Remember His Name
Even as a boy Pat Tillman felt a destiny, a need
to do the right thing whatever it cost him.
When the World Trade Center was attacked on
9/11, he thought about what he had to do and
then walked away from the NFL and became an
Army Ranger....
Posted: Tuesday September 5, 2006 11:37AM; Updated: Tuesday September 5, 2006 5:54PM
RELATED
By Gary Smith
One day, God willing, Russell Baer was
going to tell his son this story. One day,
after the boy's heart and brain had healed,
he was going to point to that picture on the
kid's bedroom shelf of the man doing a
handstand on the roof of a house, take a
deep breath and say, Mav, that's a man who
lived a life as pure and died a death as
muddy as any man ever to walk this rock,
and I was there for both. That's the man,
when your heart stopped for an hour and
they slit you open neck to navel, who I
prayed to because ... well, because you
wouldn't exist if he hadn't died, and I
wouldn't be half of who I am if he hadn't
taught me how to live. That's Pat Tillman,
the man you take your middle name from,
and I've been waiting for you to ask since
the day you were born.
• Photo Gallery: Pat Tillman
Tillman (third from right) with
members of his Army Ranger squad
in Afghanistan in April 2004.
Courtesy of Tillman Family
Russ never got that chance: Maverick Patrick Baer died on Monday. So now Russ has Pat's story
stuck in his heart....
Maybe it's best to keep it simple, to start with the day Russ first laid eyes on Pat, keep the
moralizing to a minimum and let everyone figure out what Pat's story says about human beings
and fear and the country in which we live.
Start with the day, in December 2002, when the big green duffel bags hit the ground in front of
the barracks at Fort Lewis in Washington, followed by the boots of the new Rangers joining
Russ's platoon, the Black Sheep. Russ watched them, trying to guess which one of the cherries
was the famous football player, the one -- truth be told -- he had never heard of until his mates
began saying, "Did you hear? Pat Tillman's been assigned here."
Maybe it was because Russ wasn't raised on the religion of NFL Sundays, or because the whole
world disappears for a man once the Army begins melting and molding him into a Ranger, but
somehow -- even though he had grown up only 40 miles from Pat's home in San Jose -- Russ had
never heard of the guy or his much-ballyhooed decision to walk away from the Arizona Cardinals
and a $3.6 million contract to enlist in the aftermath of 9/11. So 22-year-old Private First Class
Baer kept quiet and listened to the chow-hall chatter.
"I'll treat him just like a normal person," one platoon mate vowed.
"He's nothing special," said another. "I'll make him do push-ups."
"That dude was stupid to give up football," more than a few said. "I'd never do that."
Pat's younger brother, Kevin, fresh out of the Cleveland Indians' farm system, was coming too.
Likely a couple of meathead jocks, Russ thought, remembering the big-shot athletes at his high
school in Livermore, Calif. It wasn't hard to pick out Pat from the pack of rookie Rangers: Had to
be the guy carrying those big green bags into the barracks as if they were marshmallows.
The newbies -- Rangers who hadn't undergone the last and harshest phase of the weeding-out
process required to become "tabbed Rangers" -- spent those first two days scurrying like headless
chickens, stammering and spilling socks from their bags as officers barked at their heels, outraged
by gear that wasn't tied down properly, unit identifiers that weren't sewn onto everything just so.
Not the Tillmans. They didn't rattle.
But a man can't walk into a Ranger unit with Pat's self-assurance, reputation and anvil jaw
without every antenna on the base going up, probing for arrogance. Russ conducted his own
reconnaissance, poking his head into a smelly little squad room to watch Pat receive his lessons.
Man, he walked away thinking, he liked Specialist Tillman. Humble, soft-spoken, polite, tuned in;
swift to volunteer for crap chores, swift to knock out the 25 push-ups the punks four years
younger than he was -- but with one more stripe -- ordered him to do.
A week later Pat and Russ started bantering at the shooting range, and Pat laughed that
unforgettable laugh -- his head jolting back, his eyes disappearing into that crinkly face, his hands
clapping his thighs, a high-pitched hoo-hoo-hoo-hooooooo howling from his throat until his lungs
gasped for air -- the laugh of a man who didn't give a rat's ass what you thought of him or the
carnival.
Damn, Russ could talk Allen Ginsberg and Ralph Waldo Emerson with a big-time jock Army
Ranger. He could let loose a side of himself that he'd bottled up the day two years earlier when he
signed his enlistment papers, the Russell Baer who holed up in the latrine with his journal, or on
an off day hunched over a coffee and a book and a notepad among strangers in a Seattle café. Pat
loved oddballs -- writers, hippies, hermits, weed-smoking ballplayers -- who weren't afraid to
show their asses, loved reading their quotes and anecdotes aloud and declaring, "Now that's
something to live by," then scrawling a salty retort in the margin. At first it jarred Russ, whose
reverence for literature didn't let him lay ballpoint to book page, but then he began to do likewise.
Pat just had that way, with colonels and coaches and Nobel Prize winners, too, of slicing through
rank and reputation, of turning every encounter into nothing more or less than two human beings
talking. Hell, the guy introduced himself to strangers simply as "Pat," and if they asked what he
did before strapping it on for Uncle Sam, he'd say he studied some back at Arizona State and
quickly ask about them, never mentioning the summa cum laude or the Pac-10 defensive player of
the year award, and certainly not the NFL. And still, something about him made you walk away
wanting to learn more, laugh more, run more, give more.
Who else showed up in a college assistant coach's office at 1 a.m., asking what he thought of
Mormonism with such zest that both ended up reading the Book of Mormon so they could discuss
it in detail? Who else in the NFL or the U.S. Army took a book everywhere, even on 10-minute
errands, read The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, the Bible and the Koran, so he could carve
out his own convictions ... then bought you the book and picked a philosophical fight just to flush
out some viewpoint that might push him to revise his, push him to evolve? Gays, for instance. By
the last few years of his life, his narrow view of them as an adolescent had so altered that he
would argue they were the most evolved form of man.
Most people, Russ felt, are just pieces of everybody else, off on some mimic's mission all their
lives. It's as if there's a padlock on who they really are and just a few figure out the combination
and then the whole damn thing pops open, the treasure of possibility becomes theirs. That was
Pat, so ... so ... hell, even his mom, Mary, when she tried to get her arms around him, would just
end up throwing them in the air. He was the most respectful gutter mouth you ever met, the
politest man ever to reach across a restaurant table and dunk his sticky hands into your glass of
water. So playful and so serious, so transparent and so mysterious, so kind and so frightening, so
loud and so silent ... so juxtaposed, Mary would say. So at ease with himself that he could meet
you wherever you were.
Where Russ was, just one week before the Black Sheep shipped out for the Iraq invasion, was on
his belly in the rain on the shooting range, up to his elbows in mud and frustration, unable to dial
in the optics on his SAW gun and hit the damn target for his weapons qualification even though
he'd been handling that machine gun with ease for more than a year. Then Pat dropped to his
knees and began encouraging him. Russ had spent most of his first 22 years marinating in
negativity. His mother had cleared out five months after his birth, and his father, a 14-year Army
man, had remarried eight years later to a career military woman with a short fuse. Russ had
swallowed her anger, turned numb, then begun turning that anger outward, getting into fights and
blaming others for his troubles, drifting from one school to another until age 16 ... then dropping
out of school and home as well, moving to his grandparents' house, working three jobs and
homeschooling himself, searching for some model of the man he ached to be.
Maybe he'd finally found that man. Russ relaxed as Pat knelt beside him, then realized that a
loose screw on his sight was causing his misfires and began banging bull's-eyes. Their unit
packed up a few days later, removed its mascot from the wall -- the mountain sheep's head that
accompanied 2nd Platoon, Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment everywhere it
went -- chucked it into a parachute bag and flew to Saudi Arabia. Pat, Kevin, Russ and the Black
Sheep were going after Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.
No, Russ isn't proud of this part, but it's too important to skip past. It happened in a tent in Saudi
Arabia on the day the Black Sheep took perhaps the war's first casualty, just before the invasion
began. Russ and Pat, monitoring radio reports from buddies who'd slipped into Iraq by helicopter,
listened as the chopper crew chief was shot and one of their platoon mates took a bullet that
ricocheted off his sternum and exploded out of his shoulder.
So here it was at last, the specter of death, the dry mouth, the beginning of the self-discoveries
Russ had signed on for. Discovery 1: He wasn't ready. As the grim news crackled, he grabbed a
mate's Maxim magazine, fixed his eyes on a naked woman, nudged his neighbor and said, "Hey,
look at this chick."
It was as if Pat saw right through the surface -- the callous perv -- to the core: a kid walling off his
fear. Pat reached over, took hold of Russ's hands and said softly, "Can you please put that away?
Some of our guys are getting hurt right now. We need to focus on them." Russ nodded, grateful to
be called back to his better side without being shamed.
It began that day for Russ, the long raggedy curve that it takes to turn a life around. A man could
be strong and soft at the same time, he realized. He could manage fear by looking straight at it,
could take charge of a moment in the most unmilitary of ways, without bristling or bellowing.
The Black Sheep followed the invasion into Baghdad, spent their days pulling perimeter security
around the airport and going house to house in search of the Iraqi leaders pictured on the
infamous 52 playing cards, and their nights flinching from the pigeon crap raining through the
shrapnel-shredded hangar where they slept. Pat was so inclusive, so interested even in the
screwiest private, that any pettiness in the platoon began evaporating; the Black Sheep became
tight. Trouble was, Russ so treasured his time with Pat that he couldn't bear to share it with some
of the knuckleheads gathered around him. He'd wait until they'd fallen asleep or flaked away to
their video games and skin magazines, then beeline toward Pat and Kevin. One would glance at
the other two and say, Let's have a coffee and -- bingo -- the Baghdad Book Club was in session,
three men talking literature and ideas to the far side of midnight, Pat's eyes glittering just as they
did during all-night conversations around a fire in the front yard of his childhood home whenever
he returned there.
That's how they found themselves atop a bunker south of Baghdad late one night in March 2003,
on the eve of the rescue of Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch, knowing a bloodbath might await them the
following night, when they would encircle the hospital in Nasiriyah where she lay wounded. They
sat there, perched above their sleeping mates, watching the Marines bombard a town five miles
away, drinking in the beauty of a desert sky strobe-lit by the explosion of 155-mm shells.
Russ didn't know yet that Pat had written to his mom, delighting in the serendipity of having
found a little brother in his platoon named Baer. "Bear" was what Pat and Kevin had grown up
calling their youngest brother, Richard. But Russ felt so much brotherly trust and caring that night
in Iraq that he offered to read to Pat and Kevin from his own notebooks, his Latrine Letters. They
loved Baer's seething snapshots of life as a Ranger in a savage place.
Let's all just f------ scream
and attempt to stretch our
already shrunken hearts.
We've all got cruel intentions
climbing up our throats,
ready to spit into the eyes of any savior
that's already 15 minutes too late.
You didn't talk politics over there, not while you were still in the sandbox. But that night, as Pat
watched another orange and white flash-bang shudder the distant town, he shook his head and
said, "This war is so f------ illegal." Russ, for the first time, realized how wobbly a tightrope Pat
was walking between his integrity and his duty. Even later in their 3 1/2-month deployment in
Iraq, as it began to appear that they'd been sent on a nukes-and-biochemical-weapons wild-goose
chase, Russ never heard Pat go further than, "This is all bulls---." But surely Pat's fame and fierce
independence had unsettled higher-ups from the day he enlisted. They had tried to persuade him
to be a recruiting poster boy in Washington rather than a Ranger. Surely, one family member was
convinced, once the Army got its first glimpse of Pat's psychological profile -- he was the one
who stood outside the Cardinals' team prayer circle, the one who couldn't wait to have a mutual
friend arrange a meeting with renowned anti-war leftist Noam Chomsky after his discharge -- it
never would have allowed him to become a Ranger if it hadn't had to because he was Pat
Tillman. Hell, at the Army recruiting office the day he enlisted, before he'd even signed his
papers, one of those jalapeño drill sergeants lined up Pat, Kevin and a gaggle of other recruits and
started fire-breathing contradictory orders. "Look, you're confusing everybody and being
unreasonable," Pat told the astonished sergeant. "You're treating us like ass----s, and we haven't
even signed up to be treated like ass----s yet." At first it was a curiosity to Pat, then an irritation,
when he kept receiving orders to undergo additional psychological evaluations.
Everybody who thought he'd enlisted purely out of patriotism, they missed reality by a half mile.
Sure, he loved America and felt compelled to fight for it after more than 2,600 people at the
World Trade Center were turned to dust. But his decision sprang from soil so much richer than
that. The foisting of all the dirty work onto people less fortunate than an NFL safety clawed at his
ethics. He had uncles and grandfathers on both sides who'd fought in World War II and the
Korean War, one who'd taken a bullet in his chest, another who'd lost a finger and one who'd been
the last to leap out of a plane shot from the sky. On a level deeper than almost any other
American, he'd reaped the reward of those sacrifices: the chance his country afforded him to be
himself, all of himself.
He yearned to have a voice one day that would carry, possibly in politics, and he was far from the
sort of man who could send others into a fire that he had skirted. His relentless curiosity, his
determination to live his life as if it were a book that would hold its reader to the last word,
pushed him into the flames as well. The history of man is war, he told a family member, so how,
without sampling it, could he ever know man or himself completely?
Some people, only a few, decide early in their lives that the world will remember their names.
Some people -- fewer still -- understand that the cleanest and most powerful way to do that is by
never asking the world to remember their names, by letting their lives do that. "Let people find
things out about you," Pat told B.J. Alford, his roommate and teammate at Arizona State. "Don't
tell them." In Pat's first journal, at age 16, in one of his first entries -- 11 years to the day before
he died -- he wrote, I consider myself an atheist, however, in the back of my mind, I wonder if
there is something greater. I feel as though I am destined for something "gothic" or the elite.
Some state in which I have achieved all that can be achieved. Glory, prestige, peace of mind.
Nirvana. Obviously I won't know if my intuition is worth a s--- until I'm dead. Therefore I do not
believe in preaching. I do not know the answer so I cannot state my hypothesis as truth. My
hypothesis isn't even educated. It's more like a stab.
Only a few times in his life did he let it slip out. Drinking beer on a cliff one day in Santa
Barbara, just after the Arizona Cardinals picked him from the dregs of the 1998 draft, he stared
off at the Pacific and told Alford, "People are going to know who I am."
"Relax, Pat, you're a seventh-rounder," said Alford.
Pat fixed him with a look, but said nothing. He wasn't talking football.
Something else he figured out early: Fear was what stood between a man and an extraordinary
life, and the surest way through it was to stare it down over and over, until that gaze became
habit. As a teenager, Pat was swinging one day from branch to branch, 20 feet up, through the
trees outside his house, when neighbor Peggy Melbourne heard a thud. She ran outside and found
him lying on the ground, groaning. He dusted himself off, then ratcheted up the risk, more than
once turning to a pal in the passenger seat as he drove 75 mph on the freeway, asking him to hold
the wheel, then shimmying out the window and draping himself over the roof, only to reappear a
few minutes later through the opposite window.
Sure, he could be an idiot. He could tie one on at a buddy's wedding and then decide that the best
way to celebrate was to scale the outside of his seven-story hotel. Marie Ugenti, his high school
sweetheart and future wife, knew better than to waste her breath. The one time he let friends talk
him out of taking a risk -- a 60-foot cliff dive at Lake Tahoe with a menacing outcropping of rock
-- it ate him up so much that he returned two weeks later and did a swan dive, backward.
But the wildest one of all was the leap at Sedona, the wonderland an hour-and-a-half's drive from
Phoenix where he'd test himself during college against the river and the crazed jumble of red
rocks. There he discovered a cliff with a 40-foot drop to the boulders below. Nearly 20 feet away
was the top of a tree, 10 feet below the cliff. Pat fell silent, calculating. He retreated 20 yards, all
the space he had, and began to run. If he didn't reach that tree, death, paralysis or a bundle of
broken bones waited below. Even if he did reach it, the tree appeared to be dead, most of its
branches snapped off -- would it hold his weight? At full speed he flung himself across the
breach, struck the tree trunk so hard that it crushed the wind from his lungs as he wrapped his
arms around it and hugged for dear life ... then gathered himself, too dazed and too wise for a
whoop, but not for a smirky little smile.
Braveheart. That's who he wanted to be, said a friend who saw the glow in Pat's eyes as he
watched the movie about the Scottish warrior. Trouble was, Pat's wisdom quest was too honest,
had carried him clean past that plane where good and evil are fixed and far-flung from one
another, to a higher ledge up in the swirling fog where a man could see how right and wrong
might rotate and trade places. It just became harder and harder to be Braveheart.
Until 9/11, when for a moment there was moral clarity, a clarion call to arms, a chance to be that
man. Sitting atop that bunker, 11 days into the invasion of a country that had hatched none of the
9/11 terrorists, it was dawning on Pat with each blast-wave lighting up the desert: That moment
already was gone. Dawning on him that he'd flung himself into thin air on faith, in search of his
highest self, toward a hollow tree that might not hold his weight.
What bloodbath the Black Sheep anticipated the next night, when they took part in Saving Private
Lynch? It never happened. The "blaze of gunfire" that an early news report described as having
occurred when Special Ops forces swooped in to rescue her from a Nasiriyah hospital and Pat's
platoon provided perimeter security? It never happened either: Iraqi forces had fled the day
before, and Iraqi doctors were waiting to hand her over. Private Lynch hadn't been stabbed or
shot by the Iraqis, as intelligence reports and then news accounts had indicated, nor had she
emptied her rifle "fighting to the death" before her capture; her rifle had jammed and she never
fired a shot.
One thing really did happen, though: Pat, who'd been a business-marketing major at Arizona
State, discovered firsthand how wars and soldiers get marketed by government and media alike,
and how you can find yourself cast in the commercial whether you auditioned for it or not.
A little over a month later, in May 2003, the Black Sheep went home to Fort Lewis, shook the
sand from their underwear and started letting off steam. Forty of the boys poured into their
saloon, the Steilacoom Deli & Pub, six miles from the base, to throw a farewell party for a
departing officer, only to discover that the bar had been taken over in their absence by another
Army platoon. One of the interlopers unloaded a "F--- you!" on the Black Sheep's company
commander, and before you knew it, chairs and bodies were flying, one of those barroom brawls
that usually only happen in bad movies.
Russ tried to play peacemaker, but the meathead he was mediating with suddenly grabbed his
throat. While Russ was deciding whether to have at him, a big screaming blur grabbed the
meathead and tossed him aside like a pencil. That blur was Pat, but his goal, it became clear, was
to prevent harm, not inflict it. Turning, he saw a clot of a half-dozen combatants lurching toward
a soldier from the other platoon who had passed out on the floor, with a little help from a Black
Sheep's choke hold. Pat blitzed that way, spread his arms and drove the whole crew, his guys and
their guys, across the pub so they wouldn't trample that sorry customer on the floor.
Pat wasn't new to mayhem -- once, at a pal's south-of-the-border bachelor party, he'd ended up in
a Mexican clink. But he'd learned something crucial about life and about the swirling fog when he
was 17, outside a Round Table Pizza not far from his home.
He'd always been protective of Jeff Hechtle, a high school buddy who'd undergone more than a
dozen operations as a result of cancerous moles that covered two thirds of his head. So when
someone ran into the pizza parlor and shouted, "Jeff's getting jumped!" Pat, who'd been drinking
at a party earlier that night, bolted into the parking lot, where several guys were tangling with his
friend. As a child Pat was so sensitive that his eyes filled with tears when he saw homeless
people. Even as a teenager he would still pack Keek, the cat pillow his grandmother had sewn for
him when he was a toddler, and Fluff, his baby blanket with a bunny on it, for overnights at
friends' houses and even, in later years, for Arizona State football camps. That softness could
undermine his extraordinary aims, and so he'd paved over it with a hardness to match. Both drove
him out of that pizza shop to defend Jeff.
He caught the tail end of the melee and
went after a man in his early 20s who, it
turned out, wasn't the one who had initiated
the fight. The man, and several of his teeth,
ended up lying on the asphalt.
Everyone took off but Pat. Already, even in the wake of high school pranks that backfired, he
lived by a creed of accountability, by a motto he'd soon hear from his Arizona State football
coaches and make his own: Take it in the forehead. He gave his battered opponent his name and
phone number. The Tillmans got a phone call later that night, the young man's father saying that
his son was hospitalized and vomiting from a head injury. Suddenly Pat was staring at a felony
assault charge, the threat of a lawsuit and a potential football scholarship going up in smoke, and
in the crossfire between two parents whose marriage would dissolve two years later. His mother
wanted to take the $40,000 that she'd just inherited from her grandmother and pay off the
aggrieved family. His father, a lawyer, insisted that Pat had done the right thing and that offering
money would be an admission of guilt. Pat reeled out of his house, sobbing, and climbed a
eucalyptus tree.
Through his tears he looked down on a home where a boy could be a dreamer, an adventurer ... a
child. A home with a small black-and-white TV that received just one fuzzy channel ...
surrounded by a yard that hawks, deer, raccoons, wild boars and feral cats tumbled into from the
hills of a 4,000-acre park, crawling with trails that he and his brothers roamed ... nestled across
the street from a creek that fed a reservoir where ropes hung from thick branches that begged a
boy to grab and swing and let go.
He came down, at last, from the eucalyptus, into a world where a knight rushing to the aid of a
companion in distress could be a villain, where a man too hasty and too sure of doing the right
thing could wreak a bloody, tangled mess. He pleaded guilty to felony assault, entered a juvenile
detention center a few days after his high school graduation and was mistakenly placed in solitary
confinement for the first week. He served 30 days, did 250 hours of community service, and his
family paid $40,000 in damages.
He learned something large. He learned that he'd better begin really learning, that truth's more
slippery and the consequences more dire than he'd ever dreamed when he sketched out that path
for himself in his journal as a 16-year-old. But he wouldn't abandon it. "We've got to strive for
more," he'd invariably conclude in those debates about the world's woes around the Tillmans'
front-yard fire. "Just because it hasn't been done doesn't mean it can't be done."
Weeks passed after that wild night at the Steilacoom Deli & Pub. Pat and Kevin left Fort Lewis to
enter Ranger School, the 61-day trial by hellfire that a man had to pass to become a tabbed
Ranger. It culminated with a week and a half in the swamps of Florida that slashed 16 pounds off
the average trainee, caused hallucinations, skin diseases and even hair loss due to malnutrition,
stress and 20-hour days exposed to the elements, and made sure that nearly half of all candidates
never stitched the sacred black and gold Rangers tab onto the left shoulder of their uniforms. The
Tillmans stitched theirs, then Russ got his too, and Pat greeted him back at Fort Lewis with a
brother's hug.
Next came months of drudgery, days on the base filled with mindless tasks and barracks gossip.
Pat grew restless -- the Rangers' intensity didn't match his. Bob Ferguson, the Seattle Seahawks
general manager who had drafted Pat when Ferguson was with the Cardinals, called Pat's agent,
Frank Bauer -- the only NFL agent whose job was to say no to every commercial offer made to
his client, on philosophical grounds -- and told him that he wanted to make a Seahawk of the man
who'd been Fergy's favorite player in 30 years as an NFL administrator.
"Can't," said Bauer, "he's got a year left in the Army." But then someone told him that Pat's
circumstances were unique and that he might, having already served a tour in a war zone, be able
to get an early discharge.
Bauer called Pat. The urge to return to a simpler, cleaner battlefield, to swap uniforms again and
race into a stadium rocking from the thunder of 60,000 throats, rushed through him.
He called Bauer back a week later. No, he told him. He hadn't fulfilled his commitment. He hadn't
yet tasted live fire.
Every day, when Russ turns on his computer, he sees that photo of Pat in fatigues, his face buried
in a watermelon, sucking life to the rind ... two days before his death. And Russ is right back
there, in southeastern
Afghanistan in spring 2004, when the Black Sheep became snake eaters -- roughing it with the
natives, mingling with them to get tips and going through villages house to house to flush out the
enemy and their weapons.
You couldn't relax your guard, not even when villagers were smiling and shouting, "Eh,
America!" and pushing cups of tea into your hands, not even when Afghan coalition forces
wearing old U.S. Army fatigues were hopping into your Hummer and grinning. Every sensory
neuron kept firing, scanning for danger, because every grin, every teacup, every uniform could
cloak a bullet or a bomb meant for you.
But there was Pat, in his second week of poking into the shadows of mud and stone hovels that
might be crawling with Taliban fighters, accepting a chunk of watermelon from an Afghan and
smearing his face in it, tasting it and smelling it and feeling it drip off his nose.
Only afterward would the midnight coffee Russ shared under the stars that night with Pat and
Kevin become charged with meaning: their final one together. Having learned from Navy SEALS
he had met in Iraq, Pat had turned their ritual into art, pulling out a little Coleman stove, a French
press and a packet of his favorite beans. They laughed long and hard that night, never dreaming
that the machinery of death had already been set in gear, that a busted fuel pump on one of the
platoon's ground mobility vehicles (GMV) was its first grinding cog.
A new fuel pump arrived by airlift later the
next night. The unit mechanic installed it
the following morning, but still the GMV wouldn't start. A decision was made to pull the vehicle
with tow straps, but after a few hours on those dirt roads, the shocks, struts and steering were
shot, the vehicle immovable and the Black Sheep marooned in Magarah, a half-dozen dried mud
and rock houses, staring at a real soup sandwich.
Hours began to slow-tick away in the heat of April 22. If only Pat could wander off on his own,
with a compass, backpack and weapon. He'd come back with Osama bin Laden and Saddam
Hussein both, his friends would joke -- although some weren't joking. First Lieutenant David
Uthlaut, the Black Sheep's crackerjack platoon leader, e-mailed a request to the Forward
Operating Base (FOB) for a Chinook to swoop in, harness up the disabled GMV and ... well, the
chopper could drop it in the Indian Ocean for all he cared.
The locals gathered, eyeballing the Black Sheep. Sure, it was a hoot when several Rangers paired
off with villagers and flopped in the dirt to wrestle, and when Pat trounced Magarah's finest in a
rock-throwing contest. But Uthlaut's dilemma became dire. His commanders at the FOB, fearing
the GMV would become a propaganda trophy, wouldn't let him abandon the vehicle, nor could
they spare a Chinook to sling-load it away. So grenade the sonofabitch, groused his men, but then
everyone's tails would've been in a sling.
Thirty-five Rangers, a dozen vehicles and the six Afghan soldiers attached to the unit sat
alongside a creek, watching fields of blue and red poppy flowers glisten in the sun as morning
turned to late afternoon. The officers at the FOB, impatient, pressed Uthlaut: Solve the damned
problem and get boots on the ground in nearby Manah, the last village on the Black Sheep's
checklist for that sector, then return to base for reassignment. A crowd of Afghans gathered and
listened when a local tow-truck driver appeared, offering to winch the busted GMV onto the back
of his vehicle and haul it to the nearest highway, where it could be handed off to American forces
coming from the FOB.
Uthlaut relayed the offer back to base. The company commander seized on it, ordered him to split
his platoon into two serials -- one escorting the albatross GMV to a rendezvous point on the
highway, the other proceeding to Manah -- and to move out, now. Uthlaut, steamed, e-mailed
back his disagreement and then radioed it, hoping that officers would overhear and amend the
command. It meant splitting his firepower, relying on a local, traveling in daylight and arriving in
Manah after sundown, too late to begin clearing operations. Why not move at night and arrive
there at dawn, especially after sitting in one place for so long that half the countryside knew his
platoon's whereabouts? Objection overruled.
Suddenly orders were being barked, vehicles were pulling out. Pat and Russ would join 14 other
Rangers and four Afghan soldiers traveling in Serial 1 to Manah. Serial 2, including Kevin and
the towed turkey, would leave a few minutes later and take another road through the mountains to
the highway. Just before their exodus a one-legged man approached the platoon with a message:
An Afghan doctor who lived on a nearby hill had something to tell them. The Black Sheep, who
could tarry no more, blew him off and left in a cloud of dust.
Was the doctor trying to warn of an ambush? A more appetizing opportunity than this, no enemy
could possibly conjure. No, wait, yes it could. The tow truck -- a jinga, the locals called it -- tried
to but couldn't negotiate the steep, twisting dirt road through the mountains. Serial 2 would have
to turn around and take the longer path to the highway, following Serial 1's route for a stretch
through the narrowest of canyons. The jinga driver knew the way. He'd lead them.
Serial 1, in six vehicles up ahead, entered the canyon, its walls so sheer it felt like a cave and so
tight in spots that vehicles had just inches of clearance. Russ's guts tightened. This was exactly
the sort of terrain where, in Army training videos, he'd seen Afghans pick apart the Soviets during
their war two decades ago. "This is Ambush Alley," he told a Ranger beside him. They made it
through the gorge unscathed, passed a cluster of four houses, then missed their turnoff to Manah
and pulled to the side of the road.
Serial 2 entered the canyon and got the same ominous feelings. "Reminds me of the opening of
The Lone Ranger," one Black Sheep said, "where all the Texas Rangers got killed." Suddenly an
explosion ripped through the canyon. "IED!" someone shouted -- but no, it wasn't an Improvised
Explosive Device hidden along the road. More explosions shook the canyon, rocks cascading
from the 650-foot-high walls: mortar or rocket-propelled grenades launched from the ridgelines.
The jinga driver froze, and the four Ranger vehicles behind him were pinned, the gorge too
narrow to squeeze around him and escape. The squad leader in the GMV behind the jinga, Staff
Sgt. Greg Baker, screamed and waved at the Afghan driver to Move! Move! -- got no response
and shattered the driver's window with a blow from his M-4 rifle.
Pat and his serial might never have heard or responded to that first explosion if they hadn't missed
their turn and pulled over. But they did, at 6:34 p.m., and were now running back toward the
canyon in fire teams of two to four men. Oh, f---, Russ thought. Here it was: his and Pat's first
firefight.
Pat took off, then turned. There was confusion in the eyes of a young Ranger, 18-year-old Spc.
Bryan O'Neal, whom he'd taken under his wing months earlier. "Follow me!" he called, and the
kid came on the run. "Let's go kill the bad guys!" All the Afghans in Serial 1 stayed with the
vehicles ... except one. He went with Pat.
Russ, for the first time, saw Pat move when it was life and death. Damn, he thought -- hauling all
that gear and that big SAW gun uphill, scaling five-foot stone walls, crossing the rock rubble of
that lunar landscape, Pat was flat-out flying. He had mates in Ambush Alley. He had a brother in
the kill zone.
Three to four football fields. That's how much ground he had to cover to get back there. He and
his two men raced past the four houses. From one bolted a woman, screaming, and a flock of
children.
Pat, who often played football with no pads
other than those on his shoulders, shouted
back to a trailing sergeant: Could he rip off
his body armor so he could really run?
Request denied.
Pat and his advancing platoon mates began taking fire from the northern ridgeline as they
scrambled toward a hill near the kill zone. A radio operator behind them tried to call Serial 2 to
inform them of Serial 1's new position. No response. He tried to call in aerial support. No
response.
Pat reached the hill first, and was caught in a crossfire all his own: his need to protect O'Neal, the
young Ranger at his side, and his own screaming need to keep going and take out the Taliban
threatening his mates and brother. He crested the hill and positioned his two men behind
boulders, taking small-arms fire from both ridgelines and firing back. Now they were the ones
nearest to the dirt road and to the chaos in the canyon. Pat retraced his steps, went back over the
hill, near Russ's position, and asked permission to go even closer and attempt to take out the
enemy on the southern ridgeline. The sergeant nodded. Russ watched Pat run back over the crest,
vanishing from his view for the last time.
Back in the canyon, Serial 2's lead GMV finally got the jinga driver to move his vehicle, then
maneuvered around it. The gorge twisted, and the lead GMV -- bristling with a .50-caliber heavy
machine gun on the roof, an M240B rack-mounted machine gun, a SAW gun, three M-4s and
buckets of adrenaline -- got around the bend, to where the canyon opened wide. The squad leader,
Baker, saw muzzle flashes on the hill to his right and a bearded Afghan soldier. At last, an enemy
position they could fire on, unlike the unreachable enemy atop the canyon walls. Wrong. It was
the Afghan soldier 10 to 15 yards from Pat, wearing old U.S. desert camouflage fatigues, firing
his AK-47 at the Taliban up on the ridgeline.
"Contact!" someone shouted. Baker began firing his M-4 at the Afghan, just as Pat returned to his
position and began to tell O'Neal of his attack plan. The machine guns in the GMV, following
Baker's lead, unloaded on the hillside. The Afghan soldier dropped dead.
"Stop! Friendlies! Cease fire!" Pat and the other Black Sheep from Serial 1 screamed from the
hill. But the gunners on that lead GMV, still deafened by the blasts inside that tight gorge and
now by the .50-caliber gun blazing on the roof, couldn't hear them. The fire from the ridgelines
seemed to have ceased, the Taliban apparently in retreat. Pat and his mates raised their arms and
waved them back and forth to signal cease-fire. Some of the men in the GMV didn't see the
gesture, others didn't recognize its meaning. They kept firing.
The driver of the GMV, meanwhile, had spotted Serial 1's vehicles up ahead and realized those
were Black Sheep on the hill. "Friendlies on top!" he shouted. No one heard him. A hot .50caliber brass casing fell from the roof and burned him. Some of his mates heard his howl of pain
and thought he'd been hit by enemy fire, heightening their confusion.
On the hillside Pat heard his young partner's cries from the boulder below his. "Hey, don't worry,"
Pat called to O'Neal, "I've got something that can help us." Popping up to fling a smoke grenade
he hoped would halt the hail of fire, he drew a fusillade of bullets, zinging all around him,
pocking his bulletproof vest. The men in the lead GMV thought the smoke had come from an
exploding mortar round.
The lead GMV kept moving along the dirt road, but the firing stopped. Russ and O'Neal later
recalled seeing it stop, perhaps 33 to 55 yards from Pat's position, and some of the men inside it
getting out. The men in the GMV would say later they didn't leave the vehicle and the distance
they shot from was never that close. Pat and O'Neal, thinking that at last the gunners had realized
their blunder, stood and exchanged a few words of relief.
Suddenly, the machine guns opened up again. "Cease fire, friendlies!" Pat howled in disbelief.
Russ, hugging the ground, waiting to be hit, heard Pat screaming words he never would have for
the first 27 years, five months and 15 days of his life: "I am Pat f------ Tillman, dammit! I am Pat
f------ Tillman!"
O'Neal, bracing for his own death, suddenly heard pain in Pat's voice. A moment of silence
passed, then he heard what sounded like water gurgling down the hill, felt his shoulder
dampening.
O'Neal turned. It wasn't water. It was a river of blood. The back of Pat's head was gone.
Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" Russ heard O'Neal screaming when the shooting finally ceased. Russ
saw O'Neal yanking off his helmet and trying to tear off his bloody clothes. Russ then saw
platoon mates go over toward O'Neal with a stretcher and carry a body down that hill. But Russ's
mind refused to ask whose body it was or to add things up, because one plus one would equal
devastation.
He pulled security for three quarters of an hour, his eyes scanning the terrain for the enemy to
make sure the ambush was over, his head still in the sand. A vehicle pulled up, Kevin perched in
the turret. He'd been far to the rear, in the last vehicle of Serial 2, and knew nothing about what
had happened to Pat or the two other Black Sheep, Uthlaut and his radio operator, who'd been
wounded, possibly, by the spray of bullets from that lead GMV. He kept asking where Pat was,
wondering why he hadn't heard his brother's booming voice, but no one, as yet, had found the
courage to tell him. "Hey, what's up?" Kevin finally called out to Russ. Just then, a sergeant
approached Kevin and said softly, "I'm sorry, I hate to be the one to tell you this ... but your
brother was killed."
"What?" said Kevin. "What? ... WHAT?"
All at once Russ felt as if there were a black hole inside of him, sucking everything into it. He
watched a helicopter take away Pat's body; a second one came for Kevin. Quietly, in small
groups, the men began comparing their versions of what had occurred. The unspeakable
realization began to grip the Black Sheep. America's most renowned soldier was dead, and they
had killed him.
Thoughts, at last, began to form in the fog of Russ's mind as he awoke the next morning. Damn,
he wondered, how could that have happened, a total clusterf---, with men of this quality, men he
respected and loved, Army Rangers? Sure, you squeeze off a few rounds in the direction your
squad leader fires -- that's understandable. But then you're taught to scan and wait, identify an
enemy target before you start blazing again. Why had so many guys just kept shooting and
shooting? But he hadn't been in their shoes, seen or felt what they had while roaring out of that
trap in the canyon and thinking they were running into the ambush's second wave. Some of them
would say later that the light was bad, that all they could see were shapes and muzzle fire because
the sun was setting behind that hill. Some -- not unlike Pat's old football teammates, wide
receivers Pat had flattened during light-contact scrimmages -- felt that Pat had been
overaggressive, placing his team at risk, even though he had received permission for the position
he'd staked.
The sun rose on their silent camp. Russ saw the haunting in those gunners' eyes, and he felt sick
for them. They'd been hung out to dry -- all of them, he felt -- by leadership decisions made back
at the FOB.
The platoon headed back there that day, and the haunting only grew worse. Notices went around,
high- and low-ranking soldiers alike called to testify in the Army's initial investigation into Pat's
death. The Black Sheep wept and couldn't sleep, one of them growing dizzy at each reference to
the horror. They gathered in a large room with a chaplain and officers to vent -- a "critical
incident stress debrief," in Army lexicon -- where they yelled at each other, then talked and cried
on each other's shoulders. A colonel told some of them that everyone was to blame, not any
individual. It wasn't enough. The platoon, Russ felt, was destroyed, the men in it damaged for the
rest of their lives.
Russ missed the stress debrief. As the Tillmans' closest platoon mate, he was chosen to escort
Kevin on a flight to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, to stare for hours at that refrigerated
coffin. The two men flew in silence, Russ under orders to say nothing about the incident, "until
we get the facts," and Kevin still assuming that the enemy had killed his brother, too stunned and
grief-stricken to ask Russ for details.
Dread began to boil inside Russ. In a few days he'd be representing the U.S. Army at Pat's
memorial service, the lone Ranger there who'd been anywhere near Pat when he was killed,
facing Pat's family and friends ... under a gag order. He was willing to defy that order, to clean
latrines for the rest of his life for the sake of Pat's family, but he knew bullets were hissing
everywhere that day ... what if the conclusions he'd drawn were somehow wrong? What if he told
Pat's mom that her son had been blown away by his own men and suddenly found himself in a
media firestorm, only for Army investigators to uncover evidence proving otherwise? On the
saddest day of his life, he was going to have to squirm and evade the people who loved Pat most.
All he wanted to do, in those few days at his grandmother's house before Pat's service, was sleep,
find the bottom of a few beer bottles and stare into space, but his cousin yanked him out of bed
and dragged him to -- of all places -- the Sunshine Saloon Sports Bar in Pleasanton, Calif. A
young woman named Tammy Wright happened to be sitting at a table there, and though in a
mood to meet no one, Russ met the love of his life on a night when he would've been 7,500 miles
away if Pat hadn't died. Funny, Pat had told Russ that his old girlfriend was all wrong for him.
The Army, already confused by Kevin's insistence that there be no minister or prayers at the
repatriation ceremony for Pat's body, was bewildered to learn that Pat hadn't wanted a military
funeral or 21-gun salute -- that it was enough to just go out as a human. His widow, Marie, had
those wishes on paper, signed by Pat, to prove it. Instead Pat was cremated, his ashes scattered in
the Pacific Ocean and his memorial service held at the park in San Jose where he had stood 10
years earlier at his high school graduation.
When the nationally televised memorial service was held, 11 days after Pat's death, the Army's
top commanders in the U.S. had already been informed that it was a potential fratricide. They
kept that news to themselves, and the hero drum kept pounding. Richard Tillman, trying his best
to keep faith with his brother, walked to the microphone and said "He's not with God. He's f-----dead."
Russ nearly disintegrated when the bagpipers blew Amazing Grace as he delivered the folded
Stars and Stripes to Pat's parents and opened his mouth to say, "On behalf of a grateful nation...."
The touch of Mary Tillman's hand kept him from breaking down. Then, for two days, he joined
the two-week wake held by Pat's friends and family in the Tillmans' front yard, all-nighters spent
drinking beer and swapping every Pat story they could muster to keep him alive. One by one or in
little groups off to the side they'd ask Russ to tell them whatever he knew about how Pat had left
this world. The hardest -- it killed him -- was when Kevin asked. Russ kept telling them he saw
Pat charging up that hill and going over it, with bullets flying everywhere, bullets from both sides
... and then lapsing into silence, choking on what he couldn't say.
Then it was time for Russ to report back to the men he once trusted more than any on earth, to the
organization that he once counted on to make him a man. Russ went AWOL.
Here's the thing about integrity: it's so easy to stretch, a limp rubber band. How were men who
made their living in a bureaucracy -- say, the military or the government -- to understand the
forces at work here? How were people who are accustomed, as most of us are, to giving truth a
little pull here, another tug there, for the sake of the institution or their careers, to foresee the
tension that would be created when they began stretching the story of the death of a man who put
so little stock in institutions or careers, and so much in living an honest life?
How could they know the dynamic they were trifling with as they crafted official statements
describing the heroic death of a prize soldier, as they ordered a second investigation when the
first one produced such awkward word couplings as "gross" and "negligence"? How could
politicians, so determined to couple "honor" and "freedom," so familiar with limp rubber bands,
anticipate the recoil?
Ordinary people feeling pressured -- or could it be reflexive now? -- to cast the best possible light,
to spin anything that happened in life . . . even death. Ordinary people, never pausing to consider
DNA, unaware of how out of the ordinary were the blood relatives of the dead man. A brother
who was in that canyon, who knew all the soldiers involved and who'd be rejoining them upon
their return from Afghanistan, a philosophy major who'd be waiting with big questions now that
his head was beginning to clear. A father who made a living from confrontation, a lawyer equally
ready to hurl legalese or obscenities at generals or the Secretary of Defense once the Army
admitted, five weeks after Pat's death, that fratricide had occurred and began disbursing
information that raised as many questions as it answered. And a mother. . . .
Oh, that mother. A woman with no TV, no closet in her bedroom, no need for cosmetics or
fashionable clothes, none of the usual numbing agents or distractions. A woman who'd grown up
in a family of soldiers, vacationing at Fort Ticonderoga and West Point, eating up military history
during monthly family picnics on Gettysburg's Little Round Top as her father and an uncle
walked her through tactical masterstrokes and turning-point blunders, then coming back for
second and third helpings as a history major at San Jose State. She'd both admired and protested
war-makers, joining demonstrators in Chicago to shout Hell, no! to Vietnam. Intimidated by the
glare of four-star generals wielding 1,800-page reports? Hah. As a special-ed teacher, she'd stared
down trailers full of emotionally disturbed teenagers from whom colleagues fled, shrieking.
She'd gone through life's grinder without losing her gristle or her grin. She'd lost her father, an
international banker, to a heart attack when she was 18, weathered a divorce and now lost a son in
baffling circumstances in a war she didn't believe in. All that was left of him to fight for was the
spirit of his life, that burning authenticity, and so she came home each afternoon from a day of
teaching learning-disabled kids, took a deep breath, dug into a massive plastic bin full of
documents that she and her ex-husband had compelled the military to produce, turned on her
creeping, clogged-artery computer ... and went to work. Googling alternate sources, e-mailing
experts, telephoning Black Sheep, petitioning congressmen, plying every conscience and pulling
every lever she could with the dead weight of her son's gold-ingot name. Cross-referencing
eyewitness testimony, underlining contradictions, scrawling retorts in the margins -- like son, like
mother: No way!?????... Why the story?... Total Nonsense.... Total Bulls---.... Why all the
incompetence?... I'm not buying that!
Post-it notes piling up, bags beneath her eyes deepening, fist pounding on a table as she howled,
"Are you f------ kidding me?" to a brigadier general as stories kept changing, as the estimates of
the distance between the gun-blazing GMV and Pat kept varying -- ballooning as high as 270
yards, shrinking as low as 33 -- as descriptions of the lighting differed wildly, as eyewitnesses
told her that the shooting occurred not in one continuous four-second helter-skelter drive-by the
way her family at first was told but in volleys, with stops and starts, perhaps over the course of
nearly a minute. She and her brother Mike measuring off the distances on the hillside behind her
home and shaking their heads in disbelief when Mike, from 55 yards, could see Mary's earrings
and the three buttons on her blouse. Running back to her computer, firing off another 32
questions for Sen. John McCain to unload on the Pentagon. Mary Tillman was a bulldog.
Yes, it was true, she and Pat had always been fascinated by conspiracy theories, the back-room
machinations of power and money. But what was she supposed to do when, Mary says, an Army
coroner told her that he did not sign an initial casualty report that stated her son had been killed
by enemy fire, because he knew the enemy at that distance wasn't skilled enough to send three
bullets that close together through a man's forehead? How was she supposed to let go when so
many lapses in judgment and standard procedure seemed to have occurred? How was she
supposed to respond when she learned that the testimony of soldiers was changing, that
culpability was vanishing, that Pat's uniform and body armor had been burned within three days
of his death, that the initial investigator's report was buried and redone after he recommended that
"certain leaders be investigated" for "gross negligence" in deciding to split the platoon and have it
travel in daylight, and that two gunners be punished for gross negligence and loss of control.
What was she supposed to think when she read one officer's conclusion that the Tillmans, "not
being [Christian], I'm not really sure what they believe or how they can get their head around
death. So, in my personal opinion, sir, that is why I don't think they'll ever be satisfied."
Mary avoided TV cameras and news crews. Too melodramatic, that game. She let the antiwar
boat float by. Too muddy, that water. One man's story. One man's determination to live an honest
life ... turned on its head and spun in circles by his death. She'd let her son's story stand on its
own, let others detect patterns, connect dots.
The Army awarded her son a Silver Star for valor, perhaps unprecedented for a victim of friendly
fire. Pat's family felt it was a token to appease them, another attempt to use him in the
propagation of patriotic myth. The Army was confounded. Following its first investigation,
headed by a captain in Pat's battalion, it had produced a 109-page investigation by a lieutenant
colonel in Pat's regiment, then been pressured by the Tillmans into a far more extensive one
spearheaded by a brigadier general. The Army disciplined seven men for the incident, penalties
ranging from pay-cuts and loss of rank to dismissal from the Rangers and return to the rank-andfile Army. Mere wrist slaps, the family felt, little more than a soldier might get for cursing a
superior officer. Their questions and pressure kept mounting, compelling a fourth investigation,
this one by the Department of Defense's Inspector General.
Yes, the Army finally admitted, it had violated its own regulations by waiting more than a month
to inform the Tillmans that their son had died as a result of suspected friendly fire, but only out of
a desire to wait until it had gathered all the facts. As for the burning of the uniform and body
armor that might have shown bullet evidence, the Army countered that it was done only because
the bloodied gear was considered a potential biohazard and hygiene issue, that they might stir
emotion, and because officers in the field had already determined that fratricide was a foregone
conclusion.
How far up the chain of command did such decision making go? Would the Army -- which told
Kevin about the fratricide only after his mates returned to Fort Lewis a month after Pat's death -ever have done even that if it hadn't had to because Kevin was in the platoon? "I never had the
sensation that anybody wanted me to do anything except to tell the truth," one officer testified in
a subsequent investigation. "I was told over and over, 'This is ugly, but find the truth and let's get
out and let's get it done.' ... I think you'd have a hard time finding any impediments [or] that the
investigation was blocked or smeared in some way."
Mary didn't have a hard time.
"You try to picture, How did my child die? and it keeps changing," she said. "It's like Pat has died
seven times in my head. You think you're losing your mind for months. They attached themselves
to his virtue and then threw him under the bus. They had no regard for him as a person. He'd hate
to be used for a lie. I don't care if they put a bullet through my head in the middle of the night. I'm
not stopping."
Finally, last March, the Inspector General's office asked Army investigators to open a fifth
investigation, this one to determine if the negligence involved was criminal. Now Mary could
only wait. Two years had passed since that day she'd picked up the phone and heard Pat's wife
cry, "He's dead!" Two years, and finally the armor she'd worn for the battle, the distance that
she'd kept between herself and the words on those thousands of pages so she could use them as
weapons, began to disintegrate, leaving her defenseless against the grief.
She wanted no one outside her circle to know about that grief. Because then she, too, would be
using something pure as a tool. Just imagine a mother alone in a house typing Where is my son?
into a Google box and pressing the search button. That's what Mary Tillman did one night.
Here's what's amazing: If you type "Where is my son?" into a Google box and press the search
button, you actually get answers -- 22,700 of them! They're not real answers to Mary Tillman's
question, of course, no more than any of the myths we reach for when we're lost or scared, but we
grab for them anyway because they make us feel better, for a while.
So much do we need them that we'll even take the guy who came right out and said that the myths
are a load of crap and hoist him on our shoulders to make another myth. The President did it,
materializing on the massive video screen at an Arizona Cardinals game in a taped homage to Pat
and the global war on terror seven weeks before he was up for reelection in 2004. The Defense
Department, with the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal breaking a week after Pat's death, did it
as well.
Even Russ, who cherished Pat for standing on his own without the myths, would discover how
hard it is not to reach for one when life ambushed him again. It's what we do to get by, because
none of us wants to drink ourselves into oblivion, the way Russ began doing after he'd lost his
role model. None of us wants to lie in bed all night without sleeping, as he did, then doze off at
last, only to awaken, crying out, wet with sweat. None of us wants to feel like a victim, lose all
appetite for life, and then start screaming at the woman we love, the way Russ started doing to
Tammy.
Under threat of court-martial, he'd reported to Fort Lewis after two days on the lam, lost a rank
and swabbed toilets for weeks, but none of that mattered to him. He just couldn't trust anymore.
He lost 30 pounds. He stopped writing in his notebook. But it wasn't only in his pen that words
got stuck. He was shocked, now and then, to find himself stammering, his brain misplacing
words. He wanted to punch a wall when a sergeant major told the platoon, "You guys need to get
over the whole Tillman thing and get on with your life. I'm tired of hearing about it. Get over it."
But far worse was Kevin's frigid silence, his assumption that Russ had been part of a deception.
Kevin entered sniper school at Fort Bragg, learned the solitary man's killing art, and was asked if
he wanted to deploy again to Iraq. Even in the swirl of all his anger and sorrow, he still felt bound
in a pact with his brother to see this commitment through. His mother and uncle flew to North
Carolina and begged him not to go, and when he learned he'd be sent over with men involved in
Pat's death, that, finally, was just too much. He went to a commander and took a pass.
One day at Fort Lewis, Kevin's and Russ's eyes finally met. They talked it out, and Kevin told
Russ he understood. Russ later told Kevin and his mother everything he saw the day Pat died. But
something inside Russ remained broken. He left the Army in February 2005, 10 months after
Pat's death.
Eight months later, Maverick Patrick Baer entered the world. He was born with his heart facing
backward, and three other life-threatening cardiac defects. It would be nice to say that Mav's birth
is what turned his dad's life around, but this isn't fairy-tale time. One night, unable to contain his
hurt and rage, Russ began throwing things and shouting again at Tammy. "You don't understand!"
he howled.
"I'll call the police if you don't stop," she cried. "I don't feel safe with you. I think you need help."
"I don't care anymore," he said.
He pulled out the video of Pat's memorial service and watched it again and again, 15 times,
crying and murmuring, "I miss you, I wish you were here." He and Tammy wrapped each other in
a head-to-toe hug and wept.
He realized that it would take a lot more than hoisting each beer to Pat before he drank it, more
than wearing a silver bracelet engraved with Pat's name and the date of Pat's death. If he really
treasured his lost friend, he'd begin living by the values he had treasured in Pat. So Russ dug in,
began scribbling reminders to himself about goals and personal responsibility and sticking them
everywhere. He cut way back on his drinking. He wrote a letter to Pat, thanking him for showing
him how to change his life.
But life hammered him again. It was the night after Maverick underwent heart surgery, when he
was five months old, and all at once arched his back and froze as Russ and Tammy stared down at
him. Suddenly the nurse was shouting "Code blue!" and a dozen people were storming in,
ordering Russ and Tammy to get out, leaving them in the hallways watching their child turning
gray and flopping like a fish as doctors and nurses pounded on him, shoved tubes into him, sliced
open his chest and began massaging his heart. Still they couldn't get it beating. "Get back from
the doorway!" one cried to Russ. "You're at risk for posttraumatic stress disorder!"
"I've already got it!" Russ cried back.
His son slipping away in front of his eyes, Russ found himself doing the strangest thing, pleading
in his head, If you just get him through this, Pat, I'll do EVERYTHING I can to be the best I can
be. I don't care how you give him back to me, even if he's a vegetable and I have to feed him
through a tube when he's 75, please, I don't care, just keep him alive! That's right: a guy who
didn't believe in an afterlife praying to another guy who didn't believe in an afterlife -- and who
was dead -- to rescue his boy.
A nurse came out finally and told them that Maverick's brain had gone without oxygen for nearly
an hour, that he'd suffered massive liver and kidney damage and that even if he survived, he
might never walk, talk or see.
Two more surgeries were done, and then the damnedest things began to happen. His eyes opened
and slowly began to focus, then one day he grinned, then one day his hand began grabbing his
parents' fingers and squeezing, just like any other kid's, and Russ couldn't help feeling that
somehow it was because of Pat, and that now he had to live up to that promise he'd made.
But then all that fell apart too. On Sunday, near midnight -- six months after that terrifying night
in the hospital -- Maverick began vomiting blood. Apparently, his pulmonary artery had ruptured,
and three hours later the 11-month-old baby was dead.
So Russ is going to walk around forever with the story he was holding for his son. That's the
thing about Pat. He won't go away, because he's become a symbol of our best side and how we'll
give even that away for a soothing lie. We'll hear about people who believe in myths more than
ever because of Pat, and about people who have lost that belief because of him. We'll hear about
young people coming out of the Pat Tillman Foundation's leadership program at Arizona State
and fanning out, in Pat's name, to change the world.
Perhaps, in the aftermath of the current criminal investigation, we will hear another version of
Pat's story from the officers who made the decisions the day he died. Then the trigger-pullers -the ones perhaps not lucky enough to have raced out of a pizza parlor at 17 and learned what can
happen to a man when his adrenaline's up and he's certain he's doing the right thing -- might come
forward with their Pat, as well. We'll read books about him and likely watch movies made by
men who went to Afghanistan and walked in that canyon in search of his spirit.
But if we really want to know who Pat was, our best chance, maybe our only chance, is to look
hard at that picture of a half-naked man doing a handstand on a roof. Doing something he loved
to do just because it was hard and scary, sort of like telling the truth.
Issue date: September 11, 2006
Name _________________________________
Go to: http://blogs.jefftwp.org/wordpress/bhough/
Directions: Answer the following questions regarding the Sports Illustrated Article on Pat
Tillman.
1. Why was Russ Baer unable to tell his son about Pat Tillman?
2. What was the name of Pat Tillman’s platoon?
3. What NFL team did Tillman play for?
4. How much money did he turn down by enlisting in the Army?
5. What professional baseball team did Pat’s Brother Kevin (also an army ranger) play for?
6. Name 5 famous books Tillman read.
7. What did he think of “Gays”?
8. Name 5 characteristics of Pat.
9. What did Tillman think of the War in Iraq?
10. What wars did Pat’s uncle and grandparents fight in?
11. Name 3 examples of Tillman’s “wild side”.
12. What eventually happened to Pat when a high school buddy of his got jumped?
13. Why was Pat separated from his brother and the other Rangers?
14. How much ground did Tillman have to cover to reach Serial 2?
15. How did Tillman attempt to warn his fellow Rangers they were engaging friendlies?
16. What were Tillman’s final words?
17. What good came from Pat’s death for Russ Baer at a sportsbar?
18. Where is Pat’s body?
19. Would you have done what Mary Tillman (Pat’s mother) did to find the truth? Explain.
20. Was Baer able to cope with his son’s birth defects and Pat’s death? Explain his reaction
regarding one day in 2005.