Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

Tillman turns down a $3.6 million contract with the Cardinals and officially enlists, after nearly getting into a fight with the recruiting drill sergeant. In early July, the brothers ship off to basic training in Georgia. They’re appalled by the immaturity of their fellow recruits; the Tillman brothers are 24 and 25, whereas the rest of the recruits are in their late teens. Tillman immediately bonds with a 30-year-old Brazilian national named Túlio Tourinho, a teacher with a pregnant wife at home who, like Tillman, was so affected by 9/11 that he enlisted. They remain fast friends throughout all of basic training.

Tillman’s diary entries reveal how much he misses Marie and how guilty he feels for putting his loved ones through this pain. He struggles to adjust to the caste separation between officers and enlisted men, one of many aspects of “military culture that struck Pat as archaic, bizarre, and counterproductive” (169).

As the Bush administration tracks Tillman, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld writes a letter of support to him. With the increased pressure, and as drill sergeants bend over backwards to avoid showing favoritism, Tillman has a rough boot camp experience. He intensely misses his new wife. Due to his overwhelmed emotional state, he is unable to even speak to her when given the opportunity to make a phone call. Hardship and misery bring out who a person truly is, Túlio reflects. Tillman never shows any impatience or loses his cool, to his friend’s admiration. 

In September, Tillman and his fellow recruits are trained on different machine guns. After a recruit is accidentally injured while changing a round, Tillman muses on the danger of these machines, a fact too easy to forget. After a simulation wherein Tillman’s group failed and was “killed,” he writes in his diary about how intensely he misses Marie, asking himself why he’s done this. Tillman goes on to be overwhelmingly grateful for this experience, for it solidifies for him that Marie is the best thing to have ever happened to him. In his letters, he reassures her that this trial will only make them closer and stronger as a couple.

At the end of Basic Training, the recruits receive a 30-hour window of freedom. Hechtle and Marie fly out to spend the free time with Kevin and Tillman. He reflects on what a wonderful visit this was. Túlio is moved by Tillman and Marie’s connection. Tillman laments that few of his friends keep in close contact during his training. He deeply values Hechtle’s friendship, shown in his booking a flight and hotel for such a brief visit.

His glow from Marie’s visit fades quickly, however, once Tillman is back for advanced individual training. The sight of young, immature recruits and the archaic practices of the military disgust him anew. While practicing a form of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a young recruit challenges Tillman to a match. Kevin angrily accepts on behalf of his brother, putting the young recruit in his place for trying to win himself esteem by fighting a celebrity. The advanced training ends with a very challenging field trek, the difficulty of which Tillman respects.

His journal states that he feels no sense of accomplishment upon finishing his training: “I’ve learned no ultimate lessons and improved my character in no way” (186). He expresses gratitude for Túlio and some others, but then writes, “Kevin and I have gained only a pessimistic view of human nature. All our altruistic goals coming into this place have been ignored and trampled on” (186). He’s thrilled to leave the experience behind him.

Tillman and Kevin find the rest of their training demanding and instructive, obtaining their elite rank of Army Ranger by the end of it. They’re stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington.

The Army Rangers consider themselves superior to the rest of the Army, and new Rangers are put through “unique customs and merciless rituals” (188). Tillman struggles inwardly with the hazing: “In his sports career he was always rewarded for how well he performed. In the military it doesn’t work that way. It’s all based on how long you’ve been in, and what your rank is. It doesn’t matter how capable you are” (190). The other Rangers are surprised to find the former NFL player lacking the big head they’d assumed, although he still has a swagger: “He learned how to function within the system, how to deal with it, but he never let them break his spirit. The Army never changed him at all” (190).

Happily, Tillman and Marie live together again in a quaint cottage off base with Kevin. Marie remembers this time as idyllic, despite the seriousness of the brothers’ work.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration increasingly considers bin Laden and Afghanistan as a sideshow; their real aim is to invade Iraq, where they erroneously claim Saddam Hussein is hiding weapons of mass destruction. Secretary of State Colin Powell goes before the U.N. to present Bush’s argument for invading Iraq in February 2003. Tillman notes in his journal that he and Kevin see no clear purpose for this impending action.

A month later, Tillman and Kevin fly to Ar’ar, Saudi Arabia to set up a base. Tillman laments his separation from Marie, remembering her look of pain and disappointment as she watched them go. Both can’t wait for this episode to be behind them so they can start a family. When the Rangers are finally deployed on a combat mission into Iraq, Tillman is not among them. Despite his ideological problems with the conflict, he still wants to prove himself as a soldier. Immediately upon landing, a soldier is shot in the head and another is shot in the chest, injured severely but not killed. The man shot in the chest was from Tillman’s team. In his absence, Tillman is tasked with the bigger, heavier machine gun the injured man handled.