for his part krakauer kicks ass. is this guy the single best journalist in the world today? his construction of time lines, his knack for making valid connections and drawing relevant, insightful conclusions is par excellence. in an age of faux news journalism, in a time when what sells passes for news, when the institutions of journalism suffer from a dearth of credibility, krakauer treats his subjects objectively, thoroughly and with true journalistic integrity. his work reminds me of garcia-marquez's 'news of a kidnapping.'
tillman the man came through in krakauer's biography as a study in contradictions, a beautiful, artful, determined, motivated man of action.
i love this gray world i live in. i love the fact that the stories we used to tell have given way to complexity: truthful, black and white, white and black, sun dried, gemstone complexity. gray is the new hero. gray is who we are and what we do. (gray is the way we are feeling.) pat tillman was gloriously gray and deserves the adoration of a hero as few other in our day and age.
when tillman was a high school football stud in northern california he went out for pizza one evening after a big game and became in involved in an altercation between his circle of friends and another group from across town. tillman arrived late to the violent action but interpreted what he saw as an injury to a friend and so he set out to the right that wrong by pummeling someone who had zero involvement in the fisticuffs tillman had missed. he brutalized that person and administered severe injury.
as a reader i did not care for pat tillman at that point in his story. he was a prototypical, cro-magnon jock. however, tillman's parents, to their real credit, parented pat in such a way as they took him to the hospital to and made him apologize to the boy he injured and his family. they made him face his consequences in the criminal justice system and they loved him through the entire ordeal. this event seems to have colored tillman's life to a large degree.
there are other moments in 'where men win glory,' wherein the dark pat tillman can be seen, such as when he is vacationing in france and he gets drunk and tells some locals about we saved their asses in world war II then goes back to his hotel room and pukes all over the place.
krakauer also shows the determined pat tillman who was drawn to severe challenges and seemed to need to push himself to achieve in those situations. on vacation in sedona he dared leap from treetop to treetop, risking life on limb, for no other reason than to challenge himself and sharpen himself. on the gridiron tillman overcame and achieved. in spite of his diminutive size he lead his high school football team to glory. in turn he lead his college football team to over achievement and ultimately he became an arizona cardinal and lead the team to elusive success and established a reputation as one of the best players at his position in the national football league.
the rest of the story you know up to the tragic end. pat tillman was so affected by the 9/11 tragedy he decided to halt his nfl career from a sense of altruism to enlist, (despite his undergraduate degree from arizona state university which would have allowed him to enter the army as an officer.) he wanted to fight the enemy who wreaked such damage on the united states in real combat.
in this way tillman was simply naive. to think he could enlist and somehow end up across the field from the real enemy, the real perpetrators of those planes flying into those skyscrapers, defending all our honor in violent confrontation, was an idealistic notion that showed itself as such to tillman gradually throughout the course of his tenure in the us army, according to his journal entries.
in fact after having served in iraq and actually been near to the jessica lynch rescue farce, tillman returned stateside and through a friend made contact with noam chomsky for the purpose of arranging a meeting tillman wanted to occur only after his enlistment expired.
'where men win glory,' is, of course, a tragedy. pat tillman was shot down by ssgt trevor alders at relatively close range. the army and the bush administration tried desperately to lie to the american public, (again,) and tell us tillman died fighting heroically against a real enemy to be reckoned with, for the purpose of increasing support for an ugly, hate-filled, warmongering agenda. in the age of information however, lies like this are beyond difficult to sustain.
krakauer ruminates on the idea and consequences of friendly fire. he studies the complexities and contradictions of tillman's life. he puts the reader in the mind of tillman's wife and family as news trickles back home of his death. the sorrow is paralyzing.
on the other hand the light of coming to know some of pat tillman is edifying and enlightening on myriad levels.
