Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

by Jon Krakauer

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.