Resting on a wall of the living room in the apartment shared by my brother and me is a framed print of a drawing by artist Mike Sullivan. The image within that frame is of Pat Tillman.
In it, Pat Tillman the football player shakes the hand of Pat Tillman the soldier, representing the dichotomy that was his life.
Tillman was one of more than 1,700 NFL players drawing a salary representative of about 1 percent of our society — a career he left to join the U.S. Army Rangers — becoming one of the nearly 1.5 million military personnel on active duty.
In the five-plus years since Tillman’s death from friendly fire in Afghanistan, his legend has mushroomed because he represented what no athlete could; he was willing to give up fame and riches for his own moral code.
As an Arizona Cardinals star, with shoulder-length hair, Tillman was content to drive a beat-up Volvo while his NFL teammates cruised around in blinged-out Escalades. He truly lived life on his own terms.
Tillman’s intellectual capacity was unlike a typical jock-soldier. He was very well read, having devoured a number of religious texts — including the Bible, the Koran and the Book of Mormon, as well as transcendental authors such as Emerson and Thoreau.
In further describing this complicated individual, a very interesting meeting was supposed to have taken place after his return from Afghanistan. According to Tillman’s mother, Mary, a friend of his had arranged a meeting with Noam Chomsky. Even Chomsky has confirmed this.
Best-selling and prominent author Jack Krakauer recently took to task remembering Tillman in his own literary manner. Krakauer wrote a new book titled, “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman.”
The book provides a refresher course on the developments in Afghanistan and Iraq, Osama bin Laden’s strategies and U.S. military involvement, all wrapped around Tillman’s compelling tale.
He was killed in 2004 in an isolated rugged mountain pass in Afghanistan, but his story and its consequences are still quite relevant. The book’s release coincides with a tense debate in our country about sending more troops to Afghanistan, as requested by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.
President Obama is being accused of “dithering” and other forms of weakness in his decision not to listen to the military “genius-like” advice from McChrystal.
Let us backtrack to 12 hours after Corporal Pat Tillman was killed, and put his death into context. The Abu Ghraib prison controversy that shocked the globe had just broken. The U.S. Marines were engaged in the heaviest urban combat since the Vietnam War in the battle of Falluja and George W. Bush was up for re-election in six months.
According to Krakauer, “there was a very conscious choice … the e-mails prove it … they are immediately talking about how to exploit this [Tillman’s death] for political gain.”
Tillman was given a nationally televised memorial service, during which he was lauded as a war hero for dying while engaging the enemy.
The Tillman story was tragic enough without the added layer of deception. The Bush administration knew he’d been killed by friendly fire, yet lionized him as a hero falling to the enemy, in a public relations blitz.
The military awarded Tillman the Silver Star, with a citation that described “devastating enemy fire,” of which McChrystal — as the presiding officer — signed off on. McChrystal was instrumental and, in actuality, the point man in this cover-up.
I applaud Obama for not hastily making his decision about more troops, especially when the request comes from the man who is directly implicated in the cover-up of the death of one of the most famous and selfless soldiers our military has ever known.
Hanif Zarrabi is a Middle Eastern History graduate student and a columnist for the Daily 49er.