"Friendly Fire" and Fatuous Fibbing, part 2

Now, whoa! What's going on here? For a moment, if you will, put yourself in Mr. and Mrs. Tillman's position. What are you to think? Did one of his own buddies, in American uniform, and in momentary panic at being attacked by the numerically superior Afghan enemy, mistake pal Pat Tillman for his enemy and pull the trigger, with devastating results? (Don't forget both his two buddies claimed to have been relatively close to Pat, during the firefight.) Did the Afghan enemy, trying to kill any American in or out of uniform, happen to hit and kill Ranger Pat Tillman? Like the plot of a cheap soldier-of-fortune novel, did a carefully prepared Afghan soldier, looking for an American counterpart he'd had described to him well in advance, locate him, draw a bead on him, and, finally, nail the man? Or was there, in fact, some even more unlikely story behind Pat Tillman's death?

We are TV consumers who have learned to be awfully skeptical of what we see and hear on the media. There are, after all, Americans who believe with all their heart that the Holocaust is a story devised by Jewish historians and other media-manipulators toward their own devious ends. The Holocaust was, in short, a huge hoax pulled on the world's gullible masses by a clever minority who ought to be dismembered if we could ever find out who they were.

We've all lost our former media-innocence. We've grown wise about the world since World War II. We don't believe anything we're told. We don't believe anything except what we see with our own two eyes.

For all the courage it took for Pat Tillman's two buddies to appear on national TV and to claim their proximity to the man who was that day killed, the hard information they provided toward answering the question of who actually shot Pat Tillman was pitifully skimpy. Later, it sounded as if, shortly after the killing -- that irrefutable fact -- a whole lot of uniforms had got together -- as surely they must have in fact -- and rehearsed a technically feasible and blame-obliterating scenario that all uniformed parties agreed to abide by. And so it will remain, until at some future time, one of the parties, loose-mouthed in a bar some early Sunday morning, will flub his lines, and the whole fantasm will unravel. Followed by a perfectly fruitless Senate hearing, of course.

Only the feeble-minded and willfully blind will say that in wartime the phenomenon of friendly fire occurred only after some bright journalist, with maybe a good sense of humor, devised the term. It must've occurred in World War I, when potato-mashers and machine guns were first widely used to dispatch multitudes of the enemy to the hereafter. Maybe there was friendly-fire in the Peloponnesian War. (Although it's hard to visualize a trained Greek shooting an arrow into another trained, similarly uniformed Greek a few yards away, then dropping his bow, smiting his brow, and exclaiming, "Oh, gad, I thought the guy was a Spartan!")

What's causing all the trouble? This is the 21st century. What happens on the battlefield is immediately transmitted to the multitudes of circumambient civilians by way of the TV. There are no military secrets anymore. If the atomic scientists were working today, under that Chicago stadium, to assemble the A-bomb, the place would be mobbed by paparozzi before noon tomorrow, and the photos and plans would be published in that afternoon's Chicago papers. (Yesterday's newspaper kingpins, remembering how the Viet Nam reporters used their utter freedom to visit anywhere in the country and thus report all war irregularities, and the popular discontent with the war that eventually forced its end. Wary of such a recurrence, U.S. generals have now banned the press from ever again having such unrestricted access to such war zones as Iraq and Afghanistan.) Do our generals support our most cherished idea of freedom of the press? Now, what do you think? Think it's a natural right? If left to the generals, it'd be voted down unanimously in a heart-beat.

It's by such trickery, linguistic and otherwise, that we are very gradually but irrevocably, losing the rights guaranteed us by the fathers of our country. These are my own words, the words of a notorious political "liberal."

Editor's note: Part 1 of this column ran in the Aug. 21, Herald-Tribune