If they knew anything about my son, they wouldn't have done what they did.
It's a terrible feeling to know in your bones that you're being lied to. Sadly, this is a feeling that the family of Pat Tillman is all too familiar with since they've never been able to get a straight answer out of the military or the government about his death in Afghanistan seven years ago. A professional football player who walked away from a lucrative NFL contract to enlist in the Army in 2002, Tillman kept his reasons for doing so private, but that didn't stop people from ascribing purely idealistic motives to him in the wake of his death in the line of duty two years later. That, and the cover-up that followed is the subject of Amir Bar-Lev's 2010 documentary The Tillman Story, which gives the Tillmans the chance to tell their side of things and highlights the dishonest way Tillman's fabricated heroics were sold to the American people.
At first it was reported -- at Tillman's memorial service, no less -- that he was killed by the Taliban during an ambush. It wasn't until five weeks later that it was announced that he was actually killed by friendly fire, also during a Taliban ambush. Naturally, this didn't sit well with the Tillmans, who spent years trying to find out the whole truth of what happened, culminating in a House investigation in 2007, a full three years after his death. (To say it reached an unsatisfactory conclusion would be an understatement.) I'm not sure how much more headway (if any) has been made since the film was first screened at last year's Sundance Film Festival, but as it stands The Tillman Story is heartbreaking and sobering in equal measure.