Twenty years after Pat Tillman was mistakenly killed by members of his own platoon emerging from a rocky canyon in Afghanistan, the buddies who shouldered nearly all the blame are still frustrated that high-ranking officers escaped punishment for orders they gave before - -and for lies they told after -- the fratricide.
Over the past year, ESPN reached out to more than 50 people with disparate connections to the April 22, 2004, incident, including senior military officers, investigators, members of Congress, officials in former President George W. Bush's White House, and even the former president himself.
The interviews and a review of 20 years of investigation reports and other documents, including a book recently self-published by a former Delta Force commander, provide an expansive look inside the decisions that led to the shooting and the ensuing damage-control effort to minimize the Army's embarrassment.
Among the new findings:
Unreported in any publicly released government investigations, the tragedy nearly turned into an even worse disaster: An entirely separate Ranger group was patrolling the same area as Tillman's split platoon. All three units were converging on the same hot zone with no knowledge of one another's presence.
According to interviews, three officers commanding operations from remote consoles had multiple chances to rethink potentially fatal decisions but instead overruled platoon leaders on the ground and chose the most dangerous set of options.
The long-known cover-up of what happened reached the top ranks of the Army. Despite his sworn testimony that he knew nothing about friendly fire until weeks after Tillman's death, Gen. John Abizaid, the Central Command chief at the time, was told of the likely fratricide in a phone call within 24 hours, according to a senior officer privy to the call. On Abizaid's watch, a myth was allowed to persist for 35 days that enemy fire killed Tillman.
A senior Bush administration official appointed in the aftermath, Army Secretary Pete Geren, told ESPN in his first public comments on the Tillman case since leaving office that the military's deceit and failure to report fratricide could be interpreted as a cover-up.
"We found people who had engaged in deception," Geren told ESPN. "We found people who knew the truth and looked the other way. And there were several. And you could, if someone wanted to, call that a 'cover-up.'"