Friendly Fire

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.