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[QUOTE=Spasmolytic;212424]No, I'm not insulting the man. That's a partial quote from his brother at his memorial service. I have nothing but respect for people who serve their country. He believed in what he was doing and I can respect that (regardless of my lack of faith in my government). My respect has grown ten-fold after reading this article:

[url]http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/04/SPG5K6FD091.DTL[/url]

Just when we thought we had a pure and simple hero, a millionaire athlete who gave up wealth and fame to become the ideal patriot, to make the ultimate sacrifice, his friends and family complicated everything. They turned Pat Tillman into a human being Monday, showing us what was really lost during that ambush in Afghanistan, insisting that we question every assumption we've made since he died an icon on April 22.

Yes, there were uplifting tales, moments when tears and pride swelled in everyone watching Tillman's memorial service at the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden. There were jarring moments, too, and they carried the message of the afternoon -- "challenge yourself" -- more powerfully than those laden with conventional inspiration.

Tillman's youngest brother, Rich, wore a rumpled white T-shirt, no jacket, no tie, no collar, and immediately swore into the microphone. He hadn't written anything, he said, and with the starkest honesty, he asked mourners to hold their spiritual bromides.

"Pat isn't with God,'' he said. "He's f -- ing dead. He wasn't religious. So thank you for your thoughts, but he's f -- ing dead.''

What? This didn't happen for God, as well as country? A professional athlete turned soldier, and we're supposed to believe that he'd have no use for piety? Robbed of a cliche, where does that leave us?

Challenge yourself.

His brother-in-law and close friend, Alex Garwood, described how Tillman handled his duties when he became godfather to Garwood's son. He came to the ceremony dressed as a woman. Not as a religious commentary. He was doing a balancing act.

"We had two godfathers, no godmother,'' Garwood explained. And what NFL player turned Army Ranger wouldn't don drag to make that math work?

Who on earth was this guy?

He was the same person who often talked late into the night with his linebackers coach at ASU, prying apart stereotypes about college football players and future soldiers.

"He talked about gays,'' Lyle Setencich, the former ASU assistant said. "He asked me, 'Could you coach gays?' " Setencich told Tillman yes. He could, and he had. He repeated that at the memorial service, televised on ESPN, in front of the sports world, showing another side of a coach, another side of an American hero.

Challenge yourself.

Tillman talked about everything, with everyone. According to the speakers, he had read the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and he underlined passages constantly. Garwood recalled how he'd mail articles to friends, highlighting certain parts and writing in the margins: "Let's discuss.'' A quotation from Emerson, found underlined in Tillman's readings, adorned the program.

It concluded with this: "But the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.''

Yet he was a team player. When the Arizona Cardinals lost their kicker early in a game, Tillman cut into a conversation between the team trainer and head coach Dave McGinnis. "You know who's kicking off for us now, don't you?'' McGinnis said, quoting Tillman, a safety who had no real credentials for the kicking job. Most pro athletes wouldn't risk humiliating themselves that way.

"Pat didn't want to be the focal point, but he liked being out front,'' McGinnis said, "if that makes any sense.''

Tillman's roommate in the pros, Zack Walz, took a newspaper clipping to the podium and read about how he and some Cardinals teammates had made up faux dog tags for themselves, declaring their unit a band of warriors. "Soldiers, battlers, lay it on the line,'' Walz said, sniffling as he scanned the clip. "What the hell did we know? Listen to the words. Listen to the metaphors. ... How hollow they ring.''

When Tillman came home late last year from his first tour of duty, Walz said that he understood the difference now, what genuine war and real dog tags meant. A couple of weeks later, he received a gift in the mail, Tillman's dog tags.

"I'm holding them in my hand now,'' Walz said, "but they will never be this far from my heart again.''

Tillman's respect for his former teammate holds another lesson. Since he died, it has been fashionable to contrast his sense of duty with the petulance and inflated sense of importance in modern athletes. Still, Tillman was an athlete as much as he was a soldier.

It has been said over and over that he wouldn't want to be revered while we ignore the other soldiers lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. Would he want his former friends in football belittled, their values bashed as a way to measure his sacrifice? That's too easy.

Challenge yourself.

By the time the ceremony ended, after his brother and brother-in-law sipped the Guinness that Garwood poured in Tillman's honor, the funny, thinking, wild, crazy man had come to life. The family's loss, the loss of every soldier's family, seemed more real.

Tillman wasn't an icon anymore. He was a man you wanted to know, to spend time with, to lift a Guinness alongside. But that had become impossible, the price of war, because his brother was right. Pat is dead. He's f -- ing dead.

E-mail Gwen Knapp at [email]gknapp@sfchronicle.com[/email].[/QUOTE]

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May 17th, 2004 04:16 PM

kellychaos

Once again, Vinth awakens cataract-eyed and Bushy-taled. Why, good morning, commander!

This is Bush

And Vinth is your brain on Bush:

< insert fatass photo here >

Any questions?

Oh, and here's a sweeeeeet link:

LINKY

May 16th, 2004 04:51 PM

pjalne

I can't believe I still have this thing online.

May 16th, 2004 04:46 PM

KevinTheOmnivore

:submarineletter

May 16th, 2004 10:04 AM

VinceZeb

I'm sad to see that you haven't splattered your brains on your living room wall, Max.

May 15th, 2004 10:55 PM

mburbank

Wow. Vinth, way to get back in the game. Acussing a guy who's brother is dead of manipulating his ulogy for an 'agenda', AND getting a homo jab at Kelly! Stick with these meds, they're working out for you. Keep going like this and soon you may have the strength to put something on your site after those whacky Japanese and their life savin' robots. Way to go, you greasy, obese, cowardly, lying little girlscout!

May 15th, 2004 09:06 PM

Perndog

Quote:

Originally Posted by Big Papa Goat

Some of the liberals here are easily as dogmatic as Ronny or Vince.
Just sayin is all :/

But the dogmatic liberals get their dogma from more varied sources than the Republican Party. And they're not as blatantly retarded.

May 14th, 2004 03:56 PM

kellychaos

Quote:

Originally Posted by VinceZeb

Really, Kelly? That's what he was going for? I would have never guessed.

Speaking of tools, I bet you have sucked a few of them back in your military days. Probably the only way you avoided the towel parties, huh?

Fag.

Go back to playing with your G.I. Joe action figures. If weren't so blindingly patriotic (in the way that Bush wants you to be, not in the real sense), then you'd see that Tillman wasn't a self-righteous, born again, example for the media that everyone wanted him to be. You need to read what lies beneath the newspapers and rheotic. Life isn't that black and white. He was a human freaking being and, if I have any kind of belief at all in the afterlife, I think Tillman was speaking from the grave, through his brother, to morons like you. And as for the towel parties? Although they never happened to me, at least I earned my place in the military where a towel party was even a possibility, eh commander?

May 14th, 2004 08:32 AM

phnompehn

Quote:

Originally Posted by VinceZeb

Speaking of tools, I bet you have sucked a few of them back in your military days. Probably the only way you avoided the towel parties, huh?

Fag.

Is Burbank's quote list still being compiled? I'd say this is a definite entry.

May 14th, 2004 07:45 AM

Brandon

I miss the days when Vince's retorts were all variants of "I fucked your mother."

May 14th, 2004 06:38 AM

Dole

"Really, Kelly? That's what he was going for? I would have never guessed.

Speaking of tools, I bet you have sucked a few of them back in your military days. Probably the only way you avoided the towel parties, huh?

Fag."

-you absolute fucking loser. You pathetic twat. Why the fuck are you alive? Who would give the slightest shit if you died?

May 14th, 2004 04:21 AM

Big Papa Goat

Some of the liberals here are easily as dogmatic as Ronny or Vince.
Just sayin is all :/

May 13th, 2004 09:44 PM

sspadowsky

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zorak790

you know when i first got here, i though vince was the needed conservative on the boards. then i read a post, and have hated him ever since.

At least raygun can articulately argue a point losing or winning.

Actually, no, he can't. He can cut and paste from conservative websites, and when pressed to defend his point of view, he can say, "I don't have to support it because it's common sense and everybody knows it." (direct quote) True, he's more articulate than Vince, but so is the average lobotomite.

May 13th, 2004 09:38 PM

Perndog

Or basically just losing.

May 13th, 2004 09:12 PM

CastroMotorOil

May 13th, 2004 07:04 PM

sspadowsky

Another well-thought-out, articulate, and witty retort, brought to you by VinceZeb.

How does he do it, folks?

May 13th, 2004 06:32 PM

VinceZeb

May 13th, 2004 04:11 PM

kellychaos

Quote:

Originally Posted by VinceZeb

What his brother was SAYING was that his brother was not religious and that the service was not so much a memorial for him as a soap box for all the bandwagoners that want to jump into the spotlight of a hero's funeral by giving a false support to a person they didn't know and spouting off their conservative, moral majority rhetoric. His POINT was that they didn't even know his brother at all or the idea of God wouldn't have entered the ceremony at all. His POINT was that he didn't like his brother being used as photo op for the supposedly patriotic that wouldn't have known his brother from Adam prior to his death being a media event. Get it, tool?

May 13th, 2004 01:21 PM

Cosmo Electrolux

his brother was upset becasue of all of the religious bullshit..the gods will stuff and all of that. Apparently the deceased wasn't a religious person and the brother was offended.

May 13th, 2004 09:56 AM

Dole

"What was his brother trying to prove by all the stuff he said about his brother? It seemed that he had more of an agenda and the writer did as well. "

-His brother was in the midst of grieving for his murdered sibling. I doubt 'agendas' were particularly forefront in his mind.

The writer was trying to show that maybe Tilman was not the stereotypical gung-ho patriot that one could be forgiven for assuming he was.

May 13th, 2004 09:48 AM

VinceZeb

Yes, an agenda. Do you think the SFGate would have even commented on this story if it would have been a traditional "preachers talk about guy being good and being with god and people talk all good stuff" type of funeral service with some overt patriotism thrown in for good measure? What was his brother trying to prove by all the stuff he said about his brother? It seemed that he had more of an agenda and the writer did as well.

Be honest. Did you care about if Tillman is really in Heaven or Hell? Did we care if Tillman read religious books? It just seems too damn polarized to me. It seems like all the writer wanted to do was to say "HEY LOOK YOU GOD-LOVIN HOMOPHOBIC MIDWESTERN HICKS! HERE IS YOUR SUPER PATRIOT HERO! LOOK AT HIM NOW! HAHAHAHAHAHA!"

May 13th, 2004 08:56 AM

Dole

"used the guys death as a way to promote their own agenda" -

what?? that their brother was dead? You're talking absolute bollocks.

May 13th, 2004 08:18 AM

VinceZeb

Althought it shows how little tact his brother has (and if I was the guys' boss, I wouldn't put him in charge of anything important), that is the way a funeral should be. Funerals for the most part are bullshit. I hate those feel good "Oh there with God now" type of funeral-parties.

But what was this moronic brother (and the writer of this article) try to prove? Sounds to me that they used the guys death as a way to promote their own agenda for no reason. Certainly not the right time or place to do that. But of course kellychaos agrees with it because he is a fucking loser.

May 12th, 2004 04:13 PM

kellychaos

Absolutely. They're taking the "funerals are for the living" theory to the extreme. I'm glad his brother was there to straighten the hypocrites out. While I'm not exactly in love with the means, the end was achieved.

May 12th, 2004 01:19 PM

Spasmolytic

Quote:

Originally Posted by phnompehn

Now, if we could get Dale Earnhardt's family to say that, we'd have less rednecks with the number 3 sticker on their bumpers.

What is it with white trash idolizing/manipulating dead people for their causes? Dead people don't have opinions, yet we're always acting like they do. They're all just fucking dead.

True. You sound like George Carlin

May 12th, 2004 08:34 AM

phnompehn

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