Krakauer vs. Krakauer

When I heard about Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory, his long-awaited monograph of the late Pat Tillman, it sounded like the perfect marriage of author and subject matter. Krakauer, who made his literary bones on books about tragic accidents (1996’s cult classic Into the Wild, 1997’s best-selling Into Thin Air) has never been one to shy away from controversy. And the story of Pat Tillman – an Arizona Cardinals free safety who left the NFL for the Army Rangers following the 9/11 attacks – is certainly fraught with that. When Tillman died in Afghanistan he was painstakingly lionized by a Bush White House determined to divert attention from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Months later, however, after further investigation had revealed that the former Arizona State standout had been felled by friendly fire, the administration cover-up became a national scandal.

In this work, Krakauer does well what he always has - he skillfully celebrates the qualities that made Tillman an individual and that separated him from the more convenient jock stereotypes. Tillman was an avid autodidact, a reader of Noam Chomsky and a “cat person.” He was one of three tightly knit brothers, remained devoted to his first and only girlfriend, Marie Tillman, for the duration of his life, and was deeply opposed to the invasion of Iraq, where he served his first deployment. Necessarily perhaps Krakauer feels the need to frame Tillman’s life against greater Afghan national history, beginning with the Soviet Cold War occupation. While this can be a little distracting at first, Krakauer has obviously done his homework and, as with the rest of Where Men Win Glory, he earns these departures with the details.

The narrative only really gets off track when – most notably in his treatment of the battle of Nasiriyah – Krakauer loses his objective tone and veers slightly into partisan political indignation. While I imagine some of this anger is warranted – and is the inevitable byproduct of combing through the multi-thousand page dossier on the Army’s suspicious handling of the Tillman fratricide – these instances are distracting and mildly undermining to the otherwise excellent research discipline that characterizes the book.

Ultimately, however, Krakauer gets a lot more right than he gets wrong, and goes often and effectively for the emotional jugular. One is impressed by the author’s restraint in letting Tillman’s own words (Pat was a prodigious diarist) do much of the heavy lifting, and the degree of fairness with which Krakauer treats the American soldiers ultimately responsible for the football player’s death. Pat’s wife, members of the Tillman family, officers of his Ranger battalion, and teammates from both the ASU Sun Devils and Arizona Cardinals made themselves available to Krakauer for this work, and that he made extensive use of them is evident. Where Men Win Glory almost made me cry on the bus. Twice. The book seems a fair and fitting remembrance of the real person – not the administration propaganda tool – who died in Afghanistan that afternoon in 2004, and it easily overcomes its occasional lapses of objectivity. Krakauer succeeds by getting out of the way here, and allowing the disquieting facts to speak for themselves.

*oh also: don’t read the preface, it inexplicably jumps you to the emotional climax of the book so that when you get there after 200+ pages, you’re baffled by why they gave the ending away up-front.