Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

by Jon Krakauer

Inevitably, warring societies portray their campaigns as virtuous struggles, and present their fallen warriors as heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice for a noble cause.

As Aeschylus, the illustrious Greek tragedian, noted in the fifth century B.C., “In war, truth is the first casualty.”

He was one of those rare individuals who simply can’t be bought at any price. Although he had no qualms about making a boatload of money if it happened to mesh with his master plan, Pat was impervious to greed.

This … leads me to believe that we have little or no justification other than our imperial whim. Of course Nub & I have … willingly allowed ourselves to be pawns in this game and will do our job whether we agree with it or not. All we ask is that it is duly noted that we harbor no illusions of virtue.

To this day, very few Americans have any inkling that seventeen U.S. Marines were killed by U.S. Air Force jets on the fourth day of the Iraq War.

The Tillman brothers lamented how easy it had been for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld to bully Secretary of State Colin Powell, both houses of Congress, and the vast majority of the American people into endorsing the invasion of Iraq.

But returning to the NFL was not the only thing on Pat’s agenda after his military service was over. He was also looking forward to having a tête-à-tête with Noam Chomsky, a meeting that Pat had prevailed upon Réka Cseresnyés, his old college study partner from Budapest, to arrange.

“Pat and I used to talk at night a lot before we’d rack out. I don’t know how the conversation got brought up, but one night he said he was afraid that if something were to happen to him, Bush’s people would, like, make a big deal out of his death and parade him through the streets. And those were his exact words: ‘I don’t want them to parade me through the streets.’ It just burned into my brain, him saying that.”

it was merely a coincidence that Army personnel falsified documents, withheld information, and violated regulations “up and down the chain of command…. There was no cover-up. There was misinformed action on the part of multiple soldiers, and you had a perfect storm of mistakes by many soldiers.”

As Emmet T. Flood, special counsel to the president, explained, “We have not produced certain documents responsive to the Committee’s request because they implicate Executive Branch confidentiality interests.”

Funny a lot of people now know this name and not because of this book or event.

To raise funds, the Pat Tillman Foundation holds a pair of 4.2-mile running events each April in Tempe and San Jose;

Mary Tillman’s beautiful, searing book, Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman.