Remember His Name (GREAT SI piece on Pat Tillman)

One day, God willing, Russell Baer was going to tell his son this story. One day, after the boy's heart and brain had healed, he was going to point to that picture on the kid's bedroom shelf of the man doing a handstand on the roof of a house, take a deep breath and say, Mav, that's a man who lived a life as pure and died a death as muddy as any man ever to walk this rock, and I was there for both. That's the man, when your heart stopped for an hour and they slit you open neck to navel, who I prayed to because ... well, because you wouldn't exist if he hadn't died, and I wouldn't be half of who I am if he hadn't taught me how to live. That's Pat Tillman, the man you take your middle name from, and I've been waiting for you to ask since the day you were born.

"You didn't talk politics over there, not while you were still in the sandbox. But that night, as Pat watched another orange and white flash-bang shudder the distant town, he shook his head and said, "This war is so f------ illegal." Russ, for the first time, realized how wobbly a tightrope Pat was walking between his integrity and his duty. Even later in their 3 1/2-month deployment in Iraq, as it began to appear that they'd been sent on a nukes-and-biochemical-weapons wild-goose chase, Russ never heard Pat go further than, "This is all bulls---."

"Everybody who thought he'd enlisted purely out of patriotism, they missed reality by a half mile...On a level deeper than almost any other American, he'd reaped the reward of those sacrifices: the chance his country afforded him to be himself, all of himself.

She'd [Tilman's mother] gone through life's grinder without losing her gristle or her grin. She'd lost her father, an international banker, to a heart attack when she was 18, weathered a divorce and now lost a son in baffling circumstances in a war she didn't believe in.

Kevin[Tilman's brother] entered sniper school at Fort Bragg, learned the solitary man's killing art, and was asked if he wanted to deploy again to Iraq. Even in the swirl of all his anger and sorrow, he still felt bound in a pact with his brother to see this commitment through. His mother and uncle flew to North Carolina and begged him not to go, and when he learned he'd be sent over with men involved in Pat's death, that, finally, was just too much. He went to a commander and took a pass.

I found the story to be very negative and depressing. In many ways it demeaned Tilman's sacrifice and impugned the sacrifice of others. The US Army is demonized. It had more than a liberal tinge. It was bloody red.

The article is unforgivably dishonest. It implies that Saddam's poor innocent soldiers didn't hurt Jessica Lynch by saying rumors that they'd beaten her and that she'd fired her gun till it was empty weren't true.

Sorry, dude, you're a year out of date with your info, or a liar. The poor girl didn't fire a shot, it's true, but she was raped and her bones broke.

SI is a magazine written by wussies and Marxists who pretend to be interested in sports and masculinity, just to mess up those things for everyone else.

If you can't see the difference between his service and theirs, I can't help you. I say that as a veteran.

If you think the difference is that Tillman walked away from a job paying millions and that somehow makes him different from the other US military personnel who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan and therefore Tilman is worthy of a statue in front of Fort Benning, then I find that to be nonsense. The others were just as heroic and patriotic in their service and had as much to lose.

It is a sad commentary on the state of our country and patriotism that Tillman's service is so noteworthy. Imagine the rich and famous serving their country in the military. It goes along with the Rangel cariacture of the military as a place for the poor and undeducated who can't make it anywhere else.

FYI: I am also a veteran who served a year in Vietnam and another 8 months off the coast.

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