CON GAMES: Pat Tillman Meets James T. Kirk

May 15th, 2009 at 06:57am Michael Conniff 2

By sheer coincidence—what other kind can you find in deep space—I went to see the new “Star Trek” movie on the same stardate as the news arrived that Pat Tillman’s parents were protesting the selection of the general to lead U.S. troops in Afghanistan—the same officer who botched the investigation into their son’s death. The Tillmans, not surprisingly, are apoplectic that Lt. General Stanley McChrystal has been appointed by President Barack Obama to lead American troops in the same country where Pat Tillman died by friendly fire.

Tillman, of course, is the late National Football League (NFL) star who eschewed $3.6 million and more to enlist after 9/11 with his brother in the Army Rangers. The true story of his death was covered up multiple times by the U.S. Army—long enough for him to be buried as the quintessential American hero who gave his life for a cause greater than his own. The original story of his putatively heroic death turned out to be a complete fabrication: his family became angrier and angrier as the truth failed to unfold and the coverup began to unravel.

It was heroic enough for Pat Tillman to give up his worldly good and go into harm’s way for his country with the Rangers, but after seeing the new version of “Star Trek” I can’t help but find elements of his courageous life in the assembled mythology of James T. Kirk, the young Captain of the Starship Enterprise. The new story goes to the very birth of the baby who would become captain of the Starship Enterprise. Kirk’s father is killed after 12 minutes as Captain, but not before saving 800 lives—including the life of his wife as she gives birth in a space shuttle to James Tiberius Kirk. As in all our American wars the line between Good and Evil is thick and wide in “Star Trek” with no ambiguity about the good guys. James T. Kirk as a young man is a popcorn hero: he flings himself off Starship and somehow survives the diciest conditions on an ice planet. If they had bullets in those days they would no doubt bounce right off him. Like Pat Tillman, he is a renegade driven by forces unseen. But the fictional Kirk, nearly the same age as Tillman when he died in Afghanistan, has the luxury of beaming up whenever the penultimate moment arrives. In the forbidden terrain of Afghanistan, Pat Tillman had no such luck, no movie makeup to mask the inexorability of his tragic death.

Life imitates art but only so much—and that’s the point.

When America goes to war it goes to the movies, because in the movies you rarely see the spoiled blood of our young. Sometimes the violence is masked by the death of strange abhorrent creatures who presumably bow to shrines heretofore unseen. In real life our cause is just, our soldiers exemplary, just like in the movies. Needless to say, in the movies the good guys always win and live to fight another day. No wonder we can’t bear to lose.

Was there every a doubt that Captain Kirk would end “Star Trek” at the helm of the Starship Enterprise? Or that Pat Tillman would die so tragically and inexplicably in the war in Afghanistan?

As a people we go to war for the same reason we go to the movies: for the happy ending just before the credits roll, before Johnny comes marching home.