Ethics Newsline®

WASHINGTON
Despite learning almost immediately that “friendly fire” killed a celebrated U.S. Army Ranger, the military withheld the facts from the man’s family for weeks, admitting that fellow soldiers killed him only when the news was likely to be made public by returning combatants, the Washington Post reported last week.

Pat Tillman, a professional football player who abandoned the NFL for the Army after the attacks of 9/11, was shot by his fellow soldiers during a confused firefight in Afghanistan at dusk on April 22, 2004.

Soldiers on the scene realized almost immediately that Tillman had been killed by U.S. forces — a determination corroborated by an initial investigation a few days later.

While top officials within U.S. Central Command were informed of the fratricide by April 29 — a week after Tillman’s death, and four days before his funeral was broadcast on national TV — they continued for at least another month to maintain publicly that Tillman was killed by enemy forces.

Only on May 29, 2004, when soldiers familiar with the true cause of Tillman’s death were scheduled to return to the States, did the military concede that Tillman “died as a probable result of friendly fire while his unit was engaged in combat with enemy forces.”

Tillman’s family and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) pressed for an investigation into the details surrounding Tillman’s killing, culminating in a 1,600-page report obtained last week by the Post.

In the report, Brig. Gen. Gary M. Jones said he found that soldiers on the scene knew immediately that Tillman had been killed by friendly fire, but were told by military officers to not talk about the incident.

Despite the destruction of evidence including Tillman’s body armor and uniform, findings of “gross negligence” by soldiers involved in the incident, and the military’s decision to withhold its knowledge about Tillman’s death from his family, Jones’s report concluded that there was no evidence of official reluctance to tell the truth, noted the Associated Press.

“At the heart of every notification effort is a commitment to compassion and completeness in providing information as it is known to those who sustained the loss,” Army spokesman Paul Boyce said last week. “That is what happened in the case of Corporal Tillman, and that effort continues to this day.”