Three days removed from the ambush and the ensuing firefight, it wasn't the memory of the rounds of gunshots raining clouds of rock and dust down the towering canyon walls that troubled Spc. Ryan Mansfield. It was the madness of making sense of it all.
Spc. Pat Tillman was dead.
Sitting in a crammed tent at Camp Salerno, the Army's Forward Operating Base in the province of Khowst, Afghanistan, Mansfield witnessed the raw emotion and friction in the unit as the soldiers agonized over the tragic outcome of the mission. An Army chaplain pulled up a seat. So did an Army psychiatrist as squad leaders and high-ranking officers joined the 30 or so young Rangers still fresh from their first firefight.
The soldiers in the Black Sheep platoon didn't need a tidy, bureaucratic Army inquiry to tell them what they already knew: Pat Tillman had been killed in a case of fratricide, otherwise known as friendly fire, by someone among them at the meeting.
By then, they knew that. Like Mansfield, though, many of them were struggling with how it had happened. With why it had happened. With the awful enormity of it all.
Read Full Article »