MAYBE I WAS WRONG ABOUT TILLMAN

Seems like I may have been wrong about Tillman being a dangerous psycho. Some girl’s email that follows in its entirety shows that it she is much better informed, and I was just reacting to the foul propaganda Jessica Lynch stench that taints anything to do with Bush and his evil goddamned war machine.

looks like you've got yourself a particularly intelligent troll (haha). and of course the troll is an asshole, but i've read a bit on tillman, though not this article. all accounts show he wasn't a gung-ho anything (at least no more than other soldiers). he was a dupe and a pawn, same as all the military and much of the american people. his case resonates more b/c he was a successful pro football player who walked away from all that to go fight the taliban. and, of course, b/c his high-profile death was first used as an endless "martyr moment" and then suddenly disappeared from the talking points after it came out that he died in afghanistan under friendly fire. he was a perfect PR/recruitment poster for the bushies, a textbook case of "sacrifice" for "freedom" (and DAMN how they talked him up and talked him up during football season after he enlisted...and even after he died, until the circumstances came out. then the NFL stopped talking about him, too). then came the REAL tragedy -- the lies and coverup of how it happened. tough to portray him dying a "heroic" death when it was actually a horrible cock-up (of the type that certainly would remind the public of vietnam, a comparison bush et al were desperate to avoid at all costs back then...still are i suppose).as far as i know there's no evidence he was "fragged." fer fucksake, he was a corporal. fraggings in the nam happened usually to young, green, gung-ho first LTs who would actually get their underlings killed by ordering stupid assaults, patrols, etc etc. generally speaking LTs were fragged in self-defense. there's no conceivable reason a soldier like tillman would be that type of an uncontrollable risk. hence, fragging wouldn't be on the agenda. the accounts i have read of what happened that day indicate confusion, fear, fuckups, and deviations from an impromptu plan led to the friendly-fire death.what the government did in terms of lying to tillman's family (not to mention the rest of us) actually turned them against the cause. they would've better handled the truth and come to terms with it. instead they feel betrayed, because they were. the bush administration shook the faith in this country that one typically patriotic family held. to me the tillman case is another example of how much damage bush and his cronies have done, and a terrible reminder that they do not give one flying fuck about ANYBODY but themselves. if you're on their side, you may go into the meat grinder. if you're not on their side, you may go into the meat grinder. whatever works for them. they don't even take care of the people who support them; they only take care of their own. hang the faithful along with the faithless...they scarcely care to make that distinction, in the end.anyway, i thought the comment about tillman was very unfair and surprisingly callous. geez, he was actually opposed to the invasion of iraq, he was not religious, and he even opposed bush's reelection. i am not a fan of him; i think his choice was stupid, and the way he was held up in the media was infuriating and tiresome. at the same time i feel that we were all lied to, and some of us were more susceptible to those lies than others. the human toll that "talking points" and other rhetoric have wrought should not be forgotten -- especially b/c that's the way bush and co. act, like the words and the decisions and the actions don't have any consequences at all. but they do, and they have. not just here, of course, but in iraq and all around the world. the hypocrisy of the government and the military actively trying to conceal the truth from tillman's family strikes me as particularly despicable, maybe b/c it is such a perfect microcosm of all the things i've just mentioned.