The Tillman Story

The Tillman Story. Dir. by Amir Bar-Lev. Prod, by John Battsek. Weinstein Company, 2010. 94 mins. (http://www.tiiimanstory.com/)

On a 2004 Fox News program, the right-wing pundit Ann Coulter refused to believe that CpI. Pat Tillman, recently deceased in Afghanistan, admired Noam Chomsky and planned to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. Her refusal to release Tillman from the hero box in which she and others had imagined him indicates Tillman's role as national signifier, a role explored in Amir Bar-Lev's 2010 documentary film, The Tillman Story. The film avers that at the time of Tillman's death, with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan becoming quagmires, the American people - and especiaUy military and government leaders - needed co validate the conflicts with the story of a pure, selfless, and valiant patriot fighting to the death. Though the George W. Bush administration attempted to mold the Tillman story into the myth of a heroic death, the story as told by his outraged family in this film could not - would not - gratify that effort. As his mother, Dannie Tillman, laments near the film's conclusion, "he was a human being ... by putting that saindy quality on him, you're taking away the struggle of being a human being."

Most pertinent to students of American history and culture, The Tillman Story challenges war stories and their authors: who is authorized to narrate war and whose lives may be appropriated to construct those stories? According to the film, the Bush administration and its Department of Defense appropriated Tillman's life and death for their own dishonorable ends. As Stan Goff, a twenty-six-year Special Forces veteran and a blogger who aided the Tillmans in deciphering 3,000 pages of redacted army documents and the "hieroglyphics" ofthe Special Forces world, says, "If you want to get the public to co-sign something, you have to give them something they're willing to co-sign." One might wonder, though, if the Tillman family's claim on Tillman's life and death in this film is more authentic or is just another form of appropriation. Certainly, the concealment of Tillman's death by friendly fire is despicable; but does the family's affective relationship to Pat mean that they are more authentic owners of his life's meaning? Furthermore, the film indicates...