WHEN FORMER San Jose resident Pat Tillman was killed in action in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004, he became a symbol: first of America’s fighting spirit, then of the sinister manipulation of the Pentagon.
In the new documentary The Tillman Story, director Amir Bar-Lev (My Kid Could Paint That) interviews Tillman’s parents—his mother, Mary, a former teacher who lived in the Almaden Valley, and his father, Pat Sr., a lawyer. In home movies, we see the three rambunctious Tillman children enjoying life near Guadalupe Creek. Brothers Kevin and Pat grew into professional athletes. After Sept. 11, Pat, who was signed with the Arizona Cardinals, joined the Army Rangers, as did his baseball-playing brother. They were shipped to Afghanistan.
After the circumstances of Pat’s death started to look cloudy, Mary Tillman began investigating. She received a box of binders whose pages were black with redactions. Bar-Lev interviews former Special Forces master sergeant turned blogger Stan Goff, who helped Mary Tillman “read the hieroglyphics” and find the last people to see Pat alive.
Shading this story is the cowardice both of the Bush-era State Department and the U.S. Army. Together, they’re responsible for a cover-up of hideo-comic ineptitude. They first tried to fob off Tillman’s likely preventable death as a Silver Star–worthy moment of valor. Then they changed the story to include an incident of friendly fire—and the fact that we know even this much is because, as Pat Tillman Sr. said, “They crossed the wrong family.”
Much of what is in the film has been in books—Mary Tillman’s account Boots on the Ground and Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory. In print, there’s a tendency toward banality, repeating the anecdotes of Tillman’s student life. Such is the case with Krakauer; it’s there, too, but far more forgivable, in a mother’s fond memoir of her lost son.
Using the hotter medium of film, Bar-Lev has the advantage of revealing Pat Tillman’s magnetism. We can see here that he was someone who possessed not only the personality of a leader but also the skepticism that makes a leader worthy. After seeing The Tillman Story, it’s clear Pat Tillman was only superficially an ordinary jock. He was actually a reader of Emerson and Thoreau, the kind of eccentric who didn’t own a cell phone and who did without a car when he was in college.
Pat Tillman’s experiences in war changed him. His diaries of what he saw in Afghanistan would be worth reading—pity the Army decided to burn them. Pity also that the family’s honest reaction to his death got overruled. Take their brave decision not to accept the religious consolation thrust at them, for example. The most heart-wrenching moment in The Tillman Story may be Richard Tillman’s behavior at Pat’s funeral—showing up bearing a libation of Guinness for his brother and reminding the mourners that Pat was an atheist. It was a rare bullshit-free moment in the CNN and Fox paeans to the dead warrior.
That declaration of atheism spurred what might be the lowest moment in this saga: Tillman’s commanding officer, Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich’s speculation on ESPN that the Tillman family’s wrath was due to their atheist son being “worm dirt,” unable to have the kind of reconciliation with Jesus and his angels that makes a soldier die smiling.
With computer animation and roadside footage, Bar-Lev illustrates what happened to Pat Tillman. First, equipment failure, then the splitting up of soldiers who should have stayed together; lastly panic or trigger happiness—all leading after the long years to the tragic farce of a muffed congressional inquiry. One powerful clue reveals how far up the lies went: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld himself wrote to commend Tillman for enlisting. Startlingly, we see Rumsfeld telling a congressional committee that he has no recollection of when exactly he had heard that Tillman had died.
Some years after Pat’s death, Kevin Tillman wrote: “Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma and nonsense. … Somehow, a narrative is more important than reality.”
The Tillman Story, one of 2010’s best films, retrieves this hero from the purposes he was put to after his blood was spilt. The film brings him back from the carnival of ass-covering and scheming that profaned his death.
R; 94 min.; opens Friday, Camera 7 in Campbell
Talking about Tillman
An interview with Amir Bar-Lev, director of ‘The Tillman Story’
Amir Bar-Lev’s best-known film was My Kid Could Paint That (2007), a puzzle about an apparently gifted child whose paintings were being praised by The New York Times.
Bar-Lev’s newest documentary goes after bigger game: the cover-up of the circumstances of the death of San Jose’s own Pat Tillman, an Army ranger killed in Afghanistan by friendly fire.
As a detective story about a family trying to find their way out of a labyrinth of government obfuscation and as a commentary on how a man becomes a symbol, The Tillman Story is one of the highlight films of 2010.
Bar-Lev grew up in Berkeley, where “I studied comparative religions and philosophy and became a film editor, studying in Prague at the film academy. While I was there, I met these two men who were Holocaust survivors, and I made my first film, Fighter, about them. I’ve really had no set career path: my career has been determined by the fact that I’ve come across three really interesting stories over the course of the last 10 to 13 years.”
Now living in New York, Bar-Lev will return to our area to Camera 7 in Campbell after the Sept. 4, 4:30pm, showing to introduce the film.
METRO: This must have been a tremendously difficult film to make.
BAR-LEV: It was three years in the making. There were times I was absolutely intimidated. Early on, I realized I had one problem: there were many myths about Pat Tillman’s enlistment, since he had been very clear that he didn’t want people to talk about why he joined the Army.
On the one hand, I didn’t want a movie with a gaping hole in it. On the other hand, I respected him and his family. So that was a big challenge. I didn’t want to speculate about why he joined, so it took us a long time to find out the right way to approach it. In the film, we talked more about what we as a culture needed Pat to be, and the way we imposed our narrative on his silence. This discussion would allow people to feel satisfied, and it didn’t disrespect Pat while we were trying to celebrate him.
METRO: What was your entry point into Pat Tillman’s story?
BAR-LEV: What I can say? I knew about Pat just what everyone else knew, the bare bones of the story. When I started looking into it, I pretty quickly realized that there were myths about his life. It was well known there had been lots of myth making about his death. Anyone who gave the story more than a cursory glance saw that there was an equal amount of myth making about his life.
It intrigued me, trying to correct the record. And then Pat’s family—when we finally got a hold of the family, because they were pretty tough to get a hold of—they reinforced the matter of how Pat has been mythologized. They told us plainly they didn’t want to participate if we were going to continue with the hagiography.
Pat’s widow, Marie, said, ‘I don’t want to talk about our life together, or his inner life.’ She’s media savvy in a way … the family helped us shape the direction of the film, and they didn’t want a film that … [breaks off]
I really appreciate that you said you got a sense of him. Our challenge was to give a sense of him, not to make another caricature of him.
METRO: This was a local story for us, but I never met Pat Tillman, and I didn’t know the people. I knew the Almaden Valley itself and the Guadalupe Creek, and I appreciated how you put that onscreen.
BAR-LEV: Even though I grew up in Berkeley, I’d never been down there. I never knew the area was so beautiful.
METRO: I guess what I was going to say was that the story of Pat Tillman just added to my bitterness about the war. You try to march against it, you try to warn people, to refresh their memories about what happened during Vietnam, and it all came to pass anyway. We invaded Afghanistan, and then we invaded Iraq. And then a real best-and-the-brightest-type volunteers, and he gets his life taken. And all you can do is take refuge in this Ambrose Bierce feeling about it, some disgusting cynicism. “Well, he wanted to be in a war. He asked for it.”
BAR-LEV: You’re not alone. That feeling was taken even a lot further in some people. There was a lot of real mean-spiritedness. Well, that’s bullshit. People impose their story on the complexity of this even when faced with the facts. I’ve done Q&A’s with people of the left who are convinced Pat was assassinated because he was in cahoots with Noam Chomsky. Search online, and you’ll find these conspiracies right away.
The right has turned Pat into somebody he wasn’t, and won’t allow for any possibility of their being wrong. Now they’ve started putting down the film, and saying they won’t see it. And they’re saying they know him better than his family and his platoon mates. They know Pat Tillman from what they saw on Fox or the mainstream news media. He never got to say anything for himself.
METRO: It must have been very tough to overcome the Tillmans’ resistance. I imagine they’ve been faced with offers of feature films.
BAR-LEV: Glad you mentioned that. Guess what? I shot a scene of Marie, Pat’s widow, reading scripts that had been sent to her on spec. It was so funny—real comic relief, maybe it’ll be on the DVD extras. I don’t understand this, but apparently people write spec scripts. Some producers must hire some screenwriters up front and hope that the rights will come after. Every time I’ve tried to write a script, it took me a year. I’d never work on spec!
These scripts were—apologies if you wrote one and you’re reading this—they were hilarious. I had Marie reading a scene out loud: Pat is watching 9/11 on TV, and he’s so consumed with rage that he’s throwing chairs around the room, and then he gets on his Harley and drives off into the sunset.
And there’s another scene that’s even more laughable, when the family sits down to pray together. Oh, the machinations. All kinds of people were trying to impose their story on Pat Tillman, not just the government and the Army, but Hollywood as well.
METRO: The scene you have here of Richard Tillman swearing at the funeral sure wasn’t ready for a major motion picture.
BAR-LEV: Know why you haven’t seen that footage? It was yanked. The networks had a seven-second delay; the feed was cut after he started cussing. That’s part of the story, too. Some print journalism alluded to it: “Networks scramble after impassioned words at memorial service.” It’s such a great metaphor for what happened. Here is the public saying to the Tillmans, “You’re too emotional, you’re too distraught.”
That’s the story in the nutshell, people trying to own the grief at the expense of the Tillmans. Richard was listening to all these people trying to comfort him, [and] they’re saying something grotesque: “You don’t have to worry; Pat’s home, he’s safe.” The Tillmans are saying: The reason we don’t have to worry is because what we were worrying about has happened. And the family had to get up and assert this: Pat was a human being, Pat is now dead … because all these forces were trying to assert their personality on his dead son.
That’s why we start the film with this living person who’s staring at you, and we end with the statue. Because that’s what happened.
METRO: Were you in the military yourself?
BAR-LEV: No I grew up in Berkeley.
METRO: Of course, these days, growing up in Berkeley doesn’t prove anti-war credentials. I wasn’t in the service either. Sometimes, it seems to me that the downside of the volunteer army is that people were a lot more knowing and skeptical of the military when everyone was drafted.
BAR-LEV: I don’t know what I can add to that. But that’s what the movie is about, in some ways, facing what war is. We didn’t want to make an anti-war film, we wanted to make an anti-myth film. We’re not making a statement about whether we should be in Afghanistan or Iraq. But if we’re going to engage in warfare, we should be honest about what warfare is. It’s not a movie. Whether you’re feeling you support the military or not, you’re doing the military a disservice when you cloak warfare in these Hollywood veils.
METRO: What do you consider the most damning evidence you found?
BAR-LEV: They burned Pat’s diary, that’s shocking. But we talk about spin. The government’s been good at inculcating a sense in the public that Pat Tillman was killed because of a fog of war.
If you took a random sampling of people, they have something in their heads that the death of Pat Tillman looked like the beginning of Saving Private Ryan or Born on the Fourth of July—that there was a fog of war, and Pat got caught by an errant U.S. bullet.
In fact, there may not have been an ambush, and no soldier has reported seeing more than three people on the scene. If there were unfriendlies there, they were way high up out of effective range. There possibly may have been three or four guys on a high ridge who fired off a couple of shots and ran like hell. Then, minutes later, Pat’s fellow platoon mates emptied their weapons for a minute—and that’s an ungodly amount of time to be shooting, one to two minutes, an ungodly amount of time.
And these soldiers weren’t shooting from 200 meters [about 650 feet, approximately the length of two football fields] but from 40 meters [131 feet] This was a big eye opener for us. This would have been not just an accident but also a criminally negligent accident.
But even now when people talk about the film, they say, “The Tillmans fought to discover that Pat’s death was the result of friendly fire.” That’s not true. The friendly-fire announcement was part of the lie. The military realized five weeks into this investigation that they couldn’t get away with their hero story. So they backpedaled, very wisely.
They said, “Everything we told you about Pat saving the life of his platoon is true. But we just finished an investigation, and we happened to find out he was caught by an errant U.S. bullet.” And that worked. People felt that in five weeks, the military had come clean. In truth, they haven’t ever come clean.
METRO: The Rumsfeld letter seems to prove how high the cover-up went. Would you be willing to speculate that he knew for certain?
BAR-LEV: It’s just inconceivable that a guy with that kind of attention to detail wouldn’t know. And if you wanted incontrovertible evidence, there was the P-4 memo that Gen. Stanley McChrystal wrote, which was leaked, just like the Wikileak of the papers about Afghanistan.
So, there was McChrystal writing, “It’s come to my attention that the leaders of our country, that POTUS [i.e., George W. Bush] and Rumsfeld, are going to be doing speeches, so it’s important that everyone know that Pat Tillman died from friendly fire. If—IF!—the truth about Pat Tillman gets out it will be embarrassing, so it’s important that POTUS knows it.’
According to the Tillmans, they celebrated when that P-4 letter came out. In movies, when the smoking gun document arrives, you burst into the back door of Congress, wave it in the committee’s face, and it’s game over. In reality, every one of the letter’s recipients said they never got the document. It was the equivalent of “the dog ate my homework,” which is absolutely laughable.
METRO: Was there anyone you would have liked to interview that you didn’t get to talk to?
BAR-LEV: Of course. I would have loved to have interviewed the guys who shot him. They just declined. The military put no blocks in front of us. They let us interview soldiers in uniform. They didn’t help us, and they didn’t hinder us. They seem to feel as though a documentary isn’t a change maker. If they can spin the mainstream press as well as they have so far, they don’t have to care about a documentary.
METRO: As in any war, the idea was to seize the high ground, and that’s what happened in the war on terror; they made it beyond criticism. Anyway, do you think it’s possible that the Tillman case will be reopened?
BAR-LEV: I don’t know, but there are more questions than answers, and there really has been no accountability. Lt. Gen. Kensinger, retired, lost a star and got his severance docked a bit. He was a scapegoat.
As for those other soldiers … I’m told that the soldiers on the ground got the same punishment you’d get as if you failed to clean your rifle. Nobody has been held accountable.
I don’t want to speak for the Tillmans, because they’ve already been spoken for so much. I don’t know how they feel, but an apology—a genuine apology—would go a long way. All they got were disingenuous apologies, apologies that were lies, that were bullshit. They got the kind of apology a kid makes when he’s trying not to apologize: “I’m sorry you took it that way.”
METRO: That’s why “Mistakes were made” is such a beautiful sentence. It has an object but no subject.
BAR-LEV: When the government admits to mistakes, they’re obfuscating. They’re saying we didn’t deliberately mislead, but we fumbled it.
The maddening thing for the family or for anyone else who follows the case is that this kind of semi-apology works. The evening news says, “Military apologizes to the Tillmans.” Imagine being Danny [Mary Tillman’s nickname], and you’re being lied to in front of the world. And the military spinners are so good at getting that message across.
People think that this is a done story, a backward-looking story. The Tillmans have always said, “This isn’t about Pat. It’s about accountability. It’s about the next Pat Tillman. It’s about whether our elected leaders should get away with lying to us. It’s not about Bush, it’s not about Obama, it’s about America.
If you look online there’s people saying, “Enough about Pat Tillman!” The family couldn’t agree more: they’re never going to get Pat back. This story is about soldiers who serve this country, what they deserve, what their families deserve, and what we as a population deserve.
