Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman
I’ve read Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and Into Thin Air several times each, and I ripped through Under the Banner of Heaven in a day and a half; his prose is among the most effective in the business. He pulls together an impressive amount of information and then lays it out in a way that’s both suspenseful and orderly — not an easy feat. I wish he’d write more, and I couldn’t wait to read Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, because it could have been called Where Numbers Win Infamy: Section 194.8 of the Federal Tax Code or even Raisins: A Love Story. Krakauer can get me interested in any subject. But a book about an NFL player who volunteered for the Army Rangers after 9/11, only to get killed by friendly fire in a preventable incident the Army went to great lengths to cover up, thus threatening to have a true-crime bent? Buntnip.
…Less so, this time. Krakauer clearly had fantastic access to Tillman’s family and friends, but I think that’s why the picture of Tillman that emerges is not quite in three dimensions. Even Tillman’s graver mistakes turn into examples of his nobility, kind of, and it’s great that Tillman, having delivered a drunken crunchy beating to another high-school kid back in the day, took his punishment, learned from it, and didn’t complain — but every anecdote is like that. It’s like telling an HR rep that your biggest flaw is perfectionism, kind of. Nor is Tillman’s rationale for joining the Rangers really questioned, either by Krakauer or by Tillman’s widow. I don’t mean that he shouldn’t have joined up, or that a strong sense of honor tied to personal responsibility isn’t a good reason to do things, sometimes. But I also think that, if you’ve just gotten married, and if your younger brother, with whom you have a very close relationship, is going to do whatever you do because he idolizes/follows you to a degree, then your sense of honor needs to have a less binary approach to its own fulfillment, if that makes any sense. Again, not to imply that this sort of personal code is always immature; I just would have liked to see it investigated on the level of the negatives involved a bit more.
Krakauer produces a lot of quotes from Tillman’s friends and family along the lines of “I could have tried to talk him out of it, but it wouldn’t have worked” and “Pat just had a certain way of doing things, and I admired his determination”…yeah, you know, I have a certain way of doing things too, but if one of those “things” purposefully put me, AND my brother who in this theoretical scenario is maybe unduly attached to/influenced by me, in harm’s way, our mother would not “try” to “talk” me out of it. She would knock us both the fuck out and ship us C.O.D. to British Columbia. Tillman’s parents didn’t like it much, mind you, but they didn’t seem to press him on it very hard, or on his influence over Kevin — and Krakauer doesn’t press these questions either, really, just accepts that it’s something Pat Tillman “had to do.”
The tacit acceptance of that stance bothered me; it also bothered me that the last quarter of the book seemed to rush through the various investigations into, and cover-ups surrounding, Tillman’s death. The firefight in which Tillman gets killed is handled well, but why give us so much detail about Pat’s life up to that point, and cover the friendly-fire exchange itself in such a meticulous fashion, if the rest of the book is just a headlong dash through a checklist of armed-forces double-talk and Rumsfeldian sleaze? Isn’t that why we should take note of Tillman now — not because he played in the NFL but because the Bush administration tried to leverage that fact in the most cynical way, and screwed the family in the process? That’s the book; that’s the real odyssey here, not Pat’s workmanlike boot-camp journal entries about missing his cats (although: aw). Krakauer no doubt couldn’t get the level of cooperation from the Army’s records department that he got from the Tillmans, but still — fewer painstaking accounts of college-football victories, more holding the Department of Defense to account for their shit handling of the situation.
I’ve heard that the documentary from last year is fantastic; my hope is that it addresses the aftermath in more depth, instead of gawking at the defensive lineman who reads Chomsky, which in this text got tired quickly. The first three quarters of the book is pretty good, but I sat with some of the more Gallant-y takes on Tillman’s behavior thinking that the investigation into his death would lead to the real meat of the story, and then it didn’t.
Tags: books Jon Krakauer Pat Tillman
I love Krakauer as well, and was really looking forward to this book. I thought it was good overall, but I also thought that Krakauer’s opinion on things shone through more clearly in this book than in any other. It seemed to me that his (justifiable) anger at the Bush administration for this situation colored his ability to tell the end of the story.
The film is good — I think it goes hand-in-hand with the book — but I felt it didn’t give nearly as much information about Pat as the book did.
I literally just started reading this book yesterday and turned to it because I was so blown away by the film and wanted to know more. Not having read the book in full yet, I can’t say for certain but I feel like once you see the film, you will feel like you have a much better grasp of his parents (although perhaps not on the particular point that you seem to be speaking of -that being their view of and role (if any at all) in his decision to enlist). The lengths they (and particularly his mother) went to after his death in order out the truth and, by extension, to honour Pat were simply astonishing. To me, that determination along with the almost staggering cover up (and,of course, this is more than “we won’t tell them”; this is “we will make something up entirely that suits our agenda”) and the lack of any consequences for the terrible decisions made by those in power form the true story here. Perhaps these things are explored in appropriate depth by Krakauer but if not, I’ll be disappointed.
Not in the depth you’d think. To get information out of the Army that it doesn’t want gotten is really really hard, but then that whole period of the story is basically a postscript in the book — the process of revealing what really happened, what became of the Rangers responsible, etc., is rushed through, or listed, in a way, all “and then, and then, and then, and scene.” I was almost startled when I got to the end and realized that that was…it. Like, we’re just going to wrap up with Marie saying how sad she still feels?
it could have been called Where Numbers Win Infamy: Section 194.8 of the Federal Tax Code or even Raisins: A Love Story. Krakauer can get me interested in any subject.
WORD. That man could make the phone book interesting.
I think that, like for so many people, the Pat Tillman as mythic American hero story was too overwhelming to question. Who wants to be the first one to call out this “hero” for making what may be questionable choices? In some ways, this book is entirely different from the others because the individual in question is not a loner who went trekking off to Alaska and died, or a crazy bunch of religious fundamentalists, he’s an All American boy, and a “hero.” It’s practically something out of a novel. I think he was trying so hard to avoid “blaming the victim” that he ends up letting Tillman and his decisions off a little easy. It was probably almost unavoidable.
But isn’t joining the armed forces, for some people, actually just “something they have to do”?
It’s not a decision I can understand, myself, but I know families with more than one army member, (and more than one police officer, for that matter), and although it’s not a decision I can ever see myself making, the family members in those decisions didn’t try to intervene or stop those involved from entering professions that have a much higher than normal risk factor. I also don’t have a “calling” in that way, but I do respect people who do.
I loved Under The Banner of Heaven, so I’ll definitely check this one out. Books about “heroes” are hard to write without being either hero-worshippy or dismissive of their heroics, but I’ll for sure give it a read.
I finished this book in January and haven’t seen the documentary. The ending, or more accurately, the detail of the investigation did read like a listing of sorts and paled in comparison to the portrait he painted of Pat Tillman (including the missing bits about questioning motive, family involvement, etc). I wondered whether he took that appraoch because writing the details about A to B to C correspondence, cover-up, decision X, or fake story Y, just got so bogged down in a prior draft that it detracted (in Krakauer’s opinion) from the Tillman as Man part of the book. If I was going to bet on an author’s ability to tease apart the results of FOIA requests and make them interesting, my money would have been on Krakauer.
But isn’t joining the armed forces, for some people, actually just “something they have to do”?
Sure. Here, though, it’s couched to a certain degree as proceeding from Tillman’s honor and nobility as a man, and again, it’s not that I think this isn’t the case. But not questioning these concepts, either as they relate to the American concept of manhood or as they related to this particular man, doesn’t make for a dimensional portrait — and it’s a portrait of a man who got killed in action, so an investigation of the validity of “it’s something I just had to do” as a motive is not immaterial. I’m not real comfortable with “…because” as an answer here.
I haven’t read this or seen the doc, but if the focus of Tillman’s motivation is “It was something I had to do”, than I want to hear about how that was handled by our government, in Tillman’s case and thousands of others, and how using that line to attract some of America’s best and brightest hogtied that government when things went spectacularly wrong.
After all, if you are telling these people to go into a protracted, vicious war because what was done to our nation demanded retaliation and justice (and that’s a theoretically supportable postion, depending on your point of view) and then manage to get them killed not in any kind of justifiable battle or rescue of comrades or protection of civilians but just an armed forces SNAFU, well, you have pretty spectacularly royally fucked yourself, them, and the horses you all rode in on. And a cover up, while reluctantly understandable from pyschological or logistical points of view, is never justifiable. The PTB took a tragic mistake and turned it into a family and honor abusing scandal, and that’s the chain of events I want to see documented.
Tillman was a hero who was treated badly, but his family were the ones betrayed.
“Here, though, it’s couched to a certain degree as proceeding from Tillman’s honor and nobility as a man…”
And I think what you’re saying, here, is that it’s not so much that Krakauer doesn’t snark about this or nod-and-wink at the audience; but rather that Krakauer passes this on as though this rationalie is a fact, as though saying ‘joining the military is the ultimate expression of honor, nobility, and selflessness’ is just like someone saying ‘the sky is blue’.
I mean, it’s a biography, not a blog post; the author is supposed to be presenting facts, not editorializing in the middle of them. However, the facts as presented seem to suggest that Tillman considered the military not just the right thing to do, but the only thing to do; and it might have been interesting to investigate that further.
“rationale”, not “rationalie”, although the latter is an amusing notion.
Correct, more or less. Certainly I don’t expect Krakauer to snark on the decision, and I wouldn’t characterize Tillman’s approach to making said decision as heedless. He did discuss it with his family; he didn’t rush down to a recruiting station on September 12th.
But Krakauer didn’t hesitate to editorialize about other aspects of the story — including, as another commenter mentioned, snippety references to Rumsfeld throughout that undercut the writing. (Compare this with Krakauer’s description of Sandy Hill Pittman from Into Thin Air. It must have been almost impossible to refrain from a potshot, even inadvertently, but he kept it dry as a bone.) I would also add that biographers find ways to editorialize in the middle of facts all the time (the recent biography of Andrew Jackson is a good example). But there were aspects of this story we didn’t get the facts about in the first place.
And if a component of Tillman’s tragedy is the way he was exploited for the PR purposes of the administration — namely, posthumously bronzing him as a selfless patriot? I think it’s not just worthwhile but essential to investigate that trope, and discuss other, more nuanced, less widow-making ways in which any of us can serve our country with honor.
I hope it’s clear that I’m not slagging Tillman, or anyone else, for enlisting for these reasons (or whatever others may have pertained). But the Army’s avidity for leveraging the better angels of our natures for its own institutional ends is not exactly a big secret.
This is a half-formed thought that I’m too tired right now to flesh out much, but it might be interesting to contrast Krakauer’s portrayal of Tillman with his portrayal of Christopher McCandless in Into the Wild. I definitely feel like Krakauer questioned McCandless’s motivations and rationale for going to Alaska (and rightfully so) in that book. To be sure, most people would consider giving up a pro NFL career to join the military more noble than what McCandless did, but on the other hand, I do know of people who idolize McCandless and will defend his decisions with some ferocity. Krakauer doesn’t typically shy away from controversy (see: religion), so I do wonder why he didn’t make much attempt to give a more nuanced portrayal of Tillman. My takeaway from the book was much like Sarah’s in that I felt like Tillman was a cartoon character and kept wondering when he was going to get to the part where Tillman acted like a human being.
Just finished it. Thought the first 2/3 were better than the last, but overall I found it more satisfying that it sounds like most people here did. I read the version that had a postscript, which might have been a difference-maker. Krakauer keeps up with the Gallant stuff, saying that Tillman died not because of a fatal flaw (alpha maleness) but because of a fatal virtue (optimism, both that he wouldn’t be killed and that the Army was a noble organization without a hidden agenda).
For me the book was encapsulated in two quick passages:
“Chaos is indeed the normal state of affairs on the battleground, and no army has figured out a way to plan effectively for, let alone alleviate, the so-called fog of war.”
AND
“Most of the untried Rangers yearned to experience the atavistic rush of having to kill or be killed — a desire more common among the the male population than is usually acknowledged in polite company.”
Friendly fire deaths are something that’s common and unavoidable in war, but government doesn’t want to reveal that, because it hurts their geo-political ends by revealing war to be a disorderly, destructive endeavor. Guys like Pat Tillman don’t get what a freaking mess war is, and in Tillman’s particular case, did not get that armed combat is appreciable different from doing a triathalon or going cliff diving or the other adrenaline junkie stuff he liked to do. And then the worst irony is, the government made Tillman’s story into the kind of legend that would inspire other young guys to want to test themselves in battle. War: Even More Kickass than the NFL!
Krakauer definitely went a little soft on Tillman, but overall the book worked for me.
(PS — What kind of a jerk was the evangelical officer who said IN PRINT that Tillman’s family wouldn’t drop the investigation because they were atheists who did not have the comfort of the afterlife to get them to chill the fuck out and stop bugging the Army already? Damn.)