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" There is one moment, in a film with many such moments, that just punches you in the gut. It was at the public memorial service held for Pat Tillman in early May 2004, a couple weeks after his death in Afghanistan. Government efforts to turn Tillman into a patriotic superhero were at full tilt, and nothing was yet known to counter the official story that Tillman had been cut down in a terrorist ambush even as he saved the lives of his comrades. But this moment \u2014 at a memorial attended by pious dignitaries from across the country, all doing their part to assist in the rampant mythologizing of Tillman \u2014 should have come as a warning to the government that the Tillman family was not to be trifled with. After the solemn speakers had their say about who Pat Tillman was in life as well as in death, Tillman&amp;#039;s youngest brother, Richard, skipped the steps and climbed up on the dais, dressed not for a funeral but in T-shirt and jeans, holding a pint of Guinness. He thanked everybody for coming and then, raising the glass, said, &amp;quot;Pat isn&amp;#039;t with God. He&amp;#039;s fucking dead. He wasn&amp;#039;t religious. So thank you for your thoughts, but he&amp;#039;s fucking dead.&amp;quot; Richard Tillman&amp;#039;s grief and rage were so big that he could barely contain them, and that was before he knew that in the government cover story attending his brother&amp;#039;s death, there wasn&amp;#039;t a shred of truth. In spite of the best efforts of the White House and the Pentagon, the world would come to know he had been killed in an act of fratricide that was then covered up in favor of a horrible series of official lies.  But that we know the truth at all is owed to the extraordinary determination of Tillman&amp;#039;s family, a foulmouthed and eclectic bunch of square-jawed hippies from San Jose, California, and in particular his mother, Mary. A more compliant family, more easily bamboozled by the institutions of American power at the highest levels, might have meekly, or readily, accepted the government&amp;#039;s vigorous effort to turn Pat Tillman into a Sergeant York fantasy that it could then exploit relentlessly for propaganda purposes.  Amir Bar-Lev&amp;#039;s powerful film, Tillman (out August 20), takes in that whole sordid period in the life of America (we will need many such films and books to begin to figure out what happened to us in the first decade of this new century) and portrays the singular Tillman family vividly and wonderfully. As Mary Tillman says in the film, the truth is more powerful than the lies. Pat Tillman was a much more interesting man and more of an actual hero than the figure his government tried to turn him into. This story is not over and won&amp;#039;t be until someone is held accountable for desecrating her son&amp;#039;s corpse. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a8026/new-pat-tillman-movie-0810/>