Tackling terrorism Many touched by Tillman

Words… are my business. They are my tools…. My levers… My weapons… My bandages. I use them professionally to have an effect. I use them to anger… To inflame… To reach… To mold…. To teach…. To heal.

It’s after midnight just now. My job, where I am fortunate enough to work out of my own home as a political consultant, frequently averages between 12 to 16 hours… research, meetings, phone calls, writing, positions, strategizing…. As the impending political season starts to spool up in earnest (Washington State has one of the latest primary elections in the country… mid-September) and as the issues for those who’ve retained me begin to amp up, I find it sometimes difficult to turn it off enough for sleep to come.... sometimes, anyway.

And sleep has deserted me here once again. But work isn’t the reason. Work, for once, has nothing to do with this.

I am a veteran of over 14 years of service in the Army. One of every 7 days I’ve been alive was spent on one overseas assignment or another while I was in. Most of that was, relatively speaking, down time. Little of that duty, compared to the duty of the Rangers, could be termed “hazardous.”

I enlisted because my stepfather had thrown me out at the ripe old age of 16, and I had nowhere else to go. Leaving my home was basically a cost-free exercise. If one were to look up the word “dysfunctional,” one would find snapshots of my “family” there… in living color.

It was an easy decision to make for one in my position… so I made it. Hell, yes, I want Armor. I want to go out there surrounded by 52 tons of armor-platting with a 105 mm cannon to shoot back with. Give me that damned mobile foxhole. The pay was $288 per month… a fortune to a product of the welfare state like me.

Once I joined the Army, it didn’t take long to discover that it was a “game,” and once you figured out “the rules,” you could go far…

So, playing the game, I went from private to promotable staff sergeant in just over 7 years. I went from high school dropout to missing cum laude’ by .02 of a grade point. And I was given a Regular Army Commission… the same commission West Pointers received. And life was good.

Life continues to be good. My business is booming, I recently bought a really great house… where I’ll be building a roughly 600 square foot shop this summer. A family that has issues, but none in comparison to that of my childhood.

Even the weather’s been pretty good for this time of year.

And then, I heard about Pat Tillman.

And that is when the words stopped working for me.

I never knew Pat Tillman beyond the all-too-few articles written about his amazing, if not stunning, decision to turn his back on millions of dollars so he could become a Ranger and go defend his country.

But when I heard about him, the hook was buried. I talked him up at Legion meetings, Vietnam Veterans of America meetings, meetings at the VFW.

“Man, have you heard about that Tillman kid? Can you believe it? NO ONE turns their back on $9 million dollars to stay with a team paying a third less (just ask Alex Rodriguez) and then NO ONE turns their back on $3.6 million to go chase bad guys in Afghanistan!”

And, no one does. Except… except for Pat Tillman.

I believe I understand something of what he felt when he decided to leave football to be a soldier. The terrible events of 9/11 effected me to some extent the same way they seem to have affected him. I tried to re-enlist… I told the Army I’d even go back in as a Spec 4. I told them I could teach weapons or something at Benning, and free up a young, hard-charging Staff Sergeant to go chasing around the hills of Afghanistan. I took a run at it… an all together too short of a run… but I made the attempt. I even took it to the White House… but to no avail. (“Too old… too broken up… too friggen fat.”) My conscience: assuaged.

But when I look at what Pat Tillman gave up… when I look at the strength of his convictions…. When I see that he was willing to put aside every earthly thing he had, including his brand-new wife… to go fight in a far off foreign land, when he COULD have stayed home and made millions playing a game…. It literally brings tears to my eyes that I am so unworthy in comparison to that.

I never met Ranger Tillman. I fear I could consider myself lucky to be half the man he was in the 27 all-too-short years of his life. I sit here in the luxury of my office… wired, three computer-networked on broadband air conditioned Cokes or coffee mere feet away my bed just down the hallway past my big screen TV… and tears roll out of my eyes at the thought of what a tremendous loss this Country has sustained with Pat Tillman’s death.

That is not to belittle the deaths or wounds of any of the others. I consider them all my brothers and sisters. But I have already read the remarks from some who simply cannot know, as Pat Tillman knew, exactly what he was giving up, for exactly what he was getting in to.

Pat understood. He understood the debt that we all owe for the fabulous life (compared to 96% of the rest of the people on this planet) we all have here in America. Clearly, he felt compelled to make the effort to repay that debt, by seeking out the most challenging, dangerous duty he could find.

His very success in the Army facilitated his death. Yet, even knowing what little I know about the man… so much younger then I, yet so much more admirable in so many ways, I cannot help but think that even if he knew the outcome… he wouldn’t have changed a thing.

As I close in on the start of my 6th decade of life, I will do everything I can to emulate Pat Tillman in the ways open to me. To be as true to myself as possible. To understand those things that are most important in life. To take a stand… and in the time remaining to me, make a mark.

Suddenly, I feel very tired. I had to get this down… had to make sure it wouldn’t get lost. I got that much done… and I see it as the least I can do.

In closing, Henry V’s words seem startlingly appropriate, so I leave you with them.

"This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day."

Tim Tyers
The Arizona Republic
Sep. 11, 2002

Former Cardinals safety Pat Tillman turned his back on a three-year, $3.6 million contract and enlisted in the U.S. Army with designs on becoming a Ranger.

He was newly married, with a chance for lifetime financial security. But those close to him say he had wanted to make a difference since the terrorist attacks last Sept. 11.

Tillman, who became a Cardinal after a celebrated career at Arizona State, has refused all requests to talk about his decision to trade training camp for basic training, which started in July. But it hasn't stopped others from saluting his effort.

"God love him. America is lucky to have guys like him," Diamondbacks first baseman Mark Grace said. "It's beyond impressive."

Pat Tillman gave up a $3.6 million contract with the Cardinals to enlist in the U.S. Army.

Tillman has sworn family and friends to codes of silence. They say little, largely because Tillman has told them he wants to achieve his Ranger goal before talking. The Army is shielding him from the media, despite numerous national requests.

Often forgotten is that Tillman's younger brother, Kevin, who played baseball at ASU and was in the Cleveland Indians organization, enlisted with him. When people approach their father, attorney Pat Tillman Sr., and praise the sacrifice his celebrated son has made, he holds up two fingers.

"He and his brother are doing well and have risen to every challenge presented to them," said Elsi Jackson, a civilian public affairs officer at Fort Benning, Ga.

Jackson said the Tillmans will complete advanced individual training at the end of October, then go to a three-week parachute training course, followed by a three-week Ranger regimen course. They'll be assigned to a unit in January for nine to 12 months before returning to Ranger school.

"I've talked to his wife (Marie), and I got a letter from Pat," Cardinals defensive coordinator Larry Marmie said. "He's doing well. Everything was positive. He just talked about the work they've been through. He wished us the best and wanted to tell everybody hello."

The question posed by many in our cash-crazed society is: Why would somebody with the world at his fingers make such a sacrifice? In a recent article, the New York Times suggested that Tillman lost friends in the twin towers disaster and that spurred his decision.

"He told me it was a lot of things," Marmie said. "It was something he had thought about for a long time. He felt he had lived a very comfortable life and in some way - now this isn't word for word - he needed, not wanted, to pay someone back. He felt that he was in debt to somebody for the kind of life he had up to this point.

"He is a very, very intelligent guy who is all about challenges. I don't think he was a highly recruited guy to Arizona State, but he came to ASU because somebody saw something in him. But he came and proved himself there, and he certainly had to prove himself at this level and at another position.

"A couple of summers ago, he came to me and said he was going to run a marathon and did, and the next summer he said he was going to do a triathlon and did."

Others close to the Tillman brothers said neither of them "wants stuff happening in their back yard," a reference to the terrorist attacks.

"Pat is a live-for-the-day type of guy. He wants to make the best of his days, so I wasn't surprised," Cardinals safety Kwamie Lassiter said. "It's the type of guy he is: 'What else can I do to help somebody?' I have respect for him. He worked hard. He was seventh-rounder and made the best of his opportunity. He worked hard and established himself as a strong player. He's a stand-up guy."

Tillman's decision to forgo the security that a pro contract would have provided hasn't gone unnoticed among other athletes in Phoenix.

"I don't know him, but I've seen him play and I'm a huge fan of his," said Coyotes wing Shane Doan, a Canadian. "Everybody wants something that they can believe in passionately, and everybody believes passionately in their country. At the same time, he gave up a whole lot to do that. It's just a neat thing. You just wish him all the best."

Diamondbacks outfielder Luis Gonzalez said Tillman's decision has touched the entire community.

"He left a lot of money out there to achieve something in his heart that he wanted to do," he said. "You can't fault the man for that. Everybody loved watching him play, from his intensity to the way he approached the game. He has taken the high road on interviews and things like that. He's doing what he wants and not for recognition.

"The recognition steamrolled because he did something nobody believed anybody would ever do, leave a pro sport to join the military."

Grace said: "From what I've heard about Pat, he will be a Ranger, and he's going to defend our country. Nothing but kudos for him. I've met him, but I really don't know him. But I'd like to get to know him better."

While Pat Tillman's former Arizona Cardinals teammates sweat and grimace their way through an off-season conditioning program -- a heavy rotation of weight lifting and aerobic exercises -- Tillman faces the prospect of the ultimate sacrifice.

A member of the elite Army Rangers, Tillman presumably is on the ground somewhere in the splintered country of Iraq. Deployed in early March along with the rest of the 75th Ranger Regiment, he and his comrades are working to liberate Iraq from the grip of Saddam Hussein's regime.

Tillman, at 26 years old, left a three-year, $3.6 million contract on the table to enlist in the Army with his brother Kevin after the 2001 season. Tillman will make no more than $17,000 this year. He is believed to be the first NFL regular to leave the game for military service since World War II, when 1,000 players served and 23 were killed.

"It touches you pretty deep," Cardinals head coach Dave McGinnis said at the recent NFL meetings. "Pat Tillman is a guy that is full of fiber, full of fabric, everything that he does goes right to the core of what is good and sound in our country."

John McCain, the U.S. Senator from Arizona who was a prisoner of war for more than five years in Vietnam, lauded Tillman as "the quintessential definition of a patriot."

The Rangers are the Army's finest light infantry unit, whose standard weaponry are machine guns, mortars and grenade launchers. It was the Rangers who conducted a daylight raid in Somalia, an event upon which Ridley Scott based his 2001 film, "Black Hawk Down."

"They strike quickly, with great precision and lethality," said Carol Darby, the news media chief for the Army Special Operations command at North Carolina's Fort Bragg. "They break things open so other people can come in behind them."

After Tillman made his ground-breaking decision to serve his country in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, some wondered if others in the athletic arena -- in many minds, a parallel universe to the crucible of war -- would come in behind him.

And while there has been an outpouring of support for the U.S. troops from athletes in all sports, no other high-profile professional athlete has followed Tillman's selfless example. In fact, former Cardinals teammate Simeon Rice, now a member of the Super Bowl champion-Tampa Bay Buccaneers, disparaged Tillman in an interview on Jim Rome's radio show last month.

Pat Tillman has been alone among today's professional athletes at the highest level, giving up his career to serve his country.
"He really wasn't that good, not really," Rice said. "He was good enough to play in Arizona, [but] that's just like the XFL."

After several more promptings from Rome, Rice allowed, "I think it's very admirable, actually. You've got to give kudos to a guy like that because he did it for his own reasons. Maybe it's the Rambo movies, maybe it's Sylvester Stallone, Rocky, whatever compels him."

More likely, it was Tillman's love for America, not to mention his brother, who also enlisted. In the aftermath of the interview, Rice's remarks were seen as symptomatic of today's privileged, self-centered professional athletes who have been enabled from their earliest playing days.

"A professional athlete's career is self-indulgent almost by definition," said Alan Klein, professor of sociology and anthropology at Northeastern University. "Risking your career and your life is not an easy decision. They're content to wear a patch on the uniform for solidarity, but that's the easy way out. Really, we're all taking the easy way out.

"My parents were in [Nazi concentration camp] Auschwitz. All my life, I've heard about the acts of bravery and sacrifice. We would all like to think of ourselves as people who would do the right thing. But, deep down, how many of us would give up everything we have? Certainly, it's not a lock."

New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com

Tillman is army of one

Saturday, September 14th, 2002

Pat Tillman would be appalled. Let the man hallucinate in peace, please. Let him starve until his internal organs begin to screech in pain.

Just because he would rather sleep standing up, with ants crawling in and out of nostrils, doesn't make him insane. So what if he traded in a $3.6 million contract with the Arizona Cardinals for an existence in which his bosses make NFL coaches seem like Mahatma Gandhi and the paychecks total $18,000 a year. Must we continue to write and speak about a professional athlete who no longer matters on Sunday afternoons?

Well, yes, we must.

There might not be a more important story in sports today, tomorrow, next year, forever - whenever the elusive concept of peace is achieved - than the story of Pat Tillman. He's the Arizona Cardinal strong safety who, days after returning from his honeymoon, voluntarily tossed away what had already been a meaningful NFL career for a chance to defend what is most sacred. He's the Ted Williams of our time.

He's the only professional athlete who truly deserves to be hailed a hero.

Imagine, Tillman, 25 and in his peak earning years, did not even consult his agent on this one. What was he going to hold out for, more rations? While rescue workers were still exhuming body parts at Ground Zero last autumn, Tillman and his brother Kevin, a minor league baseball player, simply up and joined the Army with the intention of becoming Rangers, that elite Special Forces unit, the alpha males of the military. Not every athlete needs props on the highlight shows: the Tillmans, bless them, have denied all interview requests.

There was a report the brothers lost friends in the Sept. 11 attack, but family members say that is not true. Still looking for a reason? There were 2,801 of them in New York alone. One year ago many Americans had the same initial gut reaction as the Tillmans', but then the selfish and practical realities of our lives took over.

Pat and Kevin added an extra layer of meaning to the mantra hanging in the air from the doomed passengers of Flight 93: Let's roll.

The Tillmans, both of whom enlisted with the grunt ranking of specialists rather than accept the Army's offer to let them enter as officers, won't complete advanced individual training in Fort Benning, Ga., until next month. Then begins the real torture. Ranger School has been described by one graduate as "about as close to terminal misery as the Army gets."

My brother Craig remembers watching a fellow soldier, delirious and delusional and craving a soda, attempt to put change in a cactus during the now extinct desert phase in Texas. His West Point classmates have equally harrowing tales of what a person can achieve when pushed to an extreme, and it is no coincidence that a sports background was their greatest buffer.

John Beatty was a wild-man linebacker at West Point, class of '92. Pete Carey was the pretty-boy quarterback. Both eventually earned the coveted black and gold Ranger Tab, though not without some perilous moments. Only 35% of candidates graduate Ranger School, and the actual failure rate is much higher considering the three-day preliminary camp weeds out another 30-40%.

"They deprive you of sleep and they deprive you basically of food and your body gets torn down. I'm sure I talked to a couple of trees in the middle of night because I thought they were people," says Carey, who later commanded a light infantry air assault company in Korea and is now a graduate student at USC. "Football prioritizes qualities like speed and explosive power. Ranger School demands stamina and endurance in ways that football can never match."

Three phases - swamps in Florida, mountains and jungle in Georgia - make up the Ranger course over 61 days, with each training day lasting 19.6 hours. Beds, for the lucky ones, might be a tuft of pine needles, or a latrine ditch. Many soldiers snooze on their feet, after "humping" (walking with a 115-pound backpack filled with water, provisions, ammo, weapons and clothing so that they resemble camels) across miles of treacherous territory through the night.

Always, soldiers must be ready for the next operation, the next ambush. Rangers train like they fight. Bones crack and break in the pitch-black night movement; plenty of soldiers drop out after suffering trench foot and other skin diseases from spending days on end in the water. In 1995, four Rangers died of hypothermia after grueling training in the chilly, chest-high north Florida swamps, where they were engaged in a bridge-building exercise.

"Survival takes mental toughness and guts, to use words I learned from football," says Beatty, now a U.S. Army captain assigned to HQ's 5th Army in Ft. Leavenworth, Kan. "Those two-a-days and playing through pain were great preparation. It all falls under the umbrella of teamwork. If you can work as a member of a bigger goal, whether in football or the military, you have a much greater chance of surviving."

Carey remembers candy bars - John Wayne bars, they're called - being bartered for $50. Like Tillman, who is listed in the Cardinals media guide as 5-11, 200 pounds, Carey had little fat to burn: within two weeks, he went from 195 pounds to 160. At least when the body begins to smell like ammonia, feeding on itself, the bugs keep their distance. "I saw some guys who were real studs who didn't make it," says Carey. "That 12-mile road march is a heck of a lot different than doing passing drills."

Pat Tillman is, by all accounts, a real stud who tends to laugh in the abyss of can't dos. He wasn't selected until the seventh round of the 1998 NFL draft, the 226th pick overall, too small to remain a linebacker, too slow (it was assumed) to have much of a chance. He converted to safety, set a Cardinals record with 224 tackles in 2000, and when St. Louis came courting with an offer of $9 million, he chose loyalty over bucks. Bless him again, he wanted to stick with one of the NFL's most woebegone teams.

And stamina? Tillman, restless following the '99 season, ran a marathon. He prepared for the 2001 training camp by competing in a 70.2-mile triathlon. Mental toughness? Tillman used to climb atop 200-foot light towers at Sun Devil Stadium, a perfectly logical place for a guy to meditate.

The Rangers, perhaps the most storied military unit in the world, seem a sober fit. They are America's finest assassins, warriors in a testosterone fog, first in and last out, securing airfields, taking prisoners, bombing railways and bridges and doing the nasty work that makes it possible for the rest of us to enjoy our daily freedoms.

So this afternoon, as you sip a cold one and watch your heroes in shoulder pads do battle on the gridiron, think of Tillman. Tell his story, again and again and again. It bears repeating.

"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". General Barry McCaffrey