Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

A gifted athlete from a young age, Tillman’s intermittent Army journal reveals that a diving catch he made in middle school was one of the defining moments of his life, one in which he realized, with “unwavering self-assurance” (4), that he wanted to be a professional athlete. Despite his small stature, he went on to excel at football.

Born November 6, 1976, Patrick Daniel Tillman grew up near San Francisco in Fremont, California, a municipality that hosts the largest concentration of Afghans in the US. A largely tribal country, Afghanistan was manipulated and influenced by the U.S. and the Soviet Union since the 1950s, when both tried to maneuver to their advantages during the Cold War. A Marxist brand of modernization took hold in the 1970s, and Afghanistan’s prime minister, Mohammed Daoud Khan, slowly began trying to modernize the rest of the country, aided by Moscow. This tie alienated Afghan nationalists, and the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) broke ties with Daoud, murdering him and executing thousands of his supporters. Afghanistan’s elite society members fled the country, with many ending up in Fremont.

Afghanistan erupted into civil war, led by the Muslim holy warriors, the Afghan mujahideen. In late 1979, the Soviets dispatched 100,000 troops to quell the rebellion. The U.S. publicly rebuked this action, even though the CIA had been arming the mujahideen for months before the Soviet invasion to draw Russia into a debilitating debacle not unlike Vietnam. It worked, writes Krakauer: “[T]he legendary Society Fortieth Army found itself neck deep in an unexpectedly vicious guerrilla war that would keep its forces entangled in Afghanistan for the next nine years” (9).

The mujahideen were brutal in this conflict, mutilating the bodies of slain Soviet soldiers and brutalizing POWs. Many Soviets became addicted to heroin or were debilitated by disease. The Soviets changed tactics, concentrating their attacks on rural tribespeople, civilians, villages, farmland, and livestock in an act of genocide. They dropped mines and booby traps that would attract children, purposefully maiming rather than killing them. The CIA continued to fund the mujahideen, supporting military leader Jalaluddin Haqqani. In 1984, a young Osama bin Laden arrived to Khost to assist Haqqani, quickly gaining a highly regarded reputation. In 1988, he cofounded al-Qaeda, named after the training bases he organized in Khost.

Thanks to anti-aircraft weapons given to the Afghans by the U.S., the Russians admitted defeat and began to pull out of the country in 1988. Months later, the Cold War officially ended when the Berlin Wall fell, and modernity’s global Western ideology seemed to have won. The CIA pulled all their funding from the mujahideen, ignoring the fact that “Haqqani and bin Laden still controlled large numbers of fanatical holy warriors and possessed massive stockpiles of weapons that the CIA had graciously purchased for them” (16). 

The Tillman family spent Pat’s childhood in a small neighborhood at the foot of the Santa Cruz mountains. Tillman’s boyhood consisted of adventuring with his brothers in nature, very little television, and lively debates and discussions with his family. Krakauer writes, “Almost no subject was off-limits. Encouraged to think critically and be skeptical of conventional wisdom, Pat learned to trust in himself and be unafraid to buck the herd” (18). He was a rough-housing, physical kid who was nonetheless an attentive and polite student. Despite his small stature he excelled at every position in football.

An Army base a few miles from the hill where Tillman perished was renamed Forward Operating Base Tillman in his honor. Like at all FOBs, American Army troops are joined by Afghan forces, including many Pashtuns. Primary Pashtun principles are:

nang (honor), ghairat (pride), and badal (revenge), which—along with a fourth concept, melmastia (hospitality)—account for the most important tenets in an unwritten, overarching code of behavior known as Pashtunwali that shaped culture and identity in this part of Central Asia for centuries (21-22).

In Pashtun society, honor and respect are preserved through acts of courage and strength, often brutally, and over many years of family rivalries and deep-seated conflicts.

Tillman’s father, also named Patrick, instilled similar values of masculinity and physical and emotional toughness in his sons. Tillman learned early that to compensate for his stature, he had to be especially intense and intimidating on the field, even if he was sensitive on the inside. Tillman got in numerous fights but was never considered a bully. He earned the reputation of being an alpha male in the packs with which he ran.

As Tillman excelled as a high school football player, the mujahideen was slaughtering their own people, destroying much of the Kabul region. The brutal Soviet-installed Pashtun president of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA), Mohammed Najibullah, was still funded by the Soviets after their retreat. With Pakistani support, the CIA tried to oust Najibullah by pressing mujahideen leaders, including bin Laden, to attack a DRA stronghold city, Jalalabad. This resulted in a bloody standoff, with the eventual retreat by the mujahideen.

Loyalty in Afghan society descends in importance from family, to extended clan or tribe, to ethnic group, to religious affiliation. The bulk of the nation’s population lives in rural areas, with no support from Afghanistan’s central government. Thus, these rural villages held allegiance to the local mullahs, village elders, and mujahideen leaders. Their income relied on the opium trade. In 1990, bin Laden left Afghanistan. The next year, Haqqani and his holy warriors overran the DRA and captured Khost City, taking a gruesome toll on the city’s occupants. When the Soviet Union officially fell, the resources to the DRA dried up and mujahideen leaders fought for seats in Najibullah’s government.

Najibullah publicly begged U.S. forces to help prevent fundamentalism from overcoming Afghanistan. Due to the Cold War-era mindset still present in Washington, however, George H. W. Bush’s administration saw the fall of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to wash its hands of Afghanistan’s affairs: “No effort was made to thwart a takeover by the holy warriors, and the moment passed” (32).

In 1993, the battle among mujahideen leaders for Kabul resulted in a catastrophic civil war. People in the outer provinces retreated under the less-extreme tyranny of their clans and local militias. According to Krakauer, “This atomization of the nation—the hunkering of the population into a thousand premodern fiefs” provided ideal conditions to incubate the spread of terrorism (34).

On February 26, 1993, a Kuwaiti named Ramzi Yousef designed a plan to take down the World Trade Center using a homemade bomb in a van strategically placed in the parking garage. The attack only killed six but was very close to succeeding in its aim. The U.S. didn’t take it seriously. The operation was supervised by Yousef’s uncle, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the “principal architect” of the 9/11 attack on the same buildings, years later.