Fang’s Book Of The Month: “Where Men Win Glory”

A likely non-recurring feature, as I’m not much of a reader anymore, unless you count comic books, DTV menu screens and the occasional Facebook troll.

But I do watch a lot of TV, and I caught Sean Penn and author Jon Krakauer on an episode of Sundance’s Iconoclasts recently. I was watching it to see Penn, but I came away from it equally impressed with Krakauer.

He wrote the book, Into Thin Air, that Penn’s latest directorial effort was based on.

I wasn’t moved to buy that book (hello, there’s a movie of it now), but when I learned Krakauer had also authored a definitive account of the life and death of Pat Tillman—and the ensuing cover-up of that friendly-fire casualty—I sprang into action and asked the nice people at amazon to please send me a copy of Where Men Win Glory right away.

Turns out it’s ideal holiday reading for people who already find the holidays depressing.

Like most Americans who consume mainstream media, I was vaguely familiar with the broad strokes of the Tillman story. Football star who threw fame and fortune away after 9/11 because he felt the call of duty. Killed in Afghanistan by “friendly” fire, which tragedy the Bush administration successfully spun into P.R. gold until the cover-up was revealed.

Credit where credit is due, I can’t think of a person or institution in my lifetime—other than Fox News and al Qaeda—that has been better than the Bush administration at using tragedy to advance their agenda. If that’s not one of the decision points W writes about in his autobiography, he really missed an opportunity. Perhaps he’s saving it for the sequel, “How To Bring Your Own Empire To Its Knees In Two Terms Or Less.”

Anyhow, at the time the cover-up of the real cause of Tillman’s death was revealed, I remember having a bitter, Saving-Private-Lynch taste in my mouth. We had been pitched this story before and it killed in the ratings, at least till the truth came out. By which point the mainstream media had become predictably disinterested and moved on to the next storyline. This looked likely to repeat the same ignominious pattern.

Like most of the country by then, I had become somewhat inured to the lies puking forth from Washington with such numbing regularity. The Tillman story, as I saw it, was just another sad chapter in the farce that was the Bush administration’s alleged War On Terrorism, which I had already decided was more accurately a War To Settle W’s Daddy’s Old Scores.

But God damn Krakauer, he made Tillman a person for me. Moreover, a person I liked, respected and even admired. Which is quite a feat, given my predisposition against athletes, from the thugs who beat me up in high school all the way to big league, bazillion-dollar-earning professional jocks.

It turns out, Pat Tillman possessed a very sophisticated mind. And I’m not just saying that because many of his beliefs happen to dovetail with mine. In his writing, from his journals, excerpted liberally throughout the book, Tillman emerges as a keen intellect, always willing and prepared to challenge his own belief systems, as well those with whom he conversed. In other words, he not only successfully remembered large chunks of information (this was a guy who read The Odyssey for fun), but was able to see how any single piece of information related to a larger whole. He had a very analytical mind, capable of intuitive leaps equally as impressive as any feats of athleticism he performed at his day job. If someone was going to write him as a hero in their novel, that author would probably have been Ayn Rand. Or Nietzsche.

In addition to being a smart athlete, Tillman was an athlete with real heart, who wasn’t too macho to wear it on his sleeve where appropriate. He was starry-eyed and corny as a Kansas wheatfield when writing to or about his beloved Marie. While never quite rising to the level of poetry, his earnest candor is bracing as it surprising—again, coming from a huge, over-achieving jock as it does.

The actual cause of Tillman’s death is widely known to be negligence on the part of any number of Tillman’s Army higher-ups and peers; from the officer back at the base camp who ill-advisedly split the squadron in two (read the book), to the trigger-happy sap in the other half of Tillman’s squadron who actually shot the big gun that ended his life.

Even after that fratricide, there is still a good fifth of the book left over that deals with the cover-up and the Tillman family’s unceasing efforts to bring the truth to light. In a nutshell, Tillman was killed the same week that the Abu Ghraib photos surfaced and W was behind in the polls to John Kerry, all of this only months before the 2004 election. Having the truth come out then would have effectively ended Bush’s chances at re-election, and that re-election became the mission imperative of everyone from the White House to the forward operating base in Afghanistan that was tasked with burning Tillman’s uniform and notebook (a blatant breach of military protocol) before shipping his body to Dover for an autopsy.

The true villain of the story, it seems to me, has to be then-Brigadier General Stanley McChrystal. Unlike the administration apparatchiks, it was not his job to protect the president from political liabilities; it was his job to win the ground war and be an advocate for the troops under his command. He did neither of the latter but an impressive amount of the former. The same guy who got fired for talking smack about President Obama to Rolling Stone is also where the buck, and plausible deniability, stopped in the Tillman cover-up, at least militarily.

For his good work in covering the president’s ass during a period of peak political vulnerability, he was promoted to lieutenant general.

Krakauer is too good a writer to accuse Bush of personally knowing anything about the cover-up without the evidence to back it up. Myself, I don’t know either. Half of me thinks that if news of the cover-up and subsequent disinformation campaign (emanating from an office created for that specific purpose by the Bush administration) did reach President Bush, he wouldn’t have done anything to derail it. The other half suspects he was shielded from full involvement by lackeys tasked with keeping the president’s plausible deniability beyond reproach.

It’s just as well, because this isn’t a book about Bush, or McChrystal or any of the assorted bad guys who populate its pages. It’s about a good guy. A real-life, Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart character, who thought about stuff and achieved things and never sacrificed his decency or his intellect in his quest to be the best person he could be.

Yes, Where Men Win Glory does take a negative slant on aspects of the Bush administration (cover-ups, historically, will engender that when they eventually get out), but it paints a truly inspirational portrait of Pat Tillman as a man and an American. It really turned my way of thinking around regarding what I have termed “jock douchebags” since Terminator 2 coined the phrase for me. I ended up sitting in the middle of a college basketball team on the flight home from Christmas Island, and instead of seething at being surrounded by a group of loud, muscle-bound empty-heads, I was warmed by their sense of fraternity and heartened that, if the plane did experience trouble, with them (and me!) sitting in the exit row seats, the passengers would at least have a fighting chance.



Another prejudice falls...

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is a fitting tribute to Tillman’s character and courage, and ought to be required reading for anyone considering embarking upon a military career.