Anyway, three events occurred in rapid succession for me—I watched The Tillman Story, I received news that Osama Bin Laden was killed a full 24 hours after everyone else, and director/photojournalist Tim Hetherington was killed in Libya as he went about trying to search out the heart of the haziness with a video camera. These are all unrelated events, ranging from semi-recent to entirely recent, with a common denominator being “killed.” All of them are dead—atheist, pantheist, fanatic. All of them were individual parcels of manias, religion, neuroses, convictions and passions. All of them obscured at some point by media. All of them mysteriously driven.

Starting with Pat Tillman, who walked away from a coveted position in the definitive American psyche—an NFL football player for the Arizona Cardinals—to join the Army. Why he did this? Presumably because of a gnawing sense of obligation to live up to his military examples (relatives) in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The Tillman Story goes so far beyond what you’d expect, particularly when you’re not sure what you’re expecting. The documentary is fascinating not for capturing the All-American football player with the mysterious, patriotic bent, but because it demystifies. It plays at the fog of war itself, the underlying agendas, the cover-up of how he was killed, the family of his who won’t stand for it, and the size they become (pebble-like) when up against The Thing (high-ranking, untouchable military officials). It serves as a small, barely visible lantern in the haziness of war, zeroed in on in a courtroom and in the Afghanistan mountains. In effect, it is a story of obfuscation being at heart of things, with Pat Tillman’s face attached as a hero-tinted campaigning tool. The trick the film turns is a co-mingling sense of trust and distrust, the rising and falling ceilings of each. This thing touches on the outposts of what we know we don’t know. Hell, even Jon Krakauer wrote a book about Tillman, Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, that could be shelved in either fiction or nonfiction and be right in both instances.

Then news trickles in a couple of weeks back that photojournalist Tim Hetherington, who was nominated for an Oscar last year for his brilliant, terrifying film Restrepo, was killed on the job in besieged Misrata, Libya in the midst of the civil war. It’s still undetermined if he was killed by a rocket propelled grenade or by mortar fire. His mission was to capture the truth of what he saw, and to keep us informed. His film Restrepo did that. It was a clarity unusually seen of the traumatic micro-sense of war. The macro is not so easily filmed.

Diary (2010) from Tim Hetherington on Vimeo.

Two weeks later we killed Bin Laden almost a decade after the hunt got hot. I was impressed by the unsaid American persistence of so many years. I wondered if tamping out one terrorist just grows another. The news caught people in raptures. Others got blasted for voicing anything empathetic with the bearded figure. For me it just pointed up the idea that there is this fringe reality which is mysterious, comforting, unknowable. Maybe Tillman was a bad metaphor for freedom, maybe Hetherington an objective observer of it and Bin Laden its evil opposite—but that it exists as an ideology and is brought about at crazy costs is at least worth a toast.

“To whatever it is war is!”