From NBC's Meet The Press: Jon Krakauer: General McChrystal's Explanation For Pat Tillman Cover-up Is "Preposterous" - 11/01/09
Little attention has been paid to Gen. Stanley McChrystal's back-story and his rise to the height of military command of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Before becoming the voice of gravity and a champion of higher troop levels in the eight-year long war, McChrystal's resume was sullied by a controversy in that same theater: the misclassified death of Pat Tillman.
McChrystal was the head of Special Operations command in Afghanistan during Army Ranger (and former football star) Pat Tillman's death. McChrystal was the one who approved paperwork awarding Tillman a Silver Star despite knowing (or at least suspecting) that he had died in fratricide and not, as originally determined, enemy fire.
This was once a big embarrassment for the army and, to a lesser extent, McChrystal himself (though he has copped to making an innocent mistake). But when the general was elevated to top spot in Afghanistan this past spring, relatively few publications revisited the affair.
That may change. On Sunday, journalist Jon Krakauer joined the Meet the Press panel to discuss his new book on Tillman's death called Where Men Win Glory. Krakauer offered a harsh assessment of McChrystal's conduct during that period and even stressed that the General's explanations upon reflection were "preposterous" and "unbelievable."
Read more at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/01/jon-krakauer-mcchrystals_n_341545.html 'Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman' by Jon Krakauer
Pat Tillman, unlikely football hero and unlikelier warrior, went to Afghanistan and got accidentally wasted by the men in his own Ranger platoon. It happens. Among the many shadows Jon Krakauer illuminates in his compelling and dispiriting book, "Where Men Win Glory," is the commonness of fratricide in high-tech warfare. Thus the military's bleak poetry of misadventure: FUBAR, SNAFU, Charlie-Fox.
But the story here isn't Tillman's unexceptional death, or exceptional life for that matter, but what Krakauer sees as a political crime committed by the Bush administration's propaganda machine as it tried to make Tillman a martyr in the global war on terror.
Tillman saw it coming. In a moment of foreboding, he said to a friend: "I don't want them to parade me through the streets." And yet that's exactly what happened.
From the day Tillman enlisted in June 2002, the Pentagon's perception managers coveted his story: the granite-chinned NFL star who walked away from millions to fight for his country after 9/11. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- who had opened the clandestine Office of Strategic Influence in October 2001 and was the Pentagon's most enthusiastic propagandist -- sent Tillman a laudatory note and advised Secretary of the Army Thomas White to "keep an eye on him."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/afghanistan/la-et-book11-2009sep11,0,628992.story