{"id":41808,"date":"2023-02-13T09:53:45","date_gmt":"2023-02-13T17:53:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=41808"},"modified":"2023-02-13T09:53:45","modified_gmt":"2023-02-13T17:53:45","slug":"the-militarized-super-bowl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2023\/02\/13\/the-militarized-super-bowl\/","title":{"rendered":"The Militarized Super Bowl"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from Bracing Views<\/a> with the author’s permission.<\/i><\/p>\n

I never miss a Super Bowl<\/a>, and this year\u2019s game was close until its somewhat anti-climatic end. Of course, there\u2019s always a winning team and a losing one, but perhaps the biggest winner remains the military-industrial complex, which is always featured and saluted in these games.<\/p>\n

How so? The obligatory military flyover featured Navy jets flown by female pilots. Progress! The obligatory shot of an overseas (or on-the-sea) military unit featured the colorful crew of the USS Carl Vinson<\/em>, an aircraft carrier. A Marine Corps color guard marched out the American flag along with the flags of each of the armed services. The announcers made a point to \u201chonor those who fight for our nation.\u201d All this is standard stuff, a repetitive ritual that turns the Super Bowl into Veterans Day, if only for a few minutes.<\/p>\n

What was new about this year\u2019s ceremony was the celebration of Pat Tillman\u2019s life, the sole NFL player (and I think the only athlete<\/a> in any of America\u2019s \u201cmajor\u201d sports leagues) to give up his career and hefty paycheck to enlist in the U.S. military after 9\/11. Yes, Pat Tillman deserves praise<\/a> for that, and since the game was played in Arizona and Tillman had been with the Arizona Cardinals, honoring him was understandable. Yet, the network (in this case, Fox) quickly said he\u2019d \u201clost his life in the line of duty.\u201d No further details.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"

Pat Tillman\u2019s glorious statue<\/p><\/div>\n

Tillman was killed in a friendly-fire incident that was covered up by the US military in a conspiracy that went at least as high as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The military told the Tillman family Pat had died heroically in combat with the enemy in Afghanistan and awarded him the Silver Star. The Tillman family eventually learned the truth, that Pat had been killed by accident in the chaos of war, a casualty of FUBAR, because troops in combat, hyped on adrenaline, confused and under stress, make deadly mistakes far more often than we\u2019d like to admit.<\/p>\n

What makes me sad more than angry is how Tillman\u2019s legacy is being used to sell the military as a good and noble place, a path toward self-actualization. Tillman, a thoughtful person, a soldier who questioned the war<\/a> he was in, is now being reduced to a simple heroic archetype, just another recruitment statue for the US military.<\/p>\n

His life was more meaningful than that. His lesson more profound. His was a cautionary tale of a life of service and sacrifice in a war gone wrong; his death and the military\u2019s lies about the same are grim lessons about the waste of war, its lack of nobility, the sheer awfulness of it all.<\/p>\n

Tillman\u2019s statue captures the essence of a man full of life. His death by friendly fire in a misbegotten war, made worse by the lies told to the Tillman family by the US military, reminds us that the essence of war is death.<\/p>\n

That was obviously not the intended message of this Super Bowl tribute. That message was of military service as transformative, as full of grace, and I\u2019m sorry but I just can\u2019t stomach it because of what happened to Pat Tillman and how he was killed not only by friendly fire on the ground but how his life was then mutilated by those at the highest levels of the US military.<\/p>\n

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools. He writes at Bracing Views<\/a>. <\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission. I never miss a Super Bowl, and this year\u2019s game was close until its somewhat anti-climatic end. Of course, there\u2019s always a winning team and a losing one, but perhaps the biggest winner remains the military-industrial complex, which is always featured and saluted in these games. How […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-41808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":"The blurring and blending of sports and war"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41808"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41811,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41808\/revisions\/41811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41808"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=41808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}