# Friendly Fire *A Biography of Pat Tillman* — Legendary Biographies No. 012 - **Subject:** Patrick Daniel Tillman - **Written by:** Roland Mercer - **Shelf:** Sport / American Football - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 194 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 194 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-052-2) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Gideon Marsh (ISBN 979-8-90623-198-7) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/012-friendly-fire.html ## About this book April 22, 2004, the Spera Valley, Khost Province, Afghanistan. Pat Tillman, twenty-seven, an Army Ranger and former Arizona Cardinals safety who had walked away from a $3.6 million NFL contract eight months earlier to enlist, is killed by gunfire on a ridge above his patrol. The Army announces he died charging an enemy position. He is posthumously awarded the Silver Star on April 30. Five weeks later, the Army quietly notifies the family that he had in fact been killed by friendly fire — three rounds to the forehead from an M249 squad automatic weapon at close range, fired by a Ranger named Trevor Alders. Roland Mercer's biography opens earlier — in New Almaden, California, where Patrick Daniel Tillman was born in 1976 — and follows the arc through Leland High School and Arizona State, the 1998 NFL draft as the 226th overall pick, the four NFL seasons that the Cardinals' front office said publicly were too short for an All-Pro caliber safety, the post-9/11 enlistment with his brother Kevin, the deployment to Iraq for the 2003 invasion, the second deployment to Afghanistan, and the long cover-up of the friendly-fire facts that the family — led by Pat's mother Mary, his father Patrick Sr., and his brother Kevin — pursued through congressional hearings and the 2008 Friendly Fire documentary. What emerges is a portrait of a Stanford-bound NFL safety who left professional sport for the Army out of conviction and whose death the Pentagon spent six weeks lying about. ## Contents 1. The Kid from Almaden 2. Sun Devil 3. The NFL and the Life of the Mind 4. September 5. Ranger 6. Afghanistan 7. The Canyon 8. The Silver Star 9. The Other Story 10. The Lie Holds 11. Who Knew What 12. Mary Tillman 13. The Investigations 14. Congress 15. The Machinery of Myth 16. The Man They Needed Him to Be 17. Aftermath 18. The Real Pat Tillman ## Questions **Who is Friendly Fire about?** Patrick Daniel Tillman. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Friendly Fire — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,882 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 59,500 words, 18 chapters, 194 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Roland Mercer is a Boston-based culture writer whose biographies of athletes have appeared as cover features in Sports Illustrated and The Atlantic. He covers the NFL, NBA, and the institutions that profit from each. His longform writing focuses on the physical costs of modern athletic competition and the complex systems that surround professional sports. Through books like The Fastest Woman, Friendly Fire, and The Bypass Transfusion, Mercer examines the intersection of physical endurance and commercial pressure. In books such as The Twisties and The Industrial Park Murder, he explores the psychological strain on high-profile competitors and the darker aspects of competitive industries. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he spends his free time rowing on the Charles River and collecting vintage sports memorabilia.