In May of 2003, an enlisted infantry soldier named Pat Tillman wrote in Baghdad, “a bunch of EPWs [enemy prisoners of war] escaped from across the street today. Twenty escaped while four have already been caught. Nub [his brother Kevin, also a soldier] and I are rooting for the other sixteen. Sometimes it’s hard not to cheer for the underdog. P.S. — These are not military POWs, but civilians they’re holding for info.”
Tillman knew that many “civilians” had helped run Saddam’s despotic regime. Certainly he knew that soldiers in war zones do not ordinarily cheer for the escape of the people they are trying to capture or kill.
Pat Tillman was a complicated guy.
This week the fallen Ranger, patriot, all-pro NFL safety, Noam Chomsky admirer, atheist, convicted assailant, publicity hater, seeker and — yes — war hero is the subject of a Michael Moore-praised documentary, “The Tillman Story,” that explores the circumstances of his death in April 2004. A more complete picture of Tillman emerges in “Where Men Win Glory,” the book by the quest chronicler Jon Krakauer (“Into Thin Air”), which has just been published in paperback with new material about the reasons why Tillman’s death was not publicly termed a fratricide until the month following his demise.
There is a lot of Tillman to grasp, and a lot of Tillman to go around. He was the manliest of men, yet a week before he shipped out to Afghanistan his wife joked that he had become so sensitive he was practically growing breasts. Liberals and conservatives are equally interested in seizing his legend, and in defining what he symbolized. The left will revel in “The Tillman Story” and read it as a ferocious indictment of a coverup that went to the highest levels in a tawdry effort to market a phony war.
Conservatives will reply that Tillman supported the Afghanistan invasion (though he strongly opposed the Iraq war), that accidental fratricide is a blunt fact as old as war, and that it’s understandable that military officers would want to make certain of the facts (and get a second opinion, and drag their feet) before announcing that the most famous enlisted man since Elvis Presley had been ripped apart by bullets fired by his friends.
Perhaps Tillman would be incensed that his death has been treated so differently from that of any other soldier’s. He rejected all media interviews about his service and made it clear that he did not desire a military burial.
But on another level he might be pleased that he inspired so much heated debate — because there was so much conflict within him. If the cloud of rhetoric around him sometimes gets a little crazy (page 249 of Krakauer’s book quotes Hermann Goering in a way that is clearly meant to make readers think, “My God, George W. Bush is just like this guy!”), you can almost hear Pat replying, “That’s OK — sometimes I went a little nuts myself.”
Tillman was a daredevil, a reckless thrillaholic who (twice) broad-jumped 12 feet across a deep chasm just to see if he could catch himself on the branches of a tree on the other side. Failure would have meant death by falling onto the boulders far below. It was entirely within character when, in the final minutes of his life, Spc. Tillman sprinted up a canyon in Afghanistan to defend his comrades in arms from enemy fire above — and asked, as he did so, for permission to ditch his body armor because it was slowing him down. (His sergeant denied the request. The first time Tillman was shot, it was in his chest. The body armor stopped the round.)
At Arizona State University, he used to climb a 200-foot light tower above the football field in order to calm his mind. “In the military,” writes Krakauer, “when soldiers venture beyond the security of their forward operating bases, which are enclosed by massive blast walls topped with concertina wire, they refer to it as ‘going outside the wire.’ The term could just as easily serve as a slogan for how Pat lived much of his life.”
Every time he crossed that wire, he was on a mission to conquer the great within. At his worst, his gung-ho instincts betrayed his thirst for the ennobling, his warrior spirit — that flame Homer called thumos. In high school, a frenzied, out-of-control Tillman once joined a brawl that concluded with him savagely beating an innocent bystander he mistakenly thought had hit a friend of his. Tillman literally kicked his victim’s teeth in, and was charged with felony assault. When the judge learned that a conviction on this charge would void the teenager’s football scholarship to ASU, she lowered it to a misdemeanor. Tillman served 30 days in jail in 1994. Note that in Homer (whose “Iliad” furnishes Krakauer with the title of his biography), thumos is a quality that drives Odysseus forward — but one he must control in order to survive.
Tillman joined the Army for reasons that were stirring and selfless — or were they selfish? The question was much on his mind.
Though the point is disputed (by liberals, anyway), there can be little doubt why Tillman walked away from what could have been a multimillion-dollar payday as a strong safety in the NFL and enlisted in the Army. In the days following Sept. 11, 2001, Tillman said, “My great-grandfather was at Pearl Harbor. And a lot of my family has . . . gone and fought in wars. And I really haven’t done a damn thing as far as laying myself on the line like that.” He added, “We play football, you know? It is so unimportant compared to everything that’s taken place.” He enlisted in May of 2002 — the same week he got married. (His little brother Kevin, who would be just down the road when Tillman was slain, enlisted beside him, having walked away from his own job — second baseman for a Cleveland Indians farm team.)
Tillman wrote that he felt a calling, but he didn’t believe in God. (His was a family of atheists.) So who, exactly, called him to the colors? As he put it, “Who do I love? Where is my passion directed? Best I can tell, it’s directed to those who could care less: the general masses. I follow some philosophy I barely understand . . . My direction is selfish . . . Sometimes my need to love hurts — myself, my family, my cause.”
He wrote with anguish about how he had deserted his new bride Marie, the only girl he ever dated, so that he could march off to take the measure of himself. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve left her all by her lonesome to fend against the world. I struggle with the guilt of what I’ve done.” On another occasion he wrote, “Who does this? Who takes a perfectly perfect life and ruins it?” Later he wrote, “I’m sure [Marie] still hates me for everything, but at least she will know how her hate holds nothing to my own self-loathing.”
During basic training he referred to his fellow enlistees as “this house of gnats,” “resentful, ungrateful, lazy, weak and unvirtuous.” He said he wanted to “strangle someone.”
Yet he treated as an equal the trigger-happy fool who probably fired (from no more than 40 yards away, and despite shouts of “Cease fire!” and his disbelieving target’s own final words, “I’m Pat f – – – ing Tillman!”) the shots that ended Patrick Daniel Tillman’s odyssey. At Ft. Benning, the shooter, a 5-foot-5 machine gunner his fellows thought prickly and resentful in the way of many another gratuitously aggressive small man, was brought along by Tillman on a weekend leave with Kevin and some family friends.
I don’t wish to add to the anguish of this woeful incompetent so I won’t repeat his name (nor does the Tillman movie, which reserves its ire for the brass who gave the public the impression Tillman was killed by Taliban for five weeks). The shooter, when asked why he continued to fire on two sets of arms raised in surrender, replied, “This was a Third World country. They don’t have hand and arm signals like we do.”
Friendly fire applies an exponential power to the brutality, the waste, the absurdity of war. So shame tosses its cloak over the facts. When the Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson died eight days after being shot, Harper’s Weekly reported that he was felled while attacking Union troops in the Battle of Chancellorsville. In fact Jackson was shot by his own army’s nervous sentries as he returned to camp from a patrol. We are meant to believe that his last words were “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” Not, “Did you court-martial those idiots who shot me?”
The first three members of the American military to perish during combat in Afghanistan died this way: a member of the Air Force was calling in an artillery strike against the Taliban using his GPS device. The device went dead: batteries. So he replaced the batteries and read off the coordinates of the Taliban position where he wanted the B-52s to attack. But when the device failed and was turned back on, it was no longer displaying the coordinates of the Taliban fighters. It defaulted to the Air Force guy’s own location. He was asking for B-52s to drop bombs on himself.
American soldiers fired hundreds of bullets (something like 99% of which missed) in the direction of Tillman and Pfc. Bryan O’Neal, who was right next to him but survived unscathed. A couple of the shooters essentially testified that they were caught up in the excitement of mowing down what they thought were enemy snipers and couldn’t help themselves.
There were too many soldiers who had witnessed the Tillman ordeal to keep the truth under wraps for long. But a panicky captain, in a bizarre decision, ordered Tillman’s uniform and notebook burned (as if Tillman had time to write down “being fired on by fellow Rangers”). Kevin Tillman was far enough away not to see what had happened, so his platoon mates took it upon themselves not to tell him how Pat had died. The officers investigating knew what probably happened; they were just hoping that by some miracle a probe would point some or all of the blame at the Taliban. Gen. Stanley McChrystal was aware of the friendly fire investigation but approved a Silver Star (the third-highest combat honor) because he thought Tillman’s bravery in taking the high ground amid Taliban forces warranted a decoration in any event.
Tillman had said that he was repelled by the idea of his legend being “parade[d] through the streets” by the administration of George W. Bush, whom he derided as a “cowboy” for launching a “f – – – ing illegal” invasion of Iraq. But if Tillman could today talk to the soldiers who shot him, he would understand them. No matter how opposed he was to the Iraq invasion (at a time when American support was 79% and support among the troops “probably exceeded 95%,” according to Krakauer), he also wanted in. As a raw rookie, he was judged too green to come along when most of his team boarded helicopters and went off to engage the enemy at Iraq’s Qadisiyah Airbase a week after the war began. A few days earlier he had written, “My heart goes out to those who will suffer . . . most of those who will feel the wrath of this ordeal want nothing more than to live peacefully.”
Now that he was shut out of administering that wrath, he wrote, “This is a f – – – ing insult that boils my blood. All I want to do is rip out the throat of one of those loudmouth f – – – s who’s going as opposed to me . . . I feel like the last kid picked.”
Behold the antiwar warrior. In his book “Manliness,” Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield defines thumos as a quality of spiritedness that causes men “to risk their lives in order to save their lives.” Pat Tillman risked his life in order to define his life. “Manliness,” says Mansfield, “is made out of that paradox.”