Jon Krakauer's Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

The best weather of the year comes during July in the Pacific Northwest. Usually after 4th of July the sun comes out and temperatures rise and Western Washingtonians get to feel as if they are living in California. By the time the middle of August rolls around though the light is already in retreat. Absent several days in a row of rain at some point at the end of summer, the weather often remains pleasant until the beginning of October.

So this is it for us camped up here in the upper left-hand corner of the lower 48; this is our nirvana.

I started the morning yesterday by testing the status of my healing left foot by running the 7.8-mile Lake Union Loop. I took it slow, very slow, but I enjoyed myself, and the foot seemed to hold up. The weather was perfect. It was early so not a lot of people were out. Most runners one encounters are women. The odd male you come across is more often than not running with a female partner.

For the rest of the day I finished a book I had started last weekend, Jon Krakauer's Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (2009). I have had a copy since 2010, but I didn't get around to reading it until now. Krakauer has two blockbuster books to his credit: Into Thin Air (1997) and Into the Wild (1996). Both are excellent. Into Thin Air was a phenomenon of the late 1990s. Seemingly everyone read it. Then ten years later prior to the release of the Sean Penn-directed movie version, the same thing happened with Into the Wild. That doesn't happen very often for a writer.

I thought Where Men Win Glory would be another blockbuster. When I worked as a dispatcher at United Brotherhood of Carpenters local I lent my copy to a guy who often showed up to open call in the morning. Doug was his name, a good guy. He had recently lent me his copy of Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity (2010), by Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry, which is an excellent account of the moral bankruptcy of big-time college sports exemplified by the story of fuck-up sociopath tight end Jerramy Stevens. So I was returning the favor. A month later, maybe two, he handed me back my copy of Where Men Win Glory. He didn't say anything about it other than it took a long time to get going. I don't think he finished it.

Now I can see why. It is not a bad book, but it is definitely not a Krakauer blockbuster. Its flaw is that it is several different narratives that never get knit together. You have the back story of football star and thinking man Pat Tillman, which is compelling; then you have an in-depth treatment of the big fratricidal incident in Nasiriyah during the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 the year prior to Tillman's death; then you have the in-depth description of the Army Ranger friendly-fire incident that killed Tillman in Afghanistan; then you have an account of the Army's and the Bush administration's cover-up of the Tillman fratricide and the efforts of Tillman's mother Dannie to have the government investigate itself; and finally you have Krakauer's concluding comments on the doomed nature of the U.S./NATO presence in Afghanistan.

The best part of the book is reading about Pat Tillman. He was a neat guy, a real person, an honest man. Krakauer is particularly effective when he describes Tillman's rapid disillusionment with the military during basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. As Tillman wrote in his journal: "I am not a negative man, I do not want to report bad, I want to rise above and bring everyone with me. However, this fucking place blows . . . period."

Krakauer hits the right note at the end. Afghanistan is not a conflict that the United States will ever win. Tillman's head was blown off in Khost Province by a brother Ranger operating a squad automatic weapon. Close by, over the Zero Line, a.k.a., Durand Line, is North Waziristan, home to Bin Laden crony and ISI asset Jalaluddin Haqqani, head of the Haqqani network. The United States is fighting a creation of its allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. It is all a bullshit murderous game that mangles and discards the lives of young people. I doubt the ongoing Pakistani campaign in North Waziristan is anything more than a perfunctory performance of political theater.