Where men win glory: the odyssey of Pat Tillman.

by Jon Krakauer.

PROLOGUE.

If David Uthlaut was still angry when the convoy finally rolled out of Magarah, Afghanistan, the young lieutenant kept his emotions hidden from the forty-four Army Rangers under his command. Certainly he had reason to be steamed. For the previous six hours his platoon had been stopped in the middle of Taliban territory while he argued with headquarters over what to do about a wrecked Humvee. When the discussion finally concluded, Uthlaut was on the losing end of the debate, and he was ordered to complete a series of problematic tasks before nightfall-even though there wasn't nearly enough time to meet the deadline without taking dangerous chances.

The date was April 22, 2004. For eight straight days Uthlaut and his men had been combing the rough backcountry of Khost Province for Taliban insurgents. The Rangers had slept in the mud, been soaked by freezing rain, humped up and down towering escarpments with inadequate rations. At one point they got so hungry that one of the platoon's machine gunners had resorted to rooting in a garbage dump for edible morsels. But none of these tribulations had kept the elite Special Operations unit from executing its mission.

At 11:30 that morning, however, the gnarly terrain delivered a terminal blow to one of the platoon's eleven vehicles, bringing the Rangers to a halt in Magarah, a ramshackle hamlet where the Taliban held sway. Both of the Humvee's tie-rods had broken off, leaving its front wheels flopping uncontrollably in opposite directions. After the platoon mechanic determined that repairing the damage in the field was impossible, Uthlaut radioed headquarters to request that a helicopter be dispatched to hook a sling to the vehicle and airlift it back to their base, an operation considered routine for a CH-47 Chinook-a jet-powered, tandem-rotor behemoth that brings to mind an immense t.i.tanium insect.

Earlier in the day the Rangers had observed Army Chinooks lumbering purposefully across the sky, but headquarters told Uthlaut that no helicopter would be available to extract the crippled Humvee for at least ninety-six hours.

With a sling-load operation ruled out, someone in the platoon suggested they simply pull the .50-caliber machine gun from the Humvee's turret, yank its radios, blow the d.a.m.n thing up with C-4 explosives so the Taliban couldn't salvage it, and abandon the smoldering wreckage where it lay. Uthlaut knew from a prior tour in Afghanistan, however, that destroying a vehicle, even a fubar* vehicle, was strictly forbidden without approval from the commander of the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment. Some other solution to the problem would be required. vehicle, was strictly forbidden without approval from the commander of the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment. Some other solution to the problem would be required.

At 4:00 p.m. headquarters provided one. Uthlaut was ordered to split his platoon into two elements. Half his unit was directed to immediately begin towing the damaged Humvee toward the only paved road in all of Khost, which lay on the far side of a high ma.s.sif. Concurrently, the other half of the platoon was supposed to proceed to a village called Mana, situated four roadless miles from Magarah in the opposite direction, to complete the day's mission: search every building in the settlement for caches of enemy weapons. Word came down the chain of command, moreover, that "this vehicle problem better not delay us any more." The platoon leader was admonished to quit wasting time and "put boots on the ground" in Mana before nightfall.

Khost Province was the home turf of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a short, scrawny man with c.o.ke-bottle eyegla.s.ses and a beard like black steel wool that hung to his belly. Although his physical stature was unimpressive, he was legendary throughout Afghanistan for his bravery and military ac.u.men. Commander of Taliban forces in much of the country's eastern region, Haqqani was one of Osama bin Laden's most trusted a.s.sociates. The enemy fighters the Rangers had been hunting were part of the so-called Haqqani Network-a loose amalgam of Taliban militias and tribal insurgents. Mana was the last village in the area that the Rangers needed to search for Haqqani's forces, and headquarters was adamant that they clear it at the earliest possible opportunity in order to conform to a schedule established weeks earlier by deskbound officers at a distant base.

Uthlaut and his men were no less eager than headquarters to finish their business in Mana, because as soon as it was completed they could return to Forward Operating Base Salerno, where they'd be able to shower off the stink and grime, repair their battered vehicles, re-zero their weapons, and spend a night or two on honest-to-G.o.d cots before heading back outside the wire. But the Rangers on the ground weren't keen to take unnecessary risks simply to meet an arbitrary bureaucratic timeline set by "fobbits": officers who seldom ventured beyond the security of the forward operating base (the FOB, in military-speak), and therefore, from the grunts' perspective, had no clue what it was actually like to fight a war in this unforgiving country.

Uthlaut sent a series of e-mails that respectfully but vigorously registered objections to the orders he'd received. The twenty-four-year-old platoon leader pointed out, among other shortcomings, that the mountainous topography would make communication between the divided elements problematic, and that embarking for Mana with just half a platoon, in his view, "was not safe."

One of the most highly regarded young officers in the Army, Uthlaut had graduated at the top of his cla.s.s at West Point as first captain of the Corps of Cadets. When George W. Bush was sworn in as president in 2001, Uthlaut was the guy chosen to lead the Army's procession down Pennsylvania Avenue in the inaugural parade. After leaving the academy and becoming a platoon leader in the Second Ranger Battalion, he quickly earned the admiration of the enlisted men and noncommissioned officers who served under him. Uthlaut was a disciplined soldier who seldom questioned orders, and never without a compelling reason. But his urgent requests to reconsider the directive to split the platoon elicited this brusque reply from headquarters: "Reconsider denied."

"n.o.body on the ground in Magarah thought it was a good idea to split the platoon," recalls Specialist Jade Lane, who, as Uthlaut's radio operator, had been privy to the entire extended debate between headquarters and the platoon leader. "The PL didn't want to do it. But in the Army you obey orders. If somebody with a higher rank tells you to do something, you do it. So Uthlaut split the platoon."

Less than an hour of daylight remained by the time Uthlaut had finished dividing the platoon into two elements. After placing himself in charge of the element bound for Mana (designated Serial One, it consisted of two Humvees and four Toyota pickup trucks carrying twenty Rangers and seven Afghan Militia Forces), he hurriedly rolled out of Magarah in the lead Humvee at 6:00 p.m. Absent a road, Uthlaut's convoy drove down an intermittently dry riverbed, followed closely by the second element's convoy, designated Serial Two. A few minutes outside the village they reached a fork in the wadi. Uthlaut's convoy turned downstream, to the left. Serial Two, towing the trashed Humvee, turned upstream, to the right.

A British soldier named Francis Leeson, who battled a fierce tribal insurgency in this same area in the late 1940s, wrote a book in which he characterized the terrain as "frontier hills [that] are difficult of access and easy to defend. When one speaks of them as hills, rolling downs on which tanks and cavalry can operate are not meant, but the worst mountain-warfare country imaginable-steep precipices [and] narrow winding valleys." Six decades after Leeson's tour of duty, this remains a chillingly accurate description of the landscape that confronted Uthlaut's Rangers.

Half a mile west of the junction where the convoys had separated and gone in opposite directions, Serial One entered the mouth of a spectacularly narrow canyon. It was 6:10 p.m., and the lower flanks of the gorge already lay in shadow. The afternoon's warmth had been supplanted by the chill of the advancing evening, prompting the Rangers to don Gore-Tex jackets beneath their body armor. The air smelled of sage, dust, and wood smoke rising from cooking fires in a nearby village.

Ahead, the route snaked through a deep, crooked slot the river had gouged into the bedrock of the surrounding mountains. In places the pa.s.sage was only a foot or two wider than the Humvees and was constricted by vertical limestone cliffs that reduced the sky overhead to a pale blue stripe. Only by sharply craning their necks could the soldiers see the canyon rim. Up there on the heights, far above the gloom of the valley floor, the otherwise barren slopes were dotted with graceful Chilgoza pines still washed with sunlight, their silver bark and viridescent needles glowing in the fleeting rays.

The magnificence of the setting was not lost on the Rangers as their vehicles lurched over gravel berms and limestone ledges. This canyon was the most dramatic landform they'd seen since arriving in Khost: the sort of geologic wonder one might encounter in Utah's Zion National Park, or the Mogollon Rim of northern Arizona. One soldier remarked that it would be "an awesome place to go rock climbing." But most of the Rangers were less interested in the natural splendors than in the unnatural hazards that might be lurking somewhere above them.

Specialist Russell Baer was in the convoy's fourth vehicle, a Toyota Hilux pickup. Turning to Sergeant Bradley Shepherd, who was driving the truck, Baer declared, "This looks like those movies they showed us before we deployed. Back in the 1980s the Afghans used to ambush the Russians in places just like this. They slaughtered them in these canyons from above. It's how they won the war." Shepherd pondered the obvious implications of this comment, nodded soberly, then pulled out his camera and doc.u.mented their pa.s.sage through the dirty windshield as he drove.

For the next twenty minutes the convoy crept through the claustrophobic rift, forced by the severity of the terrain to move at an excruciatingly slow pace. The slot was so tight that the Humvees' fenders sometimes sc.r.a.ped against its sheer walls. The Rangers remained twitchy and anxious, expecting to be attacked from the high ground at any moment. According to Private Bryan O'Neal, a rifleman, "The canyon was very rough, there were large boulders everywhere, and the walls were at least a hundred feet high on each side. I actually had to lay on top of the vehicle to be able to pull security"-the cliffs rose so precipitously that O'Neal had to lie flat on his back in order to scan the canyon's ledges for Taliban through the scope of his M4 carbine.* After twenty minutes, Uthlaut's Humvee emerged from the western end of the slot. The valley opened, and the canyon floor broadened into a relatively flat gravel channel some thirty yards across. Corn and poppies grew in terraced plots of cultivated earth on both sides of the wadi. Cl.u.s.tered on a dun-colored hillside just outside the mouth of the narrows, eight or nine mud-walled buildings stood above the opium fields. Young Pashtun boys in filthy clothing ran up to the convoy as it rolled by, waving and laughing. The danger of an ambush appeared to have pa.s.sed. After twenty minutes, Uthlaut's Humvee emerged from the western end of the slot. The valley opened, and the canyon floor broadened into a relatively flat gravel channel some thirty yards across. Corn and poppies grew in terraced plots of cultivated earth on both sides of the wadi. Cl.u.s.tered on a dun-colored hillside just outside the mouth of the narrows, eight or nine mud-walled buildings stood above the opium fields. Young Pashtun boys in filthy clothing ran up to the convoy as it rolled by, waving and laughing. The danger of an ambush appeared to have pa.s.sed.

A moment later, a series of loud explosions echoed from the narrows behind them. "I turned toward where we had just come from," says Baer, "and all of a sudden it looked like Star Wars Star Wars back there. Red tracer rounds were flying up out of the canyon, lighting up the sky." Tracers are special bullets manufactured with a pyrotechnic charge that ignites as each projectile exits the barrel of a weapon, making the bullet's trajectory appear as a bright red streak, enabling the shooter to more easily adjust his fire toward the intended target. Every fifth bullet loaded into the machine guns used by American forces in Afghanistan was a tracer round; the Taliban in that area didn't use tracer ammunition. Baer understood instantly, therefore, that the red streaks flashing through the canyon's shadows were bullets from American soldiers returning fire against an enemy ambush. "I knew it was our guys getting hit," he says. "It was the other half of the platoon." back there. Red tracer rounds were flying up out of the canyon, lighting up the sky." Tracers are special bullets manufactured with a pyrotechnic charge that ignites as each projectile exits the barrel of a weapon, making the bullet's trajectory appear as a bright red streak, enabling the shooter to more easily adjust his fire toward the intended target. Every fifth bullet loaded into the machine guns used by American forces in Afghanistan was a tracer round; the Taliban in that area didn't use tracer ammunition. Baer understood instantly, therefore, that the red streaks flashing through the canyon's shadows were bullets from American soldiers returning fire against an enemy ambush. "I knew it was our guys getting hit," he says. "It was the other half of the platoon."

The platoon's other element, Serial Two, was supposed to be miles away by then, towing the derelict Humvee in the opposite direction. Uthlaut and his men had no idea why Serial Two would impulsively reverse course and follow them, but apparently their counterparts in the other element had done precisely that, and were now caught in the middle of what looked and sounded like an intense firefight half a mile away.

Serial One skidded to a halt and the soldiers jumped out of their trucks and Humvees. The element's highest-ranking Ranger under Uthlaut was a self-possessed staff sergeant named Matthew Weeks who had been awarded a Bronze Star for his valorous actions during a firefight in Iraq the previous year. He a.s.signed a half-dozen soldiers to stay with the six vehicles and then ordered most of the rest to move with him up the north slope of the canyon toward the cl.u.s.ter of mud buildings they'd just driven beneath. Weeks informed Uthlaut, "I'm going to try to push past the village and see if I can overwatch [Serial Two's] movement out of the ambush zone," explaining that his squad would move no farther than a brow of high ground above the settlement.

A Ranger platoon is typically organized into three squads, each consisting of two "fire teams" of six or fewer men. When Uthlaut was forced to hastily divide his platoon back in Magarah, he put Third Squad (commanded by Weeks) in Serial One and a.s.signed the bulk of First and Second squads to Serial Two. Because the two convoys needed to be of more or less equal size, however, Uthlaut pulled two men from Second Squad and added them to Serial One. These two soldiers were Private O'Neal, a baby-faced eighteen-year-old who was the youngest, greenest member of the entire unit; and Specialist Patrick Tillman, the leader of O'Neal's fire team.

Tillman-twenty-seven years old, previously employed as a strong safety in the National Football League-was unquestionably the most famous enlisted man in Afghanistan. When the World Trade Center came crashing to earth on September 11, 2001, he had been a star player with the Arizona Cardinals, renowned for patrolling the defensive backfield with riveting intensity. But Tillman came from a family with a tradition of military service that went back several generations, and he believed that as an able-bodied American he had a moral obligation to serve his country during a time of war. He didn't think he should be exempt from his duty as a citizen simply because he played professional football. So after the 2001 NFL season he walked away from a $3.6 million contract and volunteered to spend the next three years of his life as an infantryman in the U.S. Army. His brother Kevin, fourteen months younger than Pat, had enlisted at the same time and was a member of Uthlaut's platoon as well.

When the platoon was split in Magarah, Kevin had been a.s.signed to Serial Two. Now, as Pat listened to the exploding mortar sh.e.l.ls and the pop-pop-pop-pop of rifle fire, he was hyperaware that his little brother was somewhere back in the confines of the canyon getting hammered. The moment Sergeant Weeks directed the Rangers to move up the hill, Tillman sprang into action. "Pat was like a freight train," says Private Josey Boatright, recalling how Tillman sprinted past him. "Whoosh. A pit bull straining against his leash. He took off toward the high ground, yelling, 'O'Neal! On me! O'Neal! Stay on me!'"

According to O'Neal, Pat told him, "'Let's go help our boys,' and he started moving. And wherever he went, I went."

The route to the village ascended a steep gully, the bottom of which was six thousand feet above sea level. Between his weapons, body armor, night-vision optics, CamelBak water bladders, grenades, and extra ammunition, each Ranger was carrying more than sixty pounds of dead weight. Thus burdened, within seconds of leaving the vehicles, everyone was gasping for air, but the sounds of the nearby battle-moving noticeably closer by the minute-kept the Rangers pushing upward despite the pain. When they reached the village, the Rangers performed a "hasty clear," pa.s.sing quickly through the settlement without pausing to search inside any of the buildings, and then hurried toward the crest of a spur that rose above the village.

Tillman was among the first to arrive atop the spur, which was devoid of trees or other cover. After pausing for a few seconds to a.s.sess the lay of the land, he continued over the crest and scurried down the other side to a pair of low boulders, accompanied by O'Neal and a twenty-seven-year-old Afghan soldier named Sayed Farhad. These rocks afforded only minimal protection from enemy fire but provided an excellent view of the wadi where Tillman expected Serial Two to emerge from the mouth of the gorge.

A few minutes later two vehicles came speeding out of the canyon and stopped ninety yards beneath the boulders. Several Rangers climbed out of a Humvee and gazed up toward Tillman and O'Neal, who waved to let their buddies know they were up there and had them covered. It appeared as though Serial Two had escaped the ambush and everything was copacetic. And then, without warning, hundreds of bullets began to pulverize the slope around Tillman, O'Neal, and Farhad.

Ever since h.o.m.o sapiens h.o.m.o sapiens first coalesced into tribes, war has been part of the human condition. Inevitably, warring societies portray their campaigns as virtuous struggles, and present their fallen warriors as heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice for a n.o.ble cause. But death by so-called friendly fire, which is an inescapable aspect of armed conflict in the modern era, doesn't conform to this mythic narrative. It strips away war's heroic veneer to reveal what lies beneath. It's an unsettling reminder that barbarism, senseless violence, and random death are commonplace even in the most "just" and "honorable" of wars. Consequently, and unsurprisingly, when soldiers accidentally kill one of their own, there is tremendous reluctance to confront the truth within the ranks of the military. There is an overwhelming inclination to keep the unsavory particulars hidden from public view, to pretend the calamity never occurred. Thus it has always been, and probably always will be. As Aeschylus, the ill.u.s.trious Greek tragedian, noted in the fifth century first coalesced into tribes, war has been part of the human condition. Inevitably, warring societies portray their campaigns as virtuous struggles, and present their fallen warriors as heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice for a n.o.ble cause. But death by so-called friendly fire, which is an inescapable aspect of armed conflict in the modern era, doesn't conform to this mythic narrative. It strips away war's heroic veneer to reveal what lies beneath. It's an unsettling reminder that barbarism, senseless violence, and random death are commonplace even in the most "just" and "honorable" of wars. Consequently, and unsurprisingly, when soldiers accidentally kill one of their own, there is tremendous reluctance to confront the truth within the ranks of the military. There is an overwhelming inclination to keep the unsavory particulars hidden from public view, to pretend the calamity never occurred. Thus it has always been, and probably always will be. As Aeschylus, the ill.u.s.trious Greek tragedian, noted in the fifth century B.C B.C., "In war, truth is the first casualty."

When Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan, his Ranger regiment responded with a chorus of prevarication and disavowal. A cynical cover-up sanctioned at the highest levels of government, followed by a series of inept official investigations, cast a cloud of bewilderment and shame over the tragedy, compounding the heartbreak of Tillman's death.

Among the several thousand pages of doc.u.ments generated by military investigators, some baffling testimony emerged from the Ranger who is believed to have fired the bullets that ended Tillman's life. In a sworn statement, this soldier explained that while shooting a ten-round burst from his machine gun at the hillside where Tillman and O'Neal were positioned, he "identified two sets of arms straight up" through the scope of his weapon. "I saw the arms waving," he acknowledged, "but I didn't think they were trying to signal a cease-fire." So he pulled the trigger again and sprayed them with another ten-round burst. How was one supposed to make sense of this?

Or this: in July 2007, the a.s.sociated Press published an article reporting that the Navy pathologist who performed Tillman's autopsy testified that the forensic evidence indicated Tillman had been shot three times in the head from a distance of thirty-five feet or less. The article prompted widespread speculation on the Internet and in the mainstream press that he had been deliberately murdered.

Many other details about the fatal firefight that found their way into the public domain were similarly perplexing. Perhaps the greatest mystery, however, surrounded not the circ.u.mstances of Tillman's death but the essential facts of his life. Before he enlisted, Tillman was familiar to sports aficionados as an undersized, overachieving football player whose virtuosity in the defensive backfield was spellbinding. But during the four years he spent in the NFL, Tillman played for the Arizona Cardinals-a mediocre small-market team that was seldom in the limelight-so his name wasn't widely recognized beyond the realm of hard-core football fans.

Although it wasn't Tillman's intention, when he left the Cardinals to join the Army he was transformed overnight into an icon of post-9/11 patriotism. Seizing the opportunity to capitalize on his celebrity, the Bush administration endeavored to use his name and image to promote what it had christened the Global War on Terror. Tillman abhorred this role. As soon as he decided to enlist, he stopped talking to the press altogether, although his silence did nothing to squelch America's fascination with the football star who traded the bright lights and riches of the NFL for boot camp and a bad haircut. Following his death on the battlefield, the public's interest in Tillman shot through the roof. The posthumous media frenzy shed little light on who he really was, however. The intricate mosaic of personal history that defined his existence was obscured by the blizzard of hype.

Unenc.u.mbered by biographical insight, people felt emboldened to invent all manner of personae for Tillman after his pa.s.sing. Most of these renderings were based on little more than rumor and fantasy. The right-wing harridan Ann Coulter claimed him as an exemplar of Republican political values. The left-wing editorial cartoonist Ted Rall denigrated him in a four-panel comic strip as an "idiot" who joined the Army to "kill Arabs."

Neither Coulter nor Rall had any idea what motivated Pat Tillman. Beyond his family and a small circle of close friends, few people did.

* A military acronym dating from World War II that is frequently used in the modern Army, "fubar" stands for "f.u.c.ked-up beyond all recognition." A military acronym dating from World War II that is frequently used in the modern Army, "fubar" stands for "f.u.c.ked-up beyond all recognition."* The M4 is a lighter, more compact version of the Vietnam-era M16 rifle. The M4 is a lighter, more compact version of the Vietnam-era M16 rifle.

PART ONE

Earlier times may not have understood it any better than we do, but they weren't as embarra.s.sed to name it: the life force or spark thought close to divine. It is not. Instead, it's something that makes those who have it fully human, and those who don't look like sleep walkers.... It isn't enough to make someone heroic, but without it any hero will be forgotten. Rousseau called it force of soul; Arendt called it love of the world. It's the foundation of eros; you may call it charisma. Is it a gift of the G.o.ds, or something that has to be earned? Watching such people, you will sense that it's both: given like perfect pitch, or grace, that no one can deserve or strive for, and captured like the greatest of prizes it is. Having it makes people think more, see more, feel more. More intensely, more keenly, more loudly if you like; but not more in the way of the G.o.ds. On the contrary, next to heroes like Odysseus and Penelope, the G.o.ds seem oddly flat. They are bigger, of course, and they live forever, but their presence seems diminished.... The G.o.ds of The Odyssey The Odyssey aren't alive, just immortal; and with immortality most of the qualities we cherish become pointless. With nothing to risk, the G.o.ds need no courage. aren't alive, just immortal; and with immortality most of the qualities we cherish become pointless. With nothing to risk, the G.o.ds need no courage.- SUSAN N NEIMAN, Moral Clarity Moral Clarity[image]SAN FRANCIs...o...b..Y AREA

CHAPTER ONE.

During Pat Tillman's stint in the Army he intermittently kept a diary. In an entry dated July 28, 2002-three weeks after he arrived at boot camp-he wrote, "It is amazing the turns one's life can take. Major events or decisions that completely change a life. In my life there have been a number." He then cataloged several. Foremost on his mind at the time, predictably, was his decision to join the military. But the incident he put at the top of the list, which occurred when he was eleven years old, comes as a surprise. "As odd as this sounds," the journal revealed, "a diving catch I made in the 1112 all-stars was a take-off point. I excelled the rest of the tournament and gained incredible confidence. It sounds tacky but it was big."

As a child growing up in Almaden, California (an upscale suburb of San Jose), Pat had started playing baseball at the age of seven. It quickly became apparent to the adults who watched him throw a ball and swing a bat that he possessed extraordinary talent, but Pat seems not to have been particularly cognizant of his own athletic gifts until he was selected for the aforementioned all-star team in the summer of 1988. As the tournament against teams of other standout middle-school athletes got under way, he mostly sat on the bench. When the coach eventually put Pat into a game, however, he clobbered a home run and made a spectacular catch of a long fly ball hit into the outfield. Fourteen years later, as he contemplated life from the perspective of an Army barracks, he regarded that catch as a pivotal moment-a confidence booster that contributed significantly to one of his defining traits: unwavering self-a.s.surance.

In 1990, Pat matriculated at Almaden's Leland High School, one of the top public schools in the San Francis...o...b..y Area, both academically and athletically. Before entering Leland he had resolved to become the catcher on the varsity baseball team, but the head coach, Paul Ugenti, informed Pat that he wasn't ready to play varsity baseball and would have to settle for a position on the freshman-soph.o.m.ore team. Irked and perhaps insulted by Ugenti's failure to recognize his potential, Pat resolved to quit baseball and focus on football instead, even though he'd taken up the latter sport barely a year earlier and had badly fractured his right tibia in his initial season when a much larger teammate fell on his leg during practice.

With a November birthday, Pat was among the youngest kids in Leland's freshman cla.s.s, and when he started high school, he was only thirteen years old. He also happened to be small for his age, standing five feet five inches tall and weighing just 120 pounds. When he let it be known that he was going to abandon baseball for football, an a.s.sistant coach named Terry Hardtke explained to Pat that he wasn't "built like a football player" and strongly urged him to stick with baseball. Once Tillman set his sights on a goal, however, he wasn't easily diverted. He told the coach he intended to start lifting weights to build up his muscles. Then he a.s.sured Hardtke that not only would he make the Leland football team but he intended to play college football after graduating from high school. Hardtke replied that Pat was making a huge mistake-that his size would make it difficult for him ever to win a starting position on the Leland team, and that he stood virtually no chance of ever playing college ball.

Pat, however, trusted his own sense of his abilities over the coach's bleak predictions, and tried out for the Leland football team regardless. Six years later he would be a star linebacker playing in the Rose Bowl for a national collegiate championship. Twenty months after that he began a distinguished career in the National Football League.

Midway between San Jose and Oakland, the munic.i.p.ality of Fremont rises above the eastern sh.o.r.e of San Francis...o...b..y, a city of 240,000 that's always existed in the shadow of its flashier neighbors. This is where Patrick Daniel Tillman was born on November 6, 1976. Not far from the hospital where Pat entered the world is a commercial district of pharmacies, chiropractic clinics, and fast-food restaurants bisected by a four-lane thoroughfare. Along three or four blocks of this otherwise unremarkable stretch of Fremont Boulevard, one finds a concentration of incongruously exotic establishments: the Salang Pa.s.s Restaurant, an Afghan carpet store, a South Asian cinema, a shop selling Afghan clothing, the De Afghanan Kabob House, the Maiwand Market. Inside the latter, the shelves are stocked with hummus, olives, pomegranate seeds, turmeric, bags of rice, and tins of grapeseed oil. A striking woman wearing a head scarf and an elaborately embroidered vest inlaid with dozens of tiny mirrors stands at a counter near the back of the store, waiting to buy slabs of freshly baked naan. Little Kabul, as this neighborhood is known, happens to be the nexus of what is purportedly the highest concentration of Afghans in the United States, a community made famous by the best-selling novel The Kite Runner The Kite Runner.

By loose estimate, some ten thousand Afghans reside in Fremont proper, with another fifty thousand scattered across the rest of the Bay Area. They started showing up in 1978, when their homeland erupted into violence that has yet to abate three decades later. The chaos was sparked by accelerating friction between political groups within Afghanistan, but fuel for the conflagration was supplied in abundance and with great enthusiasm by the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union as each maneuvered to gain advantage in the Cold War.

The Soviets had been lavishing billions of rubles in military and economic aid on Afghanistan since the 1950s, and had cultivated close ties with the nation's leaders. Despite this injection of outside capital, by the 1970s Afghanistan remained a tribal society, essentially medieval in character. Ninety percent of its seventeen million residents were illiterate. Eighty-five percent of the population lived in the mountainous, largely roadless countryside, subsisting as farmers, herders, or nomadic traders. The overwhelming majority of these impoverished, uneducated country dwellers answered not to the central government in Kabul, with which they had little contact and from which they received almost no tangible a.s.sistance, but rather to local mullahs and tribal elders. Thanks to Moscow's creeping influence, however, a distinctly Marxist brand of modernization had begun to establish a toehold in a few of the nation's largest cities.

Afghanistan's cozy relationship with the Soviets originated under the leadership of Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud Khan, a Pashtun with fleshy jowls and a shaved head who was appointed in 1953 by his cousin and brother-in-law, King Mohammed Zahir Shah. Ten years later Daoud was forced to resign from the government after launching a brief but disastrous war against Pakistan. But in 1973 he reclaimed power by means of a nonviolent coup d'etat, deposing King Zahir and declaring himself the first president of the Republic of Afghanistan.

A fervent subculture of Marxist intellectuals, professionals, and students had by this time taken root in Kabul, intent on bringing their country into the twentieth century, kicking and screaming if need be, and President Daoud-who dressed in hand-tailored Italian suits-supported this shift toward secular modernity as long as it didn't threaten his hold on power. Under Daoud, females were given opportunities to be educated and join the professional workforce. In cities, women started appearing in public without burqas or even head scarves. Many urban men exchanged their traditional shalwar kameezes shalwar kameezes for Western business attire. These secular city dwellers swelled the ranks of a Marxist political organization known as the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, or PDPA. for Western business attire. These secular city dwellers swelled the ranks of a Marxist political organization known as the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, or PDPA.

The Soviets were Daoud's allies in the push to modernize Afghanistan, at least initially. Aid from Moscow continued to prop up the economy and the military, and under an agreement signed by Daoud, every officer in the Afghan Army went to the Soviet Union to receive military training. But he was walking a perilous political tightrope. While welcoming Soviet rubles, Daoud was an impa.s.sioned Afghan nationalist who had no desire to become a puppet of the Soviet president, Leonid Brezhnev. And although Daoud was committed to modernizing his nation, he wanted to move at a pace slow enough to avoid provoking the Islamist mullahs who controlled the hinterlands. In the end, alas, his policies placated few and managed to antagonize almost everyone else-most significantly the Soviets, the urban leftists, and the bearded fundamentalists in the countryside.

At the beginning of his presidency, Daoud had pledged to reform the government and promote civil liberties. Very soon after taking office, however, he started cracking down hard on anyone who resisted his edicts. Hundreds of rivals from all sides of the political divide were arrested and executed, ranging from antimodernist tribal elders in far-flung provinces to urban communists in the PDPA who had originally supported Daoud's rise to power.

For millennia in Afghanistan, political expression has all too often been synonymous with mayhem. On April 19, 1978, a funeral for a popular communist leader who was thought to have been murdered on Daoud's orders turned into a seething protest march. Organized by the PDPA, as many as thirty thousand Afghans took to the streets of Kabul to show their contempt for President Daoud. In typical fashion, Daoud reacted to the demonstration with excessive force, which only further incited the protesters. Sensing a momentous shift in the political tide, most units in the Afghan Army broke with Daoud and allied themselves with the PDPA. On April 27, 1978, MiG-21 jets from the Afghan Air Force strafed the Presidential Palace, where Daoud was ensconced with eighteen hundred members of his personal guard. That night, opposition forces overran the palace amid a rain of bullets. When the sun came up and the gunfire petered out, Daoud and his entire family were dead, and the surrounding streets were strewn with the bodies of two thousand Afghans.

The communist PDPA immediately a.s.sumed power and renamed the nation the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Backed by the Soviet Union, the new government moved ruthlessly to establish control across the country. During the PDPA's first twenty months at the helm, twenty-seven thousand political dissidents were rounded up, transported to the infamous Pul-e-Charkhi prison on the outskirts of Kabul, and summarily executed.

By this point the violence had instigated a wholesale exodus of Afghans to foreign lands. Because those targeted for elimination by the PDPA tended to be influential mullahs or members of the intellectual and professional cla.s.ses, many of the refugees who sought sanctuary came from the elite ranks of Afghan society. Two years after Pat Tillman's birth in Fremont, California, Afghans began flocking to the city where he was delivered.

Back in Afghanistan, the brutality of the PDPA inspired a gra.s.sroots insurrection that rapidly escalated into full-blown civil war. At the forefront of the rebellion were Muslim holy warriors, the Afghan mujahideen, who fought the communist infidels with such ferocious intensity that in December 1979 the Soviets dispatched 100,000 troops to Afghanistan to quell the rebellion, prop up the PDPA, and protect their Cold War interests in the region.

Nations throughout the world sternly criticized the Soviets for the incursion. The strongest rebuke came from the United States. Expressing shock and outrage over the invasion, President Jimmy Carter called it "the most serious threat to peace since the Second World War," and initiated first a trade embargo and then a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

But Carter's righteous indignation was more than slightly disingenuous. Although the U.S. government claimed otherwise in official statements, the CIA had begun purchasing weapons for the mujahideen at least six months before before the Soviet invasion, and this clandestine support was intended not to deter Moscow but to provoke it. According to Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the purpose of arming the Afghans was to stimulate enough turmoil in Afghanistan "to induce a Soviet military intervention." Brzezinski, the most fervent cold warrior in the Carter administration, boasted in a 1998 interview that the intent of providing arms to the mujahideen was specifically to draw "the Soviets into the Afghan trap" and ensnare them in a debilitating Vietnam-like debacle. the Soviet invasion, and this clandestine support was intended not to deter Moscow but to provoke it. According to Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the purpose of arming the Afghans was to stimulate enough turmoil in Afghanistan "to induce a Soviet military intervention." Brzezinski, the most fervent cold warrior in the Carter administration, boasted in a 1998 interview that the intent of providing arms to the mujahideen was specifically to draw "the Soviets into the Afghan trap" and ensnare them in a debilitating Vietnam-like debacle.

If that was the plan, it worked. Almost immediately upon occupying the country, the legendary Soviet Fortieth Army found itself neck deep in an unexpectedly vicious guerrilla war that would keep its forces entangled in Afghanistan for the next nine years.

Before the Soviet invasion, Afghanistan was riven by so many intransigent political and tribal factions that the nation had been for all intents and purposes ungovernable. In reflexive opposition to the Soviet occupation, virtually the entire country spontaneously united-a degree of cohesion no modern Afghan leader had ever come close to achieving.

This newly unified opposition was characterized by extraordinary violence. The mujahideen seldom took prisoners in their skirmishes with the invaders. They made a habit of mutilating the bodies of the Soviets they killed in creatively gruesome ways in order to instill terror in those sent to recover the bodies. When the mujahideen did take prisoners, according to Soviet survivors, the infidel soldiers were often gang-raped and tortured.

The Afghans quickly figured out that fighting the Soviets by conventional means was a recipe for certain defeat. Instead of confronting Soviet forces directly with large numbers of fighters, the mujahideen adopted the cla.s.sic stratagems of insurgent warfare, employing small bands of ten or fifteen men to ambush the enemy and then vanish back into the landscape before the Soviets could launch counterattacks. Soviet soldiers began to refer to the mujahideen as dukhi dukhi, Russian for "ghosts." The Afghans took brilliant advantage of the mountainous terrain to stage devastating ambushes from the high ground as Soviet convoys moved through the confines of the valley bottoms. The Soviet cause wasn't helped by a policy designated as "Limited Contingent": Moscow decided to cap the number of Fortieth Army troops in Afghanistan at 115,000, despite the fact that before the invasion Soviet generals had warned that as many as 650,000 soldiers would be needed to secure the country.* The pitiless style of guerrilla combat waged by the Afghans had an unnerving effect on the Soviets sent to fight them. Morale plummeted, especially as the conflict dragged on year after year. Because opium and hashish were readily available everywhere, drug addiction among the Soviet conscripts was rife. Their numbers were further ravaged by malaria, dysentery, hepat.i.tis, teta.n.u.s, and meningitis. Although there were never more than 120,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan at any given time, a total of 642,000 soldiers served there throughout the course of the war-470,000 of whom were debilitated by disease, addicted to heroin, wounded in battle, or killed. The pitiless style of guerrilla combat waged by the Afghans had an unnerving effect on the Soviets sent to fight them. Morale plummeted, especially as the conflict dragged on year after year. Because opium and hashish were readily available everywhere, drug addiction among the Soviet conscripts was rife. Their numbers were further ravaged by malaria, dysentery, hepat.i.tis, teta.n.u.s, and meningitis. Although there were never more than 120,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan at any given time, a total of 642,000 soldiers served there throughout the course of the war-470,000 of whom were debilitated by disease, addicted to heroin, wounded in battle, or killed.

The tenacity and brutality of the mujahideen prompted the Soviets to adopt ruthless tactics of their own. As they came to realize that it was much easier to kill unarmed civilians than to hunt down the fearsome and elusive mujahideen, the Soviets increasingly focused their attacks on the rural tribespeople who sometimes harbored combatants but didn't shoot back, rather than a.s.saulting the mujahideen directly. Jet aircraft bombed whole valleys with napalm, laying waste to farmland, orchards, and settlements. Helicopter gunships not only targeted villagers but ma.s.sacred their herds of livestock as well. These calculated acts of genocide went virtually unnoticed outside of Afghanistan.

The shift toward scorched-earth tactics intensified after Konstantin Chernenko became the Soviet general secretary in February 1984 and initiated a campaign of high-alt.i.tude carpet bombing. Taking off from bases within the Soviet Union and flying as high as forty thousand feet, safely beyond the range of mujahideen antiaircraft weapons, squadrons of swept-wing, twin-engine Tu-16 Badgers annihilated entire towns.

Under the Chernenko regime, the Soviets also increased the use of antipersonnel mines. Bombers sprinkled the countryside with tens of thousands of miniature b.o.o.by traps made to resemble brightly colored toys. Such mines were specifically created to attract very young Afghans; when the kids picked them up they would explode, maiming and killing the children. Toward this same end, Soviet Badgers also randomly scattered hundreds of thousands-some reports say millions-of so-called b.u.t.terfly mines over vast areas. Designed to flutter gently to earth and then arm upon impact, these camouflaged plastic devices wouldn't detonate until Afghan herders happened to step on them. The mines' relatively small size was intended to blow off limbs but not necessarily cause fatal injuries, in the belief that forcing Afghan villagers to take care of gravely injured countrymen would cause more hardship than killing them outright.

The Soviets' genocidal strategy inflicted terrible casualties on the Afghan people, but it also hardened their resolve. Despite all they had suffered, the mujahideen showed no sign of abandoning their fight, which must have given Moscow pause. By the time the Soviet politburo elected Mikhail Gorbachev general secretary on March 11, 1985, following the death of Chernenko, the war in Afghanistan had degenerated into a stalemate. One wonders if the new Soviet leader perhaps pondered the famous tenet voiced sixteen years earlier by Henry Kissinger in reference to the American experience in Vietnam: "We lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win."

Although the mujahideen were doing the actual fighting against the Soviets, the CIA under President Ronald Reagan was supporting the Afghan holy warriors with billions of dollars in armaments and cash (support matched dollar for dollar by Saudi Arabia, and delivered to the mujahideen by Pakistan's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence-the shadowy ISI). A disproportionate share of that bounty was directed to Jalaluddin Haqqani-a man who would have a notable impact on world affairs over the ensuing decades. Early in the Soviet-Afghan War, Haqqani had emerged as a fearless combatant and a brilliant leader of men, which is how he came to receive so much American largesse. As the war intensified throughout the 1980s and the mujahideen demonstrated amazing steadfastness, many in the CIA came to regard him as the most effective commander in the entire Afghan resistance. The Americans thought so highly of Haqqani that at one point he was reportedly brought to the United States and feted at the White House.

The base of operations for Haqqani and the fighters under his command was the mountainous terrain of what is now Khost Province.* In 1984 a wealthy young engineer from Saudi Arabia, name of Osama bin Laden, arrived in Khost to a.s.sist Haqqani's forces. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, bin Laden had been an idealistic college student receiving an annual allowance of $1 million from his family. At the time he showed up in Khost, he had yet to discover his calling, but this skinny, self-serious Arab was about to a.s.sume a much larger role on the world stage, thanks in part to what he experienced in Afghanistan. In 1984 a wealthy young engineer from Saudi Arabia, name of Osama bin Laden, arrived in Khost to a.s.sist Haqqani's forces. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, bin Laden had been an idealistic college student receiving an annual allowance of $1 million from his family. At the time he showed up in Khost, he had yet to discover his calling, but this skinny, self-serious Arab was about to a.s.sume a much larger role on the world stage, thanks in part to what he experienced in Afghanistan.

Initially, bin Laden's role in Khost was limited to providing cash to the mujahideen and overseeing the construction of supply roads, training camps, and fortified underground bunkers. He quickly developed an uncommonly close relationship with Haqqani, however, who was fluent in Arabic and had an Arab wife. Before long, bin Laden was inspired under Haqqani's tutelage to take up arms and personally engage in combat against the Soviets. Although a b.u.mbling foot soldier, bin Laden partic.i.p.ated in several firefights, displayed courage under fire, and at one point was even wounded-all of which bolstered his stature tremendously among Muslims across the globe when, shortly thereafter, he began beating the drum for global jihad.

Before his initial visit to Afghanistan, according to Lawrence Wright's book The Looming Tower The Looming Tower, "bin Laden did not...make much of an impression as a charismatic leader.... 'He had a small smile on his face and soft hands,' a hardened Pakistani mujahid mujahid recalled. 'You'd think you were shaking hands with a girl.'" Following bin Laden's exposure to combat, Wright reports, "one can hear for the first time the epic tone that began to characterize his speech-the sound of a man in the grasp of destiny." In the summer of 1988, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri founded al-Qaeda. Significantly, when bin Laden established the first al-Qaeda training camps, he situated several of them in the mountains of Khost, Haqqani's homeland. According to an interview bin Laden gave to a journalist from Al Jazeera in 2001, the name al-Qaeda-which means "the training base" in Arabic-in fact owes its origin to these camps in Khost. "The name ' al-Qaeda' was established a long time ago by mere chance," bin Laden explained. "We used to call the training camp 'al-Qaeda.' And the name stayed." recalled. 'You'd think you were shaking hands with a girl.'" Following bin Laden's exposure to combat, Wright reports, "one can hear for the first time the epic tone that began to characterize his speech-the sound of a man in the grasp of destiny." In the summer of 1988, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri founded al-Qaeda. Significantly, when bin Laden established the first al-Qaeda training camps, he situated several of them in the mountains of Khost, Haqqani's homeland. According to an interview bin Laden gave to a journalist from Al Jazeera in 2001, the name al-Qaeda-which means "the training base" in Arabic-in fact owes its origin to these camps in Khost. "The name ' al-Qaeda' was established a long time ago by mere chance," bin Laden explained. "We used to call the training camp 'al-Qaeda.' And the name stayed."

Two years before the emergence of al-Qaeda, the CIA provided the mujahideen with a weapon that began to tip the balance of the war in their favor: a thirty-five-pound, shoulder-fired, antiaircraft missile known as the FIM-92 Stinger that cost about $65,000 apiece. The heat-seeking Stingers, which would lock automatically onto a fast-moving airborne target, proved to be tremendously effective. More than two thousand Stingers were given to the Afghans, many of which went to Haqqani. As the mujahideen figured out how to use them, fear spread through the Soviet forces. By 1987 their once invulnerable Hind attack helicopters were being shot down on an almost daily basis. The Soviets' dominance of the skies above Afghanistan-their great advantage-was over.

In 1988, Moscow belatedly acknowledged that victory against the insurgents would never be achieved at any cost, and Gorbachev began to systematically withdraw the Soviet forces from Afghanistan. On February 15, 1989, when the last Soviet soldier retreated back across the Amu Darya-the broad, glacier-fed river that delineated the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan- the war had claimed the lives of an estimated twenty-five thousand Soviet soldiers and well over a million Afghans, 90 percent of whom were civilian noncombatants. Another five million Afghans-nearly a third of the prewar population-had taken flight from the ravaged nation, mostly to dismal refugee camps in neighboring Pakistan and Iran, although some fled to places as far away as California.

On the face of it, the trap set for the Soviets by the Carter administration in 1979 seemed to have worked. Nine months after Gorbachev pulled his troops from Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall came down, heralding the imminent dissolution of the Soviet empire-a collapse indubitably hastened by the staggering cost of the Afghan conflict. The climactic battle of the Cold War had been won without the American military even having to get off the couch. Acting as a proxy army, the mujahideen had given the United States a free ride. Or so it seemed at the time.

In the summer of 1989, an essay t.i.tled "The End of History?" was published in the journal National Interest National Interest by a young State Department official named Francis f.u.kuyama. The essay, which catapulted f.u.kuyama from obscurity to overnight fame (and was later expanded into an even more widely read book, by a young State Department official named Francis f.u.kuyama. The essay, which catapulted f.u.kuyama from obscurity to overnight fame (and was later expanded into an even more widely read book, The End of History and the Last Man) The End of History and the Last Man), argued that history is properly regarded as the progress of ideas rather than merely a record of human events, and that the end of the Cold War signaled the permanent victory of modernity-the apotheosis of which was the Western idea of liberal capitalist democracy. "The triumph of the West, of the Western idea," wrote f.u.kuyama, "is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.... What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the pa.s.sing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

The Soviet Union managed to hang together for another two and a half years after its army left Afghanistan, and during the interim the CIA delivered several hundred million additional dollars to the mujahideen just to make sure the Kremlin didn't change its mind about causing further mischief in South Asia. But in the final days of 1991, when the Council of Republics of the Supreme Soviet officially dissolved the Soviet Union, the CIA concluded that the Afghan freedom fighters were no longer of any use to it and immediately cut off all support. Without a second thought, the United States forgot about the mujahideen and turned its attention to other foreign adventures, in the manner of a lothario who's gotten what he wants and doesn't bother to call the morning after.

Regrettably, the men and women running things in Washington also seemed to forget that Haqqani and bin Laden still controlled large numbers of fanatical holy warriors and possessed ma.s.sive stockpiles of weapons that the CIA had graciously purchased for them. Beyond the borders of the United States, a great many people-Haqqani and bin Laden prominent among them-begged to differ with f.u.kuyama's a.s.sertion that the game was over and Western liberal democracy had won.

* U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld received strikingly similar admonitions from American generals during their planning for the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld received strikingly similar admonitions from American generals during their planning for the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.* Khost was part of Paktia Province until 1995, when it was split off as a province unto itself. Khost was part of Paktia Province until 1995, when it was split off as a province unto itself.

CHAPTER TWO.

Although Pat Tillman was born in Fremont, for all but two years of his childhood he lived thirty minutes down the freeway in a neighborhood known as New Almaden-a tranquil, closely woven community tucked alongside the narrow seam of Los Alamitos Creek, where the Tillman family occupied a tidy thirteen-hundred-square-foot cottage surrounded by shade trees. The slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains, redolent of Scotch broom and manzanita, jutted directly from their backyard. Thanks to the serenity of the setting and the proximity of so much open s.p.a.ce, New Almaden still feels like it's at a distant remove from the hyperthyroidal sprawl of greater San Jose, even though the latter begins less than two miles down the valley.

The hills immediately west of the Tillman abode are honeycombed with mine shafts that once yielded a bounty of mercury ore. It was the most valuable mine in California during the latter half of the nineteenth century, but the diggings were shut down in 1975, after which the site was designated a forty-two-hundred-acre recreational area and thirty-five miles of hiking trails were built across its sun-parched ridges. Mary Lydanne Tillman-known as Dannie to her friends and close acquaintances-spent countless hours walking these trails with Pat on her back when he was a baby.

In her book, Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman, Dannie acknowledged that her eldest son "was not a cuddly infant." Animated and adventurous right out of the womb, Pat started walking at eight and a half months, and when he was awake he was constantly in motion. The Tillmans owned a television, but the walls of the Alamitos canyon restricted reception to a single channel, and sometimes not even that, so Pat and his younger brothers, Kevin and Richard, almost never watched TV as children. Instead, they spent most of their free time playing outdoors, scrambling up the ravines and outcrops of the Almaden Quicksilver County Park, where they acquired a lasting appreciation of untamed landscapes. When the boys had to be indoors, they engaged in clamorous discussions about current events, history, and politics with their parents and each other. Almost no subject was off-limits. Encouraged to think critically and be skeptical of conventional wisdom, Pat learned to trust in himself and be unafraid to buck the herd.

From the time he was two years old, Pat was a nonstop talker, yakking all the time, and this verbosity-his insatiable appet.i.te for spirited dialogue-would, like his confidence and the immutability of his will, turn out to be one of his signature traits. When Pat was in middle school, according to Boots on the Ground by Dusk Boots on the Ground by Dusk, he was "conscientious about learning and generally well-behaved in cla.s.s," but Dannie regularly received calls from administrators concerned about Pat's roughhousing between cla.s.ses: "He was getting referrals for chasing people, wrestling in the quad, climbing on the bleachers, and talking while walking to a.s.sembly." He was a loud, happy, rambunctious youth whose exuberance could not be contained.

Pat inherited superlative athletic genes, as did his brothers, and he began playing in an organized soccer league at the age of four. Thereafter, Tillman family life was organized to no small extent around the sports played by Pat, Kevin, and Richard. In Pat's case, by the time he was in high school, the sport that he cared most pa.s.sionately about was football.

For reasons having to do with safety and liability, students were not allowed to play on the varsity football team until they were fifteen years old, so Pat didn't join the varsity squad until November 1991, when he was added to the roster for the playoffs during his soph.o.m.ore year. By the time the 1992 football season got under way he had become Leland's star player. Despite his diminutive size, the coach used him on offense as a running back and wide receiver; on defense as a linebacker and strong safety; and on special teams as a punter, punt returner, and kick returner. Pat excelled at every position. Late in a crucial game near the end of the season, he ran the ball ninety yards down the field for a come-from-behind touchdown that earned Leland a berth in the playoffs.

Not long after Pat was killed, a remote Army firebase seven miles south of the hillside where he perished was named in his honor: Forward Operating Base Tillman. In the winter of 2007 a small contingent of American soldiers was stationed here, along with a company of Afghan National Army recruits and a handful of fighters from the Afghan Security Guard. The latter, known as the ASG, is a paramilitary militia under contract to the U.S. Army to provide additional security around the base and to accompany American patrols on missions into the surrounding countryside, which is still controlled by Taliban who belong to the Haqqani Network. FOB Tillman-squatting less than two miles from the Pakistan border, encircled by a seven-foot-thick blast wall constructed from earthen HEs...o...b..rriers topped with razor wire-is attacked frequently by Haqqani's forces.