Read Online NO REGRETS ~ An American Adventure in Afghanistan by David Kaelin - Free Book Online

henchman Cheney, didn’t want Tillman to become a rallying point for the anti-Iraq war crowd. In this fantasy, the CIA was in on the hit and triple tapped Tillman while he was out on patrol. After the hit, the CIA made up the Taliban ambush to cover up their alleged treachery. It’s a crazy sounding theory. Personally, I don’t put anything past our government. America can be, and has been, a treacherous nation. We have been known to eat our own.
    I thought the Army screwed the pooch on Pat Tillman early on. There’s no way that Tillman should have been enlisted. He should have been encouraged to go for Officer Candidate School (OCS). The guy might still be alive and he’d probably have saved lives. He had leader written all over him. An enlisted Tillman was a waste of talented leadership. I’m not surprised that they got the guy killed. The Tillman military episode was a tragedy in waiting from the day he enlisted in the Army because Army leadership was and is inept. If they wanted a public relations bonanza from his enlistment, they should have made the guy a lieutenant and sent him into Iraq or Afghanistan as a leader of soldiers. “Lieutenant Tillman, the platoon leader,” would have been inspirational. Private Tillman was laughable.
    Tillman enlisted in the military to fight in a war (Afghanistan) in which he believed but served under a president for whom he did not vote. He then went off to Iraq to fight in a war that he came to believe was being illegitimately waged. These were acts of selfless service and patriotism. Not ugly nationalistic jingoism, but the selfless patriotism of a person who loves his country. Once he’d been in the Iraq conflict and saw the insanity of it, he supposedly planned to come out against the war. Yet, he was willing to defer going public until after he left the military. This was leadership exemplified. The guy made Bush, Kerry, Clinton, and that whole merry band of miscreants who serve as political leaders in America look like fools and cowards. He was a leader and one of the few true heroes of this era. His death came as no surprise to me. The Army is nothing if not a bungling bureaucratic machine of ineptitude.
    A day or so after Tillman’s death, his body was delivered to the airfield to be flown to the States. The act of taking the bodies of soldiers killed in action (KIA) to the flight line for the homeward journey is called the “Fallen Soldier” ceremony. It’s heartbreaking, but many of us at Bagram made it a point to participate. The tactical operations center would e-mail out the ceremony times base-wide. The route was always the same. Starting at the BAF morgue, the body would be loaded into the back of a vehicle. The vehicle would drive at a stately pace. Soldiers and civilians would line the sides of Disney and the road to the flight line. As the vehicle carrying the body passed, soldiers would salute. Civilians removed their hats and placed their hands over the hearts. There were always tears flowing in these moments. Units sometimes came out in formation to attend. The body or bodies of the KIA(s) would be offloaded from the vehicle and then loaded into the rear of a C130 or C17 for the return journey to their families.
    It’s a deeply personal experience to see a fellow countryman driven off in this manner. The long goodbye, I called it. It seemed that there was at least one of these ceremonies a week at BAF. It got to be too much after a while. After you’ve watched a guy whom you knew in life being driven by in a casket, it can be depressing.
    The day that they took Tillman’s body out, there were no gaps along the road. Everyone on base turned out, or so it seemed. It was a sad day and already the rumors were flying that something fishy was afoot concerning his death.
    Due to the hard work of the Tillman family, the U.S. government was forced to investigate the events around the Tillman battlefield death. The investigation revealed high-level officials in