Where Men Win Glory Part 10

"Aker walked up," says Shepherd, "and when he saw Tillman, he turned white as a ghost. G.o.dec was around by then, and as soon as he saw Aker's reaction, he knew Aker shouldn't be there. So he ordered him, 'Go down and get some ponchos and get 'em right now.'"

As Private Aker started walking down the hill to fetch ponchos and Skedcos* for packaging the bodies, Parsons's Humvee pulled to a stop in the wadi directly below the boulders where Pat was killed. Kevin was up in the Humvee's gun turret. The last vehicle in Serial Two, it had driven out of the canyon a few minutes earlier, after the shooting had already stopped. At the moment Pat had been fatally struck, Kevin was still back in the throat of the narrows, completely unaware of the unfolding tragedy. for packaging the bodies, Parsons's Humvee pulled to a stop in the wadi directly below the boulders where Pat was killed. Kevin was up in the Humvee's gun turret. The last vehicle in Serial Two, it had driven out of the canyon a few minutes earlier, after the shooting had already stopped. At the moment Pat had been fatally struck, Kevin was still back in the throat of the narrows, completely unaware of the unfolding tragedy.

Weeks immediately approached the Humvee to ask Parsons if there was a Skedco on it, prompting Kevin to inquire, "Who got hit?"

"Of course I knew," Weeks testified, "but I told him I didn't know at that point in time, because I didn't want to have to deal with that situation."

Soon thereafter, Aker reached the wadi, and he, too, asked Parsons if there was a Skedco and/or ponchos on the vehicle. When Parsons demanded, "What's going on?" Aker took him around to the rear of the Humvee and revealed they had two KIA, one of whom was a Ranger. "When I asked who it was, he whispered real quietly that it was Tillman," says Parsons. "We were down on a knee behind the vehicle. At that point I was like, 'Oh, man.' Because Kevin was right there above us in the turret pulling security."

Parsons said nothing to Kevin. He, Aker, Jacobson, Horney, and a young private named Marc Denton carried ponchos and Skedcos up the hill and helped Ward and Shepherd wrap the bodies of Tillman and Farhad, strap them onto the stretchers, and bring them down the precipitous slope in the dark. Ward picked up Tillman's SAW, MOLLE vest, and the hundreds of rounds of ammo he'd been carrying, and hung this heavy load over his shoulders on top of his own kit. "Then we started working Pat and the A.M.F. guy down to the vehicles," he says. "It wasn't easy. I got pretty smoked."

Just above the riverbed, Shepherd and Denton were lowering one of the Skedcos down a vertical embankment to Parsons and Aker when "Tillman came unpackaged," according to Parsons. Pat's upper body slid out of the poncho and hit Aker in the chest. "Aker had a really bad response to it," Parsons recalls. After they wrapped Pat up and strapped him back into the Skedco, Jacobson dragged the stretcher down the riverbed to a landing zone where a helicopter could evacuate the bodies.

It was about 7:40. Standing guard in the turret, staring up into the darkness through a night-vision device mounted on the brow of his helmet, Kevin watched his colleagues labor to haul a large object down the hillside above him. "They brought down somebody in a Skedco," he testified. "And I asked, 'Who the f.u.c.k was that?'"

"It's an A.M.F. soldier," someone in the vehicle replied.

"I'm like, 'What?'" Kevin told the investigator. "That didn't make any sense.... So I started to get a little weird feeling, you know, because my brother's a pretty loud-type guy." Kevin hadn't heard Pat's booming laugh or seen any sign of him since arriving at Serial One's location after the firefight. The last time Kevin had talked to Pat was back in Magarah before the platoon was split.

Parsons hopped into the Humvee, drove it 250 yards down the riverbed, and parked behind the rest of the convoy. Kevin resumed pulling security in the turret, but his "weird feeling" persisted. So he asked Parsons, "Where's Pat?"

"He asked me, like, three times," says Parsons. "I just ignored him the first two times. When he asked me again, I decided, 'All right, I'm gonna tell him.'"

Russell Baer was sitting in the back of Parsons's Humvee, he remembers, when "Parsons got up inside the turret with Kevin. He said to him, 'I don't want to be the one to tell you this, but your brother is dead.' Just like that. That's how Kevin found out Pat had been killed. They were right above me. I overheard him. That's how I found out, too. It was f.u.c.ked."

"I told him straight-out," says Parsons. "Kevin and me went back and forth on that for a minute, because he had the whole disbelief thing going on. But finally it ended up sinking in that his brother was KIA."

"Kevin got completely silent," says Baer. "He looked around for about five seconds and then quietly got off the jeep. Then he started walking around, screaming 'f.u.c.k!' over and over.... What do you do? I wanted to do something, but I didn't know how to make things better. It was devastating even for me; I can't imagine what it must have been like for Kevin. For him to lose Pat-I mean, they weren't just brothers; they were joined at the hip. I remember the medic-Doc Anderson, an older guy-asking Kevin for his rifle. Kevin was all tensed up. Yelling. Walking aimlessly back and forth. That's when Doc took his weapon." Parsons, worried about how Kevin might react to his brother's death, had asked Anderson to confiscate Kevin's gun.

When Parsons informed G.o.dec and Staff Sergeant Jonathan Owens, who was Kevin's squad leader, that he'd told Kevin that Pat was KIA, "Owens got in my face about it," Parsons recalls. "Said I shouldn't have told him. I ended up snapping back at him, 'Hey, Kevin is a grown man. I'm not gonna treat him like a kid. I'm not gonna lie to him about something like this. It's his brother. If it was your brother or sister out there who died, you'd want to know what happened.'" Parsons still had no idea that Pat had been killed by friendly fire, however, so he didn't reveal that aspect of the tragedy to Kevin, nor was it revealed by any of the numerous Rangers in the platoon who by then knew with absolute certainty how Pat had died.

A pair of Black Hawks appeared out of the darkness and descended amid a hurricane of debris created by their down-wash. As the Rangers watched the helos approach through their night-vision devices, the tips of the rotor blades appeared to throw off b.a.l.l.s of bright green flames-static electricity generated by the rotors cutting through the blowing sand. Uthlaut and Lane, both seriously wounded, were put on one of the birds, the bodies of Pat and Farhad were loaded onto the other, and at 7:58 the two helicopters lifted off into the night. Nine minutes later they touched down beside the field hospital at FOB Salerno. Approximately an hour after that, a Chinook returned to the wadi and flew Kevin to Salerno as well.

For the rest of the Rangers, says Josey Boatright, "It was a rough night. Everybody was exhausted and pretty freaked. We racked out by the vehicles in the wadi, but n.o.body slept much. I had Pat's blood all over my leg from where I drug his stuff. That smell-all night my sleeping bag smelled like blood."

In the morning the Black Sheep cleared Mana and the adjacent settlements. While the platoon was searching houses, Brad Jacobson remained outside pulling security. At one point he looked skyward and saw a pair of Army helicopters flying high overhead. Beneath each of the ma.s.sive Chinooks, swinging from a long nylon sling, was a Humvee being transported to Salerno. "It was a quiet reminder," Jacobson testified in a sworn statement, "that perhaps if our leaders.h.i.+p had done their job right in Bagram and had gotten that helicopter to us like we asked, none of this would have happened."

* All the Rangers wore fire- resistant Nomex gloves. All the Rangers wore fire- resistant Nomex gloves.* "ETAC" stands for "enlisted terminal attack controller"-an airman who's responsible for calling in air strikes in support of Army units on the ground. "ETAC" stands for "enlisted terminal attack controller"-an airman who's responsible for calling in air strikes in support of Army units on the ground.* A Skedco is a lightweight plastic litter for evacuating casualties. A Skedco is a lightweight plastic litter for evacuating casualties.

PART FOUR

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of G.o.d.- AESCHYLUS, Agamemnon Agamemnon

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO.

While Pat and Kevin were deployed in Iraq, Marie had been hired by a company called the Creative Group located in a skysc.r.a.per in Seattle's urban core. "I loved working there," Marie says. "I worked with a couple of girls I really liked, and enjoyed being in downtown Seattle during the week. It was nice to get away from the empty house in University Place. At the end of the day I'd maybe have a drink with one of my girlfriends and then drive back home when the traffic wasn't quite so bad."

Just before 5:00 p.m. Pacific standard time on April 22, ten and a half hours after Pat was shot, the office receptionist summoned Marie to a conference room. An Army master sergeant named William Donovan, wearing a formal Cla.s.s-A uniform and accompanied by an Army chaplain, walked into the room and asked if she was Marie Tillman and then asked if she was married to Specialist Patrick Daniel Tillman. When she replied yes to both questions, Donovan testified, "I told her, her husband was killed in action in Afghanistan today.... That's pretty much all I had to say, then I answered the questions, of course."

Marie's first question was to inquire if Kevin was okay, and then she asked how Pat was killed. Donovan told her, "We don't have any of the information right now, but it was from a gunshot wound to the head, and it was during an ambush." According to Donovan, "She was more concerned about Kevin at that point. Oh, she asked if her-if Pat's family had been notified yet. [They had not.]...From there, me and the chaplain had already worked it out how we were going to-you know, we figured we didn't want her driving. So the chaplain drove her in her vehicle, and I drove the [redacted] vehicle with [redacted] back to their place in-I forget where they live."

Before leaving her office, Marie called her parents to tell them of Pat's death. With a preternaturally calm demeanor that hid her true state of mind, she asked them to notify her sister and brother-in-law, Christine and Alex Garwood, both of whom were extremely close to Pat. A few minutes later, Marie learned that someone from the Army was en route to Dannie Tillman's residence in New Almaden to notify her that Pat had been killed. Pat's parents had divorced six years earlier, and Marie realized that Dannie would probably be home alone when the Army messenger arrived at her front door. So Marie hurriedly called Alex and asked him to contact Dannie's brother, Mike Spalding, to request that he attempt to get there first. Alex was unable to reach Uncle Mike, though, so he decided to go to Dannie's house himself.

By this time Pat's mother had a feeling that something wasn't right from the odd messages she found on her answering machine when she got home from her job teaching special education at Bret Harte Middle School. Alex remembers that as he was sitting in his car inside his garage in Los Gatos, preparing to drive to Dannie's, he received a call from Dannie on his cell phone. According to Alex, "She asked, 'Is something wrong with the boys?' I thought, 'It's not my place to tell her.' Maybe that was just cowardice on my part, but I replied, 'You need to call Marie right now.' Then I hung up and drove over to her place as fast as I could, trying to beat the Army over there."

With trepidation, Dannie called Pat and Marie's home above Tacoma Narrows, but when Marie picked up the phone, her voice sounded calm, which eased Dannie's fears somewhat. When she asked Marie what was going on, however, Marie was unable to speak. Dannie repeated the question; and again there was nothing but silence from the other end of the line. Dannie asked yet again, and this time Marie replied, "He's dead."

"Dead! Who's dead?!" Dannie demanded.

"Pat's dead."

Dannie ran out the front door of her house. Her shrieks prompted people in adjacent homes to rush outside to see what was wrong. Alex pulled in to her driveway a moment later. "Dannie's neighbors Peggy and Syd were consoling her," he says. "I went up and gave her a hug. Not long after that, an Army sergeant showed up, a woman, looking fl.u.s.tered. She'd gotten lost. As she got out of her car, she was trying to b.u.t.ton the jacket to her uniform, and we were all just standing there waiting for her to get all these b.u.t.tons b.u.t.toned. I remember thinking, 'Look, we know why you're here. Who cares about your uniform?' Then it was just like in the movies: 'On behalf of a grateful nation, your government regrets to inform you that your son Patrick Daniel Tillman was killed in action.'"

As soon as Dannie could collect herself, she asked the sergeant where Kevin was, and if he was all right, and then she called her ex-husband and gave him the terrible news. He immediately drove to the house. "When Mr. Tillman walked in," Alex says, "he and Dannie hugged across the table. He kind of pulled her across into this desperate embrace. The sergeant and I went outside to let them be alone. As we stood out there, we could hear them wailing-these primal kind of screams."

Marie's parents, Paul and Bindy Ugenti, and her sister, Christine Ugenti Garwood, flew to Seattle on April 22 to be with Marie as soon as they learned of Pat's death. "We got up to her house in Was.h.i.+ngton that evening," says Christine. "The minute I saw her, I gave her this big hug, expecting her to fall apart. But she wasn't crying, which surprised me. While I was struggling not to lose it, Marie was just sitting there; she was strangely calm. I don't know, maybe it was just too huge for her to process, but she was acting completely numb. She seemed preoccupied with making sure that Kevin was okay, that Dannie was okay, that Richard was okay, that Mr. Tillman was okay-she was directing all her energy to helping others, focusing on what needed to be done so she wouldn't have to feel anything, and it freaked me out."

While they stayed with Marie, the Ugenti parents slept in Kevin's bedroom and Christine slept on the couch. "In the mornings," Christine remembers, I would get into bed with Marie and talk. There were so many details she had to take care of. I remember getting in bed with her and asking, "What's going on? The military people are coming to your house and asking you all these questions, and you're doing all this stuff, and n.o.body's even talking about Pat, what a great person he is...." Marie started crying when I said that, and talked about how she was really feeling. She was devastated, obviously, but for some reason she felt like she had to keep it together-there were so many people around the house she felt it was important not to fall apart. I understood. I remember telling her, "You don't have to apologize for the way you're reacting. I'm just worried about you."

At 10:00 p.m. on April 22, when Kevin stepped out of a helicopter at Forward Operating Base Salerno after being flown from the canyon where Pat was shot, he was summoned to the TOC-the Tactical Operations Center-to meet with Major David Hodne. "Kevin was obviously distressed about the incident," Hodne testified, "and I attempted to console him.... He declined my offer to meet the chaplain that was inbound. He asked me to promise to exact revenge on the ambushers." Hodne a.s.sured Kevin that whoever was responsible for Pat's death would pay dearly for their actions. This would turn out to be the first in a long string of broken promises and self-serving lies proffered to the Tillman family by commissioned officers of the U.S. Army.

By this time all phones and Internet terminals available to enlisted men at Salerno had been shut down to prevent soldiers from communicating news about Pat's death to anyone beyond the FOB. There was nothing unusual or nefarious about such a lockdown; it was standard policy at bases in Afghanistan and Iraq whenever there were American casualties, in order to allow next of kin to be notified before word leaked to the media. Setting the wheels in motion to notify the Tillman family, at 11:08 p.m. a functionary in the Salerno TOC sent an e-mail to U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida, stating little more than that Specialist Patrick Daniel Tillman had been killed in action during an ambush after suffering a gunshot wound to the head.

The next morning at dawn, back in the canyon where the Black Sheep had been attacked, First Sergeant Tommy Fuller walked up to the rocks where Pat had been shot. He had arrived the previous evening with the Rangers of Alpha Company's Third Platoon, who had rushed to the canyon to support the stunned soldiers of Second Platoon shortly after the firefight. Behind the uppermost boulder, Fuller testified, "Tillman's brain was still on the ground." He put it in a Ziploc bag, which he placed inside an ammo can, and then gave the can to one of his sergeants so it could be returned to Salerno and sent back to the States with Pat's body. This ammo can, and the remains it held, were never s.h.i.+pped to the United States. They simply vanished, and have never been accounted for.

After talking to several of the survivors of the firefight, Fuller realized that Pat had been shot by his comrades, and he shared this conclusion with Captain William Saunders, the Alpha Company commander. Upon interviewing the men of Second Platoon, Saunders concurred with Fuller's a.s.sessment of the cause of death.

Around 8:30 a.m., Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Bailey, commander of the Second Ranger Battalion, arrived on the scene, spoke with soldiers from both serials, and talked at length with Fuller and Saunders. "The three of us got together," Bailey testified. "So I said, 'Alright. I think I agree with you. We need to do an investigation.' So I called Colonel Nixon [commander of the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment] and told him my gut feeling was that Tillman had been killed by friendly fire.... There was no doubt about it. It was a case where there were six or seven Rangers that saw the vehicle shooting at them." Bailey reiterated under oath in subsequent testimony that he told Nixon, "I'm sure it's a fratricide, sir, but I think I owe you the details. Let me do this investigation and I'll give it to you as quickly as I can."

When Bailey determined that an investigation was required in accordance with Article 156 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Hodne recommended that an officer at FOB Salerno named Captain Richard Scott conduct it. Bailey and Nixon agreed, and Scott was appointed to head the so-called 156 investigation.

Given that he would be probing the death of such a highprofile soldier, Scott was a curious choice for the job. Although a highly regarded officer, Scott was a mere captain, and under the direct command of Hodne, the very man whose order to split Uthlaut's platoon culminated in Tillman's death. As both Hodne and Bailey were aware, Article 156 required "the investigating officer to be senior in rank to anyone whose conduct or performance he may investigate," which precluded Scott from probing the actions of Hodne or Bailey. The investigation of Tillman's death thus took an irregular turn right out of the gate. Other irregularities soon followed.

It was early in the afternoon of April 23 when Bailey phoned Colonel Nixon in the Joint Operations Center at Bagram to alert him that friendly fire was the cause of Tillman's death. Almost immediately, Nixon delivered this shocking news in person to his boss, Brigadier General Stanley McChrystal, who ran the most covert branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

In 2009 McChrystal would be thrust into the limelight as the four-star general chosen by President Barack Obama to command all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. At the time Tillman was killed, however, McChrystal was only a one-star general, and was little known outside the taciturn Special Operations community. As head of JSOC, McChrystal was in charge of the high-risk counterterrorism missions undertaken by Navy SEALs, Delta Force operators, and Army Rangers. He ran the guys who'd rescued Jessica Lynch, as well as the units that would later capture Saddam Hussein and kill Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the notorious leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. McChrystal inspired extraordinary devotion from his subordinates, who referred to him as The Pope. A great many of the men who worked for him would do anything he asked without reservation, and would rather die than let him down.

Shrewd, exceedingly ambitious, and willing to bend rules to get results, McChrystal was widely regarded as the most effective commander in the entire Army. Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld held him in the highest esteem, considered him absolutely trustworthy, and regularly bypa.s.sed the chain of command to communicate with him directly. He worked under the radar and got stuff done. He didn't suffer from "the slows," as Rumsfeld characterized the risk-averse nature of some of McChrystal's superiors.

Shortly after McChrystal was apprised by Nixon that Tillman had been killed by friendly fire, he shared this information with Lieutenant General Philip Kensinger, commander of U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC), and General Bryan Brown, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOC). Word of the fratricide was also sent via secret back channels to the highest levels of the Pentagon and the White House, information that was restricted to an elect cadre in Was.h.i.+ngton.

Over in Afghanistan, McChrystal directed Nixon to keep the facts of Tillman's death under tight wraps within the Ranger Regiment, as well. "The guidance I put out," Nixon testified, "was that until the investigation was complete, until we knew what happened, I did not want communication of the ongoing investigation outside of the unit." According to a federal statute and several Army regulations, Marie Tillman, as next of kin, was supposed to be notified that an investigation was under way, even if friendly fire was only suspected, and "be kept informed as additional information about the cause of death becomes known." Instead, McChrystal, Nixon, and the soldiers under their command went to extraordinary lengths to prevent the Tillman family from learning the truth about how Pat died.

The same afternoon that McChrystal was informed of the fratricide-April 23-Pat's coffin was loaded onto a helicopter, and Kevin accompanied the body from Salerno to Bagram. Before departing, Kevin asked Bailey, Hodne, and virtually every other Ranger he encountered to try to find the small notebook Pat had been using to record his thoughts, so that it could be returned to the family; Kevin made it clear that recovering this notebook was extremely important to him. But even as his superiors a.s.sured Kevin they would leave no stone unturned in their hunt for the notebook, they were doing everything they could to deceive him about the cause of Pat's death.

Standard operating procedure dictates that when a soldier is killed in action, his or her uniform is left on the body for s.h.i.+pment back to the United States, to be removed during the autopsy and a.n.a.lyzed as forensic evidence. For reasons that have never been explained, Tillman's blood-soaked uniform and body armor were removed at Salerno and placed into a trash bag before the body was flown to Bagram. On the night of April 23, Sergeant James Valdez testified, a captain named Wade Bovard "came to me with an orange plastic bag containing Tillman's clothes. He then related that he wanted me to burn what was in the bag for security purposes. Additionally, Captain Bovard related he wanted me alone to burn what was in the bag to prevent security violations, leaks, and rumors."

Before destroying the items in the bag, Valdez went through the pockets of Tillman's uniform. In the cargo pocket of his pants he found Pat's notebook, after which he started a fire in an empty oil drum and destroyed the notebook, uniform, and body armor. As these items were burning, Valdez stated, "Captain Bovard came out one time to ensure that everything was going all right.... Captain Bovard then came back right at the end, when I was finis.h.i.+ng."

The Rangers of Second Platoon arrived back at Salerno on the morning of April 24, still reeling from what had happened on the twenty-second. Tommy Fuller had brought back the vest of ammo pouches that Pat had worn over his body armor, sodden with blood and riddled with bullet holes. A fragment from a green-tipped SAW round that had struck a grenade remained in one of the pouches. The next day, Fuller burned the vest in the same barrel Valdez used to destroy Pat's other belongings a day earlier.

First Platoon showed up back at the FOB not long after the Black Sheep. The previous night, acting on a tip provided by sympathetic villagers in Magarah, they'd captured four men who allegedly partic.i.p.ated in the ambush. All were local tribesmen who said they had been paid modest sums by a fifth figure, a notorious Talib, to attack the American platoon. According to the sworn testimony of Major Hodne, "Gul Zaman is the one we a.s.sessed to be the trigger man/leader for the ambush. To my knowledge, Zaman was not captured and fled to [redacted]."* By now every Ranger in the platoon knew that Pat had been killed by another Ranger, but on Bailey's orders they were admonished in the strongest possible terms not to disclose this knowledge to anyone under any circ.u.mstances. Kevin, desperate for information about how Pat met his end, repeatedly called the Salerno TOC from Bagram and asked to talk to Bryan O'Neal, because he knew O'Neal had been nearby when Pat was shot. "I had to call like eight times," Kevin testified. When he finally got Bailey on the phone, Kevin pleaded, "Where's O'Neal? Where's O'Neal? Give me somebody to talk to." By now every Ranger in the platoon knew that Pat had been killed by another Ranger, but on Bailey's orders they were admonished in the strongest possible terms not to disclose this knowledge to anyone under any circ.u.mstances. Kevin, desperate for information about how Pat met his end, repeatedly called the Salerno TOC from Bagram and asked to talk to Bryan O'Neal, because he knew O'Neal had been nearby when Pat was shot. "I had to call like eight times," Kevin testified. When he finally got Bailey on the phone, Kevin pleaded, "Where's O'Neal? Where's O'Neal? Give me somebody to talk to."

"Kevin was a basket case," Bailey testified. "So I kept putting him off." When Kevin refused to drop the matter, Bailey finally allowed Kevin and O'Neal to speak to each other, but first he sternly reiterated to O'Neal that he was under orders to say nothing about friendly fire.

"And he didn't say anything to me," Kevin recalled. "He just kind of watered the thing down. He talked for like three minutes and told me, 'We were running up the hill and...the A.M.F. guy got shot. And then Pat got shot, and we were shooting our a.s.ses off. And when I looked down, Pat was shot. And then I don't remember anything after that." Based on what O'Neal had told him, Kevin was certain Pat had been killed by the Taliban.

"I wanted right off the bat to let the family know what had happened," O'Neal stated, "especially Kevin because I worked with him in the platoon.... And I was quite appalled that when I was able actually to speak with Kevin, I was ordered not to tell him what happened."

The remains of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq are received and processed at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. On April 26, Kevin arrived at Dover with Pat's body. Russell Baer had been sent along to keep Kevin company during the long journey home. Before leaving Salerno, Baer, too, was warned to keep his lips sealed. "Me and Kevin hardly said a word to each other the whole way back," Baer says. Marie Tillman flew in from Seattle to meet their plane when they arrived in Dover.

An autopsy was performed at the base mortuary by Dr. Craig Mallak, the chief of the Armed Forces medical examiners, and Dr. James Caruso, chief deputy medical examiner. Four months earlier, Mallak had disseminated a policy throughout all branches of the military explicitly stating that deceased soldiers were to be sent to Dover with their uniforms, their body armor, and their helmets, which were to be considered crucial forensic evidence. When they saw that Pat had arrived naked, without any of this evidence, Mallak was furious. "We kept asking, 'Where are the clothes?'" he testified. When he learned they had been burned, Mallak said, "I thought, 'Why would you do that?'"

Taking their cues from McChrystal and Nixon, officers in the Ranger Regiment deliberately withheld from Mallak that Pat had been killed by friendly fire, another egregious breach of protocol. Instead, Mallak was told that Pat "was shot by insurgents or Taliban." According to Mallak, he "immediately had concerns about the case" because "the gunshot wounds to the forehead were atypical in nature, and that the initial story we received didn't-the medical evidence did not match up with the scenario as described." Mallak was sufficiently troubled by this discrepancy that he and Caruso declined to sign their names to the autopsy examination report when it was completed, and Mallak asked the Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) to look into the matter. The CID is responsible for investigating serious crimes and violations of military law within the U.S. Army, and has independent authority to scrutinize incidents of friendly fire or suspected friendly fire. Because fratricide is considered negligent homicide under military law, Army regulations obligated McChrystal, Nixon, and Bailey to notify the CID if fratricide was even suspected in the Tillman case, which would in turn compel the CID to launch an independent criminal investigation. But McChrystal and Nixon were obsessed with keeping knowledge of the fratricide "as compartmented as possible" within the Second Ranger Battalion, hidden from the prying eyes of the CID or any other Army ent.i.ty. So when the CID sent a special agent to inquire about the suspicious nature of Tillman's wounds, Nixon's legal advisor, Major Charles Kirchmaier, was dispatched to throw the CID off the scent.

Kirchmaier, who served as the Rangers' regimental judge advocate in Afghanistan, was intimately involved in Captain Scott's 156 investigation and knew that Tillman was killed by friendly fire. As an Army lawyer, Kirchmaier must have also known that providing false information to a CID agent is a serious criminal offense, punishable by imprisonment and/or dishonorable discharge. Kirchmaier nevertheless instructed Captain Scott not to disclose anything to the CID or Dr. Mallak, and when questioned by the CID agent himself, Kirchmaier prevaricated. Deftly concealing the radioactive truth, he revealed absolutely nothing about the fratricide. As a direct consequence of Kirchmaier's deceitful conduct, the CID concluded there was no reason to delve further into the circ.u.mstances of Tillman's death, and declined to go forward with its investigation.* Shortly thereafter, Kirchmaier received an e-mail from McChrystal's legal advisor, Lieutenant Colonel Norman Allen, in which Allen congratulated Kirchmaier for "keeping the CID at bay." Shortly thereafter, Kirchmaier received an e-mail from McChrystal's legal advisor, Lieutenant Colonel Norman Allen, in which Allen congratulated Kirchmaier for "keeping the CID at bay." On the night of April 28, following the autopsy, Marie, Kevin, and Russell Baer brought Pat home. From the San Francisco airport, a hea.r.s.e took Marie, Kevin, and Pat's remains to a mortuary in San Jose, where Pat's parents, his brother Richard, and one of his uncles met them shortly before midnight. As sad as the reunion was, everyone was tremendously relieved to see Kevin. On the night of April 28, following the autopsy, Marie, Kevin, and Russell Baer brought Pat home. From the San Francisco airport, a hea.r.s.e took Marie, Kevin, and Pat's remains to a mortuary in San Jose, where Pat's parents, his brother Richard, and one of his uncles met them shortly before midnight. As sad as the reunion was, everyone was tremendously relieved to see Kevin.

On April 30, Pat was cremated. A public memorial service was scheduled for Monday, May 3, to be held at the San Jose Munic.i.p.al Rose Garden.

* Apparently, Hodne was unaware that Gul Zaman, a thirty-three-year-old Wazir tribesman raised in a nearby village, was sitting in a prison cell at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp on April 22, 2004, where he'd been held since his arrest on January 21, 2002, for being an "enemy combatant." Zaman was freed from Guantanamo on April 20, 2005, after a military tribunal determined that he was an innocent Afghan who had been wrongly charged. Apparently, Hodne was unaware that Gul Zaman, a thirty-three-year-old Wazir tribesman raised in a nearby village, was sitting in a prison cell at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp on April 22, 2004, where he'd been held since his arrest on January 21, 2002, for being an "enemy combatant." Zaman was freed from Guantanamo on April 20, 2005, after a military tribunal determined that he was an innocent Afghan who had been wrongly charged.* A new CID investigation would be launched in late 2005 in conjunction with an investigation conducted by the inspector general of the Pentagon. A new CID investigation would be launched in late 2005 in conjunction with an investigation conducted by the inspector general of the Pentagon.When asked in 2006, under oath, if they had ordered soldiers to conceal from Mallak or the CID that Tillman's death was being investigated as a fratricide, McChrystal and Kirchmaier repeatedly invoked such phrases as, "not that I can recall," "I don't remember," "not that I remember," "not to recollection," and "that's definitely not my recollection." Nixon admitted he gave to his men "general guidance" that "I didn't want any external communications," but he insisted, "I don't remember the specific guidance.... As it related to external communications or specifics of guys talking between each other, I don't know that I put anything specific out on that."

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE.

Within hours of Tillman's death on April 22, Rangers at FOB Salerno started filling out paperwork to give Tillman a Silver Star, the third highest decoration for valor that can be awarded to a member of the U.S. Armed Forces. Brigadier General McChrystal administered the medal recommendation process, which was expedited so the award could be announced in advance of the memorial service on May 3. According to McChrystal's testimony, he flew from Bagram to Salerno and "sat down with the people who recommended [the Silver Star]...and we went over a whiteboard, and we looked at the geometry of the battlefield, and I queried the people to satisfy myself that, in fact, his actions warranted [the Silver Star], even though there was a potential that the actual circ.u.mstances of death had been friendly fire."

This latter clause is a lawyerly flourish on McChrystal's part, intended to suggest that there was still doubt about the cause of Tillman's death, when actually he knew with near certainty that it was fratricide. During the medal-recommendation process, McChrystal was shown the preliminary findings of Captain Scott's Article 156 investigation, which included sworn testimony from more than a dozen soldiers in Tillman's platoon. Included in this testimony were eyewitness accounts describing how Tillman had exposed himself to hundreds of machine-gun rounds in order to protect Private Bryan O'Neal. McChrystal ascertained, correctly, that the valor of Tillman's act was in no way diminished by the incontrovertible fact that that this lethal fusillade had come from his American comrades. "So," McChrystal explained, "I was comfortable recommending, once I believed that the people in the fight were convinced it warranted a Silver Star." On April 28, six days after Tillman's death, McChrystal reviewed the medal recommendation doc.u.ments a.s.sembled by Major Hodne and Lieutenant Colonel Bailey, endorsed the entire package, and e-mailed it up the chain of command to the acting secretary of the Army, R. L. Brownlee.

The material received by Brownlee consisted of five doc.u.ments: an award recommendation form bearing the signatures of McChrystal, Nixon, Bailey, and Captain William Saunders; a one-paragraph "award citation" that summarized Tillman's courageous deed; a five-paragraph "award narrative" that offered a more nuanced account of his actions; and two brief statements from soldiers who witnessed those actions. Astoundingly, none of these doc.u.ments mentioned anything about friendly fire. Indeed, the award citation alleged, "Corporal* Tillman put himself in the line of devastating enemy fire," even though no effective enemy fire was ever directed at Tillman's position during the incident. Tillman put himself in the line of devastating enemy fire," even though no effective enemy fire was ever directed at Tillman's position during the incident.

The two witness statements were attributed to Private O'Neal and Sergeant Mel Ward. O'Neal testified that he was put in front of a computer and told to type out a statement, which he did, but after he wrote it, his words were embellished so egregiously that he never signed it. In Ward's case, he didn't even remember writing such a statement. During the investigation, Ward says, "When they showed me a Silver Star recommendation that I supposedly wrote for Pat, it was unsigned, which is a big red flag for me, because in the Army you can't submit anything without signing it. They would have handed it right back to me and said, 'Hey, stupid, you need to sign this.' Besides, it didn't sound like my words.... It sounded really hokey-something I would never have written."

All the recommendation material that McChrystal approved and submitted to Secretary Brownlee was painstakingly written to create the impression that Tillman was killed by enemy fire. By any objective measure, the recommendation was fraudulent. On June 2, 2009, after President Obama nominated McChrystal to command U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the matter of the misleading medal recommendation was raised during the general's confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Senator John McCain asked McChrystal to explain why, five years earlier, he had submitted the falsified Silver Star recommendation to the secretary of the Army "in the form that it was in."

Stammering, McChrystal replied, "We sent a Silver Star that was not well written-and, although I went through the process, I will tell you now that I didn't review the citation well enough to capture-or, I didn't catch that, if you read it, you can imply that it was not friendly fire." He insisted that the recommendation package bearing his signature wasn't meant to deceive. According to McChrystal-a commander renowned for his obsessive attention to detail and intolerance of sloppy work by subordinates-he simply failed to notice that each of the doc.u.ments purporting to describe the deadly firefight had been carefully crafted to omit its most salient particular-the fact that Tillman had been shot by his Ranger comrades.

As a consequence of McChrystal's chicanery, on April 29, 2004, Secretary Brownlee formally certified the Silver Star award without knowing that Tillman was a victim of fratricide, or that his death was even under investigation. Meanwhile, Dr. Mallak, the military pathologist who had performed Tillman's autopsy, was still trying to find out why the official cause of death provided by the Ranger Regiment didn't match the medical evidence. In the hope of obtaining Tillman's helmet, uniform, and body armor for forensic a.n.a.lysis, he contacted Brigadier General Gina Farrisee, director of Military Personnel Management for the Army's deputy chief of staff, who happened to be processing Tillman's Silver Star recommendation when Mallak called. Unaware that the recommendation doc.u.ments were fraudulent, Farrisee pa.s.sed them along to Mallak in the hope that they might shed some light on the cause of death and clear up some of the confusion.

When Mallak read the medal recommendation, however, his consternation only grew. He told Farrisee, "This story stinks." Crucial details of the firefight as described in the Silver Star doc.u.ments appeared to be contradicted by Mallak's autopsy findings. "You have a problem," he warned. "This isn't right. You need to stop the Silver Star."

"If we thought that anything in that award narrative at the time was untrue," Farrisee later conceded, "we probably would have held up the award." But by the time Mallak sounded the alarm it was too late. The medal was already a done deal.

On April 28, a day before the secretary of the Army certified the Silver Star, McChrystal received word from Rumsfeld's office that the White House was working on a speech in which President Bush would eulogize Tillman at the annual White House Correspondents' a.s.sociation dinner. Because the actual cause of Tillman's death had been withheld from the president's speechwriters, McChrystal fretted that the White House might inadvertently script something that would make the president look like a liar should the truth about Tillman eventually be leaked.

To forestall such a gaffe, on April 29 McChrystal e-mailed a high-priority personal memo (known as a "Personal For" memo, or simply a "P4") to General John Abizaid, the CENTCOM commander; General Bryan Brown, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command; and Lieutenant General Kensinger, commander of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command.

"Sir, in the aftermath of Corporal Patrick Tillman's untimely yet heroic death in Afghanistan on 22 April 04," McChrystal wrote, it is antic.i.p.ated that a 156 investigation nearing completion will find that it is highly possible that Corporal Tillman was killed by friendly fire. This potential finding is exacerbated by the unconfirmed but suspected reports that POTUS [the president of the United States] and the Secretary of the Army might include comments about Corporal Tillman's heroism and his approved Silver Star medal in speeches currently being prepared.... I felt that it was essential that you received this information as soon as we detected it in order to preclude any unknowing statements by our country's leaders which might cause public embarra.s.sment if the circ.u.mstances of Corporal Tillman's death become public.

Many months later, after the cover-up unraveled and the Tillman family pressured government officials and the Army to reveal who was responsible for the lies they'd been told, McChrystal would spin the P4 memo as proof that he never meant to conceal the fratricide. But his secret back-channel memo didn't urge anyone to divulge the truth and end the cover-up; it merely sounded the alarm that someone needed to warn speechwriters to be ambiguous about the cause of death when crafting statements about Tillman, in order to provide President Bush with deniability. (In the speech Bush gave at the correspondents' dinner two days after the P4 was sent, the president praised Tillman for his courage and sacrifice, but pointedly made no mention of how he died.) If McChrystal had a change of heart after submitting the falsified medal recommendation and really wanted the truth to be known, all he needed to do was pick up the phone, inform the secretary of the Army that Tillman was killed by friendly fire, and ask him to put the Silver Star on hold until the paperwork could be corrected. That didn't happen. Instead, Secretary Brownlee approved the medal based on the spurious doc.u.ments submitted by McChrystal, and on April 30 the Army issued a press release announcing that Tillman had been posthumously awarded the Silver Star. Because it made no mention of friendly fire, none of the hundreds of news stories based on the press release reported anything about friendly fire, and the nation was thereby kept in the dark about the fratricide. As Brigadier General Howard Yellen later testified, "For the civilian on the street, the interpretation would be that he was killed by enemy fire."

During McChrystal's testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in June 2009, Senator Jim Webb asked him to explain his role in the Tillman scandal. McChrystal confessed, "We failed the family. And I was a part of that, and I apologize for it." But then he abruptly changed his tone and reiterated the same blatantly dishonest claims made by virtually every officer who partic.i.p.ated in the cover-up: "It was not intentional.... I didn't see any activities by anyone to deceive."

A moment later, however, McChrystal hinted at what might have motivated him to orchestrate what can only be described as a broad conspiracy to conceal Tillman's fratricide from the secretary of the Army, the Armed Forces medical examiner, the Army Criminal Investigative Division, the Tillman family, the news media, and the citizens of the United States. "To provide context," McChrystal testified to Webb, "as you remember, Senator, we were still in combat when we were doing all of that.... We were in the first battle of Fallujah in Iraq at the same time, so we were making mistakes."

Three weeks before Tillman was killed, horrific violence engulfed Fallujah. The bloodshed commenced when Iraqi insurgents killed four American security contractors working for Blackwater USA, burned their bodies, dragged them through the streets, and then hung their charred remains from a bridge over the Euphrates River. In response, two thousand U.S. Marines launched an a.s.sault on the city, initiating ferocious urban combat that continued until the Marines were pulled out of Fallujah on May 1, 2004, by which time twenty-seven American troops were dead, and more than ninety had been wounded. The commander of one of the insurgent factions, a previously unheralded figure named Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, emerged after the battle as a hero to Sunni Iraqis for standing up to the Americans and forcing them to withdraw from the city, transforming him from a minor player into a dangerous foe.

One week before Tillman's death, compounding the bleak reports coming out of Fallujah, CBS News notified Rumsfeld and General Richard Meyers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that 60 Minutes II 60 Minutes II was about to broadcast a story about the torture and abuse of Iraqi inmates by U.S. soldiers at a prison called Abu Ghraib. On April 28, when the program aired, the images and descriptions of the abuses were shocking. As Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel, was about to broadcast a story about the torture and abuse of Iraqi inmates by U.S. soldiers at a prison called Abu Ghraib. On April 28, when the program aired, the images and descriptions of the abuses were shocking. As Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel,* watched the show in the West Wing he muttered darkly, "This is going to kill us." watched the show in the West Wing he muttered darkly, "This is going to kill us."

Two days later, on April 30, an even more disturbing story about Abu Ghraib written by the journalist Seymour Hersh was posted on the Web site of The New Yorker The New Yorker magazine. The alleged mistreatment of Abu Ghraib prisoners included s.e.xual humiliation, sodomy, beating, murder, and the rape of a sixteen-year-old Iraqi girl, provoking outrage around the world. The revelations added significantly to the Bush administration's growing difficulties in Iraq, where the war had recently taken a dramatic turn for the worse. magazine. The alleged mistreatment of Abu Ghraib prisoners included s.e.xual humiliation, sodomy, beating, murder, and the rape of a sixteen-year-old Iraqi girl, provoking outrage around the world. The revelations added significantly to the Bush administration's growing difficulties in Iraq, where the war had recently taken a dramatic turn for the worse.

The upshot of these disquieting developments was that the White House was frantic to come up with something to divert attention from the deadly quagmire that Iraq had become, precisely as Osama bin Laden had gleefully forecast. The president was engaged in a bare-knuckle campaign to win a second term in the White House, the election was barely six months away, and his approval ratings were plummeting. When Tillman was killed, White House perception managers saw an opportunity not unlike the one provided by the Jessica Lynch debacle thirteen months earlier.

The administration had tried to make Tillman an inspirational emblem for the Global War on Terror when he was alive, but he had rebuffed those efforts by refusing to do any media interviews. If there had been a way to prevent the White House from exploiting him after his death, Tillman would have done that, too, as he made clear to Jade Lane in Iraq. "When we were in Baghdad, our cots were next to each other," Lane remembers. "Pat and I used to talk at night a lot before we'd rack out. I don't know how the conversation got brought up, but one night he said he was afraid that if something were to happen to him, Bush's people would, like, make a big deal out of his death and parade him through the streets. And those were his exact words: 'I don't want them to parade me through the streets.' It just burned into my brain, him saying that."

Following Tillman's death, there was nothing to prevent the Bush administration from using his celebrity to advance its political agenda. Jim Wilkinson, the master propagandist who had used the Jessica Lynch rescue to cover up the Nasiriyah catastrophe during the invasion of Iraq, had been appointed by Karl Rove as director of communications for the upcoming Republican National Convention, and was therefore no longer available to orchestrate the Tillman spin. But Wilkinson had trained his successors well. They wasted no time in concocting a narrative about Tillman that they hoped would distract the American public in the same way that Wilkinson's fable about Lynch had. The fact that Tillman had been cut down by his Ranger buddies rather than by the Taliban was potentially problematic for the White House, although there were ways to keep that information from entering the public domain for a while, maybe even a long while.

The moment the White House learned of Tillman's death, the president's staff went into overdrive. On April 23, the day after Tillman perished, approximately two hundred e-mails discussing the situation were transmitted or received by White House officials, including staffers from Bush's reelection campaign, who suggested to the president that it would be advantageous for him to respond to Tillman's death as quickly as possible. Jeanie Mamo-Bush's director of media affairs-sent an e-mail to Lawrence Di Rita, Rumsfeld's press secretary, asking for details about the tragedy so she could use them in a White House press release. By 11:40 a.m., a statement about Tillman had been drafted and forwarded to Press Secretary Scott McClellan and Communications Director Dan Bartlett, who immediately approved the statement on behalf of President Bush and then disseminated it to the public, even though doing so violated the Military Family Peace of Mind Act-a policy mandated by Congress and signed into law by the president just five months earlier-which was intended to give families of war casualties twenty-four hours to grieve privately before any public announcement was made about the victim. Because the Tillman family wasn't notified of Pat's death until the evening of April 22, the White House was forbidden to issue its press release before the evening of the twenty-third.

Bartlett later explained that he rushed out the statement about Tillman illegally, and with such extraordinary haste, in order to accommodate overwhelming interest from the media, noting that the story (which did not disclose that Tillman had been killed by friendly fire), "made the American people feel good about our country...and our military."

While he was alive, Tillman had been the object of tremendous public fascination, and White House officials guessed that selling him as a fallen war hero would send the media into an orgy of adulatory coverage. They were not disappointed. Thousands of tributes to Tillman appeared in all manner of media over the days and weeks that followed. As with the frenzy that followed the Jessica Lynch rescue, neither the White House nor military perception managers had to do much to sustain the media's focus on Tillman; indeed, they did little more than monitor the coverage and make copies of all the published articles for their files. On April 25, just two days after the initial White House press release, a "Weekend Media a.s.sessment" compiled by the Army chief of staff's Office of Public Affairs reported that stories about Tillman had generated the greatest interest in the Army since the president's "Mission Accomplished" speech on the aircraft carrier the previous May, adding that the Tillman stories "had been extremely positive in all media." Had it been disclosed at the outset that Tillman was killed by friendly fire, the press coverage would have been no less voluminous, but its effect on the nation's mood would have been very different.

The Army's announcement on April 30 that Tillman had been awarded the Silver Star prompted another torrent of favorable press. One day later, on May 1, McChrystal was promoted from Brigadier General to Major General.

On Monday, May 3-one day shy of Pat and Marie's second wedding anniversary-two thousand people gathered at the San Jose Munic.i.p.al Rose Garden for Pat's memorial service. Lieutenant General Kensinger was in attendance, and sought out the family before the ceremony to personally express his condolences. Although he obsequiously a.s.sured the Tillmans that he would do everything in his power to help the family through this difficult period, he said nothing to correct their understanding, based on the intentionally misleading details provided by the Army, that Pat had been shot by the Taliban.

The memorial commenced with the keening of bagpipes, after which friends, coaches, teammates, family members, and various luminaries shared their memories of Pat from the stage. ESPN broadcast the entire event live on national television. Maria Shriver spoke, and Senator John McCain. Pat's ex-teammate Jake Plummer described his old pal as fearless, tough, caring, and "one of the most beautiful people to have ever entered my life." Plummer remembered a game in which Pat had received the football after the opposing team kicked it off: "He wasn't supposed to, but he happened to catch the ball. He almost took it to the house." Laughing, Plummer recalled, "When he got tackled he jumped up and looked around like, 'What's the big deal? This ain't that hard.'"

Dave McGinnis, who coached Pat for his entire NFL career, observed, "If you wanted [Pat's] opinion, all you had to do was ask him. And if you didn't want his opinion and didn't ask him, he'd still give it to you."