All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

David Martin is National Security Correspondent for CBS News.

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"With any luck our family would sink quietly into our grief and the whole unsavory episode would be swept under the rug." That, says Kevin Tillman, is what the Army hoped would happen after it belatedly informed the family that his brother Pat had been killed not by the enemy but accidentally by one of his own men. "However, they miscacalculated our family's reaction."

The family has been relentless in demanding answers both to how Pat Tillman was killed -- was it an accident or negligence -- and why the Army took so long to tell them he had fallen to friendly fire. You don't have to buy the family's theory that the Pentagon deliberately concocted a story of heroism in Afghanistan to divert attention from a war gone bad in Iraq to be impressed by what they've accomplished. There has now been a total of five investigations into Tillman's death and four generals face the possibility of disciplinary action. But his mother, Mary, still thinks there's a cover up. "I think these generals were under orders personally by somone higher. I don't think these generals acted on their own. . . That's a smokescreen. These officers are scapegoats." And there is tantalizing evidence that she may be onto something.

An e-mail dated April 28, 2004 -- six days after Tillman died -- says that John Currin, a White House speechwriter, had asked for more information about the former NFL star which the President could use in an upcoming speech. The next day, Maj. Gen. Stan McChrystal, the commander of operations in Afghanistan, sent an "eyes only" message to three senior generals, including John Abizaid, then the overall commander of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, informing them it was "highly possible" Tillman had been killed by friendly fire. According to an investigation by the Pentagon's Inspector General, McChrystal sent that message "so that they could inform the President or the Acting Secretary of the Army, in case they chose to make remarks that might prove embarrassing if the public learned that Corporal Tillman died by frlendly fire." There the paper trail ends -- except that two days later when the President gave that speech he referred to "the loss" of Pat Tillman but made no mention of the still official story that he was killed by enemy fire. Two days after that a nationally televised memorial service was held for Tillman at which he was posthumously awarded the Silver Star. Not until more than three weeks after that was the family finally told the truth...

David Martin is National Security Correspondent for CBS News.

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To watch Jessica Lynch testify before a congressional committee today, you had to take her word for it that this was the same terrified young lady we saw being carried on to a transport plane after her rescue by special operations forces.

She showed no outward signs of the severe injuries she had suffered when her vehicle was hit by a rocket propelled grenade and crashed, although she said she still has no feeling in part of her left leg and wears a brace at least some of the time. She most definitely is no longer terrified. She is self-assured and articulate, no doubt skills she had to develop in order to handle the media frenzy that descended on her when she arrived home in Palestine, West Virginia, as probably the most famous private in the Army.

A couple days after her rescue, The Washington Post had reported that before she was captured by the Iraqis she "fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers...firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition" According to the Post account, which was based on anonymous sources citing battlefield reports, Lynch kept firing "even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds." By her own account, none of that happened. She never fired her weapon and was knocked unconscious when her vehicle crashed, waking up hours later in an Iraqi hospital. As she put it in her testimony today, the story depicted her as "the little girl Rambo from the hills of West Virginia who went down fighting. It was not true." She blamed the media for perpetuating the myth. "They should have found out the facts before they spread the word like wildfire."

Her hero status earned her and a co-writer a $1 million advance for a book, so in one sense the myth paid off for Jessica Lynch. But in her testimony she eloquently debunked the urge to put a heroic face on war. "The American people are capable of determining their own heros ...and the don't need to be told elaborate lies...The truth of war is not always easy. The truth is always more heroic than the hype."

Jim Axelrod has today's First Look at the Evening News.

One of the top stories involves the Congressional investigation into the friendly fire death of NFL star Pat Tillman in Afghanistan. Just click the monitor for more.