The Pat Tillman Cover Up: I’m Pat Fu**ing Tillman!

Dannie Tillman is a mother, teacher, and a hero. She didn’t go to war like her son, Pat Tillman, and she didn’t pick up a gun and go fight the Taliban, no, her hero status comes at the strength and resiliency in pursuing the truth surrounding the cover-up, when it came to her son’s death. That is the focal point of a brilliant documentary, The Tillman Story, retelling the story of the one time NFL Football star and American U.S. Soldier, Pat Tillman and the political cover-up of his death.If you can take one thing away from this film is that mothers will fight to the end to protect their children whether in life or death and that is what Dannie Tillman did for her son Pat. 

Pat Tillman was an NFL star who gave up a multimillion-dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals to serve his country in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Tillman became the most famous enlisted man in Afghanistan and served his country until he died. Now hearing a story like this it’s easy to call Tillman a hero, it’s easy to call him a Patriot but what you get from the film is that Pat Tillman wouldn’t care and wouldn’t want all the accolades bestowed upon him, he wasn’t that guy, Tillman was about family, his fellow soldiers and doing the right thing. 

Pat Tillman died from 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, dropped him to the ground and were from a machine gun shot by a member of his own platoon. As his team member, Private Bryan O’Neal, describes the moment when Tillman died;

“I remember the sound of a drinking fountain…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.”