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thedrifter
05-13-08, 08:35 AM
Pat Tillman's mother recalls journey for facts in new book

By Scott Lindlaw and Martha Mendoza
ASSOCIATED PRESS

1:54 p.m. May 12, 2008

Frustrated by shifting accounts of her son Pat's death, Mary Tillman sat down with Army officers and got in their faces.

“Colonel, we were given the wrong information,” she recalls telling Col. James Nixon, her son's regimental commander, according to her new book. “If the Army knew he was killed by friendly fire, why were we and the media told he was killed by the enemy and that there were nine enemy dead and all that rubbish?”

“Ma'am, we didn't want to give you false information. No one has deliberately tried to hide anything,” replied Lt. Col. Jeffrey Bailey, the battalion commander who oversaw Pat Tillman's platoon.

Mrs. Tillman recalled thinking to herself: “Everyone appears to be lying.”

In “Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman,” Mary Tillman charts her family's efforts to cut through misleading official accounts of how the one-time NFL star died as a U.S. Army Ranger in Afghanistan. It was just issued by Modern Times books.

The Army told the Tillman family and the public Tillman was killed in an enemy ambush April 22, 2004. It waited about five weeks after it suspected friendly fire was involved before disclosing Tillman's own Ranger comrades shot him in what investigators concluded was a series of terrible mistakes.

“Boots on the Ground by Dusk” is based on Mrs. Tillman's review of thousands of pages of investigative documents stemming from Pat Tillman's death. The Associated Press and some other news organizations have reported on the contents of those reports, but lawmakers granted Mrs. Tillman access to uncensored versions of some documents that were not available to journalists.

Citing documents and eyewitness accounts, Mrs. Tillman says she strongly suspects the men who shot her son stepped out of a Humvee to take aim carefully at him. They were not, as official accounts have asserted, speeding by on a bumpy mountain road. The shooters denied this.

At an Army briefing at the end of one investigation, Mrs. Tillman vents frustration and incredulity at lead investigator Brig. Gen. Gary Jones. He had dismissed the account of Spc. Bryan O'Neal, who was just a few feet away from Tillman when the Rangers lit up their position with gunfire.

“No one got out of the vehicle. That early information is incorrect, and O'Neal is the least reliable witness because he was so traumatized,” Jones tells Mrs. Tillman, according to the author.

“You won't believe O'Neal, but you'll believe the guys who were shooting at him!” Mrs. Tillman says.

The book reveals that Bailey wrote an angry e-mail to O'Neal last year when O'Neal told a congressional committee Bailey had ordered him to keep quiet about what he had seen.

Mrs. Tillman reserves special contempt for Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, currently the commander of the “black ops” Joint Special Operations Command. Just a day after approving a Silver Star medal claiming Tillman had been cut down by “devastating enemy fire,” McChrystal tried to secretly warn President Bush that the story might not be true. The AP obtained and published the memo last year.

“Not only is he lying about the circumstances surrounding Pat's death, as enemy fire had ceased many minutes before, he is proposing false language for the Silver Star narrative,” Mrs. Tillman writes of the Silver Star language. “The false narrative, which McChrystal clearly helped construct, diminished Pat's true actions.”

The Pentagon recommended last year that McChrystal be held accountable for “misleading” actions, but the Army overruled the recommendation.

Last year the Army censured a retired three-star general, Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger, for misleading investigators in the Tillman case. Specifically, a military review found “compelling evidence that Kensinger learned of suspected fratricide well before the memorial service (about two weeks after Tillman's death) and provided misleading testimony” on that issue.

New documents obtained by The AP under the Freedom of Information Act may explain why the Army felt so confident Kensinger had lied.

In a November 2006 written response to investigators, Nixon said he recalled telling Kensinger almost immediately of the possibility of friendly fire.

“I thought I did notify LTG Kensinger that there was a potential for fratricide and that we were beginning an investigation but can not recall the specific conversation,” Nixon wrote in an e-mail message. It was a follow-up to investigators who had interviewed him previously.

Nixon also recalled telling Kensinger's deputy, Brig. Gen. Howard Yellen.

Yellen has testified previously that he told Kensinger of the possibility of friendly fire the day after Tillman's death.

Ellie