The Real Story of Pat Tillman

[Nonno]

"“I’m Pat Tillman! I’m Pat ####ing Tillman! Why are you shooting at me?”

With those livid last words, pro-football star and Army Ranger Patrick Daniel Tillman Jr.—who gave up a multimillion-dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals to serve his country and become the most famous enlisted man in Afghanistan—died in a fusillade of friendly fire on a rocky hillside near the Pakistani border. The bullets, coming at him from 40 yards away at a rate of 950 rounds per minute, were from a machine gun wielded by a member of his own platoon.

“I remember the sound of a drinking fountain,” Private Bryan O’Neal says in The Tillman Story, a masterfully produced documentary opening in theaters Friday. On the evening of April 22, 2004, O’Neal was crouching next to his team leader, Corporal Tillman, as the furious volleys flew. “And I look over at my side and I see this blood pouring down this rock that I’m sitting by. His head was gone. Completely gone. And I take my helmet off and I throw it against the ground and then I kind of black out.”

Full article here.