Wasn't one of the football stars shot in the back a dozen times by his own guys?
To this day, the NFL is still part of the war propaganda. The entire nfl even wore combat fatigues during one week last season. It's amazing the amount of war propaganda we get in the NFL. Every superbowl, we get a fly-by from the air force - stealth bombers and such.
But yeah, the military marketing is egregious. If the Chiefs weren't in their heyday right now, I'd probably stop watching football altogether.
I don't recall specifics nor can I pull up any source, but I remember seeing in the past something about the US military sometimes pays organizations to do flyovers.
I happened to join the same Ranger Battalion Tillman was in after he was killed. The ground force commander at the time of Tillman's death (and perhaps whose decisions mostly attributed to Tillman's death), Major Hodne, later came back to 2nd Ranger Battalion as its commander when I was still active. He won no respect from any of us enlisted guys. Last I heard, he was a general in charge of general infantry training in Fort Benning. Fort Benning is the home of the infantry, where most basic and advanced infantry courses for the US Army are held. The irony is thick.
Not writing this to say you're necessarily wrong. The two major GWOT wars in Iraq/Afghanistan were bullshit, and Tillman along with thousands of others were killed for nothing worthwhile. There's just more nuance to the whole debacle that I think are worth pointing out. Or maybe I'm just insecure at how pointless all that shit was and I'm writing this to validate my/others' actions, hard to tell.
he was shot from within 10 yards in the back by American weapons, which for some reason the media never talks about. The official claim was that he was killed from so far away they couldn't recognize him as American
>The following day the Associated Press reported that a doctor who examined Tillman's body after his death wrote, "The medical evidence did not match up with the scenario as described",[19] also noting that the wound entrances appeared as though he had been shot with an M16 rifle from fewer than 10 yards (9.1 m) away
There definitely was no motivation to murder him, I'm convinced of it. Armed conflict inherently breeds a general cynicism, and lack of clear goals and guidance from leadership only exacerbates that. We all said out loud, "this is fucking bullshit," more than once when we would give full-throated efforts only to be frustrated by sideways shit like innocents or friends being maimed/killed, no clear mission or point to the killing and violence in general, a commander who seemed more eager to give a teary-eyed killed in action speech over a dead Ranger than to actually lay the hammer on insurgents, etc. All that to say that Tillman's misgivings about the war were especially normal. The real conspiracy was in the outright lying done about the whole thing, and in institutional leaderships' efforts to cover everything up.
Tillman was killed because of miscoordination/incompetence. The miscoordination at the macro level was from Hodne as I mentioned earlier, in his attempted orchestration of troop movement that introduced too much chaos. The incompetence came from a few variables of the people on the ground that I won't get too much into, except to say that it wasn't out of nefarious intent but instead from confusion and bad training. The SAW gunner who pumped rounds into Tillman had a reputation after he left of a bumbling, incompetent rock farmer. Note that I never met him personally, it was just his reputation around the company.
His death wasn't taboo internally. His named was invoked pretty regularly when it came to target selection and deciding if you had enough awareness of the assault forces' positions to pull the trigger into a room or general area; you never wanted to accidentally kill your buddy. A new Ranger would be liable to get smoked[1] until fluid leaked out of his ears because he "could kill another Ranger like Tillman, you fucking moron." Externally, we were ordered to divert all questions/comments about Tillman to the SOCOM Public Affairs Office.
[1]: "Getting smoked" in the Army (military?) is a euphemism for punishment through strenuous exercise/tasks, usually accompanied with humiliation and general hazing
Was either worth the cost in lives and money? I think the ultimate answer takes decades and the enemy gets their vote.
In foresight, not just in hindsight, both these wars were utterly pointless and morally abhorrent.
If western countries want to reduce Islamist extremism, we might want to start by examining our relationship with Saudi Arabia (who seem to be the ones funding and pushing a lot of it, and who we seem happy to trade with)
They were literally being nullified in realtime when they were made.
> The two major GWOT wars in Iraq/Afghanistan were bullshit
Iraq for sure; Afghanistan was more of a mixed bag, though it became total bullshit because of Iraq (through diversion of effort, alteration of the political context, and other factors stemming from the priority of Iraq.)
It was not for nothing. America is the first democracy, and hopes/aims to spread democracy in the world. But that's not an easy task. In hindsight, it's very easy to say Saddam did not have WMD's, but at the time, we knew that he had had them and used them, both against Iran, and later against his own people. Saddam was a truly awful guy. It's quite likely that is what happens with those who have absolute power for too long (see Putin). Removing Saddam was on balance a good thing for humanity.
Aside from that, Iraq and Afghanistan taught America some lessons. Lots of lessons. Blood was shed to learn them, and one can debate if the trade-off was worth it, but for sure it was not nothing.
One of these lessons, the way I see it, is that it's much easier to help a people, if they want to be helped. See Ukraine.
In any case, thank you for your service. It was definitely not for nothing.
What did we learn in Iraq that we hadn't already learned in Vietnam? What will Ukrainians learn that Georgians, Afghans, or Hungarians couldn't have told them?
> Jones reported that members of Tillman's unit burned his body armor and uniform in an apparent attempt to hide the fact that he was killed by friendly fire.[29] His notebook, in which, according to author Jon Krakauer, Tillman had recorded some of his thoughts on Afghanistan, was also burned