Jill’s Top Non-Fiction

I promised I would share my top non-fiction picks from the past year, so here they are:

The Sisters Antipodes by Jane Alison (4 1/2 stars)

The Longest Trip Home: A Memoir by John Grogan (5 stars)

Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer (5 stars)

Krakauer’s book is the one that I still think about today.  Everyone remembers hearing about the NFL player who gave up a multi-million dollar contract to serve in the Army after 9/11, only to lose his life in Afghanistan.  But few knew the entire Tillman story until now, which is far more complex than anyone could have imagined.

Krakauer describes Pat as someone who grabbed life by the horns and created his own destiny.  Baseball was orginally his sport, but when he was told he couldn’t play varsity baseball as a freshman in high school, he decided to switch to football.  At 5’5″ and 120 pounds, Pat hardly fit the profile and was told so by the Assitant Coach.  Pat told him not only would he play high school football, but also college football as well.  So he began lifting weights and working out, and by his sophomore year he was one of the star players on the Varsity team.  Thanks to a growth spurt in 11th grade that stretched him to 5’11″ and 195 pounds, he finally got the nerve to ask out his crush of many years, Marie.  Life was good.

Then came the incident at the Round Table, a pizza restaurant frequented by high school students.  It was toward the end of his senior year and he was there with his girlfriend Marie and some friends.  One of his buddies was drinking and went outside to taunt a football player from a rival team.  Eventually he got was he was looking for – a fight – but he was no match for the other guy.  When Pat heard what was going down, he came running out of the restaurant ready to defend his friend, but in the heat of the moment he misjudged the scene and attacked the wrong guy.  He ended up attacking an innocent bystander and kicking his teeth in.

Pat was originally chaged with felony assault, but when the judge learned his scholarship at Aririzona State University (ASU) was at stake, she lessened the charge to a misdemeanor.  Pat did 30 days in jail and 250 hours of community service.  Jail humbled Pat.  He did a lot of reading and thinking about his actions and about life in general.  He often remarked that the Round Table incident and his subsequent jail time changed him more than any of the good decisions he’d made in his life.

Pat did his time and finished his community service just in the nick of time to start school at ASU.  No time for summer fun.  While at school, he missed his family and girlfiend enormously, sometimes breaking down in tears when they visited.  For the first time in his life, Pat gave academics the same kind of attention he gave athletics.  One thing jail had taught him was that time was precious and he wanted to make the most of it.  He didn’t want to fool around and waste time.  As a result, he graduated magna cum laude in 3 1/2 years.

After graduating in 1998, Pat’s goal was to play in the NFL.  Although he wasn’t invited to NFL scounting combine (a rigorous training camp for NFL hopefuls), he didn’t let it get him down.  Instead he participated in Pro Day at Sun Devil Stadium, an avenue for scouts and coaches to evaluate ASU players who didn’t attend the combine.  Pat was subsequently drafted by the Arizona Cardinals – their last pick – for the NFL minimum salary of $158,000, plus a $21,000 signing bonus.

Money was not everything to Pat.  He initially lived in a small one-bedroom apartment in Pheonix.  When he did buy a house for he and Marie, it was a modest home at $149,000.  He rode his bike to work.  The first car he purchased was a used Jeep Cherokee while most of his teammates were driving to work in their “blinged out” Cadillac Escalades.  Pat bucked the system from the beginning.

Pat had mixed success in in the NFL, but by the time of the terror attacks on September 11, 2001 he had made himself a valuable player for the Cardinals. Pat was deeply affected, as were other in the NFL, by the attacks that day. But he chose to do something about it.  After much soul searching, he decided to enlist in the Army and follow the path to become an Army Ranger.  He decided this despite the fact that Arizona offered him a new three-year contact for $3.6 million.  He also decided to marry his high school sweetheart, Marie.

“My life at this point is relatively easy,” Pat wrote in a letter to his family dated April 8, 2002. “It is my belief that I could continue to play football for the next seven or eight years and create a very comfortable lifestyle. My job is challenging, enjoyable and strokes my vanity enough to fool me into thinking it’s important. For more reasons that I care to list, my job is remarkable. However, it is not enough.”

Pat’s first tour of duty was to Iraq.  Although he didn’t see much action and wasn’t exactly happy with the circumstances of the war in Iraq, when he was offered the chance to leave the Army early to return to the NFL, he chose to finish his 3 year stint because he believed it was the right thing to do.  His agent was none to happy, since he was getting mult-million dollar offers from several teams at that point.  A fatal decision.  Pat’s next tour of duty would be to Afghanistan were he would meet his end.

There isn’t enough room to go into all the details of Pat’s death.  Suffice it to say that it was the result of a risky mission gone bad.  It was awful the way it went down.  Pat was killed by one of his fellow Rangers, shot in the head three times. A mistake, which is unbelievably common in the fog of war.  In the heat of battle, protocol goes out the window.  And it seems that modern technology does not improve the odds.  Krakauer lists fratricide rates from recent wars: WWII – 21%; Vietnam 39%; Gulf War 52%; Iraq – 41%; Afghanistan – 13%. 

The worst part was that the Army tried to cover up the cause of Pat’s death, even though it was no secret to anyone who witnessed the incident.  Army medical examiners at Dover AFB were angry that his body was shipped back naked, which was strictly against regulations.  The uniform is part of the evidence.  Perhaps most grievous, it was discovered that one of his fellow soldiers burned his uniform, under orders, along with his final journal.  In the end the Army chewed him up and spit him out.

A note on Pat’s journals – Krakauer uses passages from them, which is where the reader gains the most intimate knowledge about Pat.  He was very introspective, at times funny, and highly intelligent.  He deeply loved his wife, Marie, as well as his family and friends.  It’s obvious that God threw away the mold when he made Pat Tillman.  Rest in peace, Pat.