ARUN RATH:
From WNYC in New York, this is NPR’s On the Media. Bob Garfield is out this week. I’m Arun Rath.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And I’m Brooke Gladstone. It’s been almost four months since Democrats took back the gavel on Capitol Hill, and they’ve been banging away ever since. This week, they defied the White House by passing a war-funding bill with a timetable for troop withdrawal, and issuing subpoenas to Administration and Republican Party officials involved in alleged wrongdoing.

But it was a House hearing on Tuesday that provided the most searing TV images. The topic at hand was the Pentagon’s management of war stories, specifically those of Jessica Lynch – remember her - and Corporal Pat Tillman, the former NFL star turned army ranger, who was killed in Afghanistan three years ago.

The Army originally said Tillman was ambushed by hostile forces, but it later emerged that he was killed by friendly fire. His family now accuses the Pentagon of a deliberate cover-up. Here was Pat’s brother Kevin on Tuesday.
KEVIN TILLMAN:
To further exploit Pat’s death, he was awarded the Silver Star for valor, and we believe the strategy had the intended effect. It shifted the focus from the grotesque torture at Abu Ghraib in a downward spiral of an illegal act of aggression to a great American who died a hero’s death.
ARUN RATH:
An Army investigation found that Tillman’s family should have been told about the fratricide right away. But there was no broader cover-up. That may be true, but there’s little doubt that at the time, the military benefited from the trumped-up tale of battling the enemy.

We asked military historian and Army Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Bateman, speaking as a historian, not a military spokesman, to give us some perspective on hero making in other wars.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL BATEMAN:
Government involvement really starts in the First World War. Coupled with the military’s censorship rules and control of what’s getting out, the entire United States government was geared up to mobilizing feelings of nationalism and patriotism, and not in the least because that was also one of the methods we were using to fund the war, the war bonds drives.

You really haven’t seen that in this war. Maybe we’re in a too skeptical of an age, and so we don’t even attempt such a thing.
ARUN RATH:
But you don’t think, at least to some extent, that’s what happened with Pat Tillman, that he was, you know - he was such a poster boy in every way you would really want?
LIEUTENANT COLONEL BATEMAN:
I understand that the Silver Star that they put him in for, that was something that was done that was, you know, egregious, but it was done at a very low level. This isn’t the parading the guys around, you know, the heroes of the Memphis Belle, or the guys who raised the flag on top of Mount Surabachi. You know, those were managed, staged events, after the fact.

In this case, with Tillman, the people who wrote the Silver Star, as I understand it, it seems most likely that it was somebody at a much lower level.
ARUN RATH:
Well, I think what’s troubling for people is that if you were to shake down a lot of people on the street and ask the name of a soldier who was in each war, like Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman would probably be at the top of the list.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL BATEMAN:
And the other name would be Liddie England, right?
ARUN RATH:
Right. Are you worried that these are the characters that people are going to come away from Iraq and Afghanistan with?
LIEUTENANT COLONEL BATEMAN:
Well, when you look back, the names that people remember are the names of soldiers that won the Medal of Honor. So for example, in the First World War, you have Sergeant York, and in the Second World War you have Audie Murphy, both of whom won the Medal of Honor.

It is kind of interesting, though. The Army is really not putting forward stories of heroes. We’ve had one Army Medal of Honor and one Marine Corps Medal of Honor in just about five years of war.
ARUN RATH:
Now why is that? I mean, if you actually spend time reading newspapers in depth, read Tom Ricks of The Washington Post or go online and read some military blogs, there are amazing stories of heroism. Why are they not getting out?
LIEUTENANT COLONEL BATEMAN:
I have no idea. It’s almost as though we have raised the bar ourselves, but the unintentional product of that is that there’s not as many stories to give to the media as, you know, this is something we have thoroughly investigated, and can absolutely confirm happened this way and this man deserves the Medal of Honor.

Perhaps it’s just too high of a bar to meet, now that the standards of truth are so much higher than they were in previous wars.
ARUN RATH:
Is it a new thing that we have in a situation like this, with Jessica Lynch, you know, the soldiers themselves kind of criticizing the public story that’s come into existence?
LIEUTENANT COLONEL BATEMAN:
The only thing new about it is with the proliferation of news outlets, the ability for their story to get out. If you’re willing to plough through all the primary source documents, you certainly had people who were undercutting accounts of heroism.

Today with blogs, with so many more news outlets available to them, individual soldiers can set the record straight, as it were, much sooner and much more loudly.
ARUN RATH:
Was Vietnam really the time at which the military started to lose control over the stories of their soldiers and the heroes? I mean, we talked about characters defining the war, and for a lot of people, the one soldier’s name they could recall from Vietnam would be Lieutenant Calley, of My Lai fame.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL BATEMAN:
By the time of the increasing American involvement in Vietnam, you’ve got an entirely new generation of journalists that are growing up, that were not World War II combat correspondents. A few of them were, but most of the others were a new crop, just as – the nation just lost David Halberstam - David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, and they were not brought up under the idea of, you know, we need to know what we can and can’t say. They were brought up under an idea of, well, we decide what we can and can’t say.
ARUN RATH:
Bob, thank you very much.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL BATEMAN:
Thank you, Arun.
ARUN RATH:
Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bateman is in the U.S. Army and he’s the author of No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident.