Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

by Jon Krakauer

Jalaluddin Haqqani,

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

Ninety percent of its seventeen million residents were illiterate.

Although there were never more than 120,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan at any given time, a total of 642,000 soldiers served there throughout the course of the war—470,000 of whom were debilitated by disease, addicted to heroin, wounded in battle, or killed.

According to an interview bin Laden gave to a journalist from Al Jazeera in 2001, the name al-Qaeda—which means “the training base” in Arabic—in fact owes its origin to these camps in Khost.

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.

Fukuyama from obscurity to overnight fame (and was later expanded into an even more widely read book, The End of History and the Last Man), argued that history is properly regarded as the progress of ideas rather than merely a record of human events, and that the end of the Cold War signaled the permanent victory of modernity—the apotheosis of which was the Western idea of liberal capitalist democracy.

Shifting ethnic divisions and alliances have long played a central role in Afghanistan’s chronic dysfunctionality. Although no single ethnic group makes up a majority, Pashtuns are the largest with approximately 40 percent of the national population. They are followed by ethnic Tajiks, who constitute some 30 percent; Uzbeks, with about 9 percent; Hazaras, a Shiite minority, also with about 9 percent; and a number of smaller groups such as Turkmen, Baluchis, Nuristanis, and Ismailis.

The bomb had been assembled, delivered, and detonated by a Kuwaiti named Ramzi Yousef, under the supervision of his uncle Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who would later be identified as “the principal architect” of the attack against the same buildings on September 11, 2001. Yousef had learned the art of making bombs from a manual written by the CIA for the mujahideen to use in their struggle against the Soviets.

I went up to Pat and said, “Pat, you’re done for the day, and I don’t want you playing any offense or to play defense.” He looked at me with this real quizzical look and he said, “OK.” And as I’m getting prepared for the second-half kickoff, my offensive coordinator turns to me and says, “You know, Pat’s back there ready to take the kickoff.” And I looked in astonishment and saw him back there. And he got the kickoff, and of course ran it back for a touchdown. As he came off the field, I looked at him…. And he came over to me very confidently and said, “You mentioned nothing about special teams.”

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.

paroxysmal

munificence,

redoubt

Undeterred by its indomitable reputation, on August 20, 1998, the U.S. Navy launched sixty-six Tomahawk cruise missiles at Zawar Kili from warships in the Arabian Sea, more than seven hundred miles away. Christened Operation Infinite Reach, the attack destroyed some twenty or thirty buildings but killed only six jihadis: three Yemenis, an Uzbek, an Egyptian, and one Saudi.

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.

vagaries

most football players were “dog guys,” but not Tillman, who owned two felines during his years with the Cardinals and was an unabashed “cat person.” Tillman even went so far as to try to persuade his friend and teammate Zack Walz of “the superiority of cats over all species.”

My man.

phantasmagoria

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.

Unmoved by the firestorm of criticism, the Supreme Court justices issued their momentous decision in Bush v. Gore three days later, at 10:00 p.m. on December 12. Again by a vote of 5–4, the Court ruled that the December 12 deadline for certifying the vote count would in fact be binding, and because completing a constitutionally valid recount would be impossible within the two hours that remained before the clock struck midnight, there would be no further reckoning of Florida’s disputed votes.

Among the most compelling were allegations that two of the five justices who voted with the majority in favor of Bush—Antonin Scalia and Sandra Day O’Connor—unequivocally violated the federal judicial conflict-of-interest statute by participating in Bush v. Gore. In the instance of Scalia, two of his sons were affiliated with law firms that happened to be representing Bush at the time. Regarding O’Connor, who was seventy years old and in poor health, she had stated on several occasions that she was very eager to retire from the Court and did not want a Democrat to nominate her successor. Had Scalia and O’Connor recused themselves, as the statute clearly required, the vote would have been 4–3 in favor of Gore.

There really aren't consequences for the supreme court, are there?

say nonsense,” he replied, deflecting the accusation with an imperious smirk. When Stahl wouldn’t drop the issue, he snapped, “Get over it. It’s so old by now.”

I hope he's rotting and his corpse is pissed on.

His belief that other things in life took priority over amassing wealth never faltered.

When images of the military action were shown on the JumboTron, the crowd filling the stadium let out a thunderous, cathartic roar. The attacks of 9/11 were being avenged. The United States was now at war.

Hate it.

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.

Ugh.

War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. — CHRIS HEDGES, “A CULTURE OF ATROCITY”

As soon as the sergeant recovered from his shock that a recruit would dare to address him in this fashion, he jumped down Pat’s throat. Unintimidated, Pat yelled right back at him, and the two men came close to exchanging blows before some other recruits interceded.

The military are psychos.

Despite this inauspicious episode, at the end of the day Pat and Kevin signed away their freedom, recited the oath of enlistment, and received orders to appear at Fort Benning, Georgia, on July 8, 2002. For three years thereafter, their lives would be under the nearly absolute control of the U.S. Army. Pat was twenty-five years old, and Kevin was twenty-four. Each would be starting at a base salary of $1,290 per month.

What a scam.

indolent

And “to add insult,” Pat mused, “if that wasn’t enough, I was written up for it. I fucked up my cadence calls, lost shit, got yelled and screamed at…. I was a mess. Oh well, just keep working and we’ll see what happens…. Our drill sergeants are tough but quality people and I believe they will teach us a lot. Still missing my love.”

bivouac,

Passion is what makes life interesting, what ignites our soul, drives our curiosity, fuels our love and carries our friendships, stimulates our intellect, and pushes our limits…. A passion for life is contagious and uplifting. Passion cuts both ways…. Those that make you feel on top of the world are equally able to turn it upside down…. In my life I want to create passion in my own life and with those I care for. I want to feel, experience, and live every emotion. I will suffer through the bad for the heights of the good.

they remained in Georgia to begin five weeks of what the Army calls advanced individual training, or AIT, which is scarcely distinguishable from basic.

inveigle

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.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Because her rifle had jammed, she hadn’t fired a single round. Although her injuries had indeed been life threatening, they were exclusively the result of her Humvee smashing into Hernandez’s tractor trailer; she was never shot, stabbed, tortured, or raped. After she had been transferred to Saddam Hussein General Hospital, her captors treated her with kindness and special care. And when the American commandos arrived at the hospital to rescue Lynch, they met no significant resistance.

apparatchik

quagmire,

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.

Cult.

In January 2003, the White House created the Office of Global Communications, a $200 million program to manipulate public opinion about the coming war, and installed Jim Wilkinson to oversee its operations in the Persian Gulf. According to an article by James Bamford in the November 17, 2005, issue of Rolling Stone,

perfidy

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 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.”

Their class of 253 soldiers was kept awake and on the move twenty hours a day, every day, with the exception of one eight-hour break every three weeks. They slept two or three hours a night, if they were lucky, and subsisted on a daily allowance of twenty-four hundred calories, despite the fact that on most days they burned more than five thousand calories—some days a lot more.

“It was a shock,” says Boatright: “Somebody being nice, talking to you like a human. And his brother Kevin addressed me the same way when I got to the top of the stairs.

Wow, humanity.

obdurately

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.

fatuity