By LLOYD GROVE - THE DAILY BEAST
Added: Sat, 21 Aug 2010 22:22:10 UTC

Thanks to Lucas for the link

As a new documentary about the NFL player turned Afghan war hero opens, Lloyd Grove talks to Jane Fonda and others about his unvarnished legacy.

“I’m Pat Tillman! I’m Pat fucking Tillman! Why are you shooting at me?”

With those livid last words, pro-football star and Army Ranger Patrick Daniel Tillman Jr.—who gave up a multimillion-dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals to serve his country and become the most famous enlisted man in Afghanistan—died in a fusillade of friendly fire on a rocky hillside near the Pakistani border. The bullets, coming at him from 40 yards away at a rate of 950 rounds per minute, were from a machine gun wielded by a member of his own platoon.

“I remember the sound of a drinking fountain,” Private Bryan O’Neal says in The Tillman Story, a masterfully produced documentary opening in theaters Friday. On the evening of April 22, 2004, O’Neal was crouching next to his team leader, Corporal Tillman, as the furious volleys flew. “And I look over at my side and I see this blood pouring down this rock that I’m sitting by. His head was gone. Completely gone. And I take my helmet off and I throw it against the ground and then I kind of black out.”

... (at the memorial service) “There’s a lot of people here. Thank you for coming,” a t-shirted Richard Tillman said at the microphone. “Just make no mistake—he’d want me to say this—he’s not with God. He’s fucking dead. He’s not religious. So thanks for your thoughts, but he’s fucking dead.”
... continue reading

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