Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

by Jon Krakauer

One wonders if the new Soviet leader perhaps pondered the famous tenet voiced sixteen years earlier by Henry Kissinger in reference to the American experience in Vietnam: “We lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.”

California is so big that its high-school football program is divided into fourteen geographic sections, each of which includes more students and more schools than some entire states.

By comparison, Randy Moss, the star receiver of the NFL’s New England Patriots, has run forty yards in 4.25 seconds. Deion Sanders was officially clocked at 4.17 in his prime, and once ran a forty-yard dash backward in 4.57 seconds.

In 1994, during a routine trip to Kandahar, Mullah Omar was stopped and shaken down for cash at five different checkpoints on this one short stretch of highway, which made him so angry that he organized a tribal council—a jirga—of more than fifty mullahs to eradicate the roadblocks and halt the extortion. The religious leaders decided to start small by pooling their weapons, forming a militia of their own, and forcefully removing a single checkpoint—the one nearest to Sanghisar. It was taken for granted that blood would be spilled, but they believed their cause was righteous and saw no other option, in any case. On the appointed day they approached the checkpoint warily with their rifles locked and loaded, prepared for a firefight, but as they drew near, a surprising thing happened: the hooligans manning the checkpoint fled without firing a shot. Encouraged, the mullahs turned their attention to the next checkpoint several miles down the road, and the outcome was similar. Before the week was out, they succeeded in removing every roadblock between Sanghisar and Kandahar. And thus was the Taliban created. The name—a Pashto word meaning “students of Islam”—was bestowed by Omar.

To come so close to winning the Rose Bowl and becoming national champions, only to have it all slip away in the game’s final seconds, was a crushing blow to the Arizona State players and fans. Pat, however, spent little time agonizing over the defeat. He had acquitted himself well on the field, and in any case there was nothing he or anyone else could do to change its outcome. He simply accepted the loss and moved on.

Athletes who manage to reach that rarefied stratum must survive a ruthless culling process: only 6 percent of the kids who play high-school football go on to play in college; and only about 1 percent of those college players advance to the NFL.

The Cardinals had three picks remaining in the seventh round. Staring anxiously at a television in the home of Marie’s parents as this final round got under way, Pat, Marie, and their families watched as the Cardinals used two of these picks to draft other players. When their last pick came up, they selected Pat—as the 226th of 241 players chosen. The Cardinals offered him a one-year contract for the minimum NFL salary of $158,000, plus a $21,000 signing bonus. By way of comparison, the first player chosen in that year’s draft, Peyton Manning, received a six-year deal from the Indianapolis Colts worth $48 million, with an immediate $11.6 million signing bonus.

In the spring of 1986 the Soviets directed another campaign against Zawar Kili in which jet aircraft fired guided missiles at the entrances to the largest subterranean bunkers. Commander Haqqani and 150 of his fighters were inside one of these caves when a missile made a direct hit on its entrance, trapping the mujahideen behind hundreds of tons of rubble. Other Soviet aircraft carpet bombed the complex soon thereafter, however, and inadvertently blasted away the confining debris, allowing Haqqani and his men to escape unharmed.

There's a Futurama joke in here somewhere

More than thirty of the Tomahawks allegedly came to earth well south of the training camp, on the Pakistan side of the border, killing two Pakistani bystanders. According to unconfirmed reports, a number of the eighteen-foot-long missiles landed without exploding, were salvaged by bin Laden, and were then sold to China for at least $10 million.

And although Pat delighted in the rituals associated with coffee—grinding the beans, mashing down the plunger on a French press, perusing the menu at espresso stands—the coffee itself was really just a lubricant, a catalyst, a means to a particular end, which was stimulating conversation.

“He loved to have people around,” she remembers. “He loved conversation. When we’d get together with our good friends—the friends we’ve had since Almaden—by the end of the night Pat was often the last guy talking. Or if he was tired, he would, like, lay down on the floor, but he would insist that everyone else keep talking, keep the conversation going. Then he would just lie there, listening to his friends’ voices.”

bin Laden resolved to keep attacking prominent symbols of American hegemony until the United States would finally have no choice but to invade Afghanistan and become mired in an unwinnable war, just as the Soviets had. As cited in The 9/11 Commission Report, a covert CIA source stated that bin Laden had “complained frequently that the United States had not yet attacked. According to the source, bin Ladin [sic] wanted the United States to attack, and if it did not he would launch something bigger.”

More than a little of the postelection anguish (on the part of Democrats, at any rate) derived from the fact that 97,421 Floridians had voted for the third-party candidate Ralph Nader. Throughout his campaign, Nader had labeled Bush and Gore “Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” insisting there was no real distinction between their positions. At a press conference in September 2000 Nader had proclaimed, “It doesn’t matter who is in the White House, Gore or Bush.” Now it appeared that enough voters had believed him to skew the outcome of the election. Exit polls indicated that had he not been in the race, 38 percent of his voters would have voted for Gore, 25 percent would have voted for Bush, and the remaining 37 percent wouldn’t have bothered to vote at all. In other words, without Nader on the ballot, Gore would have beaten Bush by nearly thirteen thousand votes and become president of the United States by a comfortable margin.

the highest court in the land handed down its decision, which allowed Florida’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, to certify the vote with Bush’s minuscule lead still intact, which in turn gave Florida’s twenty-five electoral votes to the Republican candidate. Twenty-four hours after the Supreme Court issued its decisive ruling, Gore addressed the nation, declaring, “Let there be no doubt: While I strongly disagree with the Court’s decision, I accept it. I accept the finality of this outcome which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College…. While we yet hold and do not yield our opposing beliefs, there is a higher duty than the one we owe to political party. This is America and we put country before party. We will stand together behind our new president.” And thus did Bush become the forty-third president of the United States, a turn of events that would have no small impact on the life of Pat Tillman.

Although Pat spoke self-deprecatingly about his intelligence, and claimed that his academic success in college came from hard work rather than brainpower, his intellectual curiosity was boundless, and he was a compulsive reader who never went anywhere without a book. Pat Murphy, the celebrated Arizona State University baseball coach, remembers seeing Pat in the bleachers during most of the Sun Devils’ baseball games when Kevin was on the team. “He always had a book with him,” says Murphy. “Between innings, or anytime there was a lull, he’d have it open and he’d be reading something.”

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.

With the tape rolling, the interviewer tried to elicit a statement from Pat to the effect that he and the other players were eager to resume playing football, in spite of the attacks that had killed nearly three thousand people. Tillman did his best to stick to this upbeat script. “I want to play now,” he started to mumble, looking uncomfortable, “if for no other reason—just because this thing has already done enough damage. Let’s move on. Let’s move on, let’s go out there, sit out there for the national anthem.” It was becoming painfully obvious, however, that these words weren’t coming from his heart. “I don’t know,” he stammered, attempting to continue. Then he sighed, collected his thoughts, and declared, “It’s hard because … I play a goddamn—We play football, you know? It just seems so goddamn … It is so unimportant compared to everything that’s taken place.” At the time, nobody who saw this interview assigned great portent to this statement, or to the depth of emotion with which it was delivered. Looking back at it again in light of subsequent events, however, it seems obvious that Tillman had already begun to think seriously about making changes in his life—changes that, in the context of the al-Qaeda strikes on New York and Washington, would entail doing something he considered to be of greater consequence than playing football.

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.

My life at this point is relatively easy. It is my belief that I could continue to play football for the next seven or eight years and create a very comfortable lifestyle for not only Marie and myself, but be afforded the luxury of helping out family and friends should a need ever arise. The coaches and players I work with treat me well and the environment has become familiar and pleasing. My job is challenging, enjoyable, and strokes my vanity enough to fool me into thinking it’s important. This all aside from the fact that I only work six months a year, the rest of the time is mine. For more reasons than I care to list, my job is remarkable.

In short, we have a great life with nothing to look forward to but more of the same.

One thing I find myself despising is the sight of all these guns in the hands of children. Of course we all understand the necessity of defense…. It doesn’t dismiss the fact that a young man I would not trust with my canteen is walking about armed….

“It is amazing the turns one’s life can take,” he reflected, then listed a few: Spending time in jail for assaulting Darin Rosas, he wrote, “was huge, drastically changing my mindset and priorities. That experience aged me about ten years and I credit it for my success with academics and football in college.”

If there is one thing certain about stress, and about despair, it’s that it will inevitably show who you really are. And the amazing thing about Pat is that the despair and stress never revealed anything ugly about him. That astounded me, because when things got hard and the kids were being utterly disrespectful, I would become an ugly individual at times. I would lose it and tell them they were being spoiled brats. But Pat was restrained. He had fortitude.

Perhaps I keep this out of my journal because I’m disappointed in myself. When Nub and I embarked on this journey I just kind of assumed these kids would fall in line…. Many times I struggle to maintain my cool through their chaos. Kevin and I are forced to yell and swear as opposed to recommend and suggest…. Perhaps I’m not as good a leader as I think. Ultimately I believe in a general goodwill, and I’ve not become bitter, however I’ve not maintained as high a road as I’d hoped. I suppose when you wrestle with pigs, you’re going to get dirty…. I continue to learn.

Pat wrote in his journal, It may be very soon that Nub & I will be called upon to take part in something I see no clear purpose for…. Were our case for war even somewhat justifiable, no doubt many of our traditional allies … would be praising our initiative…. However, every leader in the world, with a few exceptions, is crying foul, as is the voice of much of the people. This … leads me to believe that we have little or no justification other than our imperial whim. Of course Nub & I have … willingly allowed ourselves to be pawns in this game and will do our job whether we agree with it or not. All we ask is that it is duly noted that we harbor no illusions of virtue.

Being left in the tent was also a rude slap to his ego. “I feel like the last kid picked,” he complained to his journal, “losing my job my rookie year, not making varsity as a freshman. I want to fucking hurt something. I threw away or postponed a great deal to come here, broke the rules in a way. Here, nothing is based on merit. Everything has to do with time in battalion, time of rank—no comment on ability, aptitude, or skill…. I bring up ‘rule break’ only because I want someone to do this for us. Realize we are not normal privates, break the fucking rules, and put us in a position to add value. Fuck this place.”

Pat wrote of his wounded teammate when news of the casualties arrived. “He was actually born in Mexico and came north with his family as a boy. Not exactly the story some folks think of when they bitch about all those ‘foreigners’ coming over. Bravo, Manuel, you not only do your family, friends, & fellow soldiers proud, you symbolize the men this country was built by….

By sunset the firefight was over, and the Marines held both of the Nasiriyah bridges they’d been told to seize—but at a cost of eighteen dead Marines, at least seventeen of whom were killed by friendly fire. Another seventeen Marines from Charlie Company were wounded, some gravely.

The investigation, headed by the Air Force general William F. Hodgkins, was completed exactly one year after it was convened. Like most friendly-fire investigations, it was done more or less according to regulations, but with no enthusiasm for determining what really happened, or who should be held accountable. Important eyewitnesses were never interviewed. Video shot from the cockpits of the A-10 Warthogs recorded every second of the attack, but the videotapes went missing soon after the incident.

Gyrate 73 then turned his tape over to the officer who debriefed him, and the tape vanished, never to be seen again. After watching his tape, Gyrate 74 explained, “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.

The brazenness of the board’s dishonesty was breathtaking. But mendacity of this sort, it turns out, is common in such inquiries. When the military convenes a friendly-fire investigation board, the organization responsible for the incident is called upon to investigate itself, so there are powerful incentives, both institutional and personal, to assign minimal blame. Although the investigating body typically goes elaborately through the motions of unearthing the facts, seldom is the truth pursued with the zeal demonstrated by, say, the National Transportation Safety Board when it investigates commercial aviation disasters.

In January 2003, the White House created the Office of Global Communications, a $200 million program to manipulate public opinion about the coming war,

Reports came to light that in the early hours of March 23, a Royal Air Force Tornado GR4 jet bomber had been shot down by a Patriot missile fired in error by the U.S. Army, killing the airplane’s British pilot and his navigator. On the night of March 24, an Abrams tank plunged off a bridge into the Euphrates River on the west side of Nasiriyah, drowning Staff Sergeant Donald May, Lance Corporal Patrick O’Day, and Private First Class Francisco Martinez-Flores. On March 26, a firefight broke out at the intersection where Lynch’s convoy had made its fateful wrong turn three days earlier. In the ensuing confusion, one Marine unit attacked another Marine unit, wounding thirty-seven Americans, some critically, and two of their Kuwaiti interpreters.

The Iraqi staff at the hospital treated Lynch well, according to doctors and nurses interviewed by the British newspaper the Guardian. Dr. Harith al-Houssona, one of the physicians who supervised her care, said that hospital personnel even donated two pints of their own blood to give her. On March 30, al-Houssona actually put Lynch in an ambulance and instructed the driver to drop her off at a nearby American military checkpoint, but Marines shot at the ambulance as it approached, forcing it to turn around and take Lynch back to the Iraqi hospital.

Eventually Wilkinson’s rendering of Lynch’s ordeal was exposed as propaganda, but by then it had already accomplished what it was meant to accomplish: covering up the truth in order to maintain support for the president’s policies. To this day, very few Americans have any inkling that seventeen U.S. Marines were killed by U.S. Air Force jets on the fourth day of the Iraq War.

Pat’s journal entries expressed growing frustration. He admitted to bouts of depression, as well as disillusionment with some of his superiors: “We’ve had leaders telling guys to shoot innocent people only to be ignored by privates with cooler heads…. It seems their battlefield sense is less than ideal.

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.

Two years after Pat’s death, an Army captain named Aaron Swain recalled coaching Pat through the three-week “mountain phase” of the course, during which the soldiers were taught rock-climbing skills on Mount Yonah, in the Chattahoochee National Forest. “Tillman was a stud,” Swain attests. “He was the real deal.”

In mid-October, a videotape was broadcast on Al Jazeera in which Osama bin Laden looked coldly into the camera and exulted, “I am rejoicing in the fact that America has become embroiled in the quagmires of the Tigris and Euphrates. Bush thought that Iraq and its oil would be easy prey, and now here he is, stuck in dire straits, by the grace of God Almighty. Here is America today, screaming at the top of its voice as it falls apart in front of the world.”

Bin Laden regarded the invasion of Iraq as a tremendous gift from President Bush—a “rare and essentially valuable” opportunity to spread jihad, as the exiled sheik put it. Not only had the United States eliminated Saddam Hussein, whom bin Laden reviled as “a thief and an apostate,” but the American occupation was fueling Muslim rage even more than the invasion of Afghanistan had, inspiring throngs of Arab men to join the ranks of al-Qaeda.

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.

both Tillman brothers had remarked on more than one occasion that Baker was “shit hot” and “totally squared away”—among the highest compliments one Ranger can pay another.

Shrewd, exceedingly ambitious, and willing to bend rules to get results, McChrystal was widely regarded as the most effective commander in the entire Army. Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld held him in the highest esteem, considered him absolutely trustworthy, and regularly bypassed the chain of command to communicate with him directly. He worked under the radar and got stuff done. He didn’t suffer from “the slows,” as Rumsfeld characterized the risk-averse nature of some of McChrystal’s superiors.

I am the littlest man in all of this being only 140 pounds soaking wet at 5′5″ and if I have to have the largest voice on this then I will

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 myself…. I do not fear what may await me, though I’m equally confident that nothing awaits.”

“From the moment you first join the Ranger Battalion,” Ward explains, it’s ingrained in you that you will always do the right thing. They’re not like, “Please do the right thing.” It’s “We will fucking crush you if you don’t do the right thing.” You will adhere to every standard. You will always tell the truth. If you fuck up once, you’re out on your ass.

Afghanistan presently supplies 95 percent of the opium used in the global heroin trade, and narcotics production accounts for half of the country’s gross domestic product.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche introduced the concept of the Übermensch: an exemplary, transcendent figure who is the polar opposite of “the last man” or “men without chests.” The Übermensch is virtuous, loyal, ambitious and outspoken, disdainful of religious dogma and suspicious of received wisdom, intensely engaged in the hurly-burly of the real world. Above all he is passionate—a connoisseur of both “the highest joys” and “the deepest sorrows.” He believes in the moral imperative to defend (with his life, if necessary) ideals such as truth, beauty, honor, and justice. He is self-assured. He is a risk taker. He regards suffering as salutary, and scorns the path of least resistance. Nietzsche, it is not difficult to imagine, would have recognized in Pat Tillman more than a few of the attributes he ascribed to his Übermensch.