Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

by Jon Krakauer

“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.”