Pat Tillman died a decade ago

Haven't gotten through this whole story yet, but thought it was worth posting on the 10th anniversary of Pat Tillman's death.

http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/10816260/pat-tillman-enduring-guilt

And, if you haven't yet read Jon Krakauer's "Where Men Win Glory," do yourself a favor and pick it up. It's an amazing account of who Tillman was and what really happened.

 

Definitely. Excellent work.

 

Where Men Win Glory was not a very good book, in my opinion. Krakauer's agenda overpowered the narrative.

 

This story is a live wire.
I don't see how you could play it completely straight.
Nobody really knows exactly what the fuck happened.
It forces some degree of inference.

 

What was Krakauer's agenda?

 

I'm guessing to make the military look bad, but I think they did that just fine on their own.

 

I tired of the whole Tillman tributes/sainthood bit after a couple of years. I respect the fact he choose to enlist, like hundreds of thousands of others. Doesn't make him such a hero in my book. But to each their own.

 

Of course, the government had lots of practice when it came to Tillman. Recall how Jessica Lynch was "rescued?"

 

In my mind, Tillman became a hero when he left the NFL to join the military, not because he died in battle.

Right after he died, I called the PR guy of the NFL team I was covering and asked him to set up an interview with a player on the team who was college teammates with Tillman. He called me the next day and said the player wasn't comfortable with being interviewed and requested that I respect his privacy. I was kind of taken aback.

A few days later, I was on the phone with the player's agent about a different player and we were chatting about Tillman and I said, "Yeah, I wanted to interview him about Tillman, but PR said he didn't want to talk about it."

He called me back later and said, "PR never called him. He said if you want to do this to come to his house tonight."

He gave me great stuff and even called a few of his former teammates and I sat there for an hour with three of them on a conference call telling stories about Pat.

RIP Pat.

 

It's been a few years since I read WMWG, but I'm pretty sure the Lynch incident was broken down extensively in the book. Might have even been at the beginning.

 

This sums it up for me.

 

Nice example of a second day lede.