azdad1978
Championship!!!!
Washington Post
It ended on a stony ridge in fading light. Spec. Pat Tillman lay dying behind a boulder. A young fellow U.S. Army Ranger stretched prone beside him, praying quietly as tracer bullets poured in.
‘‘Cease fire! Friendlies!’’ Tillman cried out.
Smoke drifted from a signal grenade Tillman had detonated minutes before in a desperate bid to show his platoon members they were shooting the wrong men. For a few moments, the firing had stopped. Tillman stood up, chattering in relief. Then the machine gun bursts erupted again.
‘‘I could hear the pain in his voice,’’ recalled the young Ranger near him.
Tillman kept calling out that he was a friendly, and he shouted, ‘‘I am Pat (expletive) Tillman, damn it!’’ His comrade recalled: ‘‘He said this over and over again until he stopped.’’
Myths shaped Pat Tillman’s reputation, and mystery shrouded his death. A longhaired, fierce-hitting defensive back with the Arizona Cardinals, he turned away from a $3.6 million contract after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to volunteer for the war on terrorism, ultimately giving his life in combat in Taliban-infested southeastern Afghanistan.
Millions of stunned Americans mourned his death on April 22 and embraced his sacrifice as a rare example of courage and national service. But the full story of how Tillman ended up on that Afghan ridge and why he died at the hands of his own comrades has never been told.
Dozens of witness statements, e-mails, investigation findings, logbooks, maps and photographs obtained by The Washington Post show that Tillman died unnecessarily after botched communications, a mistaken decision to split his platoon over the objections of its leader and negligent shooting by pumpedup young Rangers — some in their first firefight — who failed to identify their targets as they blasted their way out of a frightening ambush.
The records show Tillman fought bravely and honorably until his last breath. They also show that his superiors exaggerated his actions and invented details as they burnished his legend in public, at the same time suppressing details that might tarnish Tillman’s commanders.
Army commanders hurriedly awarded Tillman a posthumous Silver Star for valor and released a nine-paragraph account of his heroism that made no mention of fratricide.
LEAVING THE NFL
Pat Tillman’s decision to trade the celebrity and luxury of pro football for a grunt’s life at the bottom of the Ranger chain of command shocked many people.
‘‘I play football. It just seems so unimportant compared to everything that has taken place,’’ he told NFL Films after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. His grandfather had been at Pearl Harbor. ‘‘A lot of my family has gone and fought wars, and I really haven’t done a damn thing.’’
He was very close to his younger brother, Kevin, then playing minor league baseball for the Cleveland Indians organization. They enlisted in the U.S. Army Rangers together in spring 2002. Less than a year later, they shipped out to Iraq.
The Tillman brothers served together in the ‘‘Black Sheep,’’ otherwise known as 2nd Platoon, A Company, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment. They were elite — special operators transferred from Iraq in the spring to conduct sweep and search missions against the Taliban and al-Qaida remnants in eastern Afghanistan.
On April 13, the Tillman brothers rolled out with their fellow Black Sheep from a clandestine base near the Pakistan border to begin anti-Taliban patrols with two other Ranger platoons. A week later the other platoons returned to base. So did the two senior commanding officers of A Company, records show. They left behind the 2nd Platoon to carry on operations near Khost, in Paktia province, a region of broken roads and barren rock canyons frequented by Osama bin Laden and his allies for many years before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Left in command of the 2nd Platoon was then-Lt. David Uthlaut, a recent graduate of the U.S. Military Academy. Now serving as a captain in Iraq, Uthlaut declined to be interviewed for these articles, but his statements and field communications are among the documents obtained by The Post.
Uthlaut’s mission, as Army investigators later put it, was to kill or capture any ‘‘anticoalition members’’ that he and his men could find.
SCENES FROM BATTLE
The trouble began with a Humvee’s broken fuel pump.
A helicopter flew into Paktia with a spare on the night of April 21. But the next morning, the Black Sheep’s mechanic had no luck with his repair.
Uthlaut ordered his platoon to pull out. He commanded 34 men in nine vehicles, including the busted Humvee. They towed the broken vehicle. After several hours on rough, dirt-rock roads, the Humvee’s front end buckled. It could move no farther. Uthlaut pulled his men into a tiny village called Margarah to assess options.
It was just after noon. They were in the heart of Taliban country, and they were stuck.
Uthlaut messaged his regiment’s Tactical Operations Center far away at Bagram, near Kabul. He asked for a helicopter to hoist the Humvee back to base. No dice, came the reply: There would be no transport chopper available for at least two or three days.
While Uthlaut tried to develop other ideas, his commanders at the base squabbled about the delay. According to investigative records, a senior officer in the Rangers’ operations center, whose name is redacted from documents obtained by The Post, complained pointedly to A Company’s commander, Uthlaut’s immediate superior.
‘‘This vehicle problem better not delay us any more,’’ the senior officer said, as he later recalled in a sworn statement. The 2nd Platoon was already 24 hours behind schedule, he said. It was supposed to be conducting clearing operations in a southeastern Afghan village called Manah.
By 4 p.m. Uthlaut had a solution, he believed. He could hire a local ‘‘jinga truck’’ driver to tow the Humvee out to a nearby road where the Army could move down and pick it up. In this scenario, Uthlaut told his commanders, he had a choice. He could keep his platoon together until the Humvee had been disposed of, then move to Manah. Or he could divide his platoon in half, with one ‘‘serial’’ handling the vehicle while the other serial moved immediately to the objective.
The A Company commander, under pressure, from his superior to get moving, ordered Uthlaut to split his platoon.
Uthlaut objected. ‘‘I would recommend sending our whole platoon up to the highway and then having us go together to the villages,’’ he wrote in an email to the operations center at 5:03 p.m. With sunset approaching, he wrote, even if he split the platoon, the serial that went to Manah would be unable to carry out search operations before dark. And under procedures at the time, he was not supposed to conduct such operations at night.
Uthlaut’s commander overruled him. Get half your platoon to Manah right away, he ordered.
Serial One, led by Uthlaut and including Pat Tillman, would move immediately to Manah.
Serial Two, with the local tow truck hauling the Humvee, would follow, but would soon branch off toward a highway to drop off the vehicle.
Sgt. Greg Baker, a young and slightly built Ranger nearing the end of his enlistment, commanded the heaviestarmed vehicle in Serial Two, just behind the jinga tow truck. Baker’s men wielded the .50-caliber machine gun, plus an M-240B machine gun, an M-249 squad automatic weapon and three M-4 carbines. Baker’s truck would do the heaviest shooting if there were any attack. Two of his gunners had never seen combat before.
Kevin Tillman also was assigned to Serial Two.
They left Margarah village a little after 6 p.m. They had been in the same place for more than five hours, presenting an inviting target.
Pat Tillman’s serial, with Uthlaut in command, soon turned into a steep and narrow canyon, passed through safely and approached Manah as planned.
Behind them, Serial Two briefly started down a different road, then stopped. The Afghan tow truck driver said he couldn’t navigate the pitted road. He suggested they turn around and follow the same route that Serial One had taken. After Serial Two passed Manah, the group could circle around to the designated highway. Serial Two’s leader, the platoon sergeant, agreed.
There was no radio communication between the two serials about this change in plans.
At 6:34 p.m. Serial Two, with about 17 Rangers in six vehicles, entered the narrow canyon that Serial One had just left.
AMBUSH BEGINS
When he heard the first explosion, the platoon sergeant thought one of his vehicles had struck a land mine or a roadside bomb.
They had been in the canyon only a minute. In his machine gun-laden truck, Greg Baker also thought somebody had hit a mine. He and his men jumped out of their vehicle. Baker also could hear the rattle of enemy smallarms fire.
It was not a bomb — it was an ambush. Baker and his comrades thought they could see their attackers moving above them. They began to return fire. They were trapped in the worst possible place: The kill zone of an ambush.
Finally freed, Baker’s heavily armed Humvee raced out of the ambush canyon, its machine guns pounding fire, its inexperienced shooters coursing with adrenaline.
Ahead of Serial Two, parked outside a small village near Manah, Uthlaut of Serial One heard an explosion. From his position he ‘‘could not see the enemy or make an adequate assessment of the situation,’’ so he ordered his men to move toward the firing.
Uthlaut designated Pat Tillman as one of three fire team leaders and ordered him to join other Rangers ‘‘to press the fight,’’ as Uthlaut put it, against an uncertain adversary.
Uthlaut tried to raise Serial Two on his radio, but canyon walls blocked radio signals.
Tillman and other Rangers moved up a rocky north-south ridge that faced the ambush canyon on a roughly perpendicular angle.
A sergeant with Tillman on the ridge recalled he ‘‘could actually see the enemy from the high northern ridge line. I could see their muzzle flashes.’’ The presumed Taliban guerrillas were about half a mile away, he estimated.
Tillman approached the sergeant and said ‘‘that he saw the enemy on the southern ridge line,’’ as the sergeant recalled.
On the sergeant’s instructions, Tillman moved down the slope with other Rangers and ‘‘into a position where he could engage the enemy,’’ the sergeant recalled. With Tillman were a young Ranger and a bearded Afghan militia fighter who was part of the 2nd Platoon’s traveling party.
A Ranger nearby watched Tillman take cover. ‘‘I remember not liking his position,’’ he recalled. ‘‘I had just seen a red tracer come up over us . . . which immediately struck me as being a M240 tracer. . . . At that time the issue of friendly fire began turning over in my mind.’’
FIREFIGHT
Tillman and his team fired toward the canyon.
Several of Serial Two’s Rangers said later that as they shot their way out of the canyon, they had no idea where their comrades in Serial One might be.
‘‘Contact right!’’ one gunner in Greg Baker’s truck remembered hearing as they rolled from the ambush canyon.
As he fired, Baker ‘‘noticed muzzle flashes’’ coming from a ridge to the right of the village they were now approaching. Everyone in his vehicle poured fire at the flashes in a deafening roar.
Baker was aiming at the bearded Afghan militia soldier in Pat Tillman’s fire team. He died in a fusillade from Baker’s Humvee.
Rangers are trained to shoot only after they have clearly identified specific targets as enemy forces. Gunners working together are supposed to follow orders from their vehicle’s commander — in this case, Baker. If there is no chance for orderly talk, gunners are supposed to watch their commander’s aim and shoot in the same direction.
As they pulled alongside the ridge, the gunners poured an undisciplined barrage of hundreds of rounds into the area Tillman and other members of Serial One had taken up positions, Army investigators later concluded. The gunner of the M-2 .50-caliber machine gun in Baker’s truck fired every round he had.
The shooters saw only ‘‘shapes,’’ an investigator wrote, and all of them directed bursts of machine gun fire ‘‘without positively identifying the shapes.’’
Yet not everyone in Baker’s convoy was confused. The driver of Baker’s vehicle or the one behind him — the records are not clear — pulled free of the ambush canyon and quickly recognized the parked U.S. Army vehicles of Serial One ahead of him.
‘WE HAVE FRIENDLIES’
The driver shouted twice: ‘‘We have friendlies on top!’’ Then he screamed ‘‘No!’’ Then he yelled several more times to cease fire, he recalled. ‘‘No one heard me.’’
Up on the ridge, Tillman and Rangers around him began to wave their arms and shout. But they attracted more fire from Baker’s vehicle.
Tillman and nearly a dozen other Rangers on the ridge tried everything they could: They shouted, they waved their arms, and they screamed some more.
‘‘Ranger! Ranger! Cease fire!’’ one soldier on the ridge remembered shouting.
Then Tillman ‘‘came up with the idea to let a smoke grenade go.’’ As the thick smoke unfurled, ‘‘this stopped the friendly contact for a few moments,’’ the Ranger recalled.
‘‘We thought the battle was over, so we were relieved, getting up and stretching out, and talking with one another.’’
Suddenly he saw the attacking Humvee move into ‘‘a better position to fire on us.’’ He heard a new machine gun burst and hit the ground, praying, as Pat Tillman fell.
A sergeant farther up the ridge from Tillman fired a flare — an even clearer signal than Tillman’s smoke grenade that these were friendly forces.
By now Baker’s truck had pulled past the ridge and had come into plain sight of Serial One’s U.S. vehicles. Baker said later that he looked down the road, then back up to the ridge. He saw the flare and identified Rangers. Finally he began to call for a cease-fire.
The last of Serial Two’s vehicles pulled up in the village. All the firing stopped.
The platoon sergeant jumped out and began searching for Uthlaut. He found the lieutenant sitting near a wall of the village, dropped down beside him and demanded to know what he was doing. ‘‘At that point I spotted the blood around his mouth’’ and realized there were casualties.
On the ridge the young Ranger nearest Pat Tillman screamed, ‘‘Oh my (expletive) God!’’ again and again, as one of his comrades recalled. The Ranger beside Tillman had been lying flat as Tillman initially called out for a ceasefire, yelling out his name. Then Tillman went silent as the firing continued. Now the young Ranger saw a ‘‘river of blood’’ coming from Tillman’s position. He got up, looked at Tillman, and saw that ‘‘his head was gone."
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/index.php?sty=32634
It ended on a stony ridge in fading light. Spec. Pat Tillman lay dying behind a boulder. A young fellow U.S. Army Ranger stretched prone beside him, praying quietly as tracer bullets poured in.
‘‘Cease fire! Friendlies!’’ Tillman cried out.
Smoke drifted from a signal grenade Tillman had detonated minutes before in a desperate bid to show his platoon members they were shooting the wrong men. For a few moments, the firing had stopped. Tillman stood up, chattering in relief. Then the machine gun bursts erupted again.
‘‘I could hear the pain in his voice,’’ recalled the young Ranger near him.
Tillman kept calling out that he was a friendly, and he shouted, ‘‘I am Pat (expletive) Tillman, damn it!’’ His comrade recalled: ‘‘He said this over and over again until he stopped.’’
Myths shaped Pat Tillman’s reputation, and mystery shrouded his death. A longhaired, fierce-hitting defensive back with the Arizona Cardinals, he turned away from a $3.6 million contract after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to volunteer for the war on terrorism, ultimately giving his life in combat in Taliban-infested southeastern Afghanistan.
Millions of stunned Americans mourned his death on April 22 and embraced his sacrifice as a rare example of courage and national service. But the full story of how Tillman ended up on that Afghan ridge and why he died at the hands of his own comrades has never been told.
Dozens of witness statements, e-mails, investigation findings, logbooks, maps and photographs obtained by The Washington Post show that Tillman died unnecessarily after botched communications, a mistaken decision to split his platoon over the objections of its leader and negligent shooting by pumpedup young Rangers — some in their first firefight — who failed to identify their targets as they blasted their way out of a frightening ambush.
The records show Tillman fought bravely and honorably until his last breath. They also show that his superiors exaggerated his actions and invented details as they burnished his legend in public, at the same time suppressing details that might tarnish Tillman’s commanders.
Army commanders hurriedly awarded Tillman a posthumous Silver Star for valor and released a nine-paragraph account of his heroism that made no mention of fratricide.
LEAVING THE NFL
Pat Tillman’s decision to trade the celebrity and luxury of pro football for a grunt’s life at the bottom of the Ranger chain of command shocked many people.
‘‘I play football. It just seems so unimportant compared to everything that has taken place,’’ he told NFL Films after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. His grandfather had been at Pearl Harbor. ‘‘A lot of my family has gone and fought wars, and I really haven’t done a damn thing.’’
He was very close to his younger brother, Kevin, then playing minor league baseball for the Cleveland Indians organization. They enlisted in the U.S. Army Rangers together in spring 2002. Less than a year later, they shipped out to Iraq.
The Tillman brothers served together in the ‘‘Black Sheep,’’ otherwise known as 2nd Platoon, A Company, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment. They were elite — special operators transferred from Iraq in the spring to conduct sweep and search missions against the Taliban and al-Qaida remnants in eastern Afghanistan.
On April 13, the Tillman brothers rolled out with their fellow Black Sheep from a clandestine base near the Pakistan border to begin anti-Taliban patrols with two other Ranger platoons. A week later the other platoons returned to base. So did the two senior commanding officers of A Company, records show. They left behind the 2nd Platoon to carry on operations near Khost, in Paktia province, a region of broken roads and barren rock canyons frequented by Osama bin Laden and his allies for many years before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Left in command of the 2nd Platoon was then-Lt. David Uthlaut, a recent graduate of the U.S. Military Academy. Now serving as a captain in Iraq, Uthlaut declined to be interviewed for these articles, but his statements and field communications are among the documents obtained by The Post.
Uthlaut’s mission, as Army investigators later put it, was to kill or capture any ‘‘anticoalition members’’ that he and his men could find.
SCENES FROM BATTLE
The trouble began with a Humvee’s broken fuel pump.
A helicopter flew into Paktia with a spare on the night of April 21. But the next morning, the Black Sheep’s mechanic had no luck with his repair.
Uthlaut ordered his platoon to pull out. He commanded 34 men in nine vehicles, including the busted Humvee. They towed the broken vehicle. After several hours on rough, dirt-rock roads, the Humvee’s front end buckled. It could move no farther. Uthlaut pulled his men into a tiny village called Margarah to assess options.
It was just after noon. They were in the heart of Taliban country, and they were stuck.
Uthlaut messaged his regiment’s Tactical Operations Center far away at Bagram, near Kabul. He asked for a helicopter to hoist the Humvee back to base. No dice, came the reply: There would be no transport chopper available for at least two or three days.
While Uthlaut tried to develop other ideas, his commanders at the base squabbled about the delay. According to investigative records, a senior officer in the Rangers’ operations center, whose name is redacted from documents obtained by The Post, complained pointedly to A Company’s commander, Uthlaut’s immediate superior.
‘‘This vehicle problem better not delay us any more,’’ the senior officer said, as he later recalled in a sworn statement. The 2nd Platoon was already 24 hours behind schedule, he said. It was supposed to be conducting clearing operations in a southeastern Afghan village called Manah.
By 4 p.m. Uthlaut had a solution, he believed. He could hire a local ‘‘jinga truck’’ driver to tow the Humvee out to a nearby road where the Army could move down and pick it up. In this scenario, Uthlaut told his commanders, he had a choice. He could keep his platoon together until the Humvee had been disposed of, then move to Manah. Or he could divide his platoon in half, with one ‘‘serial’’ handling the vehicle while the other serial moved immediately to the objective.
The A Company commander, under pressure, from his superior to get moving, ordered Uthlaut to split his platoon.
Uthlaut objected. ‘‘I would recommend sending our whole platoon up to the highway and then having us go together to the villages,’’ he wrote in an email to the operations center at 5:03 p.m. With sunset approaching, he wrote, even if he split the platoon, the serial that went to Manah would be unable to carry out search operations before dark. And under procedures at the time, he was not supposed to conduct such operations at night.
Uthlaut’s commander overruled him. Get half your platoon to Manah right away, he ordered.
Serial One, led by Uthlaut and including Pat Tillman, would move immediately to Manah.
Serial Two, with the local tow truck hauling the Humvee, would follow, but would soon branch off toward a highway to drop off the vehicle.
Sgt. Greg Baker, a young and slightly built Ranger nearing the end of his enlistment, commanded the heaviestarmed vehicle in Serial Two, just behind the jinga tow truck. Baker’s men wielded the .50-caliber machine gun, plus an M-240B machine gun, an M-249 squad automatic weapon and three M-4 carbines. Baker’s truck would do the heaviest shooting if there were any attack. Two of his gunners had never seen combat before.
Kevin Tillman also was assigned to Serial Two.
They left Margarah village a little after 6 p.m. They had been in the same place for more than five hours, presenting an inviting target.
Pat Tillman’s serial, with Uthlaut in command, soon turned into a steep and narrow canyon, passed through safely and approached Manah as planned.
Behind them, Serial Two briefly started down a different road, then stopped. The Afghan tow truck driver said he couldn’t navigate the pitted road. He suggested they turn around and follow the same route that Serial One had taken. After Serial Two passed Manah, the group could circle around to the designated highway. Serial Two’s leader, the platoon sergeant, agreed.
There was no radio communication between the two serials about this change in plans.
At 6:34 p.m. Serial Two, with about 17 Rangers in six vehicles, entered the narrow canyon that Serial One had just left.
AMBUSH BEGINS
When he heard the first explosion, the platoon sergeant thought one of his vehicles had struck a land mine or a roadside bomb.
They had been in the canyon only a minute. In his machine gun-laden truck, Greg Baker also thought somebody had hit a mine. He and his men jumped out of their vehicle. Baker also could hear the rattle of enemy smallarms fire.
It was not a bomb — it was an ambush. Baker and his comrades thought they could see their attackers moving above them. They began to return fire. They were trapped in the worst possible place: The kill zone of an ambush.
Finally freed, Baker’s heavily armed Humvee raced out of the ambush canyon, its machine guns pounding fire, its inexperienced shooters coursing with adrenaline.
Ahead of Serial Two, parked outside a small village near Manah, Uthlaut of Serial One heard an explosion. From his position he ‘‘could not see the enemy or make an adequate assessment of the situation,’’ so he ordered his men to move toward the firing.
Uthlaut designated Pat Tillman as one of three fire team leaders and ordered him to join other Rangers ‘‘to press the fight,’’ as Uthlaut put it, against an uncertain adversary.
Uthlaut tried to raise Serial Two on his radio, but canyon walls blocked radio signals.
Tillman and other Rangers moved up a rocky north-south ridge that faced the ambush canyon on a roughly perpendicular angle.
A sergeant with Tillman on the ridge recalled he ‘‘could actually see the enemy from the high northern ridge line. I could see their muzzle flashes.’’ The presumed Taliban guerrillas were about half a mile away, he estimated.
Tillman approached the sergeant and said ‘‘that he saw the enemy on the southern ridge line,’’ as the sergeant recalled.
On the sergeant’s instructions, Tillman moved down the slope with other Rangers and ‘‘into a position where he could engage the enemy,’’ the sergeant recalled. With Tillman were a young Ranger and a bearded Afghan militia fighter who was part of the 2nd Platoon’s traveling party.
A Ranger nearby watched Tillman take cover. ‘‘I remember not liking his position,’’ he recalled. ‘‘I had just seen a red tracer come up over us . . . which immediately struck me as being a M240 tracer. . . . At that time the issue of friendly fire began turning over in my mind.’’
FIREFIGHT
Tillman and his team fired toward the canyon.
Several of Serial Two’s Rangers said later that as they shot their way out of the canyon, they had no idea where their comrades in Serial One might be.
‘‘Contact right!’’ one gunner in Greg Baker’s truck remembered hearing as they rolled from the ambush canyon.
As he fired, Baker ‘‘noticed muzzle flashes’’ coming from a ridge to the right of the village they were now approaching. Everyone in his vehicle poured fire at the flashes in a deafening roar.
Baker was aiming at the bearded Afghan militia soldier in Pat Tillman’s fire team. He died in a fusillade from Baker’s Humvee.
Rangers are trained to shoot only after they have clearly identified specific targets as enemy forces. Gunners working together are supposed to follow orders from their vehicle’s commander — in this case, Baker. If there is no chance for orderly talk, gunners are supposed to watch their commander’s aim and shoot in the same direction.
As they pulled alongside the ridge, the gunners poured an undisciplined barrage of hundreds of rounds into the area Tillman and other members of Serial One had taken up positions, Army investigators later concluded. The gunner of the M-2 .50-caliber machine gun in Baker’s truck fired every round he had.
The shooters saw only ‘‘shapes,’’ an investigator wrote, and all of them directed bursts of machine gun fire ‘‘without positively identifying the shapes.’’
Yet not everyone in Baker’s convoy was confused. The driver of Baker’s vehicle or the one behind him — the records are not clear — pulled free of the ambush canyon and quickly recognized the parked U.S. Army vehicles of Serial One ahead of him.
‘WE HAVE FRIENDLIES’
The driver shouted twice: ‘‘We have friendlies on top!’’ Then he screamed ‘‘No!’’ Then he yelled several more times to cease fire, he recalled. ‘‘No one heard me.’’
Up on the ridge, Tillman and Rangers around him began to wave their arms and shout. But they attracted more fire from Baker’s vehicle.
Tillman and nearly a dozen other Rangers on the ridge tried everything they could: They shouted, they waved their arms, and they screamed some more.
‘‘Ranger! Ranger! Cease fire!’’ one soldier on the ridge remembered shouting.
Then Tillman ‘‘came up with the idea to let a smoke grenade go.’’ As the thick smoke unfurled, ‘‘this stopped the friendly contact for a few moments,’’ the Ranger recalled.
‘‘We thought the battle was over, so we were relieved, getting up and stretching out, and talking with one another.’’
Suddenly he saw the attacking Humvee move into ‘‘a better position to fire on us.’’ He heard a new machine gun burst and hit the ground, praying, as Pat Tillman fell.
A sergeant farther up the ridge from Tillman fired a flare — an even clearer signal than Tillman’s smoke grenade that these were friendly forces.
By now Baker’s truck had pulled past the ridge and had come into plain sight of Serial One’s U.S. vehicles. Baker said later that he looked down the road, then back up to the ridge. He saw the flare and identified Rangers. Finally he began to call for a cease-fire.
The last of Serial Two’s vehicles pulled up in the village. All the firing stopped.
The platoon sergeant jumped out and began searching for Uthlaut. He found the lieutenant sitting near a wall of the village, dropped down beside him and demanded to know what he was doing. ‘‘At that point I spotted the blood around his mouth’’ and realized there were casualties.
On the ridge the young Ranger nearest Pat Tillman screamed, ‘‘Oh my (expletive) God!’’ again and again, as one of his comrades recalled. The Ranger beside Tillman had been lying flat as Tillman initially called out for a ceasefire, yelling out his name. Then Tillman went silent as the firing continued. Now the young Ranger saw a ‘‘river of blood’’ coming from Tillman’s position. He got up, looked at Tillman, and saw that ‘‘his head was gone."
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/index.php?sty=32634
You guys need to let up
