http://www.T-Nation.com/tmagnum/readTopic.do?id=1504515
I had a few posts on this earlier. No offense meant Mufasa but you must be reading something different than I’ve seen. The last I had read (and I admit this is just mainstream online media) they were still saying the same thing that they had for the last few years, that there was no enemy firing at them just the two halves of the group of Rangers firing at each other. �?? No evidence at all of enemy fire was found at the scene.
Apparently the ones who shot him were supposedly aiming at the friendly Afghan with an AK next to and supporting Tillman.
Have you read the Sports Illustrated article on this? Sept 2006. I must point out that I am not a football fan and this is the only issue of SI I’ve ever purchased. I don’t give a damn about football just that this guy had a lot and gave it up to serve despite totally opposing the Irak thing and then was killed by a screw up and the bureaucracy tried to cover it up.
�?? Army attorneys sent one another congratulatory e-mails for keeping criminal investigators at bay as the Army conducted an internal friendly-fire investigation that resulted in administrative, or noncriminal, punishments.
While ONeal as the last one to see him alive has been quoted as having Tillman yell some stuff at him in the last moments while their team members fired on them he has come out saying that his testimony was altered from what he gave and that he never spoke to the Chaplain who claims Tillman said these things:
�?? In his last words, moments before he was killed, Tillman snapped at a panicky comrade under fire to shut up and stop “sniveling.”
according to O’Neal this is how it happened: http://www.the-dispatch.com/article/20070729/APA/707290521
bullets flew above their heads, the young soldier at Pat Tillman’s side started praying. “I thought I was praying to myself, but I guess he heard me,” Sgt. Bryan O’Neal recalled in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press. “He said something like, ‘Hey, O’Neal, why are you praying? God can’t help us now.’”
Tillman’s intent, O’Neal said, was to “more or less put my mind straight about what was going on at the moment.”
“He said, ‘I’ve got an idea to help get us out of this,’” said O’Neal, who was an 18-year-old Army Ranger in Tillman’s unit when the former NFL player was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in April 2004.
O’Neal said Tillman, a corporal, threw a smoke grenade to identify themselves to fellow soldiers who were firing at them. Tillman was waving his arms shouting “Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat (expletive) Tillman, damn it!” again and again when he was killed, O’Neal said.
A chaplain who debriefed the entire unit days after Tillman’s death later described this exchange to investigators conducting a criminal probe of the incident. But O’Neal strongly disputes portions of the chaplain’s testimony, outlined in some 2,300 pages of transcripts released to the AP this week by the Defense Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
The chaplain told investigators that O’Neal said Tillman was harsh in his last moments, snapping, 'Would you shut your (expletive) mouth? God’s not going to help you; you need to do something for yourself, you sniveling …"
“He never would have called me ‘sniveling,’” O’Neal said. “I don’t remember ever speaking to this chaplain, and I find this characterization of Pat really upsetting. He never once degraded me. He’s the only person I ever worked for who didn’t degrade anyone. He wasn’t that sort of person.”
The chaplain’s name is blacked out in the documents.
Tillman gave up a multimillion-dollar football contract to enlist with his brother in the Army after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The military initially told the public and the Tillman family that he had been killed by enemy fire. It was only weeks later, when the truth was about to be published, did the Pentagon acknowledge that he was gunned down by fellow Rangers.
The Pentagon conducted a criminal investigation and ruled that Tillman’s death at the hands of his comrades was a friendly-fire accident.
Congress is preparing for another hearing this week, while the Pentagon is separately preparing a new round of punishments.
Soldiers and commanders who worked with Tillman have repeatedly testified that he was respected, admired and well-liked.
In the same testimony, medical examiners said the bullet holes in Tillman’s head were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.
O’Neal said the shooters were “close, close enough for me to recognize them, but they sure weren’t 10 yards away. They were further than that. I’ve thought about this plenty of times. They wouldn’t have been more than 50 yards away.”