job these guys are doing. They're out in the middle of nowhere. 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. Yeah. NTC. Yeah.

The National Training Center is in the middle of Colorado. Oh, cool. So yeah, it's like they're in this like dry high desert area, searching villages and one of their Humvees gets fucked up, the axels I think break on it and they can't use it anymore. 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 different things they could have done. Tillman's platoon leader, First Lieutenant David Oothlott wanted to take the gun off and just blow up the Humvee, 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 this guy wasting money. So eventually Oothlott and his men found a local truck driver who agreed to tow the Humvee, but that created another problem.

The platoon still had more villages to clear on its list and if they didn't search all of the villages they'd been arbitrarily assigned, they'd make their Lieutenant Colonel look bad and slow up like the whole time plan that everybody was working on. You can't make Lieutenant Colonel look bad. Think of the outcome. No, no, no. So this guy, apparently they spent quite a lot of time with this Lieutenant being like, look, it's a really dumb idea to 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, no, there's a time frame you're supposed to have done. These villages by this time, we're not going to 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. He is on the phone with them, probably sipping hot coffee. So 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 Humvee 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 to split the platoon. The PL didn't want to do it, but in the Army you obey orders. With a higher rank tells you to do something, you do it. So a lot split the platoon. Now the mountains being what they are and technology being where it was in 2004,

the two groups couldn't really communicate very well. So Tillman's group didn't realize when the second group with the broken Humvee and the tow truck doubled back behind them. And this was apparently because when they first tried to get back to the base, they realized the route they wanted to take was to treasurers 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 the second group towing the Humvee is like pulling up behind Tillman's unit, they get ambushed by some Taliban guys with mortars and I think just like AK-47s.

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 cluster fuck. 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 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 with those hard to communicate, that's 2004 technology and that's also just Afghanistan. Those valleys make it almost impossible for modern radio systems to work. Yeah, so everybody's really confused and half of them are getting shot. And Tillman is with the group that's not getting shot, but he realizes what's happened. He sees that his comrades in the unit that his brothers with is under fire.

So he and a couple of other guys run towards the Rangers that are under fire to try and, 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. 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 Humvee filled with heavily armed and panic Rangers rolls towards them. Now, this unit was run by a Sergeant named Greg Baker. He was a guy with a reputation for being a very good soldier, but it seems like 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 Baker sees the Afghan National Army soldier who's standing next to Pat Tillman. And 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 ANA. So Baker kills this guy and then all of the other Rangers in his car start pouring fire into Pat Tillman and Tillman's buddy.

So we're going to talk about what happens next, but that's sort of how everything goes to shit, right? Yeah, I mean, I wish I could say that isn't, like, on brand for soldiers everywhere, just the blindly shoot where everybody else is. But I could see this happening tomorrow. And that's exactly the justification everybody else in the car gives, because they see their squad leaders shooting in one direction and so they just start firing. Yeah, and it doesn't end well.

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has just fired and killed the Afghan National Army guy next to them. And now all of the Rangers in this Humvee start pouring fire into the position where Pat Tillman is standing with his buddy, a guy named O'Neill. One of them is shooting at them with Steven Ashpole, a.50 caliber machine gunner. When asked why he and the other Rangers in the Jeep hadn't waited to ID 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 when Sergeant Baker and the other guys are firing. So that's exactly what happens. The other guy O'Neill manages to survive, but Pat Tillman is shot three times in the head

by a fellow Army Ranger with a SAW, a squad automatic weapon. And yeah, I mean, he was killed immediately. Three times? Yeah, this is going to sound really shitty, but it's shocking he was able to make that shot. Yeah, I mean, it does sound like they were all really good shots in that Humvee. Yeah, they were simultaneously and incredibly inept at where they were shooting, but incredibly accurate.

I mean, you know, at least that's half of where they're supposed to be. Yeah. So it's somewhere between two and 25% 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. Imagine that study and literally any other topic.

Yeah, 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 2010 that said that at that point at least seven US soldiers had been killed and 34 wounded in Iraq in friendly fire incidents since the invasion, but that didn't count like a dozen or so British soldiers who'd 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 was... It doesn't do a good job 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, 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 shit, like this is really where the bastardry starts to pile up, because for one thing, Lieutenant Colonel Hodney, who was the guy who had ordered a lot to split his platoons so that they wouldn't, you know, get off of the timeframe, 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 15-6,

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 put a captain in charge of it, that meant basically no one in command could be investigated as having had a role in Tillman's death from the start. So it was like... Yeah, it 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 like looked at, well, did the shitty orders they were getting contribute to this soldier dying, which seems like a definite yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so one of the men most involved in hiding what happened to Pat Tillman was a general named Stanley McChrystal. Now, at that point... Oh, boy.

Uh-huh, yeah. At that point, he was the Joint Special Operations Command Commander, JSOC. McChrystal 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. 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, McChrystal and the soldiers under their command went to extraordinary lengths to prevent the Tillman family from learning the truth about how Pat died. So, 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,

or the guys who knew what had happened 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 really ghastly situation where Kevin's going to the gym and working out with the guys who shot his brother to death and doesn't know it, which is just super gross. I didn't know this part. I actually had no idea that his brother was in the army, but that's just fucking ghoulish.

Yeah. Stephen Elliott, one of the Rangers who was in the Jeep that Pat got killed by their fuselage, 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 believed senior leaders were trying to protect the family 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, and it was important 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 not procedure at all. No, no. What they did was completely illegal and not at all normal.

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 happen 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.

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 who's in charge of burning that shit should have known something was going on. Like, hey, I've never done this before. But, okay. Weird that this is the only time this has happened. Yeah. It's weird that these desert patterned camouflage can contain secrets that I'm not aware of.

Um, so. How stupid. Yeah. Fratricide is a type of homicide. So General McChrystal and his men were obligated to inform CID of what was suspected. They didn't do this and said they sent in an army lawyer, Major Charles Kirchmeyer, to basically muddy the waters enough

that CID would decide they weren't needed. Kirchmeyer was thanked via email by McChrystal's legal advisor for, quote, keeping the CID 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 of NCIS, right? Yeah. That's the exact same thing.

Yeah. They normally investigate any 15-6 investigation. Like, not necessarily like a real investigation, but like a cursory glance. Yeah. And so basically McChrystal 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 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'll 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 crack hour describes what followed,

and like the day after Tillman died in the Bush White House. Approximately 200 emails discussing the situation were transmitted or received 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. Jeannie Mammo, Bush's director of media affairs, sent an email to Laurence Derrida, Rumsfeld's press secretary,

asking for details about the tragedy so she could use them in a White House press release. By 1140 a.m., a statement about Tillman had been drafted and forwarded to press secretary Scott McClellan 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. Bush had signed into law five months earlier. You were supposed to give families of war casualties 24 hours to grieve in private before making a public announcement about their family members' death. 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. They wanted to get out ahead of his parents morning. Well, you really got to preempt that shit. Otherwise, it's just going to look bad. Yeah, you got to nip all that crying right in the bud. Yeah, and 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 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 terrible accident. So, yeah, that's gross. It's really gross. That's like snidely whiplash of little villainy. Yeah, yeah. And what comes next is even grosser, because Stanley McChrystal puts Pat Tillman up for a Silver Star. 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. 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 kind 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 do it. Not normal at all. No, no, McChrystal knows that what he's doing is illegal and sketchy as hell, but he also doesn't want to look bad

and figures that if they give this guy a medal, his family won't ask any questions about what happened. Wow. Yeah. I mean, I knew McChrystal was a fucking asshole, but this is a whole new level. Yeah, this is really his, like, the atah of being a douchebag is, like, right here.

It's pretty remarkable. So Tillman's death was good news for the Bush administration and for the Defense Department. The global war on 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 2017 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, delivered on a garbage can cover, which is, again, a really gross way to talk about a man who just died. I mean, where the fuck do they find people who talk about recently killed people

and, like, in this manner? Come 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 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, whether it be by the enemy or by their own guys, like, wait, how can we make this work for us? What's the spin? Yeah. Yeah.

Supply-side tragedy. Yeah, it's gross. I like that term, also. So Pat Tillman's memorial ceremony was hosted at the San Jose Rose Garden, which is a 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. Of course he was. A Navy SEAL who was a friend with Pat Tillman gave a speech at his memorial service based on lies. So 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 Tillman had died. So it's just, like, this eriberos of grossness that keeps getting grosser and grosser and grosser the further down we get. It's like a layer of onions except every new layer is also shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And one of the layers in this shit onion is John McCain. He gave a speech at Pat Tillman's memorial service and did not know at the time that Pat had been killed by friendly fire. He was angry when he found that out, 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 thought Pat was in a better place. And this really pissed off Richard because Richard, like Pat and like the rest of his family, was an atheist. So there was alcohol at this gathering and it was obviously an emotionally charged time. So when it was Richard's turn to get up and speak.

I like when it's going. Yeah, yeah. So Richard gets up and looks at John McCain and says, Pat's a fucking champion and always will be. Just make 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, 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 post-mortem. Because that's exactly what some asshole in the army did

right after Pat died. So... Oh, God. Yeah, yeah. There was a tiff between Kevin Tillman and Lieutenant Colonel named Ralph Koslerich. Jesus, that's a weird last name. Anyway, I'm going to 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 Ranger battalion sent Pat's remains home from Afghanistan, he, Koslerich, was arranging a repatriation ceremony when a sergeant approached him and said, Hey, sir, Kevin Tillman doesn't want a chaplain involved in his repatriation ceremony. When Koslerich, 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 Koslerich 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 and there will be prayers. So... They may have been a little bit pissed off about that.

Yeah, what a piece of shit. Yeah, Koslerich is a real piece of shit. And we'll be hearing from him just a little bit more in the rest of this story. So... Of course, we will. Yeah. The 15-6 investigation into Pat Tillman's death

was delivered exactly one day after his memorial service, which is fun timing. 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 jeep who'd killed Tillman, quote, never received effective enemy fire throughout the entire enemy contact. And, officially, Tillman's cause of death

was the result of gross negligence. Now, this result was a real problem for the Army because they'd 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 McChrystal because now everyone knew that he'd 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 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 29th, 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 start of a three-day weekend, assuming that all of the journalists would be too drunk to write anything about it. Is that normally the case they do, like, some kind of weekend dump to try to... If it's bad news...

Yeah, I mean, 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 a human being, but, I mean, who knows, you know? Yeah, history says otherwise. Yeah, 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 congratulations on limiting the damage of the results of the 15-6. Way to go, guys! Yeah, 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. A CENTCOM 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. Yeah, I think that's a terrorist attack.

Yeah, yeah, and you would think at this point that after all that Army fuckups had cost the Tillman family, the least that the Army could do was not fuck 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 a crucial detail about how her son had died? Which is exactly what's happened.

Yeah, she found out that her son had died by friendly fire when a reporter called her asking for a comment. 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 mourning 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 as possible. Like, 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 are completely on purpose. Yeah, yeah, you're right. The only accident was his actual death. Everything after that was. Everything else is just people being actively fucking terrible to one another.

Yeah, you're right. It's weird. I don't know, it's that sort of attitude towards the military that I grew up with where 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. If I hadn't spent almost a decade in the army, I would assume that they had the best intention and then just kind of fucked it up along the way.

But I've kind of learned that they are just assholes 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 like talk to a human being. But like the people up at corporate, it's just once your job is so abstract from the human beings that your job is about, you do shit like this because it makes sense. You're not like co-opting a human being's legacy. You can rationalize it. Yeah, exactly.

There's a way to rationalize it. And this thing got rationalized all to hell and back. So the first several investigations into Pat Tillman's death were very sloppy and incomplete. The third investigation was conducted by that guy, Kozlerich, who we talked about earlier. 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? Yeah, why are you burning the evidence of an investigation? Why was the evidence lit on fire? But it did lead to some discipline. Seven Rangers were disciplined for their part in Pat's death. Most of them lost rank or were kicked back into the regular army. That's what happened to the sawgunner who killed Pat. But none of these investigations did much to help explain

why four highly trained Rangers had machine gun to comrade from 120 feet away. More troubling to the Tillman family, nothing 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'd died from friendly fire until a month later, and why he'd been nominated for a Silver Star,

presumably as a method of covering up what had happened. None of this was explained. So eventually the Defense Department's Inspector General agreed to carry out a fourth investigation. According to Sports Illustrated, the Army finally admitted it had violated its own regulations by waiting more than a month to inform the Tillmans that their son had died 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 countered that it was done only because the bloodied gear was considered a potential biohazard and hygiene issue, that they might stir emotion and because officers in the field had already determined that Fratricide was a foregone conclusion. Which is about as bullshit an answer as you can get for that.

Yeah. I mean, they knew it was Fratricide within an hour, 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. And it took four investigations for the family to start to get an idea of how gross it was.

And there's... This guy, Kozlerich, 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 Kozlerich about his shitty investigation. And during it, he wind that the Tillman family

wouldn't stop asking questions about how their son had died because they were atheists. And he thought that, like, that's why. They're just angry that they don't have any peace. And so they're taking it out on the Army. And not only did he say that... He was angry that they're asking questions about how their son died because they're godless heathens.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's basically exactly what happened. And he went on ESPN in 2006 and continued to say this shit. Like, so 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...

How dare they? 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 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, Kozlerich. Yeah, it is harder for any human garbage people like him to empathize with other people. Yeah. It's... Yeah.

So Pat's mother, 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. 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 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 of friendly fire. It was tied to a pattern of behavior among Bush administration officials and army officials. A pattern of self-serving deception using the real tragedies experienced by individual soldiers in order to deflect criticism from the disastrous war they'd embarked on. This culminated in a series of congressional investigations

starting in 2007. Rumsfeld took the stand during these investigations and when he was asked when he'd learned how Thelman died, 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 interesting because Rumsfeld had taken the time to write Pat Thelman a personal letter when he'd 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 spin his life and his death.

When he spoke to Congress, Pat's brother, Kevin, was notably less polite. He said, quote, the fact that the army and 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 instigated those lies and benefited from them. Then ensure that justice is meted out to the culpable. So Mary did eventually get 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 Silverstar, General McChrystal had learned from Rumsfeld's office that President Bush planned to talk about Pat Tillman at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. McChrystal 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 Abazed, who sent the memo onward to the White House, which means, of course, that Rumsfeld and Bush and everybody else from pretty 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. The second I heard you say Rumsfeld insisted he didn't know, Rumsfeld is widely known for being a trustworthy guy, so I was going to give him the benefit of the doubt. But I honestly, 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 speechwriters changed his 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 and why the line was suddenly different.

Maybe not. Maybe he wasn't that curious a guy. But it seems really... He doesn't seem that curious. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Tillman was pretty famous. It seems pretty clear that at least Rumsfeld knew what was going on and Stanley McChrystal sure as hell knew what was happening.

In July 2008, 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 became clear he died of friendly fire, 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 House

and Defense Department's reaction to Corporal Tillman's death was followed by a stunning lack of curiosity about emerging reports of fratricide incomprehensible carelessness and incompetence in handling the sensitive information. So, in the end, there was a tiny bit of justice done. The hammer wound up falling on a general named Kinsinger who'd been part of the cover-up, but not really a major part.

Crack Hour suggests that this was because Kinsinger was already retired at the time of the investigation. No one involved though, but much more. Yeah. Yeah. You pick the retired guy and you yell at him. And then it's fine. It's fine. And I'm going 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. Yeah. And McChrystal's career definitely didn't get hurt by this at all because I ended up being under his command in 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 charge of the war in Afghanistan when a Rolling Stone reporter... Oh, yeah. What was that like when the fucking story came out that he was talking smack about Barack Obama? Personally, I thought it was hilarious. Yeah. Not that he was shit talking the president as a field grade officer, but how much he must have 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. Yeah. It's like he was trying to do a MacArthur in Korea, but like Obama slapped his dick and fired him. Yep. And his leadership of the war in general was fucking terrible.

So I was kind of glad to see him go. Yeah. So 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. But Mary Tillman says that he kind of stopped talking to them after he ran for president in 2008, because that would have been bad for his presidential run. So like 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 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 things 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 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 is sort of an argument against why football players shouldn't kneel whenever the hell they want to. Just slap him in the face,

but with this podcast and not your hand, because... Yeah, it's kind of disgusting. It's not even just the NFL. It's like literally anything. The Colonel has been in the NFL in years. Yeah. And he still gets trotted out, because apparently soldiers have a monopoly

on what sacrifice is. 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 Tillman 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 to be remembered, but we actually believe 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 face. It's frustrating. Yeah, we talk more about Pat Tillman,

and obviously now we're guilty of that because we're talking about Pat Tillman. We talk more about Kaepernick kneeling for a fucking magical song that makes the freedom come. But like, we talk more about this shit than we do, like the fact that we're still fighting the war in Afghanistan. Yeah.

We've had this conversation more than, is 17 years too long to be at war? Which, maybe. Maybe. Find out more next year. When we have our first child younger than the war he's fighting in, which that's going to be an exciting moment for this whole country.

I'm really excited. They can enlist now, because I mean, you can enlist at 17 with your parent signature. I did. Well, if you're 17 right now, go enlist and get yourself to Afghanistan and send me a message when you are officially

in a war that you're younger than. And we'll send you a t-shirt. I think all those guys who wanted to deploy 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 a young man like March's same past that his like dad marched in 2006 or something. Like, yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. Do you follow the army's social media accounts? Oh, no, no. Not since they posted those gross pictures

of the A-10 Warthog firing a bunch of stuff and were like, they called Angel of Death. Oh, yeah. Well, they recently accidentally onioned themselves. Like, they posted this picture of, like, father and son in Afghanistan. Like, it was a good thing. Oh, no.

Yeah, it was bad. It's really sketchy. Well, and it's 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. We'll let them 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 almost two decades, I mean, it's doing irreparable damage to our society as well. And our attitude towards, like, it's perfect. Like, nobody is processing. Like, maybe we shouldn't be in a war that is generational. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that's a conversation you would think we'd start having at some point. But I don't think we are going to. No. Yeah. If we have the conversation, we hate the truth. Yeah. And if we have the conversation,

then, like, what else are we going to spend that money on? Health care? Of course not. Yeah, no, no, no. Have you tried picking yourself up by your bootstraps there? All right, Joe, that's all I got for us for today. You want to plug some plugables?

Yeah. If you want to hear about a significantly less fucked up tour of duty in Afghanistan, I wrote a book called The Hooligans of Kandahar, and it's available wherever you get your books. My podcast, Lines Led by Donkey's podcast, where we talk about things kind of like this, and try to get some humor out of the fucked up aspects

in military history. I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. You can find us on the internet at BehindTheBastroods.com, where we'll have all the sources and images for this episode. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at atbastrodspod. And you can find shirts that we make that you can wear on T-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, 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 shirts. Yeah, don't burn, don't burn the shirts. 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 great talking to you. And yeah, that's it for us today. I love about 40% of you.

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