« Life Outside Politics, Revisited | Main | Oscars 2006 »

March 05, 2006

The Tillman Investigation

The interestingly-named Bithead is unhappy about the ongoing investigation into the death of Army Ranger Pat Tillman. Tillman, of course, died in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan in April of 2004, but was initially reported killed in heroic combat with Taliban rebels. Now it appears even the follow-up investigation was flawed, and there is even the possibility that criminal neglect was involved in Tillman's death. Bithead is unhappy because he sees nothing good that could come out of this investigation. Certainly from his political perspective that is true, since the Army screwed up quite thoroughly by misreporting the circumstances surrounding Tillman's death. However, I cannot concur that such an investigation isn't warranted.

The Army has made a number of mistakes in the prosecution of this war. Much of this is understandable: war inevitably involves mistakes, as the number of variables involved are simply too high to keep take into account. But many of the Army's mistakes have involved a lot more than tactical or even strategic errors: they have involved what appear to be self-serving errors. Let's take a look at the Army's history in this war: we started off with the disastrous battle in al-Nasariya that ended with the rescue of PFC Jessica Lynch, who was initially reported as a great hero whose actions during the fight had been of extremely high caliber. Instead, it turned out Lynch may not have fired a single round in response to the Iraqi attack because her weapon jammed, likely due to poor maintenance procedures.

Move on to the Army's response to the Abu Ghraib abuses. It's certainly possible that what happened at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident due to failures by the chain of command, but the Army failed to hold anyone above the rank of Captain responsible for the failures. I've talked about some of the results of that failure earlier.

And now we have the Tillman incident, in which once again the Army put out a bogus story that seemed calculated to make the Army look good regardless of the facts. Maybe that wasn't the intent; there's no way to know. But that was certainly the impression given by that decision, and the Army's handling of the incident has made it look bad ever since. That seems to be an ongoing theme for the Army, and as a professional officer, that doesn't please me. We're supposed to be better than that. And so I have to disagree with Bithead: an investigation won't make us look bad. What's happened thus far has made us look bad. Maybe by taking the time to do the right thing and try to figure out what really happened, we can redeem ourselves just a touch for our past mistakes. Further, I find it difficult to consider an attempt to uncover the facts a bad thing, regardless of who may suffer from it politically. I don't know what will come of the investigation, but I wish the investigators luck in determining what really happened that day in Afghanistan, no matter where that investigation leads.