I Cogitate

Playing the Atheism Card Against Pat Tillman’s Family

By Stan Goff
Truthdig
July 28, 2006

Editor’s note: The author of this essay, Stan Goff, is a retired veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces. During an active-duty career that spanned 1970 to 1996, he served with the elite Delta Force and Rangers, and in Vietnam, Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Somalia and Haiti...

...Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich has taken Christ into his heart, or so he says.  Like my old colleague, Lt. Gen. William G. (“Jerry”) Boykin, he has also carried the organically entrapped messiah onto the heathen-infested battlegrounds of Southwest Asia.  Kauzlarich is the subject of my exposition today, but Boykin is his context.

You all remember Jerry Boykin­the general who, as part of the Bush 2003 civil relations effort in Iraq, called Muslims idol worshippers.

Back in the Reagan days, Boykin and I were simultaneously assigned to the allegedly super-secret Delta Force.  He was a major then, and he would organize prayer breakfasts for the unit, driving many of us out of the building to purchase sausage-biscuits.  His evangelical lunacy was already under siege then.  Special Operations is a motley fraternity, in which operators are as likely to worship Odin or an oak tree as they are to attend Sunday services.

Boykin’s recent rise is symptomatic of War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s fascination with Special Operations­in spite of its generally dismal record.  Kauzlarich was on the same career fast track when he was the 75th Ranger Regiment’s “cross commander” at Forward Operating Base Salerno, Khoust, Afghanistan, in 2004.

Bishop Boykin, shooting from the lip, asserted in 2003 that the U.S. military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq involved “an Army of God” squaring off against Satan.

Beelzebub himself!  Can’t say Jerry lacks ambition.  Of course, the Satanists in this case were the very Muslims that the administration was trying to recruit as political puppets in the oil patch.

For this subtle bit of international relations, Boykin was punished by promotion to the position of deputy undersecretary of defense for… intelligence.  Yes, the pun is nearly unbearable.

And so Boykin ascended. As the Haitian proverb says:  The higher the monkey climbs, the more you see his ass.

Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, on the other hand, is not exactly being placed center-stage at the Pentagon.  More than any other single person below the rank of general, he is probably most responsible for the Pentagon’s embarrassment when NFL-player-turned-Army-Ranger Pat Tillman was killed on April 22, 2004, by his own comrades.

Kauzlarich has been energetically avoiding responsibility for the fratricidal incident ever since...

...Kauzlarich may have conspired with others to award an inappropriate Silver Star, complete with a phony account of the events surrounding Tillman’s death.  Members of Tillman’s chain of command attended Tillman’s memorial service without breathing a word to the family about what really happened, and it appears, again from the documents, that Kauzlarich deep-sixed the original investigation, which he then had redone under his personal supervision.

The Army’s criminal investigation division and the Pentagon’s Inspector General are currently investigating Tillman’s death and the events that ensued.

Kauzlarich now looks to Nov. 7, 2006, with a gnawing disquiet. Only a thin congressional majority that stand between a nemesis like Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and the chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee. Subpoena authority might transform a mere gavel into a mighty political weapon.

But in the meantime, a recent ESPN.com exposé by Mike Fish aired an interview with Kauzlarich, who was the “cross commander” of the Rangers in Khoust, Afghanistan, in April 2004.  Kauzlarich, in a stunning display of Christian empathy, blamed the family for continuing to ask questions about the circumstances of Pat’s death, and suggested that the reason they’d found no closure was that infidels such as themselves (the Tillmans did not belong to a church), when they die, are only “worm dirt...”

...Kauzlarich, like Boykin and all their ilk, has the spiritual depth of his own skin, which is what he is trying to save … whether in an exchange of faith for immortality or in deflecting the sorry truth onto a bereaved and angered family with cheap revival-tent accusations of “atheism.”

To read complete article (and please do so), go here.

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