Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

by Jon Krakauer

Ever since Homo sapiens first coalesced into tribes, war has been part of the human condition. 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. But death by so-called friendly fire, which is an inescapable aspect of armed conflict in the modern era, doesn’t conform to this mythic narrative. It strips away war’s heroic veneer to reveal what lies beneath. It’s an unsettling reminder that barbarism, senseless violence, and random death are commonplace even in the most “just” and “honorable” of wars. Consequently, and unsurprisingly, when soldiers accidentally kill one of their own, there is tremendous reluctance to confront the truth within the ranks of the military. There is an overwhelming inclination to keep the unsavory particulars hidden from public view, to pretend the calamity never occurred. Thus it has always been, and probably always will be. As Aeschylus, the illustrious Greek tragedian, noted in the fifth century B.C., “In war, truth is the first casualty.”

Carter’s righteous indignation was more than slightly disingenuous. Although the U.S. government claimed otherwise in official statements, the CIA had begun purchasing weapons for the mujahideen at least six months before the Soviet invasion, and this clandestine support was intended not to deter Moscow but to provoke it. According to Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the purpose of arming the Afghans was to stimulate enough turmoil in Afghanistan “to induce a Soviet military intervention.” Brzezinski, the most fervent cold warrior in the Carter administration, boasted in a 1998 interview that the intent of providing arms to the mujahideen was specifically to draw “the Soviets into the Afghan trap” and ensnare them in a debilitating Vietnam-like debacle.

Before his initial visit to Afghanistan, according to Lawrence Wright’s book The Looming Tower, “bin Laden did not … make much of an impression as a charismatic leader…. ‘He had a small smile on his face and soft hands,’ a hardened Pakistani mujahid recalled. ‘You’d think you were shaking hands with a girl.’ ” Following bin Laden’s exposure to combat, Wright reports, “one can hear for the first time the epic tone that began to characterize his speech—the sound of a man in the grasp of destiny.” In the summer of 1988, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri founded al-Qaeda. Significantly, when bin Laden established the first al-Qaeda training camps, he situated several of them in the mountains of Khost, Haqqani’s homeland. According to an interview bin Laden gave to a journalist from Al Jazeera in 2001, the name al-Qaeda—which means “the training base” in Arabic—in fact owes its origin to these camps in Khost. “The name ‘ al-Qaeda’ was established a long time ago by mere chance,” bin Laden explained. “We used to call the training camp ‘al-Qaeda.’ And the name stayed.”

In 1988, Moscow belatedly acknowledged that victory against the insurgents would never be achieved at any cost, and Gorbachev began to systematically withdraw the Soviet forces from Afghanistan. On February 15, 1989, when the last Soviet soldier retreated back across the Amu Darya—the broad, glacier-fed river that delineated the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan— the war had claimed the lives of an estimated twenty-five thousand Soviet soldiers and well over a million Afghans, 90 percent of whom were civilian noncombatants. Another five million Afghans—nearly a third of the prewar population—had taken flight from the ravaged nation, mostly to dismal refugee camps in neighboring Pakistan and Iran, although some fled to places as far away as California. On the face of it, the trap set for the Soviets by the Carter administration in 1979 seemed to have worked. Nine months after Gorbachev pulled his troops from Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall came down, heralding the imminent dissolution of the Soviet empire—a collapse indubitably hastened by the staggering cost of the Afghan conflict. The climactic battle of the Cold War had been won without the American military even having to get off the couch. Acting as a proxy army, the mujahideen had given the United States a free ride. Or so it seemed at the time.

The central government had never provided much in the way of support or services to the 85 percent of Afghans who lived outside of Kabul or other major cities. In the chaos of the Soviet-Afghan War, as this support dwindled to nothing, rural Afghans looked exclusively to their mullahs, village elders, and the mujahideen commanders for protection and governance. With the national economy in ruins, these commanders and their followers turned to the cultivation of opium poppies as their primary source of revenue. By the early 1990s, Afghanistan was well on its way to supplying the lion’s share of the world’s heroin. Although the mujahideen factions continued to regard Najibullah and the DRA as their main enemy, they increasingly began fighting each other for control of the drug trade, and for weapons supplied by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the CIA. Increasingly as well, they appeared to direct their efforts at least as much toward looting and pillaging as liberating their country. In important ways they started to resemble the Latin American drug cartels—except the mujahideen had a much greater penchant for brutality and carried out their depredations in the name of God. With some justification, Western journalists began referring to mujahideen commanders as warlords. Meanwhile, even though the Soviet Army had evacuated the country, the CIA continued to provide the Afghan holy warriors with about $250 million per year as a counterbalance to the billions spent to prop u...

The bomb had been assembled, delivered, and detonated by a Kuwaiti named Ramzi Yousef, under the supervision of his uncle Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who would later be identified as “the principal architect” of the attack against the same buildings on September 11, 2001. Yousef had learned the art of making bombs from a manual written by the CIA for the mujahideen to use in their struggle against the Soviets. He was given the CIA instruction booklet while attending an al-Qaeda training camp in Khost, Afghanistan, in 1991 or 1992.

His good looks, cocky deportment, and status as a football star led some people to assume that he was a stereotypical jock—entitled, self-absorbed, intellectually shallow, incurious about the world beyond football. Actually, Pat was none of these things. A diary he kept as a sixteen-year-old reveals an introspective youth who mourned the death of a beloved cat, opined that religion was inadequate to elucidate the mysteries of existence, and ruminated on the downside of his empathetic nature. “I can’t even be an asshole to someone anymore,” the journal sardonically notes, “without feeling bad. I’m too conscious of their feelings.”

After departing in 1990, he’d resettled in his homeland, Saudi Arabia. Not long thereafter, Iraq invaded Kuwait, prompting bin Laden to propose to the Saudi royal family that he lead 30,000 veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War into battle against Saddam Hussein on their behalf.

With his shoulder-length hair and outspoken views, Tillman had been considered a maverick ever since his arrival in Tempe to attend ASU, and he’d done many things in the ensuing years that confirmed his unconventional reputation in the minds of Arizonans. He was an ardent advocate for the rights of homosexuals, for instance, and once demanded of Lyle Setencich, an ASU football coach for whom he had great respect, “Could you coach gays?” When Setencich answered not only yes he could, but that he already had, Tillman’s esteem for the coach grew even higher.

If Kevin and I are part of a situation where we must fight, every bit of my soul knows we will fight as hard as anyone ever has. We will not question the reasons for our being here or allow any personal beliefs to interfere with our job. My hope is that decisions are being made with the same good faith that Kevin and I aim to display…. I hope [this war is about] more than oil, money, & power…. I doubt that it is…. If anything were to happen to Kevin I would never forgive myself. If anything happens to Kevin, and my fears of our intent in this country prove true, I will never forgive this world.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude….

If fratricide is an untoward but inevitable aspect of warfare, so, too, is the tendency by military commanders to sweep such tragedies under the rug. It’s part of a larger pattern: the temptation among generals and politicians to control how the press portrays their military campaigns, which all too often leads them to misrepresent the truth in order to bolster public support for the war of the moment. The fact that the United States has used misinformation to promote the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is not terribly surprising, therefore. What is alarming is the scale and sophistication of these recent propaganda efforts, and the unabashedness of their executors.

Pat and Kevin were familiar with the words of Hermann Göring, Hitler’s Reichsmarschall, who in 1946, shortly before he was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity, notoriously observed: Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship…. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country.

From the early days of their friendship, Cseresnyés and Tillman would recommend books for each other to read, she says, and “probably around 2000 we started reading Chomsky and debating his ideas. His perspective on things was so different from the mainstream media, and that appealed to Pat.” Chomsky was a strident critic of the Bush administration and its Global War on Terror, and although Tillman certainly didn’t agree with all of Chomsky’s views, he concurred with many of them.

During the first months of 2004, as he contemplated his future beyond the military, Pat seemed more at ease than he had in years. “Kevin and I both noticed it,” Marie says. “He was very much at peace with himself. It was like he’d gotten rid of any of his hang-ups. He’d sort of been evolving in this direction ever since he went to juvenile hall after the Round Table fight—resetting his priorities, figuring out what really mattered.” Pat confided to Marie that the Army had “been difficult in ways he’d never imagined going into it,” but that the experience had caused him to learn a lot about himself. He said the emotional trials he’d endured had made him a better person. He said the Army had humbled him. When Pat’s mother came to Puget Sound to visit a week before Pat and Kevin shipped out to Afghanistan, Marie joked to her that Pat had become so sensitive he was starting to grow breasts.

The unstated reason for the latter was that the war in Afghanistan was the Bush administration’s neglected stepchild. When it came to allocating resources, Iraq had been given a much higher priority by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, resulting in a severe and chronic shortage of helicopters throughout Afghanistan. Due to an insufficient number of operational Chinooks and crews to fly them, a minimum of four days’ advance notice was required to airlift a vehicle.

During an investigation of Tillman’s death seven months later, Brigadier General Gary Jones asked Alpha Company first sergeant Thomas Fuller, “I mean, what necessitated in this mission right here that they had to get down there so quickly?” “I don’t think there was anything,” Fuller testified under oath. “I think that a lot of times at higher [headquarters]— maybe even, you know, higher than battalion [headquarters]— they may make a timeline, and then we just feel like we have to stick to that timeline. There’s no—there’s no ‘intel’ driving it. There’s no—you know, there’s no events driving it. It’s just a timeline, and we feel like we have to stick with it; and that’s what drives that kind of stuff.” In other words, the sense of urgency attached to the mission came from little more than a bureaucratic fixation on meeting arbitrary deadlines so missions could be checked off a list and tallied as “accomplished.” This emphasis on quantification has always been a hallmark of the military, but it was carried to new heights of fatuity during Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Pentagon. Rumsfeld was obsessed with achieving positive “metrics” that could be wielded to demonstrate progress in the Global War on Terror, or the illusion thereof.

The next vehicle to exit the narrows after Walter was a Humvee driven by Brad Jacobson, with Master Sergeant John Horney in its front passenger’s seat. Ahead, they could see Baker’s Humvee shooting up the hillside. “As soon as we got around the corner,” Jacobson remembers, “Sarn’t Horney was, like, ‘Those are friendlies up there! Those are friendlies!’ His voice was real upset. I have tunnel vision because I’m driving, just trying to haul ass without hitting rocks, but I look up and see dudes waving on the high ground. You could see the whole fucking platoon right there. And I’m sorry, but they were pretty obvious. It was dark, yeah, but it wasn’t that dark…. Nobody was being shot at by any Taliban at that point. Those guys in Baker’s truck who fucking went to town on the dudes up on the hill? They were just trigger-happy.”

From the numerous divots scarring the boulders around Tillman’s final position, investigators determined that he was fired on by a .50-caliber machine gun, an M249 SAW, and possibly one or more M4s. But the autopsy performed on Tillman after his death leaves little doubt that he was killed by the SAW. And the only SAW gunner who fired at the hillside was Trevor Alders.

Some Rangers in the platoon regarded Alders as a chest thumper who talked big but often had to ask others to help carry his load. Pat, however, had always gone out of his way to be nice to him. “Alders was pathetic,” says one of his platoon mates. “He was a child. Pat was just about the only guy in the platoon who treated him with respect.” The previous September, when they were at Fort Benning preparing to attend Ranger School, Pat and Kevin were granted a four-day pass. Alders happened to be at Benning then as well. When Pat and Kevin were invited to spend their leave at the home of some good friends of their mother’s who lived in Buckhead, just outside of Atlanta, Pat encouraged Alders to tag along. He gratefully joined them, and was treated like kin.

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. — AESCHYLUS, Agamemnon

At 10:00 p.m. on April 22, when Kevin stepped out of a helicopter at Forward Operating Base Salerno after being flown from the canyon where Pat was shot, he was summoned to the TOC—the Tactical Operations Center—to meet with Major David Hodne. “Kevin was obviously distressed about the incident,” Hodne testified, “and I attempted to console him…. He declined my offer to meet the chaplain that was inbound. He asked me to promise to exact revenge on the ambushers.” Hodne assured Kevin that whoever was responsible for Pat’s death would pay dearly for their actions. This would turn out to be the first in a long string of broken promises and self-serving lies proffered to the Tillman family by commissioned officers of the U.S. Army.

Over in Afghanistan, McChrystal directed Nixon to keep the facts of Tillman’s death under tight wraps within the Ranger Regiment, as well. “The guidance I put out,” Nixon testified, “was that until the investigation was complete, until we knew what happened, I did not want communication of the ongoing investigation outside of the unit.” According to a federal statute and several Army regulations, Marie Tillman, as next of kin, was supposed to be notified that an investigation was under way, even if friendly fire was only suspected, and “be kept informed as additional information about the cause of death becomes known.” Instead, McChrystal, Nixon, and the soldiers under their command went to extraordinary lengths to prevent the Tillman family from learning the truth about how Pat died.

Kevin asked Bailey, Hodne, and virtually every other Ranger he encountered to try to find the small notebook Pat had been using to record his thoughts, so that it could be returned to the family; Kevin made it clear that recovering this notebook was extremely important to him. But even as his superiors assured Kevin they would leave no stone unturned in their hunt for the notebook, they were doing everything they could to deceive him about the cause of Pat’s death.

The two witness statements were attributed to Private O’Neal and Sergeant Mel Ward. O’Neal testified that he was put in front of a computer and told to type out a statement, which he did, but after he wrote it, his words were embellished so egregiously that he never signed it. In Ward’s case, he didn’t even remember writing such a statement. During the investigation, Ward says, “When they showed me a Silver Star recommendation that I supposedly wrote for Pat, it was unsigned, which is a big red flag for me, because in the Army you can’t submit anything without signing it. They would have handed it right back to me and said, ‘Hey, stupid, you need to sign this.’ Besides, it didn’t sound like my words…. It sounded really hokey—something I would never have written.”

All the recommendation material that McChrystal approved and submitted to Secretary Brownlee was painstakingly written to create the impression that Tillman was killed by enemy fire. By any objective measure, the recommendation was fraudulent. On June 2, 2009, after President Obama nominated McChrystal to command U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the matter of the misleading medal recommendation was raised during the general’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Senator John McCain asked McChrystal to explain why, five years earlier, he had submitted the falsified Silver Star recommendation to the secretary of the Army “in the form that it was in.”

Many months later, after the cover-up unraveled and the Tillman family pressured government officials and the Army to reveal who was responsible for the lies they’d been told, McChrystal would spin the P4 memo as proof that he never meant to conceal the fratricide. But his secret back-channel memo didn’t urge anyone to divulge the truth and end the cover-up; it merely sounded the alarm that someone needed to warn speechwriters to be ambiguous about the cause of death when crafting statements about Tillman, in order to provide President Bush with deniability. (In the speech Bush gave at the correspondents’ dinner two days after the P4 was sent, the president praised Tillman for his courage and sacrifice, but pointedly made no mention of how he died.)

The administration had tried to make Tillman an inspirational emblem for the Global War on Terror when he was alive, but he had rebuffed those efforts by refusing to do any media interviews. If there had been a way to prevent the White House from exploiting him after his death, Tillman would have done that, too, as he made clear to Jade Lane in Iraq. “When we were in Baghdad, our cots were next to each other,” Lane remembers. “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.”

Without exception, every colonel and general officer interrogated by investigators—Bailey included—insisted that from the moment Pat was killed, he wanted to immediately notify the Tillman family that fratricide was the cause of their son’s death. But each officer claimed that he felt obligated to wait until a thorough investigation had been completed in order to avoid telling “the family something that was not true,” as Nixon phrased it, “and it took a considerable time to get the truth.” All of them seemed to be reading from the same patently disingenuous script, reciting a series of self-serving rationalizations intended to justify what was actually a very calculated effort to deceive not just the Tillman family but also the American public—which of course was the real target of the misinformation campaign.

Nixon’s sworn testimony notwithstanding, it’s difficult to fathom how the obsessive secrecy, falsified documents, and destruction of evidence were intended to protect the family from receiving a false impression of how Pat died. The available evidence indicates that McChrystal and his subordinates in the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment engaged in a coordinated effort to deliberately mislead the family, and high-ranking officials at the White House and the Pentagon abetted the deception. As Bailey’s testimony underscores, the only reason the Army finally decided to come clean was that Kevin was about to learn the truth on his own.

Kevin was told of the fratricide by the Alpha Company first sergeant on Monday, May 24. So why did Bailey wait until the night of the twenty-eighth to notify the Tillman parents? The timing is baffling until one learns that the decision by Bailey and Nixon to preemptively let the cat out of the bag caught the Pentagon and the White House by surprise, and generated no small amount of consternation at those institutions. Rumsfeld’s office wanted time to come up with a plan for containing the damage before the news was released to the media. Toward that end, it was decided that there would be no public disclosure until Saturday, May 29—the start of the Memorial Day weekend, when few reporters would be at their desks and not many Americans would be paying attention to the news.

The ensuing discussion between Di Rita and the military brass was tense. The greatest disagreement concerned the choice of a spokesman to stand before the television cameras and announce that the Army had shot its poster boy. General Brown wanted someone from Rumsfeld’s office to do it, but Di Rita immediately quashed that idea. Part of his job was to make sure Rumsfeld’s fingerprints were wiped clean from crime scenes like this; he wasn’t about to let anyone associated with his boss appear within a hundred miles of this scandal. Instead, Di Rita decreed that a uniformed general would be the bearer of bad tidings. Because Tillman was a Ranger who had been killed by fellow Rangers, and it was the Ranger Regiment that had failed to keep a lid on the fratricide, the job was given to Kensinger, the highest-ranking officer in the Ranger chain of command. “They wanted to keep, sir, the other organizations separate from it,” a colonel who was present explained to an investigator. Everyone agreed that under no circumstances should Kensinger take any questions from the media after making the announcement.

Friday afternoon, in advance of the briefing, Dannie Tillman got home from work to find a message on her machine from Billy House, a reporter at the Arizona Republic, the Phoenix newspaper, asking her to call him. When she phoned him back, House asked what she thought of the news he’d just received from an Army source that Pat’s death may have been from friendly fire. Having been told repeatedly that Pat had been shot by the Taliban, Dannie slammed the phone down, stunned. The news had been leaked to the press before she had been notified.

Later that evening, Kevin called Steve White, the Navy SEAL he and Pat had befriended in Iraq, to tell him that Pat was a victim of fratricide. When White learned that he had been used to deliver propaganda, he testified, “I was shocked.” He said he felt let down by “my military…. I am the guy that told America how he died, basically, at that memorial, and it was incorrect. That does not sit well with me.”

When the Army announced the disciplinary action that had been taken in response to Pat’s death, the Tillmans were stunned. Major David Hodne and Captain William Saunders each received nothing more than a written reprimand for “failing to provide adequate command control of subordinate units.” Staff Sergeant Greg Baker was busted in rank and “released for standards”—“RFS’d,” in Army lingo—meaning he was expelled from the Rangers and sent to the regular Army. The three machine gunners in Baker’s Humvee—Trevor Alders, Steve Elliott, and Stephen Ashpole—were also RFS’d from the Rangers to the regular Army. Lieutenant David Uthlaut, the platoon leader, was RFS’d and received a verbal reprimand from Bailey for “dereliction of duty.” For their part, Bailey was promoted from lieutenant colonel to the rank of colonel, and Nixon was made a brigadier general. All of which was regarded by the Tillman family as a despicable affront to Pat.

Some soldiers in Second Platoon took issue with the discipline meted out as well. There was unanimous agreement that Uthlaut was scapegoated. “Everybody thinks Uthlaut got the shaft,” says Jade Lane. “They shit-canned the PL for splitting the platoon, even though he didn’t want to split it at all. But because he was responsible for the platoon overall, he was booted out of the Rangers. If the Army has to decide whether to punish a lieutenant colonel at headquarters or a lieutenant in the field, you better believe the lieutenant’s going to take the hit every time. Shit rolls downhill.”

Despite the lenient sanctions given to Greg Baker, Trevor Alders, Stephen Ashpole, and Steve Elliott, all four soldiers objected vehemently when they learned they had been RFS’d, insisting that getting booted out of the Rangers for the fratricides of Tillman and Farhad was draconian. The greatest objections came from Trevor Alders, the SAW gunner who, according to the available evidence, fired the bullets that ended Tillman’s life. On June 4, Alders submitted a five-and-a-half-page, single-spaced letter in which he insisted he did nothing wrong and implored the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment to reconsider his punishment. “I believe my actions were the right thing at the right time since I was not aware of a friendly force nearby,” he wrote.

On Sunday, September 19, 2004, during halftime of a football game between the New England Patriots and the Arizona Cardinals played in Tempe, the Cardinals honored Pat with a halftime ceremony, during which Marie, Richard, and Pat’s parents walked out onto the field and stood on the fifty-yard line. Marie received heartfelt cheers when she expressed thanks to the crowd for the overwhelming support the Tillman family had received from Arizonans. A huge Cardinals jersey imprinted with the number 40 was unfurled in the bleachers. Up on the JumboTron, President George W. Bush delivered a brief video tribute to Pat, but the crowd greeted the canned speech with a loud chorus of boos, apparently believing the gesture was inspired not by any genuine respect for Tillman, but rather because Bush was trailing in most opinion polls and the presidential election was just forty-four days away.

“Why do you think that the family is not satisfied?” Jones asked. Kauzlarich explained that shortly before the Second Ranger Battalion sent Pat’s remains home from Afghanistan, he was arranging a repatriation ceremony when a sergeant approached him and said, “Hey, sir. Kevin Tillman doesn’t want a chaplain involved in his repatriation ceremony.” When Kauzlarich, an evangelical Christian, asked why, the sergeant replied, “Well, evidently he and his brother are atheists. That’s the way they were raised.” To which Kauzlarich angrily declaimed, “Well, you can tell Specialist Tillman that this ceremony ain’t about him, it is about everybody in the Joint Task Force bidding farewell to his brother, so there will be a chaplain and there will be prayers.” Pat had in fact made his wishes known quite explicitly in this regard, and had clearly stated his views on religion, life, and death on several occasions as well. During his time on earth, he wrote in his journal while serving in Iraq, he wanted “to do good, influence lives, show truth and right.” He believed it was important to have “faith in oneself” and to aspire to “a general goodness free of religious pretensions…. I’ve never feared death per se, or really given a shit what happens ‘after.’ I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. My concerns have to do with the ‘now’ and becoming the man I envision…. I think I understand that religious faith which makes the holy brave and strong; my strength is just somewhere else—it’s in m...

The president neglected to mention that three months earlier, as part of the investigation launched by Congress to finally and definitively “get to the bottom of it,” Representative Waxman had sent a letter to the White House formally requesting “all documents received or generated by any official in the Executive Office of the President, including the Communications Office and Office of Speechwriting … that relate to Corporal Tillman,” and sent a similar request to the Department of Defense. The recipients responded by sending Waxman more than thirty thousand pages of material, most of which were nothing more than press clippings about Tillman. E-mails, memos, and other documents that might have shed light on the cover-up were conspicuously withheld. 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.” Despite praising Tillman’s patriotism and courage at every opportunity, the White House in fact used every means at its disposal to obstruct the congressional investigation into Tillman’s death and its aftermath.

But his forecast about the ascendancy of the American wimp remains disturbingly accurate, according to the historian Lee Harris. In a polemic titled The Suicide of Reason, Harris argues, The problem is not that Fukuyama is dead wrong; the problem is that he is half right. Unfortunately for us, the wrong half. In the West, we are perilously getting down to our last man. Liberal democracy, among us, is achieving the goal that Fukuyama predicted for it: It is eliminating the alpha males from our midst, and at a dizzyingly accelerating rate. But in Muslim societies, the alpha male is still alive and well. While we in America are drugging our alpha boys with Ritalin, the Muslims are doing everything in their power to encourage their alpha boys to be tough, aggressive, and ruthless…. We are proud if our sons get into a good college; they are proud if their sons die as martyrs. To rid your society of high-testosterone alpha males may bring peace and quiet; but if you have an enemy that is building up an army of alpha boys to hate you fanatically and who have vowed to destroy you, you will be committing suicide…. The end of testosterone in the West alone will not culminate in the end of history, but it may well culminate in the end of the West.

Harris’s dire conjecture certainly grabs one’s attention, but it seems at least as far off the mark as Fukuyama’s. Anyone who has spent time with American troops in Afghanistan or Iraq is bound to take issue with Harris’s contention that the current generation of young men raised in the West suffers from a deficit of testosterone. In truth, our society produces all manner of males, in proportions roughly comparable to those in Muslim (and other) societies: compassionate and cruel; leaders and followers; brainiacs and fuckwits; heroes and cowards; selfless exemplars and narcissistic pretenders. Patriotic zeal runs strong in the United States, and young Americans are no less susceptible to the allure of martial adventure than young males from other cultures, including fanatical tribal cultures. Decades from now, when the president of the United States declares yet another war on some national adversary, a great many men (and more than a few women) will doubtless stream forth to enlist, just as eager to join the fight as the Americans who flocked to recruiting offices during previous armed conflicts—regardless of whether the war in question is a reckless blunder or vital to the survival of the Republic.

Whatever the statistical likelihood of being killed or wounded by friendly fire, it seems to deter few men and women from enlisting in the Armed Forces. When one talks to soldiers on the front lines, most of them accept that fratricide occasionally comes with the territory; they view it as just one of many occupational hazards in their line of work. As an infantryman, Pat Tillman understood that outside the wire, bad things happen. But he was an optimist. Archetypically American, he was confident that right would usually prevail over wrong. When he swore the oath of enlistment in the summer of 2002, he trusted that those responsible for sending him into battle would do so in good faith. At the time, he didn’t envisage that any of them would trifle with his life, or misrepresent the facts of his death, in order to further careers or advance a political agenda.

A compelling argument can be made, however, that the sad end he met in Afghanistan was more accurately a function of his stubborn idealism—his insistence on trying to do the right thing. In which case it wasn’t a tragic flaw that brought Tillman down, but a tragic virtue.