Halfway through, I was mortified. I realized why the Tillman story has stayed in my gut. Dannie Tillman did what a nation full of high-paid, overblown journalists should have done. She went after the real story while the beautiful people on TV and the nerds with notepads broadcast and wrote morality plays. She got in the military’s face, in the government’s face. She didn’t let up. She was doing journalism while journalists were doing what we mostly do now — chase Web hits and take short cuts to higher profits. A housewife got the real story, or as much of it as anybody probably will. Professionals trained to do so gathered moss and wrote slop.

Pat Tillman film a haunting blindside