Chapter 1The Kid from Almaden

Foreword

I have spent my working life writing about athletes and the institutions that profit from them. That is the beat, stated plainly: the NFL and the NBA, the leagues and the networks and the shield, the machinery that takes a young man's body and talent and converts them into product. For years I believed I understood how that machinery worked. I could tell you what a franchise does with a player's image while he is useful and what it does with his name after he is gone. I could explain the tribute video, the retired number, the moment of silence — the whole liturgy by which a league converts a person into content. I thought I had seen the machinery at full extension. Then I started reading about Pat Tillman, and I understood that I had only ever seen the junior varsity.

Because the Tillman story is my beat, taken to its logical conclusion. Here was a football player — a genuinely great one, a franchise-record-setting safety who had been underestimated at every level and had answered every underestimation with fury — who walked away from the sport, and the money, and everything my industry treats as the point of the exercise. And here is what happened next: the institutions did not let him go. The NFL claimed him. The Army claimed him. The government claimed him. When he died in a canyon in Afghanistan, killed by his own men, the claiming accelerated, and the man was buried a second time, under a story that bore almost no resemblance to who he had been. I have written about leagues that exploit the living. I had never written about what institutions do to the dead. That is why I wrote this book.

I did not conduct original interviews for it, and I want to say so plainly. The Tillman record is, by now, enormous and public: the investigations, the congressional testimony, the memoirs, the journalism, the court of official documents that his family pried open one Freedom of Information request at a time. My work was to read that record whole — the fabrications alongside the corrections, the citations alongside the retractions — and to follow the story the way I have followed every story on my beat: by asking who profited, and what they did to the person to collect.

What I expected to find was a media story. A public affairs operation, a compliant press, a narrative that served a war. That story is in this book, and it is worse than I expected. But it is not what held me for the years I spent inside this material. What held me was Pat. The journal he kept from sixteen until days before his death. The reading — Emerson, Thoreau, the philosophers he treated not as homework but as operating instructions. The 3.84 grade point average alongside the Pac-10 Defensive Player of the Year award, and the refusal, sustained across an entire life, to choose between the mind and the body. I came for the machinery. I stayed for the man the machinery tried to erase.

And I found a family. If the institutions in this book represent everything my beat has taught me to distrust, the Tillman family represents the answer to it: a mother who would not stop asking, a brother who told Congress the truth, a wife who built a monument out of what her husband had actually valued rather than what the Army said he valued. They had no leverage. They had no apparatus. They won anyway, in the only contest that finally matters, which is the contest over the truth.

Pat Tillman is worth a book — worth many books, and has gotten them — because he is the clearest case in modern American life of the distance between a person and the symbol built from him. Most athletes I have covered are simplified by the machine in small ways, a percentage point at a time. Pat was simplified totally, officially, at the level of the state. Putting the complication back is the only tribute he would have recognized. He read too seriously and questioned too honestly to want anything else.

This book is my attempt to do that: to write about a football player the way he deserved to be written about, which is to say as a thinking person first. I came to it as a critic of the institutions. I leave it as something closer to a partisan of the family, and of the stubborn, contested, irreducible man they refused to surrender.

— Roland Mercer, Boston

Chapter 1 · The Kid from Almaden

The Tillman house sat in New Almaden, at the southern edge of San Jose's Almaden Valley, where the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains nudged up against subdivisions built for families who worked in the early technology industry. It was not, however, where he was born. Patrick Daniel Tillman was born on November 6, 1976, in Fremont, California; the family settled in the Almaden Valley during his early childhood, when the valley was still more orchards than office parks, though that was changing fast. His father, Patrick Kevin Tillman, practiced law; his mother, Mary — known as Dannie — taught school. They were educated, middle-class, serious people who expected their children to read and to think.

Pat was the eldest of three boys. Kevin came two years later, and Richard, known as Rich, arrived a few years after that. The Tillman household was competitive in the way that houses with three boys tend to be, but with a particular edge. Pat set the tone. He was physical, fearless, and inclined from childhood to push past limits that other children respected as natural boundaries. He climbed things he was not supposed to climb. He fought with an intensity that made other parents nervous. He had a temper that flared hot and fast and that he would spend much of his adolescence learning to control without ever fully succeeding.

What distinguished Pat from the other tough kids in the neighborhood was that he was also unusually intelligent. He read early and widely. He asked questions that did not have easy answers, and he was not satisfied when adults tried to brush him off with simple ones. His mother noticed this early and fed it. The Tillman house was full of books, and Pat moved through them with the same restless energy he brought to everything else. By the time he reached middle school, he was reading well above his grade level, not because anyone forced him, but because his curiosity was genuine and voracious.

San Jose in the late 1970s and 1980s was undergoing the transformation that would turn it into the capital of Silicon Valley. The orchards were giving way to semiconductor fabrication plants and software companies. But in the Almaden Valley, enough of the old California remained that a kid could still disappear into the hills behind his house for hours. Pat did this regularly. He hiked, he explored, he tested himself against the terrain. He was drawn to physical challenges the way some children are drawn to puzzles, not because he wanted to win, though he did want to win, but because the act of struggling against something difficult seemed to clarify his sense of who he was.

This was apparent even before he was old enough to articulate it. The Tillman boys grew up rough. They wrestled. They fought each other and neighborhood kids. Pat, as the eldest, was often the instigator, and he brought a seriousness to physical confrontation that could be alarming. He was not a bully (the distinction matters). He did not pick on weaker kids. But he sought out challenges, and he had a temper, and the combination meant that he was frequently in trouble at school and in the neighborhood. There were incidents. Fistfights. Broken things. His parents, particularly his mother, worked to channel the aggression rather than suppress it, recognizing that attempting to stamp it out would only drive it underground.

Sports became the obvious outlet. Pat played everything (football, baseball, basketball), but it was clear early that football suited his temperament in ways the other sports did not. Football rewarded exactly the qualities he had in abundance: aggression, fearlessness, a willingness to hit and be hit, an appetite for controlled violence. He was not especially big, even as a teenager. He would never be especially big. But he was fast, he was ferocious, and he played with an intensity that made up for whatever he lacked in size.

At Leland High School, in the Almaden Valley, Pat became one of the best football players in the school's history. He played linebacker, where his combination of speed, intelligence, and barely contained fury was devastating. He hit people with a force that seemed out of proportion to his frame. He read offenses quickly and reacted before bigger, slower players could get set. His coaches recognized immediately that they had something unusual: not just a talented player, but a player whose intensity bordered on frightening. In 1993, he helped lead the Leland Chargers to a 12-1 record and the Central Coast Section Championship. The team's success was collective, but Pat's engine ran through the defense. He played almost every snap: fullback on offense, linebacker on defense, cover man on special teams, return specialist when they needed one. He did not know how to be partial. Everything he touched, he gave everything to.

The violent commitment that defined his football career produced, off the field, at least one serious consequence. He was charged with felony assault as a juvenile after defending a friend in an altercation. He pled guilty and served thirty days in a juvenile detention center. The incident did not derail his academic or athletic trajectory (he remained on course for a college scholarship and a strong academic record), but it revealed a dimension of his character that the posthumous mythology would erase: Pat Tillman was capable of real violence, and he understood the difference between violence in service of principle and violence for its own sake, but the line was sometimes thin. He was fierce. He was loyal to people he loved to the point of recklessness. He accepted consequences. The juvenile detention center was a data point, not a detour.

But Leland High was not a football factory. It was a good suburban high school in a region that cared more about academics and technology than about Friday night games. The scouting infrastructure that funneled talent from Texas and Florida and Ohio into the major college programs did not extend with the same intensity into the San Jose suburbs. Pat was talented enough to play at the next level, but he was not heavily recruited. The big programs (USC, UCLA, the traditional California football powers) did not come calling with the kind of offers that would have been standard for a linebacker of his ability in a state where football was taken more seriously.

This would turn out to be important. The gap between what Pat Tillman was and what the football establishment initially saw when it looked at him would define his athletic career and his entire life. He was always being underestimated. He was always too small, too slow on paper, too unlikely. And he responded to being underestimated with a fury that was not performative. It was genuine, felt in his bones, and extraordinarily productive. Being told he could not do something was, for Pat Tillman, the most reliable fuel in the world.

Arizona State University offered him a scholarship. It was not the most prestigious program in the Pacific-10 Conference, but it was a Division I school with a serious football tradition, and it was willing to bet on a kid from the San Jose suburbs whom the bigger programs had overlooked. Pat took the offer. He was going to Tempe.

He was also going to start keeping a journal. He began at sixteen, during his high school years, and he would not stop until the days before he died. The journal was the written record of his interior life: his readings, his arguments with himself, his questions about how to live. By the time the Army burned it in the field after his death, it had been his companion for more than a decade. Destroying it was not just destroying evidence; it was destroying the thing that made Pat Tillman irreplaceable as an individual, the private archive of a mind that was too complex to be summarized in a Silver Star citation.

Before he left, the person Pat Tillman was at eighteen deserves a moment. He was tough, physically gifted, intellectually curious, and possessed of a moral seriousness that was unusual for his age. He thought about right and wrong in ways that went beyond the conventional. He was not religious. This was already clear, though it would become more pronounced later. His moral framework was philosophical rather than theological. He read Emerson. He would read Thoreau. He was drawn to thinkers who grappled with questions about how a person should live, what obligations a person owed to the broader community, and what it meant to act with integrity in a world that did not always reward it.

He was also, beneath the toughness and the temper, fiercely loyal and capable of great tenderness. His relationship with his brothers, particularly Kevin, was close in the way that only relationships between siblings who have spent their childhood beating each other up can be. They understood each other at a level that required few words. This bond would shape both their lives in ways that neither could have predicted in the summer of 1994, when Pat packed for Arizona and Kevin was still finishing high school.

The kid who left San Jose for Tempe was not a simple person. He was not the uncomplicated jock that some people would later try to make him, and he was not the uncomplicated patriot that other people would try to make him after that. He was smart, angry, curious, tender, stubborn, and driven by impulses that he was still in the process of understanding. He was eighteen years old, and he had no idea that the decisions he would make over the next ten years would turn him into one of the most contested symbols in American life.

None of that was visible yet. In the fall of 1994, Pat Tillman was just a freshman linebacker at Arizona State, undersized and underestimated, about to prove everyone wrong for the first time. It would not be the last.

There is a broader context to the world Pat Tillman grew up in that bears on the story to come. The United States in the 1980s and early 1990s, the period of Pat's childhood and adolescence, was a country that was, by the standards of what would follow, at peace. The Cold War ended when Pat was thirteen. The Gulf War, brief and seemingly decisive, came and went in 1991, when he was fourteen. The military was visible but not central to American life in the way it would become after 2001. For most families in the Almaden Valley, the military was an abstraction, something that existed on television and in history books, not something that touched their daily lives.

This meant that Pat's later decision to enlist was not just personally surprising. It was culturally surprising. He came from a world where military service was not a default expectation. It was not something his classmates did after graduation. It was not something his parents had done. The path from Leland High School led to college and then to a professional career, not to Fort Benning and Ranger School. When Pat Tillman walked away from the NFL to join the Army Rangers, he was defying not just the expectations of the sports world but the expectations of the entire social environment in which he had been raised.

This defiance was consistent with everything about him. Pat had been defying expectations his entire life: expectations about his size, his ability, his potential. The decision to enlist was the most dramatic defiance yet, but it was not, in the context of Pat Tillman's personality and history, surprising. He had always been a person who did the thing that made sense to him, regardless of whether it made sense to anyone else. The Almaden Valley had produced a son who would outgrow it in the most literal possible way, by walking away from everything it represented and into a war zone where the values he had developed in those quiet suburban streets would be tested, confirmed, and ultimately betrayed by the institution he had trusted with his life.

The Almaden Valley shaped Pat Tillman in ways that are easy to overlook. San Jose was not a military town. It was not a place where enlistment was a natural path or where military service carried the social weight it did in parts of the South or the rural Midwest. The families in the Almaden Valley were engineers, lawyers, teachers, middle managers in the burgeoning tech industry. Their children went to college and became engineers, lawyers, teachers, and middle managers. The idea that one of them would walk away from a multimillion-dollar professional sports career to join the Army Rangers would have struck most of Pat's neighbors as incomprehensible.

But San Jose also had a particular character in the 1980s and 1990s that mattered. It was a place where intelligence was valued and where being smart was not a social liability, even for a kid who was also an athlete. Pat Tillman grew up in a culture that did not force him to choose between his mind and his body, and as a result, he never made that choice. He was always both: the kid who could knock you flat on a football field and the kid who was reading Emerson in his bedroom afterward. The people who would later express surprise that a professional football player was also an intellectual were revealing their own assumptions, not describing anything that was actually surprising about Pat Tillman.

His mother was central to this. Dannie Tillman was not a woman who accepted easy answers or tolerated laziness of thought. She raised her sons to question, to read, to think critically. She was also fierce in her defense of them, a quality that would become nationally significant years later when she turned that fierceness against the United States Army. But in the 1980s and early 1990s, it manifested in smaller ways: in her insistence that her boys do their homework, in her willingness to let them fight their own battles while making sure they understood that fighting was not the same as thinking, and in her refusal to let Pat coast on his athletic talent without developing his mind.

Patrick Tillman Sr., Pat's father, was a quieter presence, but his influence was real. As a lawyer, he modeled a kind of analytical thinking that Pat absorbed. The Tillman household was one where arguments were expected and where the quality of your reasoning mattered more than the volume of your voice. This was, in retrospect, excellent preparation for a young man who would spend his adult life making decisions that required him to think clearly under pressure, and whose final years would be spent in an institution that did not always reward independent thought.

Pat's relationship with his brothers deserves particular attention. Kevin was the brother closest to him in age and temperament. Where Pat was explosive and aggressive, Kevin was steadier, more measured, but no less tough. They fought constantly as children (real fights, not play fights), and the fighting forged a bond that was deeper than affection. They understood each other's capacity for violence and each other's capacity for loyalty, and they trusted each other in the way that only people who have tested each other physically can. This relationship would become one of the defining facts of Pat Tillman's life. When Pat enlisted after September 11, Kevin enlisted with him. They would serve together, deploy together, and on the day Pat died, Kevin was in the same canyon.

Rich, the youngest Tillman brother, grew up in the shadow of two intensely competitive older brothers. He was his own person, but the dynamic of the household was set by Pat and Kevin, and Rich navigated it with the adaptability that youngest children often develop. He would carry his own grief after Pat's death, quieter than Kevin's but no less real.

The Tillman boys were not churched. Their family's approach to questions of meaning and morality was secular and philosophical rather than religious. This was not unusual in San Jose (the Bay Area has long been one of the least religious regions in the United States), but it was significant for Pat's later life. He would serve in an Army where Christianity was the default assumption, where chaplains prayed before meals and missions, and where his atheism would set him apart in ways both subtle and overt. The roots of that atheism were in the Almaden Valley, in a household where questions about God were treated as questions, not as settled doctrine.

By the time Pat graduated from Leland High School in 1994, the outlines of the man he would become were visible to anyone paying attention. He was physically exceptional but not physically imposing: five feet eleven inches, perhaps 200 pounds, built like a safety rather than a linebacker, though he played linebacker with an aggression that made the distinction irrelevant. He was intellectually serious in a way that his athletic peers often were not. He had a moral compass that pointed toward authenticity and integrity, even when those values created friction with the world around him. And he had a chip on his shoulder the size of a California redwood, a burning need to prove himself that would drive him through college football, through the NFL, through Ranger School, and into a canyon in eastern Afghanistan where it would all end.

The chip was real. Pat Tillman felt underestimated his entire life, and the feeling was not entirely unjustified. He was always being judged by people who looked at his size, or his resume, or his background, and concluded that he was less than he was. He responded to this by becoming more: more intense, more prepared, more ferocious, more committed. It was a beautiful quality, and also exhausting, for him and for the people around him. He never learned to relax about it. He never fully made peace with the gap between who he knew he was and who the world saw when it looked at him.

That gap would grow wider after his death, when the world would see a symbol instead of a person, and the person (complicated, contradictory, brilliant, angry, loving, and irreducibly human) would disappear behind a story that bore almost no resemblance to who he actually was.

But that was a decade in the future. In the fall of 1994, Pat Tillman arrived at Arizona State University with a football scholarship, a duffel bag, and every intention of proving that the big programs had made a mistake when they passed him over. He was right about that. They had.