Pat Tillman was an extraordinary man lost to war. Most bodies destroyed and damaged in wars are male. War is an essential men’s issue.
Jon Krakauer’s book Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tilllman (2009) sheds light on Pat’s connections to Seattle and Washington state. Because of his connections to Washington, we chose to highlight this former NFL star and U.S. Army Ranger with this article.
Pat Tillman deployed from Fort Lewis for what became his last mission
After Pat Tillman and his brother Kevin completed airborne school and the Ranger Indoctrination Program in 2002, the Army assigned them to a unit called the “Black Sheep”, a platoon of the Second Ranger Battalion based at Fort Lewis, Washington. Pat’s wife found a home for the three of them in University Place, ten miles north of what is now Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM). That house satisfied the wish Pat expressed in his journal for “a quaint little cottage somewhere with personality and charm”, like his childhood home in Northern California. The two-bedroom brick bungalow had a porch that looked across the water toward Fox Island, and it even had a view of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
After participating in the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Pat and his brother returned to Washington in January 2004. A new recruit they met at Fort Lewis at that time later recounted:
“When you first get there, everything is chaos. People are screaming at you, you’re running everywhere, you can’t do anything right. Amidst all this chaos, a big dude, a specialist, comes into the barracks and walks up to me and says, ‘Are you the new guy? My name is Pat Tillman. Relax, this stuff will pass. It’ll be over soon. Nice to meet you.’ It was a shock, somebody being nice, talking to you like a human…It didn’t dawn on me who he was at the time. A lot of Rangers were cocky and arrogant. They treated the new guys like shit. Pat was never like that. He was always polite. He was a genuinely nice guy.”
In March 2004, Pat’s platoon learned they would depart soon for Afghanistan. On April 7, Pat’s wife drove him and his brother to Fort Lewis to catch their flight. Thirty hours later, they landed at Bagram Airfield, twenty-seven miles north of Kabul, the base of operations for the U.S. military in Afghanistan.
Two weeks later, Pat was dead, a victim of friendly fire on April 22, 2004.
Jon Krakauer’s book also describes a fatal incident which led to an Army Ranger policy not to travel during daylight hours – a policy which higher-ups overruled for the mission in which Pat Tillman was killed. During a daytime mission in November 2003, an enemy fighter detonated an IED under a Humvee, dismembering and killing a U.S. soldier. That soldier was Sergeant Jay Blessing, age twenty-three, from Tacoma, Washington.
Seattle Seahawks wanted to sign Pat Tillman
Pat Tillman’s three-year enlistment contract required him to serve in the Army until July 2005. However, prior to his April 2004 deployment to Afghanistan, Pat was presented with an opportunity to leave the Army early.
The general manager of the Seattle Seahawks was eager to have Pat on the Seahawks’ roster for the 2004-2005 football season. He assured Pat’s agent that given that Pat had already served a tour of duty in a war zone, he was confident the Army would oblige to release him if he filed discharge papers. Other teams were interested in signing Pat too: the St. Louis Rams, the New England Patriots, and the Dallas Cowboys.
When Pat’s agent excitedly brought the proposition to Pat, he declined. As Krakauer tells it, “breaking the commitment he’d made to the Rangers would have violated principles he considered inviolable. The handful of people who understood what made Pat tick knew that leaving the Army early was something he would never consider.”
Closing thoughts
We close this post with two passages from the postscript of Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory: The Pat Tillman Odyssey (2009).
1.
Patriotic zeal runs strong in the United States, and young Americans are no less susceptible to the allure of martial adventure than young males from other cultures, including fanatical tribal cultures. Decades from now, when the president of the United States declares yet another war on some national adversary, a great man men (and more than a few women) will doubtless stream forth to enlist, just as eager to join the fight as the Americans who flocked to recruiting offices during previous armed conflicts – regardless of whether the war in question is a reckless blunder or vital to the survival of the Republic.
2.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche introduced the concept of the Ubermensch: an exemplary, transcendent figure…virtuous, loyal, ambitious and outspoken…he regards suffering as salutary, and scorns the path of least resistance.
Nietzsche, it is not difficult to imagine, would have recognized in Pat Tillman more than a few of the attributes he ascribed to his Ubermensch. Prominent among such qualities were Tillman’s robust masculinity and its corollary, his willingness to stand up and fight. Because Tillman’s story conforms in some regards to the classic narrative of a tragic hero, and the protagonist of such a tale always possesses a tragic flaw, it might be tempting to regard Tillman’s resounding alpha maleness as his Achilles’ heel, the trait that ultimately led to his death.
A compelling argument can be made, however, that the sad end he met in Afghanistan was more accurately a function of his stubborn idealism – his insistence on trying to do the right thing. In which case it wasn’t a tragic flaw that brought Tillman down, but a tragic virtue.