{"id":199424,"date":"2007-07-30T21:15:00","date_gmt":"2007-07-31T02:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/07\/30\/soldier-denies-tillman-berated-him-military-affairs-msnbc-com\/"},"modified":"2007-07-30T21:15:00","modified_gmt":"2007-07-31T02:15:00","slug":"soldier-denies-tillman-berated-him-military-affairs-msnbc-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/07\/30\/soldier-denies-tillman-berated-him-military-affairs-msnbc-com\/","title":{"rendered":"Soldier denies Tillman berated him &#8211; Military Affairs &#8211; MSNBC.com"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Once again, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.msnbc.msn.com\/id\/20016171\/\">it appears that part of the military&#8217;s account of Tillman&#8217;s death is a lie<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>As bullets flew above their heads, the young soldier at Pat Tillman\u2019s side started praying.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">\u201cI thought I was praying to myself, but I guess he heard me,\u201d Sgt. Bryan O\u2019Neal recalled in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press. \u201cHe said something like, \u2019Hey, O\u2019Neal, why are you praying? God can\u2019t help us now.\u201d\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">Tillman\u2019s intent, O\u2019Neal said, was to \u201cmore or less put my mind straight about what was going on at the moment.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">\u201cHe said, \u2019I\u2019ve got an idea to help get us out of this,\u201d\u2019 said O\u2019Neal, who was an 18-year-old Army Ranger in Tillman\u2019s unit when the former NFL player was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in April 2004.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">O\u2019Neal 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 \u201cCease fire, friendlies, I am Pat (expletive) Tillman, damn it!\u201d again and again when he was killed, O\u2019Neal said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">A chaplain who debriefed the entire unit days after Tillman\u2019s death later described this exchange to investigators conducting a criminal probe of the incident. But O\u2019Neal strongly disputes portions of the chaplain\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>There is something of greater significance here.  It is that a Chaplain lied about this.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>I think that this guy chose to lie to investigators to further that agenda.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Once again, it appears that part of the military&#8217;s account of Tillman&#8217;s death is a lie. As bullets flew above their heads, the young soldier at Pat Tillman\u2019s side started praying. \u201cI thought I was praying to myself, but I guess he heard me,\u201d Sgt. Bryan O\u2019Neal recalled in an interview Saturday with The Associated &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,1006,1021,1098],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-military","category-religion","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199424"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199424\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}