Word: tillman
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...History repeats itself. On April 22, 2004, an American football star named Pat Tillman was killed in action in Afghanistan. After September 11, Tillman had eschewed a $3.6 million sports contract to volunteer for the Army Rangers. Selfless and ruggedly handsome, he could have played himself in the Hollywood movie about his life—had he not been shot by his own troops. On April 28, Rene Gonzalez, a political science graduate student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, objected to calling Tillman a war hero, pointing out in an essay that this “anti-hero?...
...called Gonzalez’s essay “a disgusting, arrogant and intellectually immature attack on a human being who died in service to his country.” Without a trace of irony, Wilson added, “We are fortunate that so many people like Pat Tillman have made the sacrifices necessary to protect the free speech rights of Mr. Gonzalez...
...that Gonzalez should have apologized for was confusing Pat Tillman with “Pat Tillman,” the creature constructed by the U.S. Army out of dead men’s flesh like Frankenstein’s monster. “Pat Tillman” was a “caricature,” as Tillman’s mother Mary put it, as unfamiliar to her as the square-jawed photograph broadcast to the nation by the military after Tillman’s death, a portrait that Mary had never seen before and that Pat said...
...Tillman” was a God-fearing überpatriot. But Pat Tillman, the long-haired atheist, wanted to meet Noam Chomsky, the distinguished MIT professor and anti-war writer, a “favorite author” of Pat’s, according to his mother. Pat Tillman considered as his “hero” Rachel Corrie, a peace activist crushed to death when she placed herself—living Mario Savio’s words—between a bulldozer and a home. And, according to Tillman’s friend, Army Spec. Russell Baer...
...irony is that, despite the outrage expressed ostensibly on the Tillman family’s behalf, Tillman’s mother told me she had never read Gonzalez’s essay. Tillman’s brother, Kevin, also an Army Ranger, unknowingly echoed Gonzalez when he wrote, in 2006, “Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue, and honor of its soldiers on the ground...