Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Controversy?

I'm feeling better today...thank you all for your well-wishes.

I don't know how much you guys have been hearing about the death of Pat Tillman. He was a pro-football player who joined the Army after 9/11, and then was subsequently killed in action. We're getting a lot of news about him because he grew up in San Jose.

I'm a little annoyed with the content of the news, though. It's sad that this young man was sent to a foreign country to die in a war that the government wasn't paying much attention to anyway (he was in Afghanistan). It's frustrating, yes, that the government didn't tell the family the truth about the circumstances of his death right away. But, really, is anyone that shocked that our government does not want to acknowledge friendly fire deaths as a very real experience in a combat zone? It's hard enough to spin a war, worse when your soldiers are killing one another. But it happens, like so many other awful things, in the course of the war.

The media is acting outraged that Tillman's family buried him holding him up as a hero who had died at the hands of an enemy when that wasn't the truth. But does the man's death mean more or less depending on who fired the bullet? He was in a warzone, FFS, and people were firing lot's of bullets.

We'd like to believe sometimes that the government doesn't lie to us, but let's just agree to agree that they have a really hard time telling the truth about war and what really happens during war. It's going to make uncovering the BS a lot less painful for us all.

1 comment:

P'tit-Loup said...

Such an oximoron anyway "friendly fire!" I agree the man died for the same cause as the others, whether it was during practice or delivery, it's still for the same cause that all these young folks are dying. Those who wish not to consider him on the same level, I don't know what to say about that.