(Doubleday, 383 pages, $27.95)
Pat Tillman understood that he made a fetish of personal virtue. “I follow some philosophy I barely understand,” he wrote in a journal shortly after his 2002 decision to turn down a lucrative new NFL contract and instead enlist in the U.S. Army. At the time, eight months after the attacks on the World Trade Center, playing football seemed below his personal standards. But Army training didn’t silence Tillman’s conscience. He dutifully “did his job” in Iraq even while strongly questioning the purpose of the 2003 U.S. invasion. On the final day of his life—April 22, 2004—honor ruled again. Watching from an Afghan hillside, as the rear half of his platoon came under enemy fire, the 27-year-old Ranger chose to scramble toward the firing. “Let’s go help our boys,” he said.
It’s now widely known that Tillman was cut down by friendly fire that day, and that government authorities concealed that fact until long after his televised funeral back home, said John Strawn in the Portland Sunday Oregonian. But Jon Krakauer has gone deeper into the tragedy than anyone before him, and his “nuanced, thorough, and chilling” account gives the story “the weight it deserves.” Certainly, the details of the cover-up, “even five years later, are nauseating to read,” said Dexter Filkins in The New York Times. Breaking protocol, the Army burned Tillman’s bloodied uniform, which could have provided forensic evidence. One commander knowingly sent a young soldier to lie to Tillman’s family. But Krakauer, the immensely capable author of Into Thin Air, saves almost all of this drama for the book’s last 100 pages.
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Krakauer even gives readers “a full understanding of Tillman’s motivations,” said Dan Neil in the Los Angeles Times. He notes that personal honor can become an obsession, but we never learn where Tillman’s “moral vanity” came from. Krakauer’s greatest mistake, though, is pinning all the blame for Tillman’s death on President George Bush, said Andrew Exum in The Washington Post. I served in Afghanistan myself, and “I am no fan of many of the Bush administration’s decisions.” But mistakes in the field led to Tillman’s death, and Army officials initiated the coverup of the cause. This is what happens in all wars: tragic mistakes, disillusionment, and yes, the waste of great bravery and honor like Pat Tillman’s.
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