Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman
by Jon Krakauer
Random House
The latest missive from “Into the Wild” author Jon Krakauer is easily his most controversial yet — examining the story of NFL star Pat Tillman’s decision to enlist in the U.S. Army, and the military’s attempt to cover up the circumstances of his death by friendly fire in the trenches of Afghanistan.
As Krakauer sums up the book’s main push, “If fratricide is an untoward but inevitable aspect of warfare, so, too, is the tendency by military commanders to sweep such tragedies under the rug.”
Although the book’s narrative culminates with the exploitation of Tillman’s death by a government desperate for good will in wartime, the tragic elements of Tillman’s story were in place well before then. In May 2002, Tillman, an undersized safety who’d spent his life scraping his way into the big leagues by sheer determination, shrugged off a multi-million dollar offer from the Arizona Cardinals and announced that the events of September 11 had moved him to fight for his country instead. “[My wife and I] have a great life with nothing to look forward to but more of the same,” he wrote in a typed letter, “However it is not enough…my voice is calling me in a different direction.”
A hungry reader and late-blooming academic ace, Tillman’s decision was a thoughtful one. His “voice,” as he called his conscience, took him straight through basic training and boot camp, and after some frustrating months safe on American soil (surrounded by “kids”) both he and his younger brother Kevin suddenly found themselves on a mission to shake out suspected Taliban in a remote part of Afghanistan. In 2003 Tillman was already questioning President Bush’s motives for the war —”Very soon we will be called upon to take part in something I see no clear purpose for…,” he wrote in his diary in February of that year — but he was determined to see his decision through.
The “friendly fire” that led to Tillman’s demise in 2004 was horrific. Led into an impossibly risky situation by their clueless commanders across the pond, Tillman’s troop-mates ended up wedged into a narrow canyon that left them dangerously exposed and panicked. As Krakauer describes it, “hundreds of bullets began to pulverize the slope around Tillman,” who’d broken from the group in an effort to help with their defense. One and a half minutes later, the athlete turned accomplished soldier was dead.
What came next reads like a “how-not-to” handle the death of the military’s most headline-grabbing new recruit. The investigation was a mess of misleading public announcements, evidence gone missing or destroyed, and falsified testimonial documents, and no one — not even Tillman’s immediate family — was told how he’d died until nearly a month after the fact, despite the fact that all the soldiers in his platoon agreed on the facts. Even then, the brass never fully admitted the truth, pronouncing to the public only: “While there was no one specific finding of fault, the investigation results indicate that Corporal Tillman probably died as a result of friendly fire.”
According to Krakauer, the fact that the Abu Ghraib scandal had broken just days before supplies the uncomfortable explanation: “When Tillman was killed,” he writes, “White House perception managers saw an opportunity not unlike the one provided by the Jessica Lynch debacle thirteen months earlier.” In other words, concealing the circumstances of this hero’s death for as long as possible that spring was simply good PR.