Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

by Jon Krakauer

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.*