The Tillman Story (photo courtesy of A&E Indie Films)

But while the new documentary details one mother’s struggle to expose government lies about her fallen son, it also fails to dispel the most widely accepted myth about Pat Tillman: that he is a hero.

Whether or not Mr. Tillman is a hero is not the film’s main subject, and I mean no disrespect. But while the film tells us that Tillman was not a hero, and that he would in fact not want to be considered one, the selective narrative nonetheless dresses him in hero’s clothes.

Pat Tillman, the former NFL safety who left a multimillion dollar football deal to enlist in the army, is painted as everyone’s extraordinary friend, a Good Samaritan who sticks up for the weak, and a loyal son and committed family man. The charming and attractive adonis is an intellectual athlete with an open mind, a kind and sensitive warrior-poet who ponders religion and wrestles with moral questions. We’re led to believe that the sum of all these parts is a man who went to war with the best intentions.

The mistake is that the film does not evaluate those intentions and their larger consequences. Director Amir Bar-Lev chooses to show us football stadiums packed with adulating fans worshiping Tillman without exploring American soldier-worship. And when Tillman’s mother calls him a hero, no one asks what he’s done to deserve the lofty descriptor.

Sacrificing millions of dollars and an NFL career for a higher calling that benefits the greater good is honorable and admirable. But it matters what the cause is, and it matters whether or not it actually does something for the greater good. Tillman’s cause met neither of those two requirements.

9-11 inspired Tillman to leave the lucrative world of professional sport to fight in the War on Terror. After he was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan under very shady circumstances, the military concocted a fantastic story describing his death as one of courage and bravery in which he was felled by the Taliban in battle.

But the official story kept changing inexplicably and Tillman’s heartbroken mother Mary embarked on a years-long crusade to find out the truth. Taking her cause to the halls of congress she used redacted official documents to implicate General Stanley McChrystal and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the cover up of the cause of her son’s death. It becomes clear that the military wanted to use their most famous soldier’s death as PR for the unpopular War on Terror.

The film is tense and engaging, and who wouldn’t admire Ms. Tillman’s courage and resolve to sift through 6,000 of documents detailing her son’s death? But the heroic portrait of Pat Tillman himself is inconsistent with the rest of the film’s ethical idealism.

The film makes clear that Tillman did what he did because he thought it was right. But if what he thought was right was in fact wrong, is he still a hero? The legend in America says the soldier is heroic whether his cause is right or wrong, and Bar Levi feeds this with an unquestioning presentation of Tillman’s motives and actions during the war.

But if all troops are labeled heroes no matter what they do society looses rich avenues of critical analysis needed to understand our wars. University of Texas Journalism Professor Robert Jensen wrote about this trend in his recent essay There Are No Heroes in Illegal and Immoral Wars:

“The social pressure on us to use the language of heroism -- or risk being labeled callous or traitors -- undermines our ability to evaluate the politics and ethics of wars in a historical framework...this talk of heroism is part of the way we avoid politics and deny the unpleasant fact that these are imperial wars. U.S. military forces are in the Middle East and Central Asia not to bring freedom but to extend and deepen U.S. power in a region home to the world's most important energy resources.”

The saint-like depiction of Tillman is also problematic because the film makes clear that he in fact knew his presence in Iraq was wrong, and he wrote letters home calling the war “fucking illegal.” So if he knew what he was doing was wrong, where does that put him on the moral/ethical scale?

While Tillman may or may not have engaged in individual acts of heroism (and he may or may not have done so after the war had he lived), the truest heroes are not people like Tillman, but instead those like First Lieutenant Ehren K. Watada, who refused to deploy to Iraq on the grounds that it would make him party to war crimes.

If what Tillman himself said is true, that the war was “fucking illegal,” then his activities in Iraq were criminal, not heroic. The smokescreen that blinds us to these simple facts is as old as this country and it is one of the ties that binds us to our unshakeable addiction to war.

John McCain, our most famous contemporary “war hero,” is a salient example of how the hero-complex allows us to get away with murder. McCain bombed and killed thousands of innocent Vietnamese civilians in the streets of Hanoi, and for that, he’s a hero. If all soldiers are heroes simply for “serving their country” and following orders, no matter what their actions are, then wasn’t the German soldier who guarded the gates of Auschwitz also a hero?

Tillman’s family deserves all the credit in the world for not relenting in its battle to bring the military to book for its lies, its sordid manipulation of Tillman’s death and its cold abuse of his family. "The Tillman Story" deserves praise for its deft portrayal of this struggle. But flawed is the film’s assumption that Pat Tillman’s saga should or could have ended in any other way than violent tragedy.  Teach men to kill and give them guns, and they’ll kill and die.

*But by ignoring the deaths of Afghans and Iraqis - including an Afghan who was also killed in the friendly-fire incident that took Tillman’s life - and by ignoring the fact that Tillman's job was to kill, the film ignores war’s most wretched effect: the worst thing about war is not that people like Pat Tillman are killed, but that they are turned into killers.

The obfuscation of these truths propagates all wars. "The Tillman Story" does well to expose at least one war myth - that the government cares about its soldiers - and upon the filmmakers and Tillman’s family should be bestowed due credit. But the documentary’s narrow vision ignores the upsetting fact that Pat Tillman killed and died not defending our country, but attacking another.

"The Tillman Story" did not have to come out and say “Pat Tillman is not a hero.” It just didn’t have to treat him like one.

* (Paragraph changed on 9/12/10 for clarity)

To reach reporter Jon Dillingham, click here.