Letters to the Editor
captainlarab
Published Letters: 541 Editor's Choice: 41
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Sorry, but count me in the "fuck-up" camp
[Read the article: There was no "coverup"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yellow Dog, I know that it seems to you that nothing besides a murder "makes sense." And certainly, we're seeing some shenanigans on the part of higher-level officers who thought they had a good PR thing going on and are tap-dancing like crazy now that the thing has blown up in their face.
But I'm with Garry: I just don't see how you could order a hit on Tillman for someone within his unit and get away with it. These people are Army Rangers who live and work as a team, not professional assassins; they also have absolutely no training or interest in covering up their work, as an assassin would have to. Also, it wouldn't be worth the risk to take Tillman's life just to silence him. Come on, the right wing controls the MSM now--if Tillman had come out as a virulent and highly articulate anti-war advocate, they could have effectively silenced him just by keeping him from getting much press coverage in favor of increased coverage of Linsday Lohan (anyway, how credible an advocate against the Iraq war could he be, when he had only served in Afghanistan??)
No, despite the shenanigans at the higher levels, when it comes down to the question of what actually happened to him in the field, I just have to favor the fuckup theory because I know from experience just how easy it is to screw something up in a way that results in someone's injury or death. All you have to do is get turned around in the woods, stay out a little too late so you can't see in the dark, get a little nervous, and with just a touch of bad luck the die will be cast. Put enough troops in the field with heavy equipment and firepower and it will happen.
You don't even have to have weapons involved. I was in a Patriot air defense artillery battalion. We moved primarily by 10-ton truck (HEMMTT) and HMMWV. The trucks carried the missiles, which were usually dummy missiles just used for practice (and even the real ones are not that explosive). Just getting troops out of the motor pool made me nervous. An entire parking lot full of vehicles starts moving out of a gate at once, with people all over the ground waving arm signals to them, and someone's going to get backed into or get his foot run over. You put a bunch of 18- to 20-year olds in charge of operating a crane that is loading or unloading missiles from the back of a truck, and with the slightest lapse in someone's focus, something very bad can happen. I also had a sergeant who lost half his fingertip in the most bizarre accident of all--on a parked, inactive Patriot radar, he was up on a ladder securing a latch--the kind of latch that has a hole for a padlock, like you might see on a school locker or a shed--and his finger tip got pinched in the latch just as the ladder wobbled and fell out from under him.
So, when I hear about a "friendly fire" incident, my initial reaction is not to think in conspiratorial terms. My initial reaction is "Oh, how sad and unfortunate," and then I wonder who's at fault and how many heads are going to roll, and marvel at how lucky I was that none of my royal screw-ups in the Army resulted in death or injury. Because establishing blame is always a first instinct when these things happen. People all the way up the chain of command who weren't even there are going to get blamed. I know it was a mark against me when my sergeant lost his fingertip; the inference was, if I had been providing more adequate supervision, I might have wandered by and seen that the ladder was wobbly. That's how the Army views "command responsibility," and that unfortunately puts people in such a defensive posture when an incident like this happens that there is an instinctive drive to start misconstruing or outright denying what actually happened.