After Pat’s Birthday

And if Olbermann’s words don’t impress the need for regime change here at home, then maybe these words of Kevin Tillman will:

After Pat’s Birthday
Posted on Oct 19, 2006
By Kevin Tillman

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we get out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by...


Courtesy the Tillman Family
Pat Tillman (left) and his brother Kevin stand
in front of a Chinook helicopter in Saudi Arabia
before their tour of duty as Army Rangers in Iraq in 2003.

Editor’s note: Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004.

Truthdig has the rest of Tillman's powerful essay here.