Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

by Jon Krakauer

Mana was the last village in the area that the Rangers needed to search for Haqqani’s forces, and headquarters was adamant that they clear it at the earliest possible opportunity in order to conform to a schedule established weeks earlier by deskbound officers at a distant base.

A British soldier named Francis Leeson, who battled a fierce tribal insurgency in this same area in the late 1940s, wrote a book in which he characterized the terrain as “frontier hills [that] are difficult of access and easy to defend. When one speaks of them as hills, rolling downs on which tanks and cavalry can operate are not meant, but the worst mountain-warfare country imaginable—steep precipices [and] narrow winding valleys.”

The moment Sergeant Weeks directed the Rangers to move up the hill, Tillman sprang into action. “Pat was like a freight train,” says Private Josey Boatright, recalling how Tillman sprinted past him. “Whoosh. A pit bull straining against his leash. He took off toward the high ground, yelling, ‘O’Neal! On me! O’Neal! Stay on me!’ ” According to O’Neal, Pat told him, “ ‘Let’s go help our boys,’ and he started moving. And wherever he went, I went.”

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.

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

Pat and his younger brothers, Kevin and Richard, almost never watched TV as children. Instead, they spent most of their free time playing outdoors, scrambling up the ravines and outcrops of the Almaden Quicksilver County Park, where they acquired a lasting appreciation of untamed landscapes. When the boys had to be indoors, they engaged in clamorous discussions about current events, history, and politics with their parents and each other. Almost no subject was off-limits. Encouraged to think critically and be skeptical of conventional wisdom, Pat learned to trust in himself and be unafraid to buck the herd.

As a matter of principle, he fought only with kids who were bigger than he was, and on several occasions he intervened to rescue nerdy classmates who were being hassled by older, larger tormentors. But when Pat fought, he fought to win and never capitulated,

fiefdoms. In Afghan society, individual loyalty belongs foremost to the family and then—in rapidly descending order—to one’s extended clan or tribe, one’s ethnic group, and one’s religious sect. 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.

He especially hoped to win a scholarship to attend Stanford, which was just twenty-five miles from his home, or the University of Washington, because Seattle’s misty climate and coffee culture captured Pat’s imagination.

“What I take from Pat Tillman is that you are not who you are at your worst moment.

Pat excelled in his other classes as well, earning a 3.5 grade point average. During his second semester it improved to 3.81. The semester after that, in the fall of 1995, he received an A in each of his five courses, for a perfect 4.0 GPA. “Once he got in the habit of studying, he found a lot of success,”

During the off-season, Tillman had reenrolled at ASU to earn a master’s degree in history, which also set him apart. “Because of his schedule he couldn’t attend classes on campus,” Marie recalls, “so Pat would meet independently with a professor from the history department who gave him assignments and worked with him online.”

As Pat and Marie rambled through Germany, he made it his mission to sample every variety of local beer and sausage he came across, and then offered an assessment of each in his journal. In Munich, he raved about the spicy Bratwurst and reacted favorably to a Schweinwurst, but upon having his first taste of an almost raw Weisswurst, he observed, “The texture was soft and taste not particularly noteworthy…. Before I even left the table my stomach was screaming. Marie had to carry my ass back to our room.”

Because he loved engaging in informed debate, Pat made an effort to study history, economic theory, and world events from a variety of perspectives. Toward that end he read the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Quran, and the works of writers ranging from Adolf Hitler to Henry David Thoreau. Although Tillman held strong opinions on many subjects, he was bracingly open-minded and quick to admit he was wrong when confronted with facts and a persuasive argument.

Pat was agnostic, perhaps even an atheist, but the Tillman family creed nevertheless imparted to him an overarching sense of values that included a belief in the transcendent importance of continually striving to better oneself—intellectually, morally, and physically. Endurance events like marathons and triathlons, which favor bony ectomorphs, were not Tillman’s strong suit—hence their appeal to him: they were especially challenging to a guy with the hulking physique of a professional football player.

On June 30, 2001, the CIA issued a top-secret report known as the Senior Executive Intelligence Brief that included an article titled “Bin Laden Threats Are Real.” By late July “the system was blinking red,” according to the CIA director, George Tenet, and could not “get any worse.” Yet the highest-ranking members of the Bush administration—including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney, and President Bush himself—continued to express doubts about the seriousness of the threat posed by bin Laden. Two senior officials in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center were so dismayed by the failure of the White House to heed their impassioned warnings that they considered resigning and taking their concerns to the media.

Ten days after that, three U.S. Green Berets were killed and five others were gravely wounded on the outskirts of Kandahar when a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber struck them with a two-thousand-pound, satellite-guided “smart” bomb that had been calibrated “for maximum blast effect.” The latter accident occurred during a desperate firefight between the Taliban and American Special Forces. An inexperienced Air Force tactical air controller had just calculated the coordinates of an enemy fighting position and was about to call in an air strike when the batteries died in his precision GPS device, causing its display screen to go dark. Frantically, the air controller put new batteries into the GPS, the numbers flashed back on the screen a moment later, and he directed the B-52 flying overhead to drop its lethal payload on these coordinates. The air controller was unaware, however, that after a battery replacement his GPS automatically defaulted to display the coordinates of its own position. He mistakenly called in these coordinates instead of the Taliban’s position, and the upshot was the first three members of the American military to die in the Afghanistan war were victims of fratricide.*

War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians.

It seems that more often than not we know the right decision long before it’s actually made. Somewhere inside, we hear a voice, and intuitively know the answer to any problem or situation we encounter. Our voice leads us in the direction of the person we wish to become, but it is up to us whether or not to follow. More times than not we are pointed in a predictable, straightforward, and seemingly positive direction. However, occasionally we are directed down a different path entirely. Not necessarily a bad path, but a more difficult one.

In his sports career he was always rewarded for how well he performed. In the military it doesn’t work that way. It’s all based on how long you’ve been in, and what your rank is. It doesn’t matter how capable you are.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush had repeatedly promised that if he was elected, his administration would promote a “humble” foreign policy. “I’m going to be judicious as to how to use the military,” he pledged during his second debate with Al Gore. “It needs to be in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear, and the exit strategy obvious…. I think the United States must be … humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.”

Mr. Wilkinson first left his mark on the 2000 presidential race in March 1999, when he helped package and promote the notion that Al Gore claimed to have “invented the Internet.”

“I asked Intel, ‘Can I keep this and turn it in later? I’d like to look at this tape later on.’ ” He was allowed to take it, whereupon he “mistakenly” inserted the tape into the cockpit video camera and recorded over it, erasing it. The two most crucial pieces of evidence were thereby destroyed. Nobody ever made any real effort to determine what actually happened to the tapes, and no one was disciplined in any way for the loss of this key evidence. Despite the destruction of the cockpit tapes and other shortcomings of the investigation, the available facts clearly indicate that at least seventeen of the deaths were the result of fratricide. When General Hodgkins’s investigating board released its report, however, it refused to acknowledge that any of the deaths were attributable to friendly fire. On March 29, 2004, in a press release announcing the completion of the investigation, U.S. Central Command summarized the board’s conclusions thus: A total of 18 Marines were killed and 17 were wounded. Eight of the deaths were verified as the result of enemy fire; of the remaining 10 Marines killed, investigators were unable to determine the cause of death as the Marines were also engaged in heavy fighting with the enemy at the time of the incident.

“I was friends with Kevin before I was friends with Pat,” says Baer, a well-read autodidact with eclectic taste. “I was reading Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda and the Public Mind and Plato’s Republic. Kevin had read stuff by both these writers—he’d been a philosophy major in college. So we got into a discussion about literature, which led to further conversations that included Pat. It was great. I finally had people I could talk to. “Pat was a serious listener. He was one of the first people who really challenged my ideas: ‘Do you really believe that? Why? Don’t accept everything you read. You should question it all, take what makes sense, and throw away the rest.’ He was constantly asking, ‘Did you ever consider this? What about that?’ He changed the way I thought.”

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.

The majority of the Rangers in Tillman’s platoon hadn’t joined the Special Operations Forces in order to go camping in exotic lands; they’d enlisted to be part of a rarefied warrior culture. Engaging in mortal combat was not an aspect of their service they sought to avoid. To the contrary, they’d aspired to it since they were small boys. They were itching to confront the enemy firsthand and prove themselves under fire. Approximately half the platoon had never been in a firefight. Most of the untried Rangers yearned to experience the atavistic rush of having to kill or be killed—a desire more common among the male population than is usually acknowledged in polite company.

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.

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.

Taking their cues from McChrystal and Nixon, officers in the Ranger Regiment deliberately withheld from Mallak that Pat had been killed by friendly fire, another egregious breach of protocol. Instead, Mallak was told that Pat “was shot by insurgents or Taliban.” According to Mallak, he “immediately had concerns about the case” because “the gunshot wounds to the forehead were atypical in nature, and that the initial story we received didn’t—the medical evidence did not match up with the scenario as described.” Mallak was sufficiently troubled by this discrepancy that he and Caruso declined to sign their names to the autopsy examination report when it was completed, and Mallak asked the Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) to look into the matter.

But McChrystal and Nixon were obsessed with keeping knowledge of the fratricide “as compartmented as possible” within the Second Ranger Battalion, hidden from the prying eyes of the CID or any other Army entity. So when the CID sent a special agent to inquire about the suspicious nature of Tillman’s wounds, Nixon’s legal advisor, Major Charles Kirchmaier, was dispatched to throw the CID off the scent. Kirchmaier, who served as the Rangers’ regimental judge advocate in Afghanistan, was intimately involved in Captain Scott’s 15–6 investigation and knew that Tillman was killed by friendly fire. As an Army lawyer, Kirchmaier must have also known that providing false information to a CID agent is a serious criminal offense, punishable by imprisonment and/or dishonorable discharge. Kirchmaier nevertheless instructed Captain Scott not to disclose anything to the CID or Dr. Mallak, and when questioned by the CID agent himself, Kirchmaier prevaricated. Deftly concealing the radioactive truth, he revealed absolutely nothing about the fratricide. As a direct consequence of Kirchmaier’s deceitful conduct, the CID concluded there was no reason to delve further into the circumstances of Tillman’s death, and declined to go forward with its investigation.* Shortly thereafter, Kirchmaier received an e-mail from McChrystal’s legal advisor, Lieutenant Colonel Norman Allen, in which Allen congratulated Kirchmaier for “keeping the CID at bay.”†

What the fuck

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.” Stammering, McChrystal replied, “We sent a Silver Star that was not well written—and, although I went through the process, I will tell you now that I didn’t review the citation well enough to capture—or, I didn’t catch that, if you read it, you can imply that it was not friendly fire.” He insisted that the recommendation package bearing his signature wasn’t meant to deceive. According to McChrystal—a commander renowned for his obsessive attention to detail and intolerance of sloppy work by subordinates—he simply failed to notice that each of the documents purporting to describe the deadly firefight had been carefully crafted to omit its most salient particular—the fact that Tillman had been shot by his Ranger comrades.

“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.”

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.”