30 July 2007

Soldier denies Tillman berated him - Military Affairs - MSNBC.com

Once again, it appears that part of the military's account of Tillman's death is a lie.

As bullets flew above their heads, the young soldier at Pat Tillman’s side started praying.

“I thought I was praying to myself, but I guess he heard me,” Sgt. Bryan O’Neal recalled in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press. “He said something like, ’Hey, O’Neal, why are you praying? God can’t help us now.”’

Tillman’s intent, O’Neal said, was to “more or less put my mind straight about what was going on at the moment.”

“He said, ’I’ve got an idea to help get us out of this,”’ said O’Neal, who was an 18-year-old Army Ranger in Tillman’s unit when the former NFL player was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in April 2004.

O’Neal said Tillman, a corporal, threw a smoke grenade to identify themselves to fellow soldiers who were firing at them. Tillman was waving his arms shouting “Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat (expletive) Tillman, damn it!” again and again when he was killed, O’Neal said.

A chaplain who debriefed the entire unit days after Tillman’s death later described this exchange to investigators conducting a criminal probe of the incident. But O’Neal strongly disputes portions of the chaplain’s testimony, outlined in some 2,300 pages of transcripts released to the AP this week by the Defense Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
There is something of greater significance here. It is that a Chaplain lied about this.

Christian conservative Dominionists have had the infiltration of the military as a goal for some time, look at the discrimination as the Air Force academy, and Tillman was known to be an Atheist.

I think that this guy chose to lie to investigators to further that agenda.

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