CNN.com – Army finds Tillman probably killed by friendly fire – May 29, 2004:
U.S. Army Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former professional football player killed last month in Afghanistan, was probably killed by gunfire from his own unit during an intense firefight, the U.S. Army said Saturday.
As the article reads, this in no way diminishes his sacrifice: he is no less a role model to his fellow soldiers who he was leading to the rescue of a convoy, nor to others who want to focus on something more ennobling than the Abu Ghraib debacle.
But the fact is that, for all our sophisticated weaponry and high tech ordnance, people get killed or maimed by friendly fire or accidents all the time. An RAF Tornado was shot down by US forces in the early stages of the Iraq war, killing both of the crew. It happens in the confusion of a nighttime firefight and the relative clarity of computerized weapons systems.
Ever read Fail-Safe? I’m struck by the scenario of that book — a computer failure in a “failure-proof” system leads to a devastating nuclear strike on Moscow despite every effort to avert it — and one of the opening lines of John Keegan’s The First World War: “Armies make plans.”
The plans are made, the technologies are invented, but at the end of the day, a lot of people just get killed. The technologies that might save us from this are some of our oldest and most familiar and, thanks to the Secretary of Defense, now banned. We can be grateful to Roger Fenton, who took this image in 1855 in the Crimea: those aren’t cannonballs or stones, but human skulls.
And of course, Mathew Brady documented the American Civil War for us to be reminded of the horrors of the bloodiest war fought in the US.