Twenty years ago, a platoon of Army Rangers came upon an abandoned humvee in a dense slot canyon in Afghanistan. The platoon leader radioed his commander to ask what they should do, and received orders to split the platoon, and try to guide the humvee through the narrow twists and turns of the canyon. The platoon split up and began the trek, but before long, gunfire broke out. Members of the lead squad ran back to help the group riding with the humvee. Machine guns rattled and echoed off the rocks, smoke bombs flared, and before long, two soldiers were dead. Neither of them were members of the Taliban.
One of the soldiers was an Afghan militiaman named Syed Farhad. And the other was Pat Tillman, a former safety for the Arizona Cardinals and linebacker for the ASU Sun Devils.
Tillman enlisted in the Army Rangers shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, leaving behind the millions he was earning in the NFL. As he put it at the time, so many other people had signed up to defend their country, while he hadn’t, quote, “done a damn thing.” But when Tillman was deployed to Iraq, he quickly grew disillusioned with the US war effort, reportedly telling friends that what America was doing was “illegal.”
In the wake of his death, the Army initially claimed he was wounded in combat, and awarded him a Silver Star for valor. But the truth was more complicated: he’d actually been killed by friendly fire, something his platoon mates knew, but were told not to talk about.
Tillman’s family was lied to, but when the truth finally came out, the military claimed there hadn’t been a coverup. To this day, the facts about what happened in that slot canyon and the aftermath of the skirmish are still being debated.
Jeremy Schaap, is a reporter and host at ESPN. His latest documentary for the channel, “Pat Tillman: Life, Death, Legacy,” airs Nov. 7 at 5 p.m. and will be available to stream on ESPN+.
Schaap joined The Show to talk about the project.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: Jeremy, I got the sense in this doc that your goal was to tell more than the story of just Pat Tillman.
JEREMY SCHAAP: It’s the story of Pat Tillman. It’s the story of the circumstances of his death and the aftermath and the misrepresentation of the circumstances of his death. But it’s also about the lasting impact on so many people. On his mother, Dannie, and on his platoon mates, several of whom we spoke to for this project. And after two decades, the toll that all of this has taken emotionally on so many people.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, I’m really glad you brought up the conversations with the other members of Tillman’s platoon, because those are some of the most wrenching moments in the doc. There’s a part where — I think his name is Steven Elliott, he’s one of Pat Tillman’s former platoon mates. And he says, “The idea that I would have been shooting my machine gun at a member of my own platoon in that moment would have made about as much sense as if you told me one of my family members was up on that ridge.”
SCHAAP: That’s exactly right, yeah.
DINGMAN: And it just struck me as such a clear and rare insight into the kind of thing that is going through a soldier’s mind in a moment of chaos.
SCHAAP: You know, you’re just hoping that the people are comfortable enough to get to a place where they can share their emotional truth with you. When Steven Elliot talks about that moment, and they’ve just been ambushed by the enemy, he’s thinking himself like, “I’m firing where my squad leader, the sergeant in the vehicle is firing.”
And the thought that standing up there on that ridge are three guys on my side, it just never occurred to him. The pain he feels, that so many of these platoon mates feel that we spoke to, that some people blamed us. But look at the difficulty of the situation. Look at the situation that they were put in. If you go on the internet to see other people say “this was a conspiracy” or “you guys did it intentionally” — it’s just unspeakable.
DINGMAN: Well, in a similar vein, in the conversation that you have with Dannie Tillman, Pat’s mom, the part where she says something to the effect of, “OK, so there has been this admission that there was wrongdoing, people looking the other way in the military during their investigation.” And she said something to the effect of, “What’s that supposed to do for me?”
I thought that was interesting because in a lot of the other coverage of Tillman’s death and his family that I have read or watched, there’s a lot of focus on Dannie Tillman as is this kind of remarkable figure. She was a scholar of history, didn’t have a TV.
SCHAAP: And relentless.
DINGMAN: And completely relentless, brave, gave testimony, all of these things. But it felt like in this doc, she got to just be a parent.
SCHAAP: Hmm. Yeah. So much of what she says is so heartbreaking. She’s so emotionally raw. And I think she’s so astute with her observations about herself. To me that that fascinating part where she says “Look I know people are going to think I was nuts, but I believed these conspiracy theories, I believed that the Army tried to orchestrate his death. To keep him quiet because he wasn’t going to support his their causes, etc., etc.”
And she says, “I know how crazy that sounds now.” But that process of getting there, to being able to recognize that, for her it’s hard. She talked about letting go. Not letting go of Pat — she’ll never let go of her son, Pat Tillman, but letting go of this mission. In some ways, it’s defined who she’s been for 20 years.
DINGMAN: So speaking of the lies that were told to Dannie Tillman, one of the biggest moments in the doc is obviously the conversation that you have with Pete Geren, who was the secretary of the Army at the time of the investigations. And as you point out, he hasn’t talked about this in 15 years. Tell me about the process of approaching him and convincing him to speak on the record finally.
SCHAAP: Yeah, that very interesting. So I reached out to Pete Geren. Secretary Geren was a former congressman as well, former Democratic congressman from the Fort Worth area. And initially, he agreed to do an interview. And then he decided he didn’t want to do an interview, which people do. It’s certainly their prerogative. We don’t have subpoena power or anything like that.
And then we got on the phone. He and I, I think we spent about an hour on the phone together. And at that point, he had changed his mind again. And he told me that he felt a kind of obligation to talk about the death of Pat Tillman and the war in Afghanistan and in general.
And he was certainly displeased with the decisions made, as he said, by both the Trump administration and the Biden administration, the way that the American withdrawal from Afghanistan was handled. But he wanted to talk about, through Pat Tillman, the sacrifices and the commitment of the 7,000 plus American service members who were killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
DINGMAN: It was a really interesting moment in the doc for a variety of reasons. But one of them I felt, at sort of a meta level, is it was such a critical illustration of the value of telling a story like this. 20 years later, even though it has already been told.
Because culturally, the way that we look back on the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan now is so different than it was in, say, 2006, when there was a big Sports Illustrated profile of of Pat Tillman; or 2009 or ’10, when the Jon Krakauer book came out.
That era of American foreign policy is seen with so much more clarity, and it lends just like a little bit of a different flavor to the the urgency or the mission, let’s call it, of talking about the long term effects of incidents like the Tillman story on people who were involved in those conflicts.
SCHAAP: There’s no doubt about that. In particular, since the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, which I think took place right in the summer of 2021. So now it’s been three years, and we were there for 20 years. Pat Tillman was one of those who died in our efforts in Afghanistan after taking the country out from under the control of the Taliban, and now it’s back under the control of the Taliban.
And that’s something that Pete Geren is angry about. You know, this is history. It’s recent history, right? But for for millions of millions of people, it’s hard to remember what it felt like in those moments — on 9/11 and the way that some people responded.
And we think about Pat Tillman. He was a potent symbol as well. He was the guy who left the NFL to join the fight. And as Dannie Tillman said, Pat died doing what he volunteered to do: defending the country.
I really do feel the more you learn about Pat Tillman — you know how often, the more you learn about people who seem to be heroic, the less impressed you are? It really is the opposite with Pat Tillman. He was to not letting other people fight for his freedom. It’s about somebody who walked the walk.
