Pat Tillman investigations spur questions
Probes highlight chaos surrounding former football player's combat death
November 9, 2006
In a remote and dangerous corner of Afghanistan, under the protective roar of Apache attack helicopters and B-52 bombers, special agents and investigators did their work.
They walked the landscape with surviving witnesses. They found a rock stained with the blood of the victim. They re-enacted the killings — here the U.S. Army Rangers swept through the canyon in their Humvee, blasting away; here the doomed man waved his arms, pleading for recognition as a friend, not an enemy.
“Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat (expletive) Tillman, damn it!” he shouted, again and again.
The latest inquiry into Tillman’s death by friendly fire should end next month; authorities have said they intend to release to the public only a synopsis of their report. But The Associated Press has combed through the results of 2¼ years of investigations and uncovered some startling findings.
One of the four shooters, Staff Sgt. Trevor Alders, had recently had PRK laser eye surgery. Although he could see two sets of hands “straight up,” his vision was “hazy,” he said. In the absence of “friendly identifying signals,” he assumed Tillman and an allied Afghan who also was killed were enemy.
Another, Spc. Steve Elliott, said he was “excited” by the sight of rifles, muzzle flashes and “shapes.” A third, Spc. Stephen Ashpole, said he saw two figures, and just aimed where everyone else was shooting.
Squad leader Sgt. Greg Baker had 20-20 eyesight, but claimed he had “tunnel vision.” Amid the chaos and pumping adrenaline, Baker said he hammered what he thought was the enemy but was actually the allied Afghan fighter next to Tillman who was trying to give the Americans cover: “I zoned in on him because I could see the AK-47. I focused only on him.”
All four failed to identify their targets before firing, a direct violation of the fire discipline techniques drilled into every soldier.
Shortage of supplies
There’s more:
* Tillman’s platoon had nearly run out of vital supplies, according to one of the shooters. They were down to the water in their Camelbak drinking pouches, and were forced to buy a goat from a local vendor. Delayed supply flights contributed to the hunger, fatigue and possibly misjudgments by platoon members.
* A key commander in the events that led to Tillman’s death both was reprimanded for his role and meted out punishments to those who fired, raising questions of conflict of interest.
* A field hospital report says someone tried to jump-start Tillman’s heart with CPR hours after his head had been partly blown off and his corpse wrapped in a poncho; key evidence including Tillman’s body armor and uniform was burned.
* Investigators have been stymied because some of those involved now have lawyers and refused to cooperate, and other soldiers who were at the scene couldn’t be located.
* Three of the four shooters are now out of the Army, and essentially beyond the reach of military justice.
Taken together, these findings raise more questions than they answer, in a case that already had veered from suggestions that it all was a result of the “fog of war” to insinuations that criminal acts were to blame.
The Pentagon’s failure to reveal for more than a month that Tillman was killed by friendly fire have raised suspicions of a coverup. To Tillman’s family, there is little doubt that his death was more than an innocent mistake.
One investigator told the Tillmans that it hadn’t been ruled out that Tillman was shot by an American sniper or deliberately murdered by his own men — though he also gave no indication the evidence pointed that way.
“I will not assume his death was accidental or ’fog of war,”’ said his father, Pat Tillman Sr. “I want to know what happened, and they’ve clouded that so badly we may never know.”
Almost two years after three bullets through the forehead killed the star defensive back — a man who President Bush would call “an inspiration on and off the football field” — the fourth investigation began.
This time, the investigators are supposed to think like prosecutors:
Who fired the shots that killed Pat Tillman, and why?
Who insisted Tillman’s platoon split and travel through dangerous territory in daylight, against its own policy? Who let the command slip away and chaos engulf the unit?
And perhaps most of all: Was a crime committed?
From football to Rangers
The long and complicated story of Pat Tillman’s death and the investigations it spawned began five years ago, in the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center.
“It is a proud and patriotic thing you are doing,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld wrote to Tillman in 2002, after Tillman — shocked and outraged by the Sept. 11 attacks — turned down a multimillion-dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals to join the elite Army Rangers.
The San Jose, Calif. native enlisted with his brother Kevin, who gave up his own chance to play professional baseball. The Tillmans were deployed to Iraq in 2003, then sent to Afghanistan.
The mission of their “Black Sheep” platoon in April 2004 sounded straightforward: Divide a region along the Pakistan border into zones, then check each grid for insurgents and weapons. They were to clear two zones and then move deeper into Afghanistan.
A broken-down Humvee known as a Ground Mobility Vehicle, or GMV, stalled the unit on an isolated road. A mechanic couldn’t fix it, and a fuel pump flown in on a helicopter didn’t help.
Hours passed. Enemy fighters watched invisibly, plotting their ambush.
Tillman’s platoon must have presented an inviting target. There were 39 men and about a dozen vehicles.
Impatience was rising at the tactical operations center at Forward Operating Base Salerno, near Khowst, Afghanistan, where officers coordinated the movements of several platoons. Led by then-Maj. David Hodne, the so-called Cross-Functional Team worked at a U-shaped table inside a 20-by-30-foot tent with a projection screen and a satellite radio.
(Hodne, now a lieutenant colonel and executive officer for the 75th Ranger Regiment, declined to be interviewed on the record by the AP — as did nearly every person involved in the incident.)
When the Humvee broke down, the Black Sheep were nearing the end of their assignment; all that was left was to “turn one last stone and then get out,” Hodne would testify. The unit was then to head for Manah, a small village where it would spend the night.
The commanders had already given the Black Sheep an extra day to get into its grid zones. High-ranking commanders were “pushing us pretty hard to keep moving,” said Hodne.
“We had better not have any more delays due to this vehicle,” he told his subordinates.
'I felt like the village idiot'
At the operations center, the Black Sheep’s company commander, then-Capt. William C. “Satch” Saunders, was feeling the heat to get the platoon moving.
“We wanted to make sure we had a force staged to confirm or deny any enemy presence in Manah the next day, so we would not get ourselves too far behind setting ourselves up for our next series of operations,” he recalled later to an investigator.
The order came down to split the platoon in two to speed its progress.
Saunders initially told investigators that Hodne had issued the order, but later, after he was given immunity from prosecution, he acknowledged it was his decision alone.
Hodne later said he was in the dark — “I felt like the village idiot because I had no idea what they were doing,” he recalled. The decision was foolhardy, he said. Divided in two, “they didn’t have enough combat power to do that mission” of clearing Manah, he testified. (Other commanders have insisted that splitting the platoon was perfectly safe and a common practice.)
One thing is clear: The order sparked a flurry of activity by the Black Sheep.
One of the gunners who shot Tillman said his unit didn’t even have time to look at a map before getting back on the road.
“We were rushed to conduct an operation that had such flaws,” said Alders. “Which in the end would prove to be fatal.”
“If anything, this sense of urgency was as deadly to Tillman as the bullet that cut his life short,” Alders wrote in a lengthy statement protesting his expulsion from the Rangers. “We could have conducted the search at night like we did on the follow-up operations or the next morning like we ended up doing anyway. Why, I ask, why?”
An investigator, Brig. Gen. Gary M. Jones, would later agree that an “artificial sense of urgency” to keep Tillman’s platoon moving was a crucial factor in his death: “There was no specific intelligence that made the movement to Manah before nightfall imperative.”
An officer involved in the incident told AP there was, however, general intelligence of insurgent activity in this region, historically a Taliban hotbed.
That suspicion would be confirmed when the Black Sheep drove through a narrow canyon, its walls towering about 500 feet, and came under fire from enemy Afghans. Chaos broke out and communications broke down.
After the platoon split, the second section of the convoy roared out of the canyon, into an open valley and straight at their comrades a few minutes ahead. A Humvee packed with pumped-up Rangers opened fire, killing the friendly Afghan and Tillman, though he desperately sought to be recognized.
Later, at least one of the same Rangers turned his guns on a village where witnesses say civilian women and children had gathered. The shooters raked it with fire, the American witnesses said; they wounded two additional fellow Rangers, including their own platoon leader.
'Holding the military accountable'
Had it happened in the United States, police would have quickly cordoned off the area with “crime scene” tape and determined whether a law had been broken.
Instead, the investigations into Tillman’s death have cascaded, one after another, for the past 30 months.
For Mary Tillman, getting to the bottom of her son’s death is more than a personal quest.
“This isn’t just about our son,” she said. “It’s about holding the military accountable. Finding out what happened to Pat is ultimately going to be important in finding out what happened to other soldiers.”
In the days after the shootings, the first officer appointed to investigate, then-Capt. Richard Scott, interviewed all four shooters, their driver, and many others who were there. He concluded within a week that the gunmen demonstrated “gross negligence” and recommended further investigation.
“It could involve some Rangers that could be charged” with a crime, Scott told a superior later.
Then-Lt. Col. Jeffrey Bailey later assured Tillman’s family that those responsible would be punished as harshly as possible.
But no one was ever court martialed; staff lawyers advised senior Army commanders reviewing the incident that there was no legal basis for it.
Instead, the Army punished seven people; four soldiers received relatively minor punishments known as Article 15s under military law, with no court proceedings. These four ranged from written reprimands to expulsion from the Rangers. One, Baker, had his pay reduced and was effectively forced out of the Army. The other three soldiers received administrative reprimands.
Scott’s report circulated briefly among a small corps of high-ranking officers.
Then, it disappeared.
Some of Tillman’s relatives think the Army buried the report because its findings were too explosive. Army officials refused to provide a copy to the AP, saying no materials related to the investigation could be released.
Lingering questions
The commander of Tillman’s 75th Ranger Regiment, then-Col. James C. Nixon, wasn’t satisfied with Scott’s investigation, which he said focused too heavily on pre-combat inspections and procedures rather than on what had happened.
Scott “made some conclusions in the document that weren’t validated by facts” as described by the participants, Nixon would tell later investigators.
Nixon assigned his top aide, Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, to lead what became the second investigation. Kauzlarich harshly criticized Baker and the men on his truck.
Among other things, Baker should have known that at least two of his subordinates had never been in a firefight, and should have closely supervised where they shot.
“His failure to do so resulted in deaths of Cpl. Tillman and the AMF soldier, and the serious wounding of two other (Rangers),” Kauzlarich concluded. “While a great deal of discretion should be granted to a leader who is making difficult judgments in the heat of combat, the command also has a responsibility to hold its leaders accountable when that judgment is so wanton or poor that it places the lives of other men at risk.”
The Tillman family complained that questions remained: Who killed Tillman? Why did they fire? Were the punishments stiff enough?
“I don’t think that punishment fit their actions out there in the field,” said Kevin Tillman, who was with his brother the day Pat was killed but was several minutes behind him in the trailing element of a convoy and saw nothing.
“They were not inquiring, identifying, engaging (targets). They weren’t doing their job as a soldier,” he told an investigator. “You have an obligation as a soldier to, you know, do certain things, and just shooting isn’t one of your responsibilities. You know, it has to be a known, likely suspect.”
And so, in November 2004, acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee ordered up yet another investigation, by Jones.
The result was 2,100 pages of transcripts and detailed descriptions of the incident, but no new charges or punishments. The report, completed Jan. 10, 2005, was provided to the Tillman family. It has not been released to the public; the family found it wanting.
Pressed anew by the Tillmans, the Pentagon inspector general announced a review of the investigations in August 2005. And in March 2006, they launched a new criminal probe into the actions of the men who shot at Tillman.
In-depth investigation
The veteran Pentagon official who is overseeing these latest inquiries, acting Defense Department Inspector General Thomas Gimble, has called the Tillman probe the toughest case he has ever seen, according to people he recently briefed.
Investigators are looking at who pulled the triggers and fired at Tillman; they are also looking at the officers who pressured the platoon to move through a region with a history of ambushes; the soldiers who burned Tillman’s uniform and body armor afterward; and at everyone in the chain of command who deliberately kept the circumstances of Tillman’s death from the family for more than a month.
Military investigators under Gimble’s direction this year visited the rugged valley in eastern Afghanistan where Tillman was killed. It was a risky trip; the region is even more dangerous today than it was in 2004.
According to one person briefed by investigators, the contingent included at least two soldiers who were there the day of the incident — Staff Sgt. Matthew Weeks, a squad leader who was up the hill from Tillman when he was shot, and the driver of the GMV that carried the Rangers who shot Tillman, Staff Sgt. Kellett Sayre.
When the current inquiry began, the Pentagon projected it would be completed by September 2006. Now Gimble and the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, known as CID, are aiming to finish their work by December, say lawmakers and other officials briefed by Gimble.
CID is probing everything up to and including Tillman’s shooting. The inspector general’s office itself has a half-dozen investigators researching everything that happened afterward, including allegations of a coverup.
The investigators have taken sworn testimony from about 70 people, some of whom said they were questioned for more than six hours. But Gimble said investigators have been hindered by a failure to locate key witnesses, even some who are still in the active military.
Moreover, those who are now out of the Army, including three of the four shooters, can’t be court martialed. They could be charged in the civilian justice system by a U.S. attorney, but such a step would be highly unusual.
The law that allows it, the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, has been invoked fewer than a half-dozen times since its enactment in 2000, said Scott Silliman, executive director of Duke Law School’s Center on Law, Ethics and National Security and a high-ranking Air Force lawyer until his retirement in 1993.
The investigation, Gimble has said, is also complicated because of “numerous missteps” by the three previous investigators, particularly their failure to follow standards for handling evidence.
Gimble promised lawmakers in a series of briefings this fall that his investigation “will bring all to light.” He has committed to releasing his detailed findings to key legislators, Pentagon officials and the Tillman family, as well as a synopsis to the general public, congressional aides said.
Gimble declined an AP request for an interview.
Punishments handed out
To date, a total of seven soldiers have been disciplined in Tillman’s death.
Bailey, the 2nd Ranger Battalion commander who was camped out about two miles down the road with another unit the night Tillman died, surveyed the shooting scene hours after it occurred.
“I don’t think there was any criminal act,” he said. “It was a fratricide based upon a lot of contributing factors, confusion,” he testified to an investigator in late 2004.
Some high-ranking officers, including Bailey, believe a lack of control in the field was to blame — starting with the platoon leader and including the soldiers who didn’t identify their targets.
Bailey, who approved punishments for several of the soldiers, said he disagreed with the platoon’s protests that they were “doing what we asked them to do under some very difficult circumstances, and that there were mistakes made but they weren’t negligent mistakes.”
He also testified that “three gunners were, to varying degrees, culpable in what had happened out there.” And he said he wanted a fourth soldier involved — the squad leader, Baker — “out of the military.”
Baker soon left the Army.
As for others involved:
* The three other shooters — Ashpole, Alders and Elliott — remained in the service initially but Elliott and Ashpole have since left. Elliott struck a deal with authorities; in exchange for his testimony to investigator Jones, the Army gave him immunity from prosecution “in any criminal proceedings.”
* The platoon leader, Lt. David Uthlaut, was later bumped down from the Rangers to the regular Army for failing to prepare his men prior to the shootings, according to Bailey.
“They didn’t do communications checks. They didn’t check out their equipment. So they’d been there 24 hours,” Bailey testified. “For example, some of the weapons systems weren’t even loaded with ammunition. Many of the soldiers didn’t know where they were going. They didn’t have contingency plans.”
A non-commissioned officer on the ground that day, however, testified that the unit carried out required communications checks.
Uthlaut was also wounded by fellow Rangers in the incident. He was awarded the Purple Heart and later promoted to captain.
Saunders, the company commander, was given the authority to punish three soldiers. Both Saunders and Hodne received formal written reprimands for failing to “provide adequate command and control” of subordinate units — administrative punishments lighter than the Article 15s handed down to the soldiers who shot at Tillman. This obviously hasn’t hurt Hodne’s career; he has since been promoted.
“I thought it was (the commanders’) fault, or part of their fault that we were even in this situation, when they’re telling us to split up,” said Ashpole.
Congressional hearings?
Some lawmakers have warned that if this probe does not clear up all questions on Tillman’s death, they may press for congressional hearings. Others have said Congress could call for an independent panel of retired military officers and other experts to conduct an outside probe.
Rep. Mike Honda, a Democrat who represents the San Jose district where Tillman’s family lives, has pressed the Pentagon for answers on the status of its investigations.
“I’m very impatient and at times cynical,” Honda said. But, he said, the honor of the military — and the confidence of the public in the military and the government — are at stake.
“So if we pursue the truth and wait for it,” he said, “it may be worthwhile.”
© 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Showing posts with label William Saunders. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William Saunders. Show all posts
MSNBC : Pat Tillman investigations spur questions
Thursday, November 09, 2006
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ABC : A Case of Fratricide: Who Killed Pat Tillman?
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
A Case of Fratricide: Who Killed Pat Tillman?
By MIKE FISH | July 19, 2006
Early in the evening of April 22, 2004, a heavily armored vehicle in the trailing half of a split platoon came under attack from enemy fire in the rugged mountainous terrain of southeastern Afghanistan.
Soldiers in a Humvee opened fire in retaliation, but instead shot at fellow Rangers positioned ahead, killing Spc. Pat Tillman and an Afghan soldier standing 10 feet off Tillman's left shoulder.
The former NFL safety -- the Army's most-celebrated volunteer -- took three bullets to the forehead.
Three days removed from the ambush and the ensuing firefight, it wasn't the memory of the rounds of gunshots raining clouds of rock and dust down the towering canyon walls that troubled Spc. Ryan Mansfield.
It was the madness of making sense of it all.
Two years after Tillman's death, the Defense Department Inspector General's Office nears the completion of yet another investigation into the death and many very important questions remain unanswered.
Sitting in a crammed tent at Camp Salerno, the Army's Forward Operating Base in the province of Khowst, Afghanistan, Mansfield witnessed the raw emotion and friction in the unit as the soldiers agonized over the tragic outcome of the mission.
An Army chaplain pulled up a seat, so did an Army psychiatrist as squad leaders and high-ranking officers joined the 30 or so young Rangers still fresh from their first firefight.
The soldiers in the Black Sheep platoon didn't need a tidy, bureaucratic Army inquiry to tell them what they already knew: Tillman had been killed in a case of fratricide, otherwise known as friendly fire, by someone among them at the meeting.
By then, they knew that.
Like Mansfield, though, many of them were struggling with how it had happened. With why it had happened. With the awful enormity of it all.
"It was emotional," said Mansfield, then 20 years old and a gunner in the vehicle that had been just in front of Tillman's, in an interview with ESPN.com.
"Some people had things they said that other people didn't want to hear. It was just pretty personal. People in the second serial [the trailing half of the platoon] had a different perspective of what happened than people in the first."
The perspectives on the circumstances are still very much at odds, and the story is still very much alive.
Are the Rangers who fired at Tillman and their other fellow soldiers guilty of criminal wrongdoing?
Why did the Army glorify Tillman's actions on the battlefield during the firefight in which he was killed?
Did the Army purposely conceal that Tillman had been killed by friendly fire? If so, why?
And did the Army consciously puff up the Tillman story by awarding the dead soldier a Silver Star, its third-highest distinction for combat valor, to go along with his Purple Heart and a posthumous promotion from specialist to corporal?
For reasons that remain under investigation, the Pentagon elected for almost five weeks after the killing not to disclose the fact Tillman had been gunned down by members of his own platoon.
Yet some in Tillman's unit knew the night it happened. ESPN.com found that word of the fratricide had filtered through the ranks within a day or two of Tillman's death.
Army brass calling the shots from Camp Salerno also understood what had to be, for them, the discomfiting news about the elite group of soldiers expected to live and fight by a Ranger Creed that reads, in part, "I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy, and under no circumstances will I ever embarrass my country."
According to one of the documents obtained by ESPN.com, an Army official flown in to join the platoon the day after the shooting as part of the April 25, 2004, debriefing process told Army investigators, "I think at that point people already knew that it was a fratricide."
He said, "So when I say 'people' -- [I mean] leadership, OK."
In the meeting three days after Tillman's death, however, chaos and unanswered questions dominated the warm night air as Mansfield and the rest of the unit tried to understand how a Ranger had killed the war's most-famous soldier.
As the meeting progressed, the young men took turns pitching their piece of the big picture. Words like "bad judgment" and "panic" were tossed about. Gossip and suspicion flowed freely.
Because of the gruesome damage done to Tillman's head by the gunfire, popular theory first focused on a soldier who'd manned a .50-caliber machine gun as the likely shooter, but Army documents showed that investigators later dismissed that idea.
That soldier left the Army when his enlistment ended and declined several interview requests by ESPN.com.
A few of the Rangers piped up, according to two soldiers in attendance that evening, to suggest Tillman had been overly aggressive when he took his position low on the desolate ridge.
In one of the Army documents, an officer assigned to observe the reaction of the Rangers during the debriefing session later told investigators, "A lot of them felt like his [Tillman's] actions that day had put himself and [Spc. Bryan O'Neal] and the Afghan soldier in peril that was unnecessary."
O'Neal, an 18-year-old soldier who had been positioned on the ridge just a few yards from Tillman during the firefight, sat quietly through most of the meeting.
Eventually, though, his few, riveting words brought a hush over the assembled platoon.
Another soldier at the session, Spc. Pedro Arreola, told ESPN.com that O'Neal, fighting back tears and shaking with emotion, said: "The only reason I am standing here is because Pat Tillman saved my life."
That night, O'Neal didn't detail for his fellow Rangers exactly how Tillman had saved him.
Later, according to a transcript of his interview with an Army investigator, O'Neal said he'd been out in the open and under intense fire while Tillman had what O'Neal described as "pretty good cover."
Tillman, O'Neal told the investigator, "wasn't really too much in danger," although the Afghan Military Forces soldier already lay off to the side, dead.
"I was watching them as they were shooting at me," O'Neal told the investigator, speaking about his fellow Rangers, "and I was watching the rounds when they were -- and Pat could look around -- and I was noticing that most of their fire seemed to be directed towards me. And he moved out from behind his cover to throw some smoke. … All I remember was him telling me, 'Hey, don't worry, I've got something that can help us.' And he popped a smoke [grenade], I guess, and that's when he got shot -- one of the few times he got shot."
The official Army autopsy report obtained by ESPN.com shows that, besides the three bullets in his forehead, Tillman had shrapnel in his left forearm and wrist.
Asked by ESPN.com to review the autopsy's findings, renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden suggested the three bullets that struck Tillman in the head came in rapid succession, and most likely were from the weapon of a single shooter.
Documents from the Army's investigations indicate the wounds likely came from American 5.56-mm or 7.62-mm rounds.
"The first bullet that struck him in the head, he was dead," Baden told ESPN.com. "Then he was struck by two additional bullets, because of the rapid fire of the weapon that was used. He also may have been shot by other weapons in the arm and vest. This would indicate that. … More than one person was firing at him."
The previous investigations under Army regulation 15-6, which establishes procedures for such inquiries, concluded that a trio of young Rangers was following the initial fire of their squad leader, Sgt. Greg Baker, as the soldiers were trained to do.
None of those official inquiries identified who squeezed the trigger on the fatal shots.
Baden, though, suspects that enough ballistics evidence remained for the Army to have pinpointed the shooter, even though key evidence such as Tillman's uniform and body armor was destroyed within three days of his death.
Baden also said X-rays could have been used to identify the path the bullets took through Tillman's head, but the results were not included in the autopsy report, neither was mention of a hole in Tillman's leg discovered by a soldier who helped carry the body down the hillside.
"They should be able to figure out where the bullets came from, from the trajectory analysis, and whose weapon they came from, from microscopic ballistic comparison," said Baden, chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police and a frequent consultant in high-profile murder cases. "The person who fired probably knows who he is. I think the supervisors know who the shooter or shooters were, but they're not releasing it."
According to the Army officer who directed the first official inquiry, the Army might have more of a clue about the shooter's identity than it has let on. Asked whether ballistics work was done to identify who fired the fatal shots, Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich told ESPN.com, "I think, yeah, they did. And I think they know [who fired]. But I never found out."
Mansfield and other Rangers who attended the post-incident meeting said -- both in interviews with ESPN.com and in documents from the Army investigations -- they were advised by debriefers that night that the unit as a whole bore the responsibility for Tillman's death and they should avoid placing blame on any one person.
In his interview with ESPN.com, Kauzlarich also said he was not driven to identify Tillman's killer.
"You know what? I don't think it really matters," Kauzlarich said. "And the reason I say that -- you got to look at the overall situation here that these guys were fighting in. And somebody hit him. So would you hold that guy [who] hit him responsible for hitting him, when everybody was shooting in that direction, given the situation? We'll see how the [Defense Department Inspector General's] investigation comes out. But I had no issue on not finding a specific person responsible for doing it."
Kauzlarich said he was confident the current probe would not result in criminal charges against the shooter or shooters.
He said investigators would not still be examining the killing if it were not for Tillman's NFL celebrity -- he walked away from a multimillion-dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals when he enlisted -- and the pressure brought to bear by Tillman's family or a number of Washington politicos.
"His parents continue to ask for it to be looked at," Kauzlarich said. "And that is really their prerogative. And if they have the right backing, the right powerful people in our government to continue to let it happen, then that is the case."
"But there [have] been numerous unfortunate cases of fratricide, and the parents have basically said, 'OK, it was an unfortunate accident.' And they let it go. So this is -- I don't know, these people have a hard time letting it go. It may be because of their religious beliefs."
In a transcript of his interview with Brig. Gen. Gary Jones during a November 2004 investigation, Kauzlarich said he'd learned Kevin Tillman, Pat's brother and fellow Army Ranger who was a part of the battle the night Pat Tillman died, objected to the presence of a chaplain and the saying of prayers during a repatriation ceremony in Germany before his brother's body was returned to the United States.
Kauzlarich, now a battalion commanding officer at Fort Riley in Kansas, further suggested the Tillman family's unhappiness with the findings of past investigations might be because of the absence of a Christian faith in their lives.
In an interview with ESPN.com, Kauzlarich said: "When you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don't believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt. So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more -- that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don't know how an atheist thinks. I can only imagine that that would be pretty tough."
Asked by ESPN.com whether the Tillmans' religious beliefs are a factor in the ongoing investigation, Kauzlarich said, "I think so. There is not a whole lot of trust in the system or faith in the system [by the Tillmans]. So that is my personal opinion, knowing what I know."
Asked what might finally placate the family, Kauzlarich said, "You know what? I don't think anything will make them happy, quite honestly. I don't know. Maybe they want to see somebody's head on a platter. But will that really make them happy? No, because they can't bring their son back."
Kauzlarich, now 40, was the Ranger regiment executive officer in Afghanistan, making him ultimately responsible for the conduct of the fateful operation in which Pat Tillman died. Kauzlarich later played a role in writing the recommendation for the posthumous Silver Star. And finally, with his fingerprints already all over many of the hot-button issues, including the question of who ordered the platoon to be split as it dragged a disabled Humvee through the mountains, Kauzlarich conducted the first official Army investigation into Tillman's death.
That investigation is among the inquiries that didn't satisfy the Tillman family.
"Well, this guy makes disparaging remarks about the fact that we're not Christians, and the reason that we can't put Pat to rest is because we're not Christians," Mary Tillman, Pat's mother, said in an interview with ESPN.com. Mary Tillman casts the family as spiritual, though she said it does not believe in many of the fundamental aspects of organized religion.
"Oh, it has nothing to do with the fact that this whole thing is shady," she said sarcastically, "But it is because we are not Christians."
After a pause, her voice full with emotion, she added, "Pat may not have been what you call a Christian. He was about the best person I ever knew. I mean, he was just a good guy. He didn't lie. He was very honest. He was very generous. He was very humble. I mean, he had an ego, but it was a healthy ego. It is like, everything those [people] are, he wasn't."
Though rarely for public consumption, the Tillman family has continued to try to push through layers of Army bureaucracy for answers, about both the death of their son and the appearance that Pat Tillman's Army life, and death, might have been used for political purposes.
Were the Army and/or the White House so desperate for a positive spin that they morphed Tillman into a male version of Jessica Lynch, the Army private from West Virginia who was foisted into the spotlight early in the Iraq War during the march to Baghdad? The Pentagon initially portrayed Lynch as fighting until the last bullet was fired before she was wounded and captured. Only later was it learned that she had been injured when her vehicle crashed and she had been knocked unconscious. In her authorized biography, "I Am a Soldier, Too," she said she never fired a shot.
Tillman's Silver Star suggests the possibility of a similar spin. According to military records, 45 Silver Stars for gallantry have been awarded to soldiers for their heroism during the war in Afghanistan. An Army official told ESPN.com that Tillman's is the only one of those 45 that involved friendly fire. Although involved in the writing of Tillman's Silver Star application, Kauzlarich said the medals are "typically not" awarded in such cases.
"I mean, had the story come out that he had been killed by his own guys, then it probably would have been looked at differently," Kauzlarich said.
Army documents and statements given by witnesses during the Army's investigations indicate top officials already suspected fratricide when Tillman's Silver Star application was crafted. According to the transcript of his statement, Tillman's company commander, Capt. William Saunders acknowledged providing the information needed for Tillman's Silver Star recommendation, stating that before submission, "We became aware that his death was a possible fratricide." During a separate interview with investigators, Saunders said he arriving at the scene of the battle early the following morning -- April 23, 2004 -- and being informed fratricide was suspected.
Though two other Rangers were wounded in the incident, no one else on the battlefield that day was awarded a Silver Star.
Partly for that reason, the Army could be in for an embarrassing PR hit when the Defense Department Inspector General's Office releases its findings after an almost yearlong review of the events surrounding Tillman's death. That could come perhaps as early as September -- the start of another NFL season. The IG's Office initiated its current inquiry after determining the three earlier military investigations, including the one by Kauzlarich, failed to fully address concerns and allegations raised by the Tillman family as well as by Washington politicians.
In a March 23, 2006, letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a copy of which was obtained by ESPN.com, Reps. Michael Honda, D-Calif., Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, Ike Skelton, D-Mo., and Christopher Shays, R-Conn., wrote: "The Army ... should have a shared interest in determining whether Army officials covered up the true facts regarding Corporal Tillman's death." To that end, the lawmakers suggest congressional hearings ultimately might be convened to delve into the matter.
Both the White House and Rumsfeld's office declined comment for this story. Through spokesman Hollen J. Wheeler, the secretary of defense turned down the opportunity to address ESPN.com's questions about the Tillman situation e-mailed to his office.
The Army, too, isn't eager to discuss publicly either the specifics of the battle in which Tillman was killed or the events and investigations that have taken place since. ESPN.com e-mailed a series of questions about Tillman's death to the Department of the Army. Paul Boyce, the Army's deputy director of public affairs, cited the ongoing investigation as a reason for declining to respond.
In some cases, it appears the Army has tried to discourage the soldiers who fought with Tillman from speaking about how he died. Some of the Rangers contacted by ESPN.com said they were told that a nondisclosure agreement they signed upon entering the regiment precludes them from talking about the incident. Others told ESPN.com that a confidentiality agreement they signed upon leaving the Rangers prohibits them from discussing classified information for 80 years. Notices also have been posted around Fort Lewis advising soldiers not to talk about the Tillman incident with the media, according to a Ranger from Tillman's platoon who was stationed there.
O'Neal, the Ranger alongside Tillman when he was killed, told ESPN.com, "I've been advised not to talk by my superiors -- people that control me."
However, with the help of a number of other Rangers who were willing to talk about the firefight, along with documents from the Army's investigations, ESPN.com has been able to reconstruct the events leading up to and including the battle scene.
On the morning of April 21, 2004, a day before Tillman was gunned down, a failed fuel pump on a ground mobility vehicle -- Army jargon for a Humvee -- brought the Ranger platoon to a halt as it searched for Taliban and al Qaeda fighters. Another pump was flown in by helicopter that night, but according to an Army synopsis of one of the investigations, it didn't fix the problem.
The Army's elite fighting group -- 35 soldiers in 11 vehicles -- pulled out from their camp, towing the broken-down Humvee. The Rangers had no tow bar, so they improvised with straps. A few hours later, the Humvee's front end gave out near the village of Magarah and the Ranger convoy stopped.
Lt. David Uthlaut, the leader of the Black Sheep platoon, radioed for help to have the $50,000 Humvee airlifted out by a Chinook cargo helicopter to end the delay, according to several documents from the Army investigation led by Jones. Uthlaut was told, according to the documents, that it would be three or four days until the helicopter would be available. And he was told he could not abandon the vehicle along the roadside or blow it up to keep it out of the hands of Afghan insurgents.
Back at the Camp Salerno base, Saunders, the company commander, ordered the platoon to be split. The Humvee, accompanied by 19 Rangers in five vehicles, was to be towed by a local driver to a designated "recovery point" on a road that branched off to the north, where it was to be retrieved by an Army wrecker. According to the plan, the platoon was then to reunite and hit its objectives the next morning, raiding nearby villages to look for weapons and high-value targets.
Had the platoon stayed together, it's possible the friendly-fire incident might not have happened. According to the November 2004 interview transcript of an officer involved in one of the Army's investigations, "The results that caused Corporal Tillman's death really had nothing to do with splitting that [platoon] up…" But the officer continues his sentence with, "…except for that the converging forces killed him."
After a six- to seven-hour layover in Magarah, the Rangers paid a local driver $120 to pull the crippled vehicle along the mountainous roads with his "jinga truck," a large, colorful rig used to cart everything from livestock to shrubs.
But 10 or 15 minutes after the now-split platoon's first unit -- which comprised Pat Tillman, 15 other Rangers and four AMF soldiers in six vehicles -- had left, the jinga truck driver, who had become part of the second unit, deemed the road to the chosen recovery point to be too treacherous. He began to follow the path of the first unit toward the village of Manah. In the deep canyon, the two groups temporarily lost radio contact with each other.
It was early evening, close to 6:45. Daylight was waning along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, though it wasn't quite dark enough for night vision goggles. Suddenly, small arms fire from Afghan insurgents rained down from high atop a ridge, and an explosion rocked the floor of the canyon near where the second serial was traveling. The Rangers still in the canyon had no place to hide.
Making matters worse, when the trailing convoy, including the disabled Humvee and the jinga truck, was caught in the ambush, the non-English-speaking jinga driver was out in front of the Army's elite soldiers. According to the transcripts of statements given by several witnesses, the jinga truck initially blocked the convoy's escape route through the canyon. Kevin Tillman was in the rear vehicle of the second serial, which had come under fire.
Beyond the canyon, the first group of Rangers, including Pat Tillman, dismounted near the tiny village of Sperah and moved into position to fire at the muzzle flashes visible at the top of the ridgeline and lay cover for the trailing convoy.
Pat Tillman and O'Neal took off to reach a position low on the ridgeline. The Afghan soldier, who had been in the vehicle behind Pat Tillman, followed them.
As the second unit's lead vehicle broke free of the canyon, Baker, who was standing in the front passenger side, spotted the dark-skinned Afghan soldier on his feet and firing an AK-47 in the direction of the convoy. He took aim.
Baker told ESPN.com that he didn't realize he had targeted a friendly Afghan soldier, one of four who a few days earlier had joined the Rangers for a sweep operation of the countryside, or that the Afghan was firing over the convoy, at an enemy position high atop the ridgeline.
Neither, Baker said, did he realize that just a few feet off the Afghan's right shoulder were two Americans in Ranger uniforms: Pat Tillman and O'Neal.
Baker fired.
The Afghan was killed, his gut torn open as Baker let loose eight rounds.
Baker's first shots triggered wild, frenzied firing from the young shooters under his charge in the vehicle, engaging everything in the vicinity of the friendly Afghan.
"Well, we teach our guys to, you know -- one of our fire commands is to shoot where the leader shoots," Baker said to ESPN.com.
And that is what they did?
"Right," Baker answered.
But according to one of the Rangers in the first unit, the soldiers also are trained to make certain they know what they are aiming at before they pull the trigger.
"I was always taught: identify, acquire, engage," Arreola said in an interview with ESPN.com. "Identify your target. Acquire it -- put your gun sight on it. And if the threat is there, engage. So that is what I did. And that is why I shot up on top of the mountain, knowing that nobody we would give a s--- about is up there. And if anything, the threat is up there."
When asked by ESPN.com whether the Rangers in the second serial should have known what they were shooting, Arreola said: "Yes, definitely. That is what we are taught. It is burned into our minds."
Arreola, who was in the last vehicle of the second serial, told ESPN.com he did not shoot at Tillman or the other Rangers on the ridgeline. Both Arreola and Mansfield were interviewed on Memorial Day of this year at an Orange County, Calif., jail facility, where they are serving sentences for felony assault for their part in a November 2004 bar fight in Fullerton.
Pat Tillman and other Rangers on the ridgeline frantically waved their arms. Tillman set off a smoke grenade. At one point, the firing ceased briefly when the soldiers in the trailing serial lost sight of their targets as their vehicle rounded a curve. Thinking the firefight was over, Tillman and O'Neal stood to stretch their legs. According to O'Neal's interview transcript from the Army's November 2004 investigation, the two Rangers assumed the shooters had recognized the tragic error.
"So we figured we were fine," O'Neal recalled for investigators. "We figured it was -- you know, they realized we were friendly."
But the firing resumed.
This time, someone put three bullets in Tillman's head.
O'Neal's account, again from the Army's documents: "I probably laid down for a minute, you know, just trying to decide what had just happened. And after about then, I started to notice I was hearing some kind of running water sound and then I noticed I was just covered in blood and the blood was just running all over me and, at that time, I knew something was wrong. Probably not even a minute, a minute and a half before I started calling. I looked at Pat and realized he was dead and I called for [redacted] and it probably took a minute and a half, two minutes before they got to my position."
Before they eased off their triggers, the shooters also hit and wounded the platoon leader, Lt. Uthlaut, and his radio telephone operator, Spc. Jade Lane, who were positioned alongside a mud house less than 100 yards down the road.
"I just [feel] horrible," Baker told ESPN.com. "I mean, all of us did. ... I don't know how you deal with something like this. The mood overall was just crappy. Everyone was down. [Tillman] was a great guy and stuff like that. Awesome guy."
Now out of the Army and living in Tacoma, Wash., near where the Ranger unit had trained at Fort Lewis, Baker said he remembers his anxiety rising as his Humvee moved farther down the road. Up ahead, the vehicles belonging to the first group were stopped. Off to his right, up on the hills lining the road, were Rangers, some flailing their arms to signal for a cease-fire.
Explaining what first moved him to squeeze the trigger of his automatic weapon, Baker told ESPN.com, "It was just thinking that we'd seen bad guys on top of them, 'cause obviously that was where we were receiving fire at the whole time. And it just happened that the Afghan's moving with [Tillman and O'Neal], too -- the Afghan being their furthest man to the right, you know. So that was the first person that we [saw] on top of the hill, and him firing an AK-47, the same weapon system [the enemy was] shooting at us."
Kauzlarich, in the first official Army investigation, harshly chastised Baker for allowing himself to become "tunnel visioned" on the AMF soldier.
"He was firing up over us," Baker said he realized later. "But just at our angle, it looked like it came down at us because just the way the terrain was laid out and stuff like that. He was actually firing on a firing position up over our heads."
As for Pat Tillman, Baker said, "I couldn't... I didn't see him."
Nor did he see O'Neal, standing alongside Tillman. And he said he didn't pick up on the smoke canister Tillman set off.
Baker has never denied shooting the friendly Afghan soldier. In one of his statements to Kauzlarich during the first official investigation, Baker said, "I killed that guy. I killed the AMF soldier."
In stark contrast with Tillman, the Afghan remains a true unknown soldier. U.S. military officials told ESPN.com they aren't certain of his identity. Representatives with the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, as well as officials with the Afghanistan National Army, told ESPN.com they also have no record of his identity.
The job of making sense of the battlefield scene initially belonged to Capt. Richard Scott.
Within 24 hours after the Rangers killed Pat Tillman, Scott, who has since risen to the rank of major, was assigned to conduct the first, though unofficial, investigation. He was told up front that fratricide was suspected, a suspicion he seconded after he interviewed the Rangers and finished his inquiry. According to the transcript of his statement given to investigators later, he found Tillman had been killed by friendly fire.
At the time he was assigned to the investigation, Scott was already a decorated, if young, officer on the rise. A year earlier, he'd been recognized at the Pentagon during ceremonies for the 16th annual Gen. Douglas MacArthur Army Leadership Awards. Army brass, however, subsequently determined the assignment of Scott to the investigation wasn't in line with Army protocol once the scope of the inquiry began to focus on his superior officer, Kauzlarich. According to Army documents, though, Kauzlarich was assigned to what would become the Army's first official investigation on May 8, 2004, a little more than two weeks after Tillman had been killed. Kauzlarich completed his report within a week.
The existence of the Army's initial investigation didn't become known by the Tillman family until Kevin Tillman's chance encounter with Scott at Fort Bragg, N.C., in late 2004.
Scott's conclusions were more unfavorable toward the actions of the Rangers than any of the subsequent Army investigations, and they came during a time of turmoil and negative headlines for the Army and the Bush administration. The war images in front of the public were awful. Remains of the bodies of American contractors working in Iraq were strung up in Fallujah just three weeks before Tillman's death. And on April 28, "60 Minutes II" broadcast graphic photos depicting abuse by U.S. soldiers working as guards in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
According to Scott's statement provided in an investigation concluded last year and obtained by ESPN.com, he said he believed some of the shooters "could be charged for criminal intent" and at least three had demonstrated "gross negligence." Scott told Jones, the brigadier general assigned to conduct the most recently concluded investigation, that Baker should have been "chaptered out of the Army" and expressed his frustration that the shooters were allowed to change their stories and hadn't been punished adequately.
Reached by ESPN.com, Scott declined to elaborate, saying "Unfortunately, I can't really discuss anything until the [current] investigation is over with. I'm under a strict order not to."
Jones, who retired from the Army in January, also declined comment.
In findings released in March 2005, Jones acknowledged the Army knew almost immediately that Tillman had been killed by fellow soldiers, but blamed confusion over an interpretation of the regulations rather than a cover-up for the delay in telling Tillman's family. Jones upheld the awarding of the Silver Star to Tillman, even though he'd been killed before he could carry out what, in Jones' words, was an "audacious plan" that evening on the battlefield.
According to Army documents, Jones also upheld the relatively light sentences previously levied against the handful of soldiers and officers. The most serious reprimand: a dismissal from the Rangers, but not the Army, along with a Field Grade Article 15 Non-Judicial Punishment (which allows a commanding officer considerable leeway in administering discipline) for Baker. The other soldiers who fired with Baker -- Trevor Alders, Steve Elliott and Steve Ashpole -- received Company Grade Article 15s (which are less severe reprimands than the Field Grade level), and also were dismissed from the Rangers but not the Army.
"They didn't have to serve any punishments for their Article 15s," Lane, the radio operator who was wounded by friendly fire in the incident, said in an interview with ESPN.com. "No deduction in rank. No extra duty. No punishment of any kind. Their punishment was -- and this is what they were told -- that 'leaving the Rangers was punishment enough.' "
Platoon leader Uthlaut received a verbal reprimand as well as reassigned to the regular Army. Still in the Army and now a captain, he recently was stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia.
Among other things, the Tillman family is troubled the Army didn't take action against the soldiers who, according to Army documents and witness statements, destroyed potentially key evidence within days of Tillman's death. His body armor was burned April 23 -- a day after his death -- and two days later his uniform and vest were similarly burned. Soldiers said they destroyed Tillman's bloody belongings for hygiene reasons, as well as for the morale of the platoon, though they failed to follow Army procedures requiring medical authority before doing so.
A soldier who burned Tillman's uniform said in his statement it was not an effort to destroy evidence: "At that time it was acknowledged that this was fratricide. There was no question in my mind it was a friendly fire incident and [I] had no thought of 'destroying evidence' as we already knew that this was fratricide."
For the past two years, Kevin Tillman has been a reclusive figure. He rarely has been seen at ceremonies honoring his late brother, and he has avoided the media. Now out of the service, he has refused to go on the record for this story. But Arreola and Mansfield remember Kevin's reaction to his brother's death.
Arreola, a 22-year-old from Fontana, Calif., who had been in the vehicle with Kevin when the firefight started, was pulling guard duty with Kevin after the shooting was over. Arreola said he sensed something was wrong.
"It was dark already," Arreola told ESPN.com. "I just saw like a shadow. I saw Kevin. I saw somebody walk up to him, don't know who it was. I heard voices and I don't know what was said. I just remember hearing Kevin crying. And then I put that together with [the fact] we took a casualty.
"Then," Arreola said, "I went into shock. Kind of like, 'What the hell just happened?' "
Another Ranger had whispered to Kevin that Pat Tillman was dead.
Mansfield reflected with empathy on the changes he saw in Kevin when he rejoined the platoon upon its return to Fort Lewis about five weeks after Pat Tillman's death.
"He kept himself away from everybody," said Mansfield, clad in a dark blue prison jumpsuit with his head shaved. "And when we came back [to Fort Lewis], people were laughing, joking. And to him, he still didn't think people should be laughing, joking. A lot of people were trying to move on, trying to get past it; but to him, it was still pretty close. He didn't [think] that we should be doing that. So he pushed us away from him and wanted nothing to do with anybody there."
Said Arreola: "I think he blamed everybody that was there. Not one person in particular, but maybe he felt more toward certain people."
Army Spc. Russell Baer, one of Kevin Tillman's closer friends in the unit, accompanied Kevin and his brother's body on the flight back to the United States from Afghanistan. In his own interview with Army investigators in November 2004, Baer said he had been told to "pretty much keep my mouth shut up about the incident until all the pieces were put together."
Frustration with that situation, he said, caused him to be two days late returning to the Army, a transgression for which he was disciplined.
"I went home and saw all the pain and frustration. ... I always had that piece in my head -- my part of the puzzle and I couldn't tell them about it," Baer told investigators. "I was pissed off and I really at that time did not want to come back."
The next chapter in the Pat Tillman story is still to be written. It remains unclear whether the current inquiry will bring results that will satisfy his family. From their perspective, the accounts have been marked by uncertainties and unknowns from the very beginning, and the passing of time since April 22, 2004, doesn't help.
Even that night in the cramped tent at Camp Salerno, when the story should have been fresh, witnesses couldn't agree on what had happened. According to one Army document, a high-ranking officer who led the after-action review described the scene to Army investigators: "That whole (unit) was pissed off. But it started to become clear as we drew this thing out that there was just some -- some things didn't make sense."
And that hasn't changed.
By MIKE FISH | July 19, 2006
Early in the evening of April 22, 2004, a heavily armored vehicle in the trailing half of a split platoon came under attack from enemy fire in the rugged mountainous terrain of southeastern Afghanistan.
Soldiers in a Humvee opened fire in retaliation, but instead shot at fellow Rangers positioned ahead, killing Spc. Pat Tillman and an Afghan soldier standing 10 feet off Tillman's left shoulder.
The former NFL safety -- the Army's most-celebrated volunteer -- took three bullets to the forehead.
Three days removed from the ambush and the ensuing firefight, it wasn't the memory of the rounds of gunshots raining clouds of rock and dust down the towering canyon walls that troubled Spc. Ryan Mansfield.
It was the madness of making sense of it all.
Two years after Tillman's death, the Defense Department Inspector General's Office nears the completion of yet another investigation into the death and many very important questions remain unanswered.
Sitting in a crammed tent at Camp Salerno, the Army's Forward Operating Base in the province of Khowst, Afghanistan, Mansfield witnessed the raw emotion and friction in the unit as the soldiers agonized over the tragic outcome of the mission.
An Army chaplain pulled up a seat, so did an Army psychiatrist as squad leaders and high-ranking officers joined the 30 or so young Rangers still fresh from their first firefight.
The soldiers in the Black Sheep platoon didn't need a tidy, bureaucratic Army inquiry to tell them what they already knew: Tillman had been killed in a case of fratricide, otherwise known as friendly fire, by someone among them at the meeting.
By then, they knew that.
Like Mansfield, though, many of them were struggling with how it had happened. With why it had happened. With the awful enormity of it all.
"It was emotional," said Mansfield, then 20 years old and a gunner in the vehicle that had been just in front of Tillman's, in an interview with ESPN.com.
"Some people had things they said that other people didn't want to hear. It was just pretty personal. People in the second serial [the trailing half of the platoon] had a different perspective of what happened than people in the first."
The perspectives on the circumstances are still very much at odds, and the story is still very much alive.
Are the Rangers who fired at Tillman and their other fellow soldiers guilty of criminal wrongdoing?
Why did the Army glorify Tillman's actions on the battlefield during the firefight in which he was killed?
Did the Army purposely conceal that Tillman had been killed by friendly fire? If so, why?
And did the Army consciously puff up the Tillman story by awarding the dead soldier a Silver Star, its third-highest distinction for combat valor, to go along with his Purple Heart and a posthumous promotion from specialist to corporal?
For reasons that remain under investigation, the Pentagon elected for almost five weeks after the killing not to disclose the fact Tillman had been gunned down by members of his own platoon.
Yet some in Tillman's unit knew the night it happened. ESPN.com found that word of the fratricide had filtered through the ranks within a day or two of Tillman's death.
Army brass calling the shots from Camp Salerno also understood what had to be, for them, the discomfiting news about the elite group of soldiers expected to live and fight by a Ranger Creed that reads, in part, "I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy, and under no circumstances will I ever embarrass my country."
According to one of the documents obtained by ESPN.com, an Army official flown in to join the platoon the day after the shooting as part of the April 25, 2004, debriefing process told Army investigators, "I think at that point people already knew that it was a fratricide."
He said, "So when I say 'people' -- [I mean] leadership, OK."
In the meeting three days after Tillman's death, however, chaos and unanswered questions dominated the warm night air as Mansfield and the rest of the unit tried to understand how a Ranger had killed the war's most-famous soldier.
As the meeting progressed, the young men took turns pitching their piece of the big picture. Words like "bad judgment" and "panic" were tossed about. Gossip and suspicion flowed freely.
Because of the gruesome damage done to Tillman's head by the gunfire, popular theory first focused on a soldier who'd manned a .50-caliber machine gun as the likely shooter, but Army documents showed that investigators later dismissed that idea.
That soldier left the Army when his enlistment ended and declined several interview requests by ESPN.com.
A few of the Rangers piped up, according to two soldiers in attendance that evening, to suggest Tillman had been overly aggressive when he took his position low on the desolate ridge.
In one of the Army documents, an officer assigned to observe the reaction of the Rangers during the debriefing session later told investigators, "A lot of them felt like his [Tillman's] actions that day had put himself and [Spc. Bryan O'Neal] and the Afghan soldier in peril that was unnecessary."
O'Neal, an 18-year-old soldier who had been positioned on the ridge just a few yards from Tillman during the firefight, sat quietly through most of the meeting.
Eventually, though, his few, riveting words brought a hush over the assembled platoon.
Another soldier at the session, Spc. Pedro Arreola, told ESPN.com that O'Neal, fighting back tears and shaking with emotion, said: "The only reason I am standing here is because Pat Tillman saved my life."
That night, O'Neal didn't detail for his fellow Rangers exactly how Tillman had saved him.
Later, according to a transcript of his interview with an Army investigator, O'Neal said he'd been out in the open and under intense fire while Tillman had what O'Neal described as "pretty good cover."
Tillman, O'Neal told the investigator, "wasn't really too much in danger," although the Afghan Military Forces soldier already lay off to the side, dead.
"I was watching them as they were shooting at me," O'Neal told the investigator, speaking about his fellow Rangers, "and I was watching the rounds when they were -- and Pat could look around -- and I was noticing that most of their fire seemed to be directed towards me. And he moved out from behind his cover to throw some smoke. … All I remember was him telling me, 'Hey, don't worry, I've got something that can help us.' And he popped a smoke [grenade], I guess, and that's when he got shot -- one of the few times he got shot."
The official Army autopsy report obtained by ESPN.com shows that, besides the three bullets in his forehead, Tillman had shrapnel in his left forearm and wrist.
Asked by ESPN.com to review the autopsy's findings, renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden suggested the three bullets that struck Tillman in the head came in rapid succession, and most likely were from the weapon of a single shooter.
Documents from the Army's investigations indicate the wounds likely came from American 5.56-mm or 7.62-mm rounds.
"The first bullet that struck him in the head, he was dead," Baden told ESPN.com. "Then he was struck by two additional bullets, because of the rapid fire of the weapon that was used. He also may have been shot by other weapons in the arm and vest. This would indicate that. … More than one person was firing at him."
The previous investigations under Army regulation 15-6, which establishes procedures for such inquiries, concluded that a trio of young Rangers was following the initial fire of their squad leader, Sgt. Greg Baker, as the soldiers were trained to do.
None of those official inquiries identified who squeezed the trigger on the fatal shots.
Baden, though, suspects that enough ballistics evidence remained for the Army to have pinpointed the shooter, even though key evidence such as Tillman's uniform and body armor was destroyed within three days of his death.
Baden also said X-rays could have been used to identify the path the bullets took through Tillman's head, but the results were not included in the autopsy report, neither was mention of a hole in Tillman's leg discovered by a soldier who helped carry the body down the hillside.
"They should be able to figure out where the bullets came from, from the trajectory analysis, and whose weapon they came from, from microscopic ballistic comparison," said Baden, chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police and a frequent consultant in high-profile murder cases. "The person who fired probably knows who he is. I think the supervisors know who the shooter or shooters were, but they're not releasing it."
According to the Army officer who directed the first official inquiry, the Army might have more of a clue about the shooter's identity than it has let on. Asked whether ballistics work was done to identify who fired the fatal shots, Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich told ESPN.com, "I think, yeah, they did. And I think they know [who fired]. But I never found out."
Mansfield and other Rangers who attended the post-incident meeting said -- both in interviews with ESPN.com and in documents from the Army investigations -- they were advised by debriefers that night that the unit as a whole bore the responsibility for Tillman's death and they should avoid placing blame on any one person.
In his interview with ESPN.com, Kauzlarich also said he was not driven to identify Tillman's killer.
"You know what? I don't think it really matters," Kauzlarich said. "And the reason I say that -- you got to look at the overall situation here that these guys were fighting in. And somebody hit him. So would you hold that guy [who] hit him responsible for hitting him, when everybody was shooting in that direction, given the situation? We'll see how the [Defense Department Inspector General's] investigation comes out. But I had no issue on not finding a specific person responsible for doing it."
Kauzlarich said he was confident the current probe would not result in criminal charges against the shooter or shooters.
He said investigators would not still be examining the killing if it were not for Tillman's NFL celebrity -- he walked away from a multimillion-dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals when he enlisted -- and the pressure brought to bear by Tillman's family or a number of Washington politicos.
"His parents continue to ask for it to be looked at," Kauzlarich said. "And that is really their prerogative. And if they have the right backing, the right powerful people in our government to continue to let it happen, then that is the case."
"But there [have] been numerous unfortunate cases of fratricide, and the parents have basically said, 'OK, it was an unfortunate accident.' And they let it go. So this is -- I don't know, these people have a hard time letting it go. It may be because of their religious beliefs."
In a transcript of his interview with Brig. Gen. Gary Jones during a November 2004 investigation, Kauzlarich said he'd learned Kevin Tillman, Pat's brother and fellow Army Ranger who was a part of the battle the night Pat Tillman died, objected to the presence of a chaplain and the saying of prayers during a repatriation ceremony in Germany before his brother's body was returned to the United States.
Kauzlarich, now a battalion commanding officer at Fort Riley in Kansas, further suggested the Tillman family's unhappiness with the findings of past investigations might be because of the absence of a Christian faith in their lives.
In an interview with ESPN.com, Kauzlarich said: "When you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don't believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt. So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more -- that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don't know how an atheist thinks. I can only imagine that that would be pretty tough."
Asked by ESPN.com whether the Tillmans' religious beliefs are a factor in the ongoing investigation, Kauzlarich said, "I think so. There is not a whole lot of trust in the system or faith in the system [by the Tillmans]. So that is my personal opinion, knowing what I know."
Asked what might finally placate the family, Kauzlarich said, "You know what? I don't think anything will make them happy, quite honestly. I don't know. Maybe they want to see somebody's head on a platter. But will that really make them happy? No, because they can't bring their son back."
Kauzlarich, now 40, was the Ranger regiment executive officer in Afghanistan, making him ultimately responsible for the conduct of the fateful operation in which Pat Tillman died. Kauzlarich later played a role in writing the recommendation for the posthumous Silver Star. And finally, with his fingerprints already all over many of the hot-button issues, including the question of who ordered the platoon to be split as it dragged a disabled Humvee through the mountains, Kauzlarich conducted the first official Army investigation into Tillman's death.
That investigation is among the inquiries that didn't satisfy the Tillman family.
"Well, this guy makes disparaging remarks about the fact that we're not Christians, and the reason that we can't put Pat to rest is because we're not Christians," Mary Tillman, Pat's mother, said in an interview with ESPN.com. Mary Tillman casts the family as spiritual, though she said it does not believe in many of the fundamental aspects of organized religion.
"Oh, it has nothing to do with the fact that this whole thing is shady," she said sarcastically, "But it is because we are not Christians."
After a pause, her voice full with emotion, she added, "Pat may not have been what you call a Christian. He was about the best person I ever knew. I mean, he was just a good guy. He didn't lie. He was very honest. He was very generous. He was very humble. I mean, he had an ego, but it was a healthy ego. It is like, everything those [people] are, he wasn't."
Though rarely for public consumption, the Tillman family has continued to try to push through layers of Army bureaucracy for answers, about both the death of their son and the appearance that Pat Tillman's Army life, and death, might have been used for political purposes.
Were the Army and/or the White House so desperate for a positive spin that they morphed Tillman into a male version of Jessica Lynch, the Army private from West Virginia who was foisted into the spotlight early in the Iraq War during the march to Baghdad? The Pentagon initially portrayed Lynch as fighting until the last bullet was fired before she was wounded and captured. Only later was it learned that she had been injured when her vehicle crashed and she had been knocked unconscious. In her authorized biography, "I Am a Soldier, Too," she said she never fired a shot.
Tillman's Silver Star suggests the possibility of a similar spin. According to military records, 45 Silver Stars for gallantry have been awarded to soldiers for their heroism during the war in Afghanistan. An Army official told ESPN.com that Tillman's is the only one of those 45 that involved friendly fire. Although involved in the writing of Tillman's Silver Star application, Kauzlarich said the medals are "typically not" awarded in such cases.
"I mean, had the story come out that he had been killed by his own guys, then it probably would have been looked at differently," Kauzlarich said.
Army documents and statements given by witnesses during the Army's investigations indicate top officials already suspected fratricide when Tillman's Silver Star application was crafted. According to the transcript of his statement, Tillman's company commander, Capt. William Saunders acknowledged providing the information needed for Tillman's Silver Star recommendation, stating that before submission, "We became aware that his death was a possible fratricide." During a separate interview with investigators, Saunders said he arriving at the scene of the battle early the following morning -- April 23, 2004 -- and being informed fratricide was suspected.
Though two other Rangers were wounded in the incident, no one else on the battlefield that day was awarded a Silver Star.
Partly for that reason, the Army could be in for an embarrassing PR hit when the Defense Department Inspector General's Office releases its findings after an almost yearlong review of the events surrounding Tillman's death. That could come perhaps as early as September -- the start of another NFL season. The IG's Office initiated its current inquiry after determining the three earlier military investigations, including the one by Kauzlarich, failed to fully address concerns and allegations raised by the Tillman family as well as by Washington politicians.
In a March 23, 2006, letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a copy of which was obtained by ESPN.com, Reps. Michael Honda, D-Calif., Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, Ike Skelton, D-Mo., and Christopher Shays, R-Conn., wrote: "The Army ... should have a shared interest in determining whether Army officials covered up the true facts regarding Corporal Tillman's death." To that end, the lawmakers suggest congressional hearings ultimately might be convened to delve into the matter.
Both the White House and Rumsfeld's office declined comment for this story. Through spokesman Hollen J. Wheeler, the secretary of defense turned down the opportunity to address ESPN.com's questions about the Tillman situation e-mailed to his office.
The Army, too, isn't eager to discuss publicly either the specifics of the battle in which Tillman was killed or the events and investigations that have taken place since. ESPN.com e-mailed a series of questions about Tillman's death to the Department of the Army. Paul Boyce, the Army's deputy director of public affairs, cited the ongoing investigation as a reason for declining to respond.
In some cases, it appears the Army has tried to discourage the soldiers who fought with Tillman from speaking about how he died. Some of the Rangers contacted by ESPN.com said they were told that a nondisclosure agreement they signed upon entering the regiment precludes them from talking about the incident. Others told ESPN.com that a confidentiality agreement they signed upon leaving the Rangers prohibits them from discussing classified information for 80 years. Notices also have been posted around Fort Lewis advising soldiers not to talk about the Tillman incident with the media, according to a Ranger from Tillman's platoon who was stationed there.
O'Neal, the Ranger alongside Tillman when he was killed, told ESPN.com, "I've been advised not to talk by my superiors -- people that control me."
However, with the help of a number of other Rangers who were willing to talk about the firefight, along with documents from the Army's investigations, ESPN.com has been able to reconstruct the events leading up to and including the battle scene.
On the morning of April 21, 2004, a day before Tillman was gunned down, a failed fuel pump on a ground mobility vehicle -- Army jargon for a Humvee -- brought the Ranger platoon to a halt as it searched for Taliban and al Qaeda fighters. Another pump was flown in by helicopter that night, but according to an Army synopsis of one of the investigations, it didn't fix the problem.
The Army's elite fighting group -- 35 soldiers in 11 vehicles -- pulled out from their camp, towing the broken-down Humvee. The Rangers had no tow bar, so they improvised with straps. A few hours later, the Humvee's front end gave out near the village of Magarah and the Ranger convoy stopped.
Lt. David Uthlaut, the leader of the Black Sheep platoon, radioed for help to have the $50,000 Humvee airlifted out by a Chinook cargo helicopter to end the delay, according to several documents from the Army investigation led by Jones. Uthlaut was told, according to the documents, that it would be three or four days until the helicopter would be available. And he was told he could not abandon the vehicle along the roadside or blow it up to keep it out of the hands of Afghan insurgents.
Back at the Camp Salerno base, Saunders, the company commander, ordered the platoon to be split. The Humvee, accompanied by 19 Rangers in five vehicles, was to be towed by a local driver to a designated "recovery point" on a road that branched off to the north, where it was to be retrieved by an Army wrecker. According to the plan, the platoon was then to reunite and hit its objectives the next morning, raiding nearby villages to look for weapons and high-value targets.
Had the platoon stayed together, it's possible the friendly-fire incident might not have happened. According to the November 2004 interview transcript of an officer involved in one of the Army's investigations, "The results that caused Corporal Tillman's death really had nothing to do with splitting that [platoon] up…" But the officer continues his sentence with, "…except for that the converging forces killed him."
After a six- to seven-hour layover in Magarah, the Rangers paid a local driver $120 to pull the crippled vehicle along the mountainous roads with his "jinga truck," a large, colorful rig used to cart everything from livestock to shrubs.
But 10 or 15 minutes after the now-split platoon's first unit -- which comprised Pat Tillman, 15 other Rangers and four AMF soldiers in six vehicles -- had left, the jinga truck driver, who had become part of the second unit, deemed the road to the chosen recovery point to be too treacherous. He began to follow the path of the first unit toward the village of Manah. In the deep canyon, the two groups temporarily lost radio contact with each other.
It was early evening, close to 6:45. Daylight was waning along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, though it wasn't quite dark enough for night vision goggles. Suddenly, small arms fire from Afghan insurgents rained down from high atop a ridge, and an explosion rocked the floor of the canyon near where the second serial was traveling. The Rangers still in the canyon had no place to hide.
Making matters worse, when the trailing convoy, including the disabled Humvee and the jinga truck, was caught in the ambush, the non-English-speaking jinga driver was out in front of the Army's elite soldiers. According to the transcripts of statements given by several witnesses, the jinga truck initially blocked the convoy's escape route through the canyon. Kevin Tillman was in the rear vehicle of the second serial, which had come under fire.
Beyond the canyon, the first group of Rangers, including Pat Tillman, dismounted near the tiny village of Sperah and moved into position to fire at the muzzle flashes visible at the top of the ridgeline and lay cover for the trailing convoy.
Pat Tillman and O'Neal took off to reach a position low on the ridgeline. The Afghan soldier, who had been in the vehicle behind Pat Tillman, followed them.
As the second unit's lead vehicle broke free of the canyon, Baker, who was standing in the front passenger side, spotted the dark-skinned Afghan soldier on his feet and firing an AK-47 in the direction of the convoy. He took aim.
Baker told ESPN.com that he didn't realize he had targeted a friendly Afghan soldier, one of four who a few days earlier had joined the Rangers for a sweep operation of the countryside, or that the Afghan was firing over the convoy, at an enemy position high atop the ridgeline.
Neither, Baker said, did he realize that just a few feet off the Afghan's right shoulder were two Americans in Ranger uniforms: Pat Tillman and O'Neal.
Baker fired.
The Afghan was killed, his gut torn open as Baker let loose eight rounds.
Baker's first shots triggered wild, frenzied firing from the young shooters under his charge in the vehicle, engaging everything in the vicinity of the friendly Afghan.
"Well, we teach our guys to, you know -- one of our fire commands is to shoot where the leader shoots," Baker said to ESPN.com.
And that is what they did?
"Right," Baker answered.
But according to one of the Rangers in the first unit, the soldiers also are trained to make certain they know what they are aiming at before they pull the trigger.
"I was always taught: identify, acquire, engage," Arreola said in an interview with ESPN.com. "Identify your target. Acquire it -- put your gun sight on it. And if the threat is there, engage. So that is what I did. And that is why I shot up on top of the mountain, knowing that nobody we would give a s--- about is up there. And if anything, the threat is up there."
When asked by ESPN.com whether the Rangers in the second serial should have known what they were shooting, Arreola said: "Yes, definitely. That is what we are taught. It is burned into our minds."
Arreola, who was in the last vehicle of the second serial, told ESPN.com he did not shoot at Tillman or the other Rangers on the ridgeline. Both Arreola and Mansfield were interviewed on Memorial Day of this year at an Orange County, Calif., jail facility, where they are serving sentences for felony assault for their part in a November 2004 bar fight in Fullerton.
Pat Tillman and other Rangers on the ridgeline frantically waved their arms. Tillman set off a smoke grenade. At one point, the firing ceased briefly when the soldiers in the trailing serial lost sight of their targets as their vehicle rounded a curve. Thinking the firefight was over, Tillman and O'Neal stood to stretch their legs. According to O'Neal's interview transcript from the Army's November 2004 investigation, the two Rangers assumed the shooters had recognized the tragic error.
"So we figured we were fine," O'Neal recalled for investigators. "We figured it was -- you know, they realized we were friendly."
But the firing resumed.
This time, someone put three bullets in Tillman's head.
O'Neal's account, again from the Army's documents: "I probably laid down for a minute, you know, just trying to decide what had just happened. And after about then, I started to notice I was hearing some kind of running water sound and then I noticed I was just covered in blood and the blood was just running all over me and, at that time, I knew something was wrong. Probably not even a minute, a minute and a half before I started calling. I looked at Pat and realized he was dead and I called for [redacted] and it probably took a minute and a half, two minutes before they got to my position."
Before they eased off their triggers, the shooters also hit and wounded the platoon leader, Lt. Uthlaut, and his radio telephone operator, Spc. Jade Lane, who were positioned alongside a mud house less than 100 yards down the road.
"I just [feel] horrible," Baker told ESPN.com. "I mean, all of us did. ... I don't know how you deal with something like this. The mood overall was just crappy. Everyone was down. [Tillman] was a great guy and stuff like that. Awesome guy."
Now out of the Army and living in Tacoma, Wash., near where the Ranger unit had trained at Fort Lewis, Baker said he remembers his anxiety rising as his Humvee moved farther down the road. Up ahead, the vehicles belonging to the first group were stopped. Off to his right, up on the hills lining the road, were Rangers, some flailing their arms to signal for a cease-fire.
Explaining what first moved him to squeeze the trigger of his automatic weapon, Baker told ESPN.com, "It was just thinking that we'd seen bad guys on top of them, 'cause obviously that was where we were receiving fire at the whole time. And it just happened that the Afghan's moving with [Tillman and O'Neal], too -- the Afghan being their furthest man to the right, you know. So that was the first person that we [saw] on top of the hill, and him firing an AK-47, the same weapon system [the enemy was] shooting at us."
Kauzlarich, in the first official Army investigation, harshly chastised Baker for allowing himself to become "tunnel visioned" on the AMF soldier.
"He was firing up over us," Baker said he realized later. "But just at our angle, it looked like it came down at us because just the way the terrain was laid out and stuff like that. He was actually firing on a firing position up over our heads."
As for Pat Tillman, Baker said, "I couldn't... I didn't see him."
Nor did he see O'Neal, standing alongside Tillman. And he said he didn't pick up on the smoke canister Tillman set off.
Baker has never denied shooting the friendly Afghan soldier. In one of his statements to Kauzlarich during the first official investigation, Baker said, "I killed that guy. I killed the AMF soldier."
In stark contrast with Tillman, the Afghan remains a true unknown soldier. U.S. military officials told ESPN.com they aren't certain of his identity. Representatives with the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, as well as officials with the Afghanistan National Army, told ESPN.com they also have no record of his identity.
The job of making sense of the battlefield scene initially belonged to Capt. Richard Scott.
Within 24 hours after the Rangers killed Pat Tillman, Scott, who has since risen to the rank of major, was assigned to conduct the first, though unofficial, investigation. He was told up front that fratricide was suspected, a suspicion he seconded after he interviewed the Rangers and finished his inquiry. According to the transcript of his statement given to investigators later, he found Tillman had been killed by friendly fire.
At the time he was assigned to the investigation, Scott was already a decorated, if young, officer on the rise. A year earlier, he'd been recognized at the Pentagon during ceremonies for the 16th annual Gen. Douglas MacArthur Army Leadership Awards. Army brass, however, subsequently determined the assignment of Scott to the investigation wasn't in line with Army protocol once the scope of the inquiry began to focus on his superior officer, Kauzlarich. According to Army documents, though, Kauzlarich was assigned to what would become the Army's first official investigation on May 8, 2004, a little more than two weeks after Tillman had been killed. Kauzlarich completed his report within a week.
The existence of the Army's initial investigation didn't become known by the Tillman family until Kevin Tillman's chance encounter with Scott at Fort Bragg, N.C., in late 2004.
Scott's conclusions were more unfavorable toward the actions of the Rangers than any of the subsequent Army investigations, and they came during a time of turmoil and negative headlines for the Army and the Bush administration. The war images in front of the public were awful. Remains of the bodies of American contractors working in Iraq were strung up in Fallujah just three weeks before Tillman's death. And on April 28, "60 Minutes II" broadcast graphic photos depicting abuse by U.S. soldiers working as guards in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
According to Scott's statement provided in an investigation concluded last year and obtained by ESPN.com, he said he believed some of the shooters "could be charged for criminal intent" and at least three had demonstrated "gross negligence." Scott told Jones, the brigadier general assigned to conduct the most recently concluded investigation, that Baker should have been "chaptered out of the Army" and expressed his frustration that the shooters were allowed to change their stories and hadn't been punished adequately.
Reached by ESPN.com, Scott declined to elaborate, saying "Unfortunately, I can't really discuss anything until the [current] investigation is over with. I'm under a strict order not to."
Jones, who retired from the Army in January, also declined comment.
In findings released in March 2005, Jones acknowledged the Army knew almost immediately that Tillman had been killed by fellow soldiers, but blamed confusion over an interpretation of the regulations rather than a cover-up for the delay in telling Tillman's family. Jones upheld the awarding of the Silver Star to Tillman, even though he'd been killed before he could carry out what, in Jones' words, was an "audacious plan" that evening on the battlefield.
According to Army documents, Jones also upheld the relatively light sentences previously levied against the handful of soldiers and officers. The most serious reprimand: a dismissal from the Rangers, but not the Army, along with a Field Grade Article 15 Non-Judicial Punishment (which allows a commanding officer considerable leeway in administering discipline) for Baker. The other soldiers who fired with Baker -- Trevor Alders, Steve Elliott and Steve Ashpole -- received Company Grade Article 15s (which are less severe reprimands than the Field Grade level), and also were dismissed from the Rangers but not the Army.
"They didn't have to serve any punishments for their Article 15s," Lane, the radio operator who was wounded by friendly fire in the incident, said in an interview with ESPN.com. "No deduction in rank. No extra duty. No punishment of any kind. Their punishment was -- and this is what they were told -- that 'leaving the Rangers was punishment enough.' "
Platoon leader Uthlaut received a verbal reprimand as well as reassigned to the regular Army. Still in the Army and now a captain, he recently was stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia.
Among other things, the Tillman family is troubled the Army didn't take action against the soldiers who, according to Army documents and witness statements, destroyed potentially key evidence within days of Tillman's death. His body armor was burned April 23 -- a day after his death -- and two days later his uniform and vest were similarly burned. Soldiers said they destroyed Tillman's bloody belongings for hygiene reasons, as well as for the morale of the platoon, though they failed to follow Army procedures requiring medical authority before doing so.
A soldier who burned Tillman's uniform said in his statement it was not an effort to destroy evidence: "At that time it was acknowledged that this was fratricide. There was no question in my mind it was a friendly fire incident and [I] had no thought of 'destroying evidence' as we already knew that this was fratricide."
For the past two years, Kevin Tillman has been a reclusive figure. He rarely has been seen at ceremonies honoring his late brother, and he has avoided the media. Now out of the service, he has refused to go on the record for this story. But Arreola and Mansfield remember Kevin's reaction to his brother's death.
Arreola, a 22-year-old from Fontana, Calif., who had been in the vehicle with Kevin when the firefight started, was pulling guard duty with Kevin after the shooting was over. Arreola said he sensed something was wrong.
"It was dark already," Arreola told ESPN.com. "I just saw like a shadow. I saw Kevin. I saw somebody walk up to him, don't know who it was. I heard voices and I don't know what was said. I just remember hearing Kevin crying. And then I put that together with [the fact] we took a casualty.
"Then," Arreola said, "I went into shock. Kind of like, 'What the hell just happened?' "
Another Ranger had whispered to Kevin that Pat Tillman was dead.
Mansfield reflected with empathy on the changes he saw in Kevin when he rejoined the platoon upon its return to Fort Lewis about five weeks after Pat Tillman's death.
"He kept himself away from everybody," said Mansfield, clad in a dark blue prison jumpsuit with his head shaved. "And when we came back [to Fort Lewis], people were laughing, joking. And to him, he still didn't think people should be laughing, joking. A lot of people were trying to move on, trying to get past it; but to him, it was still pretty close. He didn't [think] that we should be doing that. So he pushed us away from him and wanted nothing to do with anybody there."
Said Arreola: "I think he blamed everybody that was there. Not one person in particular, but maybe he felt more toward certain people."
Army Spc. Russell Baer, one of Kevin Tillman's closer friends in the unit, accompanied Kevin and his brother's body on the flight back to the United States from Afghanistan. In his own interview with Army investigators in November 2004, Baer said he had been told to "pretty much keep my mouth shut up about the incident until all the pieces were put together."
Frustration with that situation, he said, caused him to be two days late returning to the Army, a transgression for which he was disciplined.
"I went home and saw all the pain and frustration. ... I always had that piece in my head -- my part of the puzzle and I couldn't tell them about it," Baer told investigators. "I was pissed off and I really at that time did not want to come back."
The next chapter in the Pat Tillman story is still to be written. It remains unclear whether the current inquiry will bring results that will satisfy his family. From their perspective, the accounts have been marked by uncertainties and unknowns from the very beginning, and the passing of time since April 22, 2004, doesn't help.
Even that night in the cramped tent at Camp Salerno, when the story should have been fresh, witnesses couldn't agree on what had happened. According to one Army document, a high-ranking officer who led the after-action review described the scene to Army investigators: "That whole (unit) was pissed off. But it started to become clear as we drew this thing out that there was just some -- some things didn't make sense."
And that hasn't changed.
Filed under
Bryan O'Neal,
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Gary Jones,
Greg Baker,
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memory,
Michael Baden,
Pedro Arreola,
Ralph Kauzlarich,
remember,
Richard Scott,
Ryan Mansfield,
William Saunders,
worm dirt
by Winter Patriot
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S.F. Chronicle : FAMILY DEMANDS THE TRUTH
Sunday, September 25, 2005
FAMILY DEMANDS THE TRUTH
New inquiry may expose events that led to Pat Tillman's death
Robert Collier | San Francisco Chronicle | September 25, 2005
The battle between a grieving family and the U.S. military justice system is on display in thousands of pages of documents strewn across Mary Tillman’s dining room table in suburban San Jose.
As she pores through testimony from three previous Army investigations into the killing of her son, former football star Pat Tillman, by his fellow Army Rangers last year in Afghanistan, she hopes that a new inquiry launched in August by the Pentagon’s inspector general finally will answer the family’s questions:
Were witnesses allowed to change their testimony on key details, as alleged by one investigator? Why did internal documents on the case, such as the initial casualty report, include false information? When did top Pentagon officials know that Tillman’s death was caused by friendly fire, and why did they delay for five weeks before informing his family?
“There have been so many discrepancies so far that it’s hard to know what to believe,” Mary Tillman said. “There are too many murky details.” The files the family received from the Army in March are heavily censored, with nearly every page containing blacked-out sections; most names have been deleted. (Names for this story were provided by sources close to the investigation.) At least one volume was withheld altogether from the family, and even an Army press release given to the media has deletions. On her copies, Mary Tillman has added competing marks and scrawls — countless color-coded tabs and angry notes such as “Contradiction!” “Wrong!” and “????”
A Chronicle review of more than 2,000 pages of testimony, as well as interviews with Pat Tillman’s family members and soldiers who served with him, found contradictions, inaccuracies and what appears to be the military’s attempt at self-protection.
For example, the documents contain testimony of the first investigating officer alleging that Army officials allowed witnesses to change key details in their sworn statements so his finding that certain soldiers committed “gross negligence” could be softened.
Interviews also show a side of Pat Tillman not widely known — a fiercely independent thinker who enlisted, fought and died in service to his country yet was critical of President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq, where he served a tour of duty. He was an avid reader whose interests ranged from history books on World War II and Winston Churchill to works of leftist Noam Chomsky, a favorite author.
Unlike Cindy Sheehan — who has protested against President Bush because of the death of her son Casey in combat in Baghdad — Mary Tillman, 49, who teaches in a San Jose public junior high school, and her ex-husband, Patrick Tillman, 50, a San Jose lawyer, have avoided association with the anti-war movement. Their main public allies are Sen. John McCain, RAriz., and Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose, who have lobbied on their behalf. Yet the case has high stakes because of Pat Tillman’s status as an all-American hero.
A football star at Leland High School in San Jose and at Arizona State University, Tillman was chosen Pac-10 defensive player of the year in 1997 and selected by the Arizona Cardinals in the NFL draft the following spring.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Arizona State and graduated summa cum laude in 3 1/2 years with a 3.84 grade point average. Ever the student, Tillman not only memorized the playbook by the time he reported for the Cardinals’ rookie camp but pointed out errors in it. He then worked on a master’s degree in history while playing professional football.
His 224 tackles in a single season (2000) are a team record, and because of team loyalty he rejected a five year, $9 million offer from the St. Louis Rams for a one-year, $512,000 contract to stay with Arizona the next year.
Moved in part by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Tillman decided to give up his career, saying he wanted to fight al Qaeda and help find Osama bin Laden. He spurned the Cardinals’ offer of a three year, $3.6 million contract extension and joined the Army in June 2002 along with his brother Kevin, who was playing minor-league baseball for the Cleveland Indians organization.
Pat Tillman’s enlistment grabbed the attention of the nation — and the highest levels of the Bush administration. A personal letter from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, thanking him for serving his country, now resides in a storage box, put away by Pat’s widow, Marie.
Instead of going to Afghanistan, as the brothers expected, their Ranger battalion was sent to participate in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The Tillmans saw combat several times on their way to Baghdad. In early 2004, they finally were assigned to Afghanistan.
Although the Rangers are an elite combat group, the investigative documents reveal that the conduct of the Tillmans’ detachment — A Company, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment — appeared to be anything but expert as it advanced through a remote canyon in eastern Afghanistan on April 22, 2004, on a mission to search for Taliban and al Qaeda fighters in a village called Manah.
According to the files, when one of the humvees became disabled, thus stalling the mission, commanding officers split Tillman’s platoon in two so one half could move on and the other could arrange transport for the disabled vehicle. Platoon leader Lt. David Uthlaut protested the move as dangerous, but he was overruled. The first group was ordered out in the late afternoon, with Pat Tillman in the forward unit. Kevin’s unit followed 15 to 20 minutes later, hauling the humvee on an Afghan-owned flatbed truck. Both groups temporarily lost radio and visual contact with each other in the deep canyon, and the second group came under attack from suspected Taliban fighters on the surrounding ridges.
Pat Tillman, according to testimony, climbed a hill with another soldier and an Afghan militiaman, intending to attack the enemy. He offered to remove his 28-pound body armor so he could move more quickly, but was ordered not to. Meanwhile, the lead vehicle in the platoon’s second group arrived near Tillman’s position about 65 meters away and mistook the group as enemy. The Afghan stood and fired above the second group at the suspected enemy on the opposite ridge. Although the driver of the second group’s lead vehicle, according to his testimony, recognized Tillman’s group as “friendlies” and tried to signal others in his vehicle not to shoot, they directed fire toward the Afghan and began shooting wildly, without first identifying their target, and also shot at a village on the ridgeline.
The Afghan was killed. According to testimony, Tillman, who along with others on the hill waved his arms and yelled “cease fire,” set off a smoke grenade to identify his group as fellow soldiers. There was a momentary lull in the firing, and he and the soldier next to him, thinking themselves safe, relaxed, stood up and started talking. But the shooting resumed. Tillman was hit in the wrist with shrapnel and in his body armor with numerous bullets.
The soldier next to him testified: “I could hear the pain in his voice as he called out, ‘Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat f—ing Tillman, dammit.” He said this over and over until he stopped,” having been hit by three bullets in the forehead, killing him.
The soldier continued, “I then looked over at my side to see a river of blood coming down from where he was … I saw his head was gone.” Two other Rangers elsewhere on the mountainside were injured by shrapnel.
Kevin was unaware that his brother had been killed until nearly an hour later when he asked if anyone had seen Pat and a fellow soldier told him.
Tillman’s death came at a sensitive time for the Bush administration — just a week before the Army’s abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq became public and sparked a huge scandal. The Pentagon immediately announced that Tillman had died heroically in combat with the enemy, and President Bush hailed him as “an inspiration on and off the football field, as with all who made the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror.”
His killing was widely reported by the media, including conservative commentators such as Ann Coulter, who called him “an American original — virtuous, pure and masculine like only an American male can be.” His May 3, 2004, memorial in San Jose drew 3,500 people and was nationally televised.
Not until five weeks later, as Tillman’s battalion was returning home, did officials inform the public and the Tillman family that he had been killed by his fellow soldiers.
According to testimony, the first investigation was initiated less than 24 hours after Tillman’s death by an officer in the same Ranger battalion. His report, delivered May 4, 2004, determined that soldiers involved in the incident had committed “gross negligence” and should be appropriately disciplined. The officer became a key witness in the subsequent investigation. For reasons that are not clear, the officer’s investigation was taken over by a higher ranking commander. That officer’s findings, delivered the next month, called for less severe discipline.
The parents, protesting that many questions were left unanswered, found a sympathetic ear in McCain, who Mary Tillman later said was greatly admired by her son. Tillman was well known in Arizona because of his success there as a college and pro football player. McCain began to press the Pentagon on the family’s behalf, and a third probe finally was authorized. Its report was delivered in January.
The military is saying little publicly about the Tillman case. Most Army personnel who were involved in the Tillman incident or the investigations declined to comment publicly when contacted by The Chronicle. The inspector general’s press office also declined to comment, saying only that the new probe is openended.
Over the coming weeks, Pentagon investigators are scheduled to carry out new interviews with many of the soldiers, officers and others involved in the incident. As they carry out their reassessment, potentially controversial points include:
-- Conflicting testimony. In his Nov. 14, 2004, interrogation, the first investigator expressed frustration with “watching some of these guys getting off, what I thought … was a lesser of a punishment than what they should’ve received. And I will tell you, over a period of time … the stories have changed. They have changed to, I think, help some individuals.”
The investigator testified that after he submitted his report on May 3, higher-ranking officers permitted soldiers to change key details of their testimony in order to prevent any individual from being singled out for punishment.
“They had the entire chain of command (inaudible) that were involved, the [deleted], all sticking up for [deleted] … And the reason the [deleted] called me in … because the [deleted] … changed their story in how things occurred and the timing and the distance in an attempt to stick up for their counterpart, implied, insinuated that the report wasn’t as accurate as I submitted it …” the first investigator testified.
In another section of his testimony, he said witnesses changed details regarding “the distance, the time, the location and the positioning” in Tillman’s killing.
Another disputed detail was whether the soldiers were firing while speeding down the canyon or whether they stopped, got out and continued shooting. In testimony in the third investigation, the soldiers said they did not stop. However, the medical examiner’s report said Tillman was killed by three bullets closely spaced in his forehead — a pattern that would have been unlikely if the shooter were moving fast. Spc. Russell Baer, a soldier pinned down by gunfire on the hillside near Tillman, said in an interview with The Chronicle that at least two soldiers had gotten out of the humvee to fire uphill. One other soldier confirmed this account to a Tillman family member.
One soldier dismissed by the Rangers for his actions in the incident submitted a statement in the third investigation that suggests the probe was incomplete: “The investigation does not truly set to rest the events of the evening of 22 April 2004. There is critical information not included or misinterpreted in it that could shed some light on who is really at fault for this,” he wrote.
-- Commanders’ accountability. According to the documents and interviews, Capt. William Saunders, to whom platoon leader Uthlaut had protested splitting his troops, was allowed to change his testimony over a crucial detail — whether he had reported Uthlaut’s dissent to a higher ranking commander. In initial questioning, Saunders said he had done so, but when that apparently was contradicted by that commander’s testimony, Saunders was threatened with perjury charges. He was given immunity and allowed to change his prior testimony.
The regiment’s commander, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Bailey, was promoted to colonel two months after the incident, and Saunders, who a source said received a reprimand, later was given authority to determine the punishment of those below him. He gave administrative reprimands to six soldiers, including Uthlaut, who had been seriously wounded in the face by shrapnel in the incident. Uthlaut — who was first captain of his senior class at West Point, the academy’s highest honor — was dismissed from the Rangers and re-entered the regular Army.
“It seems grossly inappropriate that Saunders would determine punishment for the others when he shares responsibility for the debacle,” Mary Tillman said.
Baer told The Chronicle that commanding officers were to blame for the friendly fire because they split the platoon and ordered it to leave a secure location in favor of a region known as a Taliban stronghold.
“It was dumb to send us out during daylight,” said Baer, who was honorably discharged from the Rangers earlier this year and lives in the East Bay.
“It’s a well-known military doctrine that privates first learn going through basic training — if you are in enemy territory and you are stopped for a prolonged period of time, the best thing to do is to wait until nightfall. Why they thought that moving us out in broad daylight from our position, dragging a busted humvee slowly through a known hotspot after we had been stranded there all day was a good idea will forever elude me. Who made that decision? Bailey? Saunders? That’s what I want to know.”
-- Inaccurate information. While the military code gives clear guidance for informing family members upon a soldier’s death when cases are suspected of being a result of friendly fire, that procedure was not followed in the Tillman case. After Tillman’s death, the Army gave conflicting and incorrect descriptions of the events.
On April 22, the family was told that Tillman was hit with enemy fire getting out of a vehicle and died an hour later at a field hospital.
Although there was ample testimony that Tillman died immediately, an Army report — dated April 22, 2004, from the field hospital in Salerno, Afghanistan, where his body was taken — suggested otherwise. While it stated that he had no blood pressure or pulse “on arrival,” it stated that cardio pulmonary resuscitation had been conducted and that he was transferred to the intensive care unit for further CPR.
On April 23, all top Ranger commanders were told of the suspected fratricide. That same day, an Army press release said he was killed “when his patrol vehicle came under attack.”
On April 29, four days before Tillman’s memorial, Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, and other top commanders were told of the fratricide. It is not known if Abizaid reported the news to Washington. Mary Tillman believes that with her son’s high profile, and the fact that Rumsfeld sent him a personal letter, the word quickly reached the defense secretary. “If Pat was on Rumsfeld’s radar, it’s pretty likely that he would have been informed right away after he was killed,” she said. White House, Pentagon and Army spokesmen all said they had no information on when Bush or Rumsfeld were informed.
On April 30, the Army awarded Tillman a Silver Star medal for bravery, saying that “through the firing Tillman’s voice was heard issuing fire commands to take the fight to the enemy on the dominating high ground.”
On May 2, the acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee was told of the fratricide.
On May 7, the Army’s official casualty report stated incorrectly that Tillman was killed by “enemy forces” and “died in a medical treatment facility.”
On May 28, the Army finally admitted to Tillman’s family that he had been killed by friendly fire.
“The administration clearly was using this case for its own political reasons,” said the father, Patrick Tillman. “This cover-up started within minutes of Pat’s death, and it started at high levels. This is not something that (lower-ranking) people in the field do,” he said.
The files show that many of the soldiers questioned in the inquiry said it was common knowledge that the incident involved friendly fire.
A soldier who on April 23 burned Tillman’s bullet riddled body armor — which would have been evidence in a friendly-fire investigation — testified that he did so because there was no doubt it was friendly fire that killed Tillman. Two days later, Tillman’s uniform and vest also were burned because they were soaked in blood and considered a biohazard. Tillman’s uniform also was burned.
The officer who led the first investigation testified that when he was given responsibility for the probe the morning after Tillman’s death, he was informed that the cause was “potential fratricide.’’
After they received the friendly-fire notification May 28, the Tillmans began a public campaign seeking more information. But it was only when the Tillmans began angrily accusing the Pentagon of a coverup, in June 2005, that the Army apologized for the delay, issuing a statement blaming “procedural misjudgments and mistakes.”
-- Legal liability. In testimony on Nov. 14, the officer who conducted the first investigation said that he thought some Rangers could have been charged with “criminal intent,” and that some Rangers committed “gross negligence.” The legal difference between the two terms is roughly similar to the distinction between murder and involuntary manslaughter.
The Tillmans demand that all avenues of inquiry remain open.
“I want to know what kind of criminal intent there was,” Mary Tillman said. “There’s so much in the reports that is (deleted) that it’s hard to tell what we’re not seeing.”
In Congress, pressure is building for a full public disclosure of what happened. “I am committed to continuing my work with the Tillman family to ensure that their concerns are being addressed,” said Rep. Honda. He added that he expects the investigation to do the following: “1) provide all factual evidence about the events of April 22, 2004; 2) identify the command decisions that contributed to Pat Tillman’s death; 3) explain why the Army took so long to reveal fratricide as the cause of Pat Tillman’s death; and 4) offer all necessary recommendations for improved procedures relating to such incidents.”
Patrick Tillman drily called the new Army probe “the latest, greatest investigation.” He added, “In Washington, I don’t think any of them want it investigated. They (politicians and Army officials) just don’t want to see it ended with them, landing on their desk so they get blamed for the cover-up.” The January 2005 investigation concluded that there was no coverup.
Throughout the controversy, the Tillman family has been reluctant to cause a media stir. Mary noted that Pat shunned publicity, refusing all public comment when he enlisted and asking the Army to reject all media requests for interviews while he was in service. Pat’s widow, Marie, and his brother Kevin have not become publicly involved in the case, and they declined to comment for this article.
Yet other Tillman family members are less reluctant to show Tillman’s unique character, which was more complex than the public image of a gung-ho patriotic warrior. He started keeping a journal at 16 and continued the practice on the battlefield, writing in it regularly. (His journal was lost immediately after his death.) Mary Tillman said a friend of Pat’s even arranged a private meeting with Chomsky, the antiwar author, to take place after his return from Afghanistan — a meeting prevented by his death. She said that although he supported the Afghan war, believing it justified by the Sept. 11 attacks, “Pat was very critical of the whole Iraq war.”
Baer, who served with Tillman for more than a year in Iraq and Afghanistan, told one anecdote that took place during the March 2003 invasion as the Rangers moved up through southern Iraq.
“I can see it like a movie screen,” Baer said. “We were outside of (a city in southern Iraq) watching as bombs were dropping on the town. We were at an old air base, me, Kevin and Pat, we weren’t in the fight right then. We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so f— illegal.’ And we all said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s who he was. He totally was against Bush.”
Another soldier in the platoon, who asked not to be identified, said Pat urged him to vote for Bush’s Democratic opponent in the 2004 election, Sen. John Kerry.
Senior Chief Petty Officer Stephen White — a Navy SEAL who served with Pat and Kevin for four months in Iraq and was the only military member to speak at Tillman’s memorial — said Pat “wasn’t very fired up about being in Iraq” and instead wanted to go fight al Qaeda in Afghanistan. He said both Pat and Kevin (who has a degree in philosophy) “were amazingly well-read individuals … very firm in some of their beliefs, their political and religious or not so religious beliefs.”
Baer recalled that Tillman encouraged him in his ambitions as an amateur poet. “I would read him my poems, and we would talk about them,” Baer said. “He helped me grow as an individual.”
Tillman subscribed to the Economist magazine, and a fellow soldier said Tillman created a makeshift base library of classic novels so his platoon mates would have literature to read in their down time. He even brought gourmet coffee to brew for his platoon in the field in Afghanistan.
Baer said Tillman was popular among his fellow soldiers and had no enemies. “The guys who killed Pat were his biggest fans,” he said. “They were really wrecked afterward.” He called Tillman “this amazing positive force who really brought our whole platoon together.
He had this great energy. Everybody loved him.” His former comrades and family recall Tillman as a born leader yet remarkably humble. White, the Navy SEAL, recalls one day when “some 19-year-old Ranger came and ordered him to cut an acre of grass.
And Pat just did it, he cut that grass, he didn’t complain. He could have taken millions of dollars playing football, but instead he was just taking orders like that.”
Mary Tillman says that’s how Pat would have wanted to be remembered, as an individual, not as a stock figure or political prop. But she also believes “Pat was a real hero, not what they used him as.”
For the moment, all that is left are the memories and the thick binders spread across Mary Tillman’s dining room table in San Jose. As she waits for the Pentagon investigators to finish their new probe, she wonders whether they will ask the hard questions. Like other family members, “I just want accountability,” she said. “I want answers.”
‘IT’S HARD TO KNOW WHAT TO BELIEVE’
That’s the lament of Mary Tillman, above, a teacher of special education in a San Jose public school. She has long pressed the Army to reopen its investigation into the friendly-fire killing of her son, Pat Tillman, in a canyon in Afghanistan on April 22, . The persistence of Mary Tillman and her former husband, Patrick Tillman, was rewarded when the Pentagon’s inspector general opened a new inquiry in August, the fourth such probe. Mary Tillman says she hopes questions created by discrepancies in past testimony will finally be answered.
STORY CHANGES OVER TIME
An officer in Pat Tillman's Ranger battalion who directed the first investigation into the soldier's death served as a witness on Nov. 14, 2004, in the third investigation, which was led by Brig. Gen. Gary Jones. The first investigator complained that the officers in charge of the second investigation had allowed Rangers involved in the shooting to change their testimony.
THREAT OF PERJURY CHARGES
An excerpt from a March 3, 2005, memorandum by Brig. Gen. Gary Jones describes how Capt. William Saunders, the commander of Pat Tillman's Ranger company, was threatened with perjury charges. Jones' memo said Saunders made false claims that he had informed his superiors that platoon commander Lt. David Uthlaut had protested orders given to him leading up to the incident. Despite this threat, Saunders was allowed to change his testimony and was granted immunity.
E-mail Robert Collier at rcollier@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
New inquiry may expose events that led to Pat Tillman's death
Robert Collier | San Francisco Chronicle | September 25, 2005
The battle between a grieving family and the U.S. military justice system is on display in thousands of pages of documents strewn across Mary Tillman’s dining room table in suburban San Jose.
As she pores through testimony from three previous Army investigations into the killing of her son, former football star Pat Tillman, by his fellow Army Rangers last year in Afghanistan, she hopes that a new inquiry launched in August by the Pentagon’s inspector general finally will answer the family’s questions:
Were witnesses allowed to change their testimony on key details, as alleged by one investigator? Why did internal documents on the case, such as the initial casualty report, include false information? When did top Pentagon officials know that Tillman’s death was caused by friendly fire, and why did they delay for five weeks before informing his family?
“There have been so many discrepancies so far that it’s hard to know what to believe,” Mary Tillman said. “There are too many murky details.” The files the family received from the Army in March are heavily censored, with nearly every page containing blacked-out sections; most names have been deleted. (Names for this story were provided by sources close to the investigation.) At least one volume was withheld altogether from the family, and even an Army press release given to the media has deletions. On her copies, Mary Tillman has added competing marks and scrawls — countless color-coded tabs and angry notes such as “Contradiction!” “Wrong!” and “????”
A Chronicle review of more than 2,000 pages of testimony, as well as interviews with Pat Tillman’s family members and soldiers who served with him, found contradictions, inaccuracies and what appears to be the military’s attempt at self-protection.
For example, the documents contain testimony of the first investigating officer alleging that Army officials allowed witnesses to change key details in their sworn statements so his finding that certain soldiers committed “gross negligence” could be softened.
Interviews also show a side of Pat Tillman not widely known — a fiercely independent thinker who enlisted, fought and died in service to his country yet was critical of President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq, where he served a tour of duty. He was an avid reader whose interests ranged from history books on World War II and Winston Churchill to works of leftist Noam Chomsky, a favorite author.
Unlike Cindy Sheehan — who has protested against President Bush because of the death of her son Casey in combat in Baghdad — Mary Tillman, 49, who teaches in a San Jose public junior high school, and her ex-husband, Patrick Tillman, 50, a San Jose lawyer, have avoided association with the anti-war movement. Their main public allies are Sen. John McCain, RAriz., and Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose, who have lobbied on their behalf. Yet the case has high stakes because of Pat Tillman’s status as an all-American hero.
A football star at Leland High School in San Jose and at Arizona State University, Tillman was chosen Pac-10 defensive player of the year in 1997 and selected by the Arizona Cardinals in the NFL draft the following spring.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Arizona State and graduated summa cum laude in 3 1/2 years with a 3.84 grade point average. Ever the student, Tillman not only memorized the playbook by the time he reported for the Cardinals’ rookie camp but pointed out errors in it. He then worked on a master’s degree in history while playing professional football.
His 224 tackles in a single season (2000) are a team record, and because of team loyalty he rejected a five year, $9 million offer from the St. Louis Rams for a one-year, $512,000 contract to stay with Arizona the next year.
Moved in part by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Tillman decided to give up his career, saying he wanted to fight al Qaeda and help find Osama bin Laden. He spurned the Cardinals’ offer of a three year, $3.6 million contract extension and joined the Army in June 2002 along with his brother Kevin, who was playing minor-league baseball for the Cleveland Indians organization.
Pat Tillman’s enlistment grabbed the attention of the nation — and the highest levels of the Bush administration. A personal letter from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, thanking him for serving his country, now resides in a storage box, put away by Pat’s widow, Marie.
Instead of going to Afghanistan, as the brothers expected, their Ranger battalion was sent to participate in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The Tillmans saw combat several times on their way to Baghdad. In early 2004, they finally were assigned to Afghanistan.
Although the Rangers are an elite combat group, the investigative documents reveal that the conduct of the Tillmans’ detachment — A Company, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment — appeared to be anything but expert as it advanced through a remote canyon in eastern Afghanistan on April 22, 2004, on a mission to search for Taliban and al Qaeda fighters in a village called Manah.
According to the files, when one of the humvees became disabled, thus stalling the mission, commanding officers split Tillman’s platoon in two so one half could move on and the other could arrange transport for the disabled vehicle. Platoon leader Lt. David Uthlaut protested the move as dangerous, but he was overruled. The first group was ordered out in the late afternoon, with Pat Tillman in the forward unit. Kevin’s unit followed 15 to 20 minutes later, hauling the humvee on an Afghan-owned flatbed truck. Both groups temporarily lost radio and visual contact with each other in the deep canyon, and the second group came under attack from suspected Taliban fighters on the surrounding ridges.
Pat Tillman, according to testimony, climbed a hill with another soldier and an Afghan militiaman, intending to attack the enemy. He offered to remove his 28-pound body armor so he could move more quickly, but was ordered not to. Meanwhile, the lead vehicle in the platoon’s second group arrived near Tillman’s position about 65 meters away and mistook the group as enemy. The Afghan stood and fired above the second group at the suspected enemy on the opposite ridge. Although the driver of the second group’s lead vehicle, according to his testimony, recognized Tillman’s group as “friendlies” and tried to signal others in his vehicle not to shoot, they directed fire toward the Afghan and began shooting wildly, without first identifying their target, and also shot at a village on the ridgeline.
The Afghan was killed. According to testimony, Tillman, who along with others on the hill waved his arms and yelled “cease fire,” set off a smoke grenade to identify his group as fellow soldiers. There was a momentary lull in the firing, and he and the soldier next to him, thinking themselves safe, relaxed, stood up and started talking. But the shooting resumed. Tillman was hit in the wrist with shrapnel and in his body armor with numerous bullets.
The soldier next to him testified: “I could hear the pain in his voice as he called out, ‘Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat f—ing Tillman, dammit.” He said this over and over until he stopped,” having been hit by three bullets in the forehead, killing him.
The soldier continued, “I then looked over at my side to see a river of blood coming down from where he was … I saw his head was gone.” Two other Rangers elsewhere on the mountainside were injured by shrapnel.
Kevin was unaware that his brother had been killed until nearly an hour later when he asked if anyone had seen Pat and a fellow soldier told him.
Tillman’s death came at a sensitive time for the Bush administration — just a week before the Army’s abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq became public and sparked a huge scandal. The Pentagon immediately announced that Tillman had died heroically in combat with the enemy, and President Bush hailed him as “an inspiration on and off the football field, as with all who made the ultimate sacrifice in the war on terror.”
His killing was widely reported by the media, including conservative commentators such as Ann Coulter, who called him “an American original — virtuous, pure and masculine like only an American male can be.” His May 3, 2004, memorial in San Jose drew 3,500 people and was nationally televised.
Not until five weeks later, as Tillman’s battalion was returning home, did officials inform the public and the Tillman family that he had been killed by his fellow soldiers.
According to testimony, the first investigation was initiated less than 24 hours after Tillman’s death by an officer in the same Ranger battalion. His report, delivered May 4, 2004, determined that soldiers involved in the incident had committed “gross negligence” and should be appropriately disciplined. The officer became a key witness in the subsequent investigation. For reasons that are not clear, the officer’s investigation was taken over by a higher ranking commander. That officer’s findings, delivered the next month, called for less severe discipline.
The parents, protesting that many questions were left unanswered, found a sympathetic ear in McCain, who Mary Tillman later said was greatly admired by her son. Tillman was well known in Arizona because of his success there as a college and pro football player. McCain began to press the Pentagon on the family’s behalf, and a third probe finally was authorized. Its report was delivered in January.
The military is saying little publicly about the Tillman case. Most Army personnel who were involved in the Tillman incident or the investigations declined to comment publicly when contacted by The Chronicle. The inspector general’s press office also declined to comment, saying only that the new probe is openended.
Over the coming weeks, Pentagon investigators are scheduled to carry out new interviews with many of the soldiers, officers and others involved in the incident. As they carry out their reassessment, potentially controversial points include:
-- Conflicting testimony. In his Nov. 14, 2004, interrogation, the first investigator expressed frustration with “watching some of these guys getting off, what I thought … was a lesser of a punishment than what they should’ve received. And I will tell you, over a period of time … the stories have changed. They have changed to, I think, help some individuals.”
The investigator testified that after he submitted his report on May 3, higher-ranking officers permitted soldiers to change key details of their testimony in order to prevent any individual from being singled out for punishment.
“They had the entire chain of command (inaudible) that were involved, the [deleted], all sticking up for [deleted] … And the reason the [deleted] called me in … because the [deleted] … changed their story in how things occurred and the timing and the distance in an attempt to stick up for their counterpart, implied, insinuated that the report wasn’t as accurate as I submitted it …” the first investigator testified.
In another section of his testimony, he said witnesses changed details regarding “the distance, the time, the location and the positioning” in Tillman’s killing.
Another disputed detail was whether the soldiers were firing while speeding down the canyon or whether they stopped, got out and continued shooting. In testimony in the third investigation, the soldiers said they did not stop. However, the medical examiner’s report said Tillman was killed by three bullets closely spaced in his forehead — a pattern that would have been unlikely if the shooter were moving fast. Spc. Russell Baer, a soldier pinned down by gunfire on the hillside near Tillman, said in an interview with The Chronicle that at least two soldiers had gotten out of the humvee to fire uphill. One other soldier confirmed this account to a Tillman family member.
One soldier dismissed by the Rangers for his actions in the incident submitted a statement in the third investigation that suggests the probe was incomplete: “The investigation does not truly set to rest the events of the evening of 22 April 2004. There is critical information not included or misinterpreted in it that could shed some light on who is really at fault for this,” he wrote.
-- Commanders’ accountability. According to the documents and interviews, Capt. William Saunders, to whom platoon leader Uthlaut had protested splitting his troops, was allowed to change his testimony over a crucial detail — whether he had reported Uthlaut’s dissent to a higher ranking commander. In initial questioning, Saunders said he had done so, but when that apparently was contradicted by that commander’s testimony, Saunders was threatened with perjury charges. He was given immunity and allowed to change his prior testimony.
The regiment’s commander, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Bailey, was promoted to colonel two months after the incident, and Saunders, who a source said received a reprimand, later was given authority to determine the punishment of those below him. He gave administrative reprimands to six soldiers, including Uthlaut, who had been seriously wounded in the face by shrapnel in the incident. Uthlaut — who was first captain of his senior class at West Point, the academy’s highest honor — was dismissed from the Rangers and re-entered the regular Army.
“It seems grossly inappropriate that Saunders would determine punishment for the others when he shares responsibility for the debacle,” Mary Tillman said.
Baer told The Chronicle that commanding officers were to blame for the friendly fire because they split the platoon and ordered it to leave a secure location in favor of a region known as a Taliban stronghold.
“It was dumb to send us out during daylight,” said Baer, who was honorably discharged from the Rangers earlier this year and lives in the East Bay.
“It’s a well-known military doctrine that privates first learn going through basic training — if you are in enemy territory and you are stopped for a prolonged period of time, the best thing to do is to wait until nightfall. Why they thought that moving us out in broad daylight from our position, dragging a busted humvee slowly through a known hotspot after we had been stranded there all day was a good idea will forever elude me. Who made that decision? Bailey? Saunders? That’s what I want to know.”
-- Inaccurate information. While the military code gives clear guidance for informing family members upon a soldier’s death when cases are suspected of being a result of friendly fire, that procedure was not followed in the Tillman case. After Tillman’s death, the Army gave conflicting and incorrect descriptions of the events.
On April 22, the family was told that Tillman was hit with enemy fire getting out of a vehicle and died an hour later at a field hospital.
Although there was ample testimony that Tillman died immediately, an Army report — dated April 22, 2004, from the field hospital in Salerno, Afghanistan, where his body was taken — suggested otherwise. While it stated that he had no blood pressure or pulse “on arrival,” it stated that cardio pulmonary resuscitation had been conducted and that he was transferred to the intensive care unit for further CPR.
On April 23, all top Ranger commanders were told of the suspected fratricide. That same day, an Army press release said he was killed “when his patrol vehicle came under attack.”
On April 29, four days before Tillman’s memorial, Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command, and other top commanders were told of the fratricide. It is not known if Abizaid reported the news to Washington. Mary Tillman believes that with her son’s high profile, and the fact that Rumsfeld sent him a personal letter, the word quickly reached the defense secretary. “If Pat was on Rumsfeld’s radar, it’s pretty likely that he would have been informed right away after he was killed,” she said. White House, Pentagon and Army spokesmen all said they had no information on when Bush or Rumsfeld were informed.
On April 30, the Army awarded Tillman a Silver Star medal for bravery, saying that “through the firing Tillman’s voice was heard issuing fire commands to take the fight to the enemy on the dominating high ground.”
On May 2, the acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee was told of the fratricide.
On May 7, the Army’s official casualty report stated incorrectly that Tillman was killed by “enemy forces” and “died in a medical treatment facility.”
On May 28, the Army finally admitted to Tillman’s family that he had been killed by friendly fire.
“The administration clearly was using this case for its own political reasons,” said the father, Patrick Tillman. “This cover-up started within minutes of Pat’s death, and it started at high levels. This is not something that (lower-ranking) people in the field do,” he said.
The files show that many of the soldiers questioned in the inquiry said it was common knowledge that the incident involved friendly fire.
A soldier who on April 23 burned Tillman’s bullet riddled body armor — which would have been evidence in a friendly-fire investigation — testified that he did so because there was no doubt it was friendly fire that killed Tillman. Two days later, Tillman’s uniform and vest also were burned because they were soaked in blood and considered a biohazard. Tillman’s uniform also was burned.
The officer who led the first investigation testified that when he was given responsibility for the probe the morning after Tillman’s death, he was informed that the cause was “potential fratricide.’’
After they received the friendly-fire notification May 28, the Tillmans began a public campaign seeking more information. But it was only when the Tillmans began angrily accusing the Pentagon of a coverup, in June 2005, that the Army apologized for the delay, issuing a statement blaming “procedural misjudgments and mistakes.”
-- Legal liability. In testimony on Nov. 14, the officer who conducted the first investigation said that he thought some Rangers could have been charged with “criminal intent,” and that some Rangers committed “gross negligence.” The legal difference between the two terms is roughly similar to the distinction between murder and involuntary manslaughter.
The Tillmans demand that all avenues of inquiry remain open.
“I want to know what kind of criminal intent there was,” Mary Tillman said. “There’s so much in the reports that is (deleted) that it’s hard to tell what we’re not seeing.”
In Congress, pressure is building for a full public disclosure of what happened. “I am committed to continuing my work with the Tillman family to ensure that their concerns are being addressed,” said Rep. Honda. He added that he expects the investigation to do the following: “1) provide all factual evidence about the events of April 22, 2004; 2) identify the command decisions that contributed to Pat Tillman’s death; 3) explain why the Army took so long to reveal fratricide as the cause of Pat Tillman’s death; and 4) offer all necessary recommendations for improved procedures relating to such incidents.”
Patrick Tillman drily called the new Army probe “the latest, greatest investigation.” He added, “In Washington, I don’t think any of them want it investigated. They (politicians and Army officials) just don’t want to see it ended with them, landing on their desk so they get blamed for the cover-up.” The January 2005 investigation concluded that there was no coverup.
Throughout the controversy, the Tillman family has been reluctant to cause a media stir. Mary noted that Pat shunned publicity, refusing all public comment when he enlisted and asking the Army to reject all media requests for interviews while he was in service. Pat’s widow, Marie, and his brother Kevin have not become publicly involved in the case, and they declined to comment for this article.
Yet other Tillman family members are less reluctant to show Tillman’s unique character, which was more complex than the public image of a gung-ho patriotic warrior. He started keeping a journal at 16 and continued the practice on the battlefield, writing in it regularly. (His journal was lost immediately after his death.) Mary Tillman said a friend of Pat’s even arranged a private meeting with Chomsky, the antiwar author, to take place after his return from Afghanistan — a meeting prevented by his death. She said that although he supported the Afghan war, believing it justified by the Sept. 11 attacks, “Pat was very critical of the whole Iraq war.”
Baer, who served with Tillman for more than a year in Iraq and Afghanistan, told one anecdote that took place during the March 2003 invasion as the Rangers moved up through southern Iraq.
“I can see it like a movie screen,” Baer said. “We were outside of (a city in southern Iraq) watching as bombs were dropping on the town. We were at an old air base, me, Kevin and Pat, we weren’t in the fight right then. We were talking. And Pat said, ‘You know, this war is so f— illegal.’ And we all said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s who he was. He totally was against Bush.”
Another soldier in the platoon, who asked not to be identified, said Pat urged him to vote for Bush’s Democratic opponent in the 2004 election, Sen. John Kerry.
Senior Chief Petty Officer Stephen White — a Navy SEAL who served with Pat and Kevin for four months in Iraq and was the only military member to speak at Tillman’s memorial — said Pat “wasn’t very fired up about being in Iraq” and instead wanted to go fight al Qaeda in Afghanistan. He said both Pat and Kevin (who has a degree in philosophy) “were amazingly well-read individuals … very firm in some of their beliefs, their political and religious or not so religious beliefs.”
Baer recalled that Tillman encouraged him in his ambitions as an amateur poet. “I would read him my poems, and we would talk about them,” Baer said. “He helped me grow as an individual.”
Tillman subscribed to the Economist magazine, and a fellow soldier said Tillman created a makeshift base library of classic novels so his platoon mates would have literature to read in their down time. He even brought gourmet coffee to brew for his platoon in the field in Afghanistan.
Baer said Tillman was popular among his fellow soldiers and had no enemies. “The guys who killed Pat were his biggest fans,” he said. “They were really wrecked afterward.” He called Tillman “this amazing positive force who really brought our whole platoon together.
He had this great energy. Everybody loved him.” His former comrades and family recall Tillman as a born leader yet remarkably humble. White, the Navy SEAL, recalls one day when “some 19-year-old Ranger came and ordered him to cut an acre of grass.
And Pat just did it, he cut that grass, he didn’t complain. He could have taken millions of dollars playing football, but instead he was just taking orders like that.”
Mary Tillman says that’s how Pat would have wanted to be remembered, as an individual, not as a stock figure or political prop. But she also believes “Pat was a real hero, not what they used him as.”
For the moment, all that is left are the memories and the thick binders spread across Mary Tillman’s dining room table in San Jose. As she waits for the Pentagon investigators to finish their new probe, she wonders whether they will ask the hard questions. Like other family members, “I just want accountability,” she said. “I want answers.”
‘IT’S HARD TO KNOW WHAT TO BELIEVE’
That’s the lament of Mary Tillman, above, a teacher of special education in a San Jose public school. She has long pressed the Army to reopen its investigation into the friendly-fire killing of her son, Pat Tillman, in a canyon in Afghanistan on April 22, . The persistence of Mary Tillman and her former husband, Patrick Tillman, was rewarded when the Pentagon’s inspector general opened a new inquiry in August, the fourth such probe. Mary Tillman says she hopes questions created by discrepancies in past testimony will finally be answered.
STORY CHANGES OVER TIME
An officer in Pat Tillman's Ranger battalion who directed the first investigation into the soldier's death served as a witness on Nov. 14, 2004, in the third investigation, which was led by Brig. Gen. Gary Jones. The first investigator complained that the officers in charge of the second investigation had allowed Rangers involved in the shooting to change their testimony.
THREAT OF PERJURY CHARGES
An excerpt from a March 3, 2005, memorandum by Brig. Gen. Gary Jones describes how Capt. William Saunders, the commander of Pat Tillman's Ranger company, was threatened with perjury charges. Jones' memo said Saunders made false claims that he had informed his superiors that platoon commander Lt. David Uthlaut had protested orders given to him leading up to the incident. Despite this threat, Saunders was allowed to change his testimony and was granted immunity.
E-mail Robert Collier at rcollier@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Filed under
Abu Ghraib,
Ann Coulter,
criminal intent,
David Uthlaut,
Donald Rumsfeld,
Gary Jones,
Jeffrey Bailey,
John Abizaid,
John McCain,
Les Brownlee,
Mike Honda,
remember,
Russell Baer,
Stephen White,
William Saunders
by Winter Patriot
on Sunday, September 25, 2005 |
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