That, it turns out, wasn't true either.
Caught in the middle of the conflations and contradictions were the surviving members of Tillman's family: his mother, Mary "Dannie" Tillman; his two brothers, Kevin and Richard; his widow, Marie; and his father, Patrick Tillman Sr. They could easily have accepted the Army's version of events - after all, it painted their fallen loved one as a patriot, a hero.
But, as Amir Bar-Lev's wrenching documentary, The Tillman Story, reveals, the family was not ready to accept easy lies. Nor were they willing to let Pat become a symbol in a propaganda campaign. They insisted on finding out what really happened. And they defied the Pentagon, the White House, and Congress in their efforts to uncover the truth.
"There's something that we do - the media, the public - to a family in the role that the Tillmans were in that takes away their dignity," says Bar-Lev. "They can be used as a kind of prop for the pageantry that we wanted to put on to celebrate Pat Tillman's sacrifice. . . . But the Tillmans have hung onto their dignity. That's one of the most noble things about this family, is that they've resisted that. They've tried to seize control of their son's story, their husband's story, their brother's story."
Narrated by Josh Brolin, The Tillman Story - which opened Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse - offers a powerful portrait of a fiercely independent-minded clan, and an equally powerful condemnation of military and government institutions playing fast and loose with the facts. Bar-Lev's 2007 documentary My Kid Could Paint That similarly explored issues of truth: did a 4-year-old girl really paint these abstract artworks selling for five and six figures in New York galleries?
