Steve, you're right... but its the media sensation and those who run with the ball that are irritating, to say the least.
He was a man and a hero, no more so than any other man in the field. Making him a media icon is simply going with the popular flow and driving the media to find more stories akin to that.
Nuke, if you wanted to have a "respectful" conversation you wouldn't have singled me out. There was atleast one other person who said what I said, but in more words and less concise - of course he served so you couldn't say, "Hey ass, I will destroy you now". At the same time, I posted remarks that were directly related to the thread's subject/title. Then, you decided to make a new thread because you knew when you saw the title that it wasn't about Tillman - and about Patriotism defined... about Tillman.
At the same time, you state that I view Tillman as less of a patriot than the hundreds of thousands of millions of men/soldiers that came before him - when in fact I was stating that those same men/soldiers were in fact just as much as patriotism defined as he was. Thereby, in the roundabout way, achieving what I intended in the first post - that he was no more "Patriotism defined" than those fine men that came before him. He was more of a man/patriot than the NFL players, but thats different than saying he was "Patriotism defined".
-SW