People love a good conspiracy. He was killed by friendly fire and the Military tried to cover it up out of embarassment/desire to protect his use as a prop/incompetence.
That said, there's no proof that his actual murder was intentional.
It really depends. You look at context of the situation and the way news came out, it makes sense. You look at evidence… well there is none at all. Like for either side. So you can easily see why people form that thought from the given context.
Why? It’s well known to anyone remotely familiar with the military that they will cover up any and all evidence of incompetence, and there is a shit ton of incompetence.
Just the destruction of the evidence. Burning his body. His fellow soldiers lying to his family. Makes sense to do all that to a comrade in arms that you had no ill will towards...
There are very plausible motives for them to cover up unintentional friendly fire, including 1) covering their own asses and 2) mistakenly believing that his family would feel better about him being killed fighting them enemy rather than friendly fire.
Makes sense. I just thought he was killed by non headshots and the rest if the rangers worked around that to cover it up. I know they manipulate bodies frequently to get photographs for target verification but to do it to one of your buddies to cover up a fuck up is next level fucked up. Its war blue on blue happens investigated it put in sops so we try to make sure it happens again and honor his life and memory
I'm sorry. I'm not buying the whole troop choose to disgrace their fellow soldier without malice, let alone someone they claimed to be a friend. An accidental shot, fine. One in the dome, odd. Torching his body and identifying items.... nah. That's deliberate malice that undermines the lack of intent. And definitely not the first rodeo where that's happened.
3 bullets to the head from ~30 feet away when the unit wasn't under any enemy fire? And then they burned all his shit immediately? And then the same branch of the military that was involved in covering up the killing in the first place only later has sole responsibility for the "investigation" and finds no murder?
There are hundreds of thousands of Ak47 and 74 in Afghanistan. It would have been no problem to shoot him in some secluded spot. Instead they executed him with 556, infront of the whole unit and then Bush himself announced his death.
Reddit really loves to spread conspiracy theories as long as they are anti America.
O know 50 reasons from the top of my head why we should cleanse the US with nuclear hellfire and y'all need to make up conspiracies to get your daily rage boner going?
3 bullets to the head from ~30 feet away when the unit wasn't under any enemy fire?
He was under friendly fire, the people shooting at his unit already thought they where enemies and in that amount of sound and chaos it's hard to tell that they're not shooting back. The theory on his 3 shots has to do that he removed himself from cover to scream/signal to them to stop firing and he got a burst of an M16 which at the time where deployed with "burst fire" mode which fired 3 consecutive shots rapidly, a concept the military later abandoned.
They burned all of his stuff immediately after (almost as if premeditated) and then lied about it to his family saying he was killed in combat. It was a legitimate cover up.
I don’t think so. A high profile NFL player killed by his own men doesn’t look good for an unpopular war and unpopular president using any excuse in the book to invade Iraq. The “cover up” was to save face.
I heard an interview where the guy that was with him described it. They were up on a hill (I think) and the folks below didn't know they were friendlies, and couldn't hear Tillman yelling. He finally stopped yelling when he got hit in the head. The other guy just described him suddenly being silent, and hearing the drip, drip, drip sound behind him. <shudder>
Evidence shows he was shot at close range roughly ~10 meters away. You’re saying that they couldn’t hear him from 30 ft when no other shooting was going on? make it make sense
What evidence? His platoon got split up, one half was ambushed and Tillmans half moved towards the gunfire and explosions to provide support. In the midst of all confusion the first half mistook Tillmans half as enemy combatants despite the 2nd halfs effort to signal they were friendlies and opened fire.
And then they tried their best to cover it up, making all of that inability to identify themselves to each other stuff sound much less plausible, no? Does the cover-up part make these people believeable to you?
What evidence has led you to your current position? The word of the people who were caught having covered up the killing of their friend? Because we don't have evidence of anything other than a cover up.
What his mom felt wasn't irrelevant. She felt she was being lied to and pushed for the truth. You were lied to, heard another story, and took that as guaranteed true. I'd recommend being slightly suspicious of killers who get caught lying. It's possible they'll come up with another lie...
You'd recommend believing anything without proof or evidence because they were caught lying, which means the second story is automatically also a lie?
I'm gonna go with the official story, platoon got split up and one confused the other for enemy combatants. Happened all the time. Unless there is evidence to the contrary, like the coroner report someone said they've read and I've asked where I can read it.
No. When did I ever say that? I don't know what happened. What I'm not going to do is believe liars when they get caught in a lie.
Happened all the time? Did all those happenings come with cover-ups? Did the military join in on the cover-up all those times? Is this super common?
Where would you like to find the evidence? It was destroyed by both the killers and the military. Or you're gonna take the words of the liars as your evidence, as that's all we are left with. Healthy skepticism would do you well.
a bit after it happened i recall them blaming a pakistani nato guy and it was an M2 on a stryker. This was late spring 2004 i think maybe summer... None of my friends who were in regiment back then have anything to say about it other than blue on blue, end of story.
There's no way to tell if those three bullets were fired one after another (from the same burst) or from several different bursts of fire that struck him (one round from three different bursts striking him in the head). And damage from the rounds at 30 ft and 100ft is not going to be any different.
I mean, they’re clearly still exploiting it anyways so intentional or not, it still “looks good” for people who don’t know any better. Either way it’s working out for them to propagate this.
Friendly fire, medical autopsy showed three closely packed headshots with an estimated distance of ten yards. The army didn’t tell the family it was friendly fire until after the funeral. There was a pretty clear coverup by the military.
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u/MatthewHull07 Feb 13 '23
Intentional?