Saturday, March 24, 2007

What about all of the other guys who serve?

This morning, while watching NBC's Saturday morning news program, they discussed the latest in the Pat Tillman story. You may recall that he's the pro football player who left the NFL to join the armed forces after the attacks on New York and Washington and was killed in Afghanistan.

What irks me is the part these newswhores must say every time they report this story. They stress that Pat Tillman walked away from a (and this must be said slowly and with awe) multi... million... dollar... NFL contract.

Yes, that was noble, but do these people think everyone else who went to fight had nothing better to do? There are plenty of men and women who have careers and families they left behind to join the fight. And there are plenty of others who have made a career of the military. What about those men and women who have served when the whole nation wasn't so psyched about the military?

It's sad that Pat Tillman was killed, but it's sad that so many others have been killed, too. They're all tragic. Enough with his NFL career. It's no more important than some guy who left his software design job or running a hardware store or any of the others.

3 comments:

Cincy Diva said...

and yet we're all taken to task because we would rather see them home and out of harm's way.

Will said...

Somewhere here in Massachusetts there was a student who stated in his college's newspaper something similar and all Hell broke loose. He finally had to make a massive recantation and leave school for a while because of all the credible threats on his life. The combination of war hero and football hero was too potent for a reasonable point of view on the enormity of the Iraq disaster at that point in time.

However I do not mind the revival of this case because previously only the grunts in Tilman's unit have suffered punishment and public disgrace. Now at last the higher level officers are going to get their comeuppance. The military's handling of Tilman's death was a classic dirty cover-up--they even lied outright to the family as well as everybody else.

Ironically, Tilman's sports god image may have fostered their willingness to engage in lies, for fear that the public would learn that our own had killed a major league jock. The whole thing stinks; my hope is that bringing the officers rather than just the underlings to justice this time might serve as a model for the fall and prosecution of others who have lied and involved us in this unjust, corrupt disaster.

Lee said...

Ditto-ing the sentiments and Will's post. Out here in Arizona, it gets brought up often since he was an ASU graduate and was on the Phoenix team.

What's also interesting to note was that he was an atheist which rarely, if ever, gets mentioned.