Pat Tillman: The Fame Game

For give the absence, Folks! New job and lots of transitioning around the house ...

Yet, I did start a post that I am sure is going to reign down Hell on me but I am going to say what is in my heart, that is what the men and women in the Middle East are risking their lives for after all.

I really have some issues with the Pat Tillman story and how his family, it seems predominantly his father and brother, is handling the details surrounding his death. Read more here. My question to the Tillman Family is this, How do you want Pat remembered? Do you want him remembered as someone who gave his life in the line of duty? As a NFL player who gave up a high paying career to waste his life for an unjust cause? As a hero?

I just can't seem to find an answer as to what this family wants. No matter how many rants they post, how many officers' careers and families are destroyed, none of this is going to bring Pat Tillman back. It seems to me that they simply have a vendetta that will never be satisfied. They want to embarrass the military, the government and the administration at any and all costs. Yet to what end?

It is because of who Pat was before he put on the uniform, his fame, that earned him an 18 month probe conducted by the Department of Defense. Just like John McCain, who because of his father, was the poster child for the POWs during Vietnam, it would seem that Tillman's notoriety is providing his family with much more that the family of a single mom whose only son is still Missing In Action from Vietnam would ever receive. This woman's family couldn't even get the military to go out and look for her son after his capture and still today the decades of lies is so deep and so thick, the family may never get the only thing they truly want; some piece of their loved one to bury and say goodbye. Then, as time passes, a place to go to be with him, to visit him and to talk to him.

It is clear that the Tillman's have gotten much more than just about any other military family could dream of in like circumstances. It is the Fame Game. Might I be so bold as to suggest that the Tillman Family regroup and make an effort to use the public stage that Pat's life has offered them and find a way to make his life mean something; focus on The Pat Tillman Foundation, support gold star military families or dare I say, be thankful that they had a body returned to them to bury and say goodbye. Why not turn around and try to help the not so famous families of those being held in Columbia, the families of those British Sailors held in Iran or even POW/MIA Families of those still unaccounted for.

Those things would make Pat's life mean something and have an everlasting impact far beyond his NFL notoriety ...