Pat Tillman would probably want to be commemorated by nothing more than the simple hush we devote to other lost infantrymen we didn't know. He no doubt would have preferred that we dwell instead on the photographs of those caskets draped in flags coming home from Iraq. He would surely disapprove of so much attention diverted to a single serviceman, simply because he played football. In the two years since he abandoned his NFL career and enlisted to become an Army Ranger, he steadfastly declined interviews and refused to use his military experience for renown or profit.
Instead, he embodied the words of an anonymous war poet: "I was that which others cared not to be. I went where others feared to go and did what others failed to do. I asked nothing from those that gave nothing ... "
War poets may be the only voices capable of speaking to the loss of Tillman, who gave everything. "Tilly" to his friends, he was killed in action in Afghanistan because, as he put it, his life as a football player was privileged and he needed, he said, to "pay something back." While he wished to be just another soldier, he never was, because he made the war personal to us. For better or worse we imagine an intimacy with our hero-athletes. Sacrifice now has a face, and a voice.
Tillman had luxuriant surfer hair, and he said "dude" a lot, and he liked to climb to the top of stadium light towers, where he would sit and think deeply. So now we feel the war, and it's high time, in this leisurely part of the newspaper devoted to games. Why did it take the death of Tillman for meanings to be restored, for play to become just play again, and war a soul-torturing affair, instead of bad metaphor?
At Arizona State he was known as a quirky-bright guy and a fervent overachiever, who sat in the front of every class in a tee shirt and flip-flops with his hair draped over his shoulder, taking copious notes. He was one of the last players given a scholarship, too small to be a linebacker at 5 feet 11, but he became the Pac-10 defensive player of the year. He was a 19-year-old when he told a young reporter for a local paper that he was going to do big things beyond the field. "Dude," he said to Scott Bordow, "I'm going to make a million dollars by the time I'm 30, and it's not going to be in football." He graduated cum laude in three and a half years.
"Courage was mine, and I had mystery; Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery."
— Wilfred Owen.
He was drafted in the lowly seventh round in 1998 by the Arizona Cardinals, and converted to safety. Too slow to be a safety, he nevertheless set a club record with 224 tackles in 2000. In the offseason, he ran marathons, and competed in a triathlon, and it became a familiar sight in the club's parking lot to see Tilly ride his bike to work and park it next to the luxury SUVs of his teammates.
Then one morning at a coffee shop after Sept. 11, he told his defensive coordinator Larry Marmie, "You better draft a safety," because he was enlisting. Tillman was no toy soldier, no adventuring Rambo. At Fort Benning, Tillman and his brother Kevin graduated from basic training with distinction, and Tillman was chosen to carry his unit's colors. This is what it means to be a Ranger, a member of the Army's finest light infantry unit: two thirds of all candidates fail or drop out. They learn to parachute at night under fire, to sleep standing up, to subsist for days in jungles or on mountainsides with no food. In 1995, five candidates died of hypothermia while training in a Georgia swamp. A prospective Ranger's ordinary day lasts 19.6 hours.
"As a company commander in combat . . . crawling around in the mud with an enemy machine gun hammering over my head . . . the crotch ripped out of my uniform . . . constipated . . . hungry . . . huge bug bites under my eyes . . . exhausted with days of intermittent sleep . . . I could always comfort myself by saying . . . 'it could be worse . . . I could be back in Ranger School,''' Gen. Barry McCaffrey once reminisced.
"Here dead we lie because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life to be sure, is nothing much to lose; But young men think it is, and we were young."
— A.E. Housman
Tillman's gallant death raises complicated questions about the role of athletes in society, about why we so overpraise some people and so undervalue others. Was Tillman a more valuable person because he once played in the NFL?
Former teammate Pete Kendall, the Cardinals' starting center, said, "The loss of Pat brings it home. Everyday there are countless families having to get the same news." Some 117 U.S. soldiers have died — 70 in combat — during Operation Enduring Freedom, which began in Afghanistan in late 2001.
In March of 2003, Staff Sgt. Jacob Frazier, serving with the 169th Air Support Operations Squadron, died when four gunmen on motorcycles ambushed the reconnaissance unit he was traveling with. In April of 2002, Jerod Dennis, a member of the 3rd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment out of Fort Bragg, N.C. , was on patrol with other soldiers when they drove into an ambush by rebel fighters.
"A lot of time in football, the analogies with war are thrown about," said Kendall. "They talk about soldiering on and that sort of thing. Today you see how hollow that is."
Tillman would no doubt suggest that we grieve equally for Staff Sgt. James D. Mowris. And Staff Sgt. James D. Scott. And Sgt. Danton K Seitsinger. And Sgt. Benjamin L. Gilman. And Sgt. Nicholes D. Golding. And Staff Sgt. Anthony S. Lagman. And Sgt. Michael J. Esposito, Jr. All killed.
He would probably wish us to realize that outfits continue to rotate in and out of Afghanistan, and the war is not over there. The focus, understandably and for good reason, has been on Iraq. But there has been a real war going on in Afghanistan also, and while it might be "small" on the current relative scale, down at the squad, platoon, and company and battalion level it all tends to look pretty much the same, and the Pat Tillmans of the world are out there at the tip of the spear.
As perfect strangers we can only guess why a star athlete would give up a $3.9 million NFL contract for the infantry life. But perhaps it was a simple decision. Perhaps Tillman felt what Wilfred Owen did in 1917, when he returned to the war after being wounded in heavy fighting on the Somme.
"My nerves are in perfect order," Owen wrote his mother. "I came out again in order to help these boys; directly, by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can."
A friend of Tillman's from the Arizona State athletic department spoke with him on April 1, shortly before he left Fort Lewis, Wash., for Afghanistan. Tillman, did what guys operating with Special Forces do, he issued only the most laconic description of how and what he was doing. He had been to the Middle East for several months once already, and now he was about to ship out again. "We're pretty busy around here right now," he said.
What Tillman's friends did learn was that Tillman no longer considered himself a football player. He was thinking seriously of reenlisting and of making the military his career. He aspired to be an officer. He wanted, he said, to lead Rangers.
"I, too, have dropped off fear — Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon, And sailed my spirit surging, light and clear. Past the entanglement where hopes lay strewn."
— Wilfred Owen, killed in action, 1918, five days before the armistice.
