Prior to Sunday’s big game, students receiving scholarships from the Pat Tillman Foundation were brought on-field for the coin toss. Afterwards, viewers were shown a segment in which Tillman was described as a patriotic hero who died "in the line of duty."
Posts garnering millions of views on social slammed the NFL and the US military for using Tillman as a recruiting prop after he was killed by US forces with three shots to the head at close range after criticizing the War in Iraq as "f*cking illegal."
"Obviously the Army killing Pat Tillman and covering it up afterwards is the worst thing the U.S. military did to him, but the years they’ve spent rolling out his portrait backed by some inspirational music as a recruiting tool is a surprisingly close second," American journalist Jay Willis wrote on Twitter.
Tillman joined the US Army in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks which killed nearly 3,000 Americans. But he quickly realized that the reality of the situation wasn’t quite what was advertised.
After participating in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 and subsequently becoming an Army Ranger, Tillman began to grow increasingly skeptical of the US military’s declared motives in the Middle East. He reportedly confided in a colleague that he thought the war in Iraq was "f*cking illegal” and one of his diary entries questioned the attempted capture of Jessica Lynch, a private first class. Though he hoped to see her rescued, “sending this many folks for a single low ranking soldier screams of media blitz," he wrote.
"Then," as his brother Kevin would
tell Congress several years later, "on April 22, 2004, my brother Pat was killed in a firefight in eastern Afghanistan."
Indeed, "the content of the multiple investigations reveal a series of contradictions that strongly suggest deliberate and careful misrepresentations," Kevin explained. "We believe this narrative was intended to deceive the family, but more importantly to deceive the American public."
Despite actually being killed by his own comrades, the fake story of Tillman's slaying was widely disseminated in American media and, his brother says, used to distract from an explosive report by investigative journalists Christian Parenti and Seymour Hersh exposing the US military’s torture of Afghan detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison.
According to a 2009 report from CBS, "Spc. Jade Lane, a friend of Tillman's, told Krakauer that during their first night as Army Rangers in Iraq, Tillman had told him he was worried that if anything happened to him, the government would create a media blitz around him."
In an
interview with Sports Illustrated, his mother, Mary Tillman, had few kind words for US military officials, who she says "attached themselves to his virtue and then threw him under the bus."