[video=youtube;NGvDEFNg91o]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGvDEFNg91o[/video] The only promotional appearance on TV Richard Tillman will be making for the documentary The Tillman Story. Talks about the friendly fire cover up and more. The friendly fire statistics in American wars are ridiculous.. % of US troops killed due to friendly fire: World War 2 - 21% Vietnam - 39% Gulf War - 52% I think we are doing it wrong.. Quote by Richard Tillman from Pat's funeral service after John McCain references that Pat is in heaven:
It really doesn't make sense either. The weapon technology has improved in leaps and bounds since WWII, yet friendly fire has gone up drastically as well.
Those statistics don't even include the tens of thousands killed slowly by Agent Orange and other chemical agents illegally used by the US.
The US killed more US soldiers in the Gulf war than the enemy did. That bears repeating. The US killed more US soldiers in the Gulf war than the enemy did.
It also doesn't take into account the # of soldiers who came back from Nam' with P.T.S.D. and self medicated with drugs that they picked up in Nam'. My uncle falls under that category.
It probably doesn't include Pat Tillman either, as all evidence not yet destroyed by the Army points to a case of pre-meditated murder to cover up something/someone he was writing about.
I was talking to someone about this and they brought up that it's possible that friendly fire wasn't reported as much in the older wars, even though it obviously isn't always reported even now.
The technology explanation is better than the inaccurate reporting theory. Almost all guns have repeat fire now. In WW2 only machine guns did, and most combat soldiers weren't designated machine gunners. They had to bolt a rifle and it took time to fire a second shot. They fired their gun with economy, planning each bullet, taking time to shoot. Now it comes out in a spray and a misdirection means an automatic death. Those are two interesting points, Maris. 1) The US killed more US soldiers in the Gulf war (52%) than the enemy did (48%). 2) All evidence not yet destroyed by the Army points to a case of pre-meditated murder to cover up something/someone Tillman was writing about.
My guess is the vast majority of friendly fire deaths are from heavy artillery, air cover missiles, and bombing missions.
We can at least be thankful that when they go door to door picking up people on their lists to take to the torture asylum, they don't have fellow Americans on the list yet.
My theory is Tillman had some sort of mental disorder and the troops shot him because he was crazy. dunno, he just seems a bit off....
From what I hear, Ranger Pat Tillman was considered somewhat of an egotistical dick around the Ranger community. I'm sure he must've been popular with most of the guys but with some of the others, not so much. I can't see pre-meditated murder but I can see an accident (or "accident") occurring and because of his divided reputation, much confusion and disagreement occurred.
Well, I don't buy all the conspiracy theories, but I read and was disturbed by "Where men win glory" by Jon Krakauer. And as far as the friendly fire incidents, it's also worth taking into account the nature of the warfare. It's far less classical, and far more guerilla-type, where the Yanks are at a big disadvantage in terms of familiarity with the terrain and culture. Still, it's inexcusable.
I think the majority of friendly fire deaths are from dropping bombs or firing missles from so far away we can't really tell what the target is. Seems a bit easire to pull the trigger when you are not looking into someone's eyes. I can also say from experience... that US forces didn't spend a lot of time training for the type of conflicts we are in now. All the training was 'we control everything behind this line... and enemy controls everything on the other side of that line...' but our current conflicts are not like that at all.
Warning: long winding rant to follow. Friendly fire deaths were certainly under-represented before Vietnam. Up to that point, we were much more jingoistic in our fighting--Huns/Krauts/Japs/Gooks killed our men, we didn't. Anything that disagreed with that storyline was almost certainly whitewashed. The real story is not the rise in killing of US troops by friendly fire. It's the overall decline in killing of US soldiers by the enemy, for several reasons. Our government has much less of a stomach for getting our own US soldiers killed since Vietnam. No president wants to hear chanting like, "Hey hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" So we have better armor, better weapons, better training, and we do more of our fighting with missiles/drones/mercenaries/locals. And we're much better at saving our own wounded. But the ferocity of our weapons sometimes leave less margin for error. To simplify, if you are wearing body armor and throwing hand grenades from air planes and the enemy has rocks and pointy sticks, the biggest danger is often that the grenade blows up in your face. Check out this interesting chart about US soldier mortality by war. It's fascinating to note that nearly half of all deaths occurred in the Civil War, the ultimate "friendly fire" war. 625,000 dead. Compare that to the longest-running war in US history--Afghanistan has a "meager" (if you don't happen to be one of them) 1,135 deaths. Since Vietnam, less than 12,000 soldiers have died for our country. Vietnam alone had 58,000 killed. On one hand, that's great for our country because nobody wants to see American soldiers die. But I think there is a flip side. The generation that fought in WWII was the "greatest generation" because they truly understood sacrifice. They knew that if you voted for war, a lot of people die. Maybe not our own people, but a lot. So George Bush Sr. didn't fuck around with war. That generation also knew nothing was easy. If you wanted to put a man on the moon or pay for old people's health care or build a highway system or beat the commies, you had to pay taxes for it. They also saw first hand through things like the GI Bill that government spending worked when used properly, but you couldn't go overboard or you'd end up like the USSR, imploding under the weight of its untenable economy. I look around and I see a nation of buffoons and charlatans, offering quick fixes and demagoguery. I see China make 25 year moon shot commitments to electric cars and infrastructure, while we make 25 year moonshot commitments to Afghanistan. We're getting our asses kicked, and we're so unlike the Greatest Generation that we can't even be bothered to look up from our iPhones to notice. Nothing makes a person, or a country, more serious about things than when it notices it stands a pretty damned good chance of dying. In our video game bailout nation, death leads to a respawn or a handout. A spiraling deficit leads to a tax cut or a new program. Nobody is seriously worried about working together to fix the problems, because the last generation to really be forced to do that are in their 80's and too worried about their Medicare. I don't know if I should be happy or depressed that our nation has had it so good for so long. tl/dr version: Friendly fire seems bad because we're getting killed less by the enemy in wars. That has made us a nation of pussy whiners.
Richard Tillman apparently still has a lot of anger issues regarding the death of his brother. Going on the air with a hate merchant like Bill Maher demeans Pat's life, IMO. Same thing if he went on Sean Hannity's show, or Rush Limbaugh's, or Keith Olbermann's. These political hacks are one of the primary reasons that our society is so divided. Pat Tillman chose to join the Army. Regardless of how his death was used by the military, he ultimately was another casualty in a misguided war, yet he chose to be in combat. Trading on his name to make a quick buck is the Tillman's right, but continually picking at scabs means that wounds never heal.
