REVIEW: Soldier's family digs for truth in Tillman documentary

Pat Tillman, an all-star defensive back with the Arizona Cardinals, walked away from a multimillion-dollar NFL contract to enlist as an Army Ranger with his younger brother just months after 9/11.

Two years later, the celebrity soldier was dead, killed in a Taliban ambush. At the memorial service celebrating his life, military members extolled his heroism and recounted stories of how his actions saved the lives of his entire squad.

It was a great story. Too bad none of it was true.

The truth is that Tillman was killed not by the enemy, but by his own men in a machismo display of trigger-happy bloodlust.
 The military, jolted by the loss of one of its most effective PR tools, decided to turn tragedy into triumph.

Instead of telling the truth of Tillman’s fate, the Army invented a heroic story, destroyed the physical evidence, issued a posthumous Silver Star, and threw a lavish military funeral, something Tillman had expressly forbidden in his will.

But the military deceived the wrong family. While their cover-up may have fooled the American people and turned Tillman’s death into a powerful political propaganda tool to bolster domestic support for an unpopular war, the Tillmans got to the truth, despite the Army’s attempt to drown them in more than 3,000 pages of technical paperwork. The paper trail, including a leaked top-secret memo, eventually showed that the conspiracy went all the way to the White House.

Director Amir Bar-Lev’s blistering new documentary may sound like the most uncreative title ever conceived, but it hides a treasure trove of meanings — first, the detailed account of “the most famous enlisted man in the Army,” second, a family’s crusade to uncover the truth, and lastly the creation of a mythology.

The truth is that Tillman was an endlessly curious eccentric who lived on the edge, a free-spirited iconoclast raised in a family of equally direct, candid, profane personalities.

You will leave “The Tillman Story” enraged, not because the movie is bad but because it does its job so superbly well — moving you out of both your seat and your apathy. The film tells of a PR dream that turned into a nightmare, of one of the military’s most shameful moments, and of the power of unbounded familial love. Funny, sad, profane and deeply disturbing, “The Tillman Story” is the very embodiment of the rousing sentiment “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.”