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Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman |  | Author: Jon Krakauer
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Rating:  255 reviews
Sales Rank: 11453
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 416
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.6
ISBN: 0385522266
Dewey Decimal Number: 958.1047
EAN: 9780385522267
ASIN: 0385522266
Publication Date: September 15, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
BRAND NEW HARDBACK
Amazon.com Review
Book Description
The bestselling author of Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, and Under the Banner of Heaven delivers a stunning, eloquent account of a remarkable young man’s haunting journey.
Like the men whose epic stories Jon Krakauer has told in his previous bestsellers, Pat Tillman was an irrepressible individualist and iconoclast. In May 2002, Tillman walked away from his $3.6 million NFL contract to enlist in the United States Army. He was deeply troubled by 9/11, and he felt a strong moral obligation to join the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Two years later, he died on a desolate hillside in southeastern Afghanistan.
Though obvious to most of the two dozen soldiers on the scene that a ranger in Tillman’s own platoon had fired the fatal shots, the Army aggressively maneuvered to keep this information from Tillman’s wife, other family members, and the American public for five weeks following his death. During this time, President Bush repeatedly invoked Tillman’s name to promote his administration’s foreign policy. Long after Tillman’s nationally televised memorial service, the Army grudgingly notified his closest relatives that he had “probably” been killed by friendly fire while it continued to dissemble about the details of his death and who was responsible.
In Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer draws on Tillman’s journals and letters, interviews with his wife and friends, conversations with the soldiers who served alongside him, and extensive research on the ground in Afghanistan to render an intricate mosaic of this driven, complex, and uncommonly compelling figure as well as the definitive account of the events and actions that led to his death. Before he enlisted in the army, Tillman was familiar to sports aficionados as an undersized, overachieving Arizona Cardinals safety whose virtuosity in the defensive backfield was spellbinding. With his shoulder-length hair, outspoken views, and boundless intellectual curiosity, Tillman was considered a maverick. America was fascinated when he traded the bright lights and riches of the NFL for boot camp and a buzz cut. Sent first to Iraq—a war he would openly declare was “illegal as hell” —and eventually to Afghanistan, Tillman was driven by complicated, emotionally charged, sometimes contradictory notions of duty, honor, justice, patriotism, and masculine pride, and he was determined to serve his entire three-year commitment. But on April 22, 2004, his life would end in a barrage of bullets fired by his fellow soldiers.
Krakauer chronicles Tillman’s riveting, tragic odyssey in engrossing detail highlighting his remarkable character and personality while closely examining the murky, heartbreaking circumstances of his death. Infused with the power and authenticity readers have come to expect from Krakauer’s storytelling, Where Men Win Glory exposes shattering truths about men and war.
Amazon Exclusive: Jon Krakauer in Afghanistan Click on thumbnails for larger images  |  |  | Krakauer and First Lieutenant Eric Hayes on a foot patrol along the Afghanistan Pakistan border.
(Photo © Dennis Knowles) | Krakauer doing Humvee maintenance, 2007.
(Photo © Eric Hayesy) | Observation Post, Forward Operating Base Tillman |
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 255
 Inglorious Basterds September 1, 2010
o dubhthaigh (north rustico, pei, canada)
There really is nothing exceptional about Pat Tillman. Like many other devoted and patriotic men and women who were outraged not just by the attack of 9/11, but also by the rise of a syndicate of criminals who would use any means necessary to kill innocents, to trade in the netherworld of drugs and arms smuggling, to launder money and extort bribes and infuse it all with religion and politics, taking advantage of those who either should have known better or were simply to dim and obedient to question authority. Of course, tick it just slightly and instead of the ragheads in the dessert, you're talking about Richard Cheney.
In Tillman's case, he was an honourable man, a loving son and husband and someone with a bright future ahead of him, who did what he did because he felt in his heart that it was the right thing to do. Out of his sense of duty, he fought in a war he thought the workings of an Imperial Fool, and died in the war he set out to prosecute. He was the victim of gunshots from his own troops fired in a moment of extreme panic and under intense duress while carrying out an assignment that was simply stupid, given the circumstances they were in, and had to do more with enforcing obedience than in pursuing the very bad guys they were after.
None of that makes Tillman exceptional. Thousands upon thousands of other men and women in these two conflicts, and hundreds of thousands in prior ones, have all suffered such an end leaving their loved ones devastated. A nation should try to be of some small comfort to these dear people left behind with a massive hole in their hearts, bleeding a slow death the rest of their lives.
And that's where Pat's story becomes something else. This book is as much, if not more, about Pat's mother and wife and how they came to pursue the real villains in this story. Both women had an unnerving sense that they were being lied to from the beginning, and the beginning was Rumsfeld and Cheney deciding to make a poster boy of Pat. GI Joe. Sargeant York. You know, like those propaganda films you see at the multi-plex: Be all that you can be: dead as a doornail, exploited by your government, shattered and broken, if you're lucky to survive the idea that you've just killed people, or been blown half to bits.
Marie Tillman wouldn't let it end there and in her dogged pursuit of the truth underscored the fact that the President of the United States is sworn to protect the country from enemies foreign and domestic. Problem here is, W is one of the enemies. There really is nothing exceptional about generating a myth about an individual soldier in order to inspire, and dupe, others. Speer and Goebbels did it all the time for the Third Reich. Lots of those men died in battle as well. There is also no "fog of war." There is certainly fear, absolute panic, complete loss of discipline in circumstances that are categorically frightening. But there is no fog. You shoot or get shot and sometimes both. Anything that moves. And that's what happened to Pat. Sent into a ravine to tow a humvee, of all the stupid things to save, aware that the Taliban had been tipped off, panic set in. Pat was hit at close range by someone who could clearly see that Pat was not Taliban, but the man paniced. More than likely, if he wasn't subsequently killed, he has received no counselling at all from the VA and wakes most nights in a cold sweat reliving what he did.
Again, there's nothing exceptional about that. What is exceptional is the lengths that Cheney, Rumsfeld and W were willing to go to cover the tragedy up. What is also alarming is the man chosen to carry this out: Stanley MacChrystal. By the Army's own standards and criminal codes, what Cheney, Rumsfeld, W and Stan the Man did was criminal. Stan should have been court-martialed and sent to prison. He was awarded 2 more stars. When the Army's own CID investigated and determined beyond any reasonable doubt that what was done was ordered from the White House through the DOD Secretary directly to MacRollingStone, Cheney and Rumsfeld buried it. Nothing was done. Nothing.
If you're Richard Nixon, you're rolling in your grave. Actively engaging in obstruction of justice is cause for impeachment. And prison. Marie Tillman got the goods on them and they told her clearly that there was nothing she could do. They owned the game.
The "fog of war".... America has been in a fog for a while now. I figure since Reagan. A fog about who pulls the strings, a fog about who stands on their necks, a fog about the deadly mixture of religion and politics, a fog about who the government is beholden to. Along comes two women who simply loved their husband and son, and they blow the fog away. Hog tied by two wars it can ill afford, crippled by deals that gave the financial integrity of the country and the manufacturing heart to criminal oligarchies like China and Russia, duped into bailing out the very perpetrators of their financial collapse, America is a country that ought to be able to see, especially because it is now on its knees, what needs to be done, but like Einstein's definition of insanity, it keeps trying the same thing over and over, convinced a new dawn is just on the horizon. It isn't. And won't be until stories like this are no longer written. And it rids itself first of enemies domestic, before it tackles those on foreign shores.
 Five Stars For Pat Tillman - Three Stars for Krakauer August 29, 2010
John G. Jazwiec (Chicago IL)
"Where Men Win Glory" is an ambitious, nuanced book about Pat Tillman, geopolitics and the disconnect between the propaganda and leadership of the military and the events on the ground. Krakauer should be applauded for his fearless field work and his research.
There is one minor and one major problem with the book.
The minor problem with the book is that it's most interesting passages are in the first half of the book and claim dominion over Pat Tillman's mother's account "Boots on the Ground by Dusk: My Tribute to Pat Tillman". Although the first half of the book is a page turner, it is mostly about who and how Pat Tillman was raised and what motivated him in his youth and sports career. It is just creepy to this reader, that Krakauer, would try to explain Pat Tillman, better than his own mother.
The major problem in the book comes after Pat Tillman leaves for his fateful Afghanistan mission. Krakauer does a great job of describing the idiotic ways the military uses artificial timelines by politically motivated commanders who are not in the field. He also describes the military as a frustrating system of length-in-the-corps meritocracy vs. the intelligence and skill based system in business and sports. Finally he succeeds in showing the reader the huge problems of execution using many different military corps.
But once he sets all of this up, and with the reader inherently knowing the ending will be bad, but expending so much energy on why it will be bad, he leaves the reader to plow though the second half of the book on just military details.
The books tries to be half biography/geopolitics/military high level analysis AND a detailed written account of warfare. Krakauer leaves his ability to be a great story teller in the first half of the book to be a great reporter in the second half of the book.
If Krakauer would have blended both story telling and reporting throughout the book he would have better succeeded. Imagine "Band of Brothers" by Steven Ambrose describing the entire story of E Company and then a bland account of the great battles they participated in, without the same personalization, and you would have a book that does not totally succeed like "Where Men Win Glory".
Despite that this book should be read. Besides its overarching macro context, it is a powerful and moving account of a special man who is atypical in this non-America's special generation. Pat Tillman, through his daily diaries and other peoples accounts, was a driven, emotional, home body who also was at peace with taking risks. He was also an avid reader of the classics, always was reading a book, and a driven student in college, who graduated with a G.P.A of 3.8. His writing skills in his daily diaries are more poetry than bland journaling. Especially poignant is his journaling on how he has to put up with kids five years younger with no education telling him what to do. Despite his frustration, he did not take the chance of early discharge to sign a big contract with Seattle (a place he and his wife Marie always wanted to live) after an uneventful tour in Iraq.
The title of this review is five stars for Pat Tillman. But number of stars is not enough. Pat Tillman was a real American hero and his stubborn idealism was a "tragic virtue" wasted by a government and military with "tragic flaws".
 A great story used to package a liberal political rant August 29, 2010
Curtis Johnson
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
I'll always enjoy the storytelling of Jon Krakauer-- but in this case there was too much of his liberal political agenda. To me, many of the facts were dubious or cherry picked to support his position. This is ironic given that a significant part of this book rants about using propaganda to obscure the facts and make a bogus case.
Nonetheless, it is an interesting read about a fascinating person. 50% of the population (the left leaning) will love this book. The other 50% need to be prepared to wade through a cess pool of nonsense to pull out the gems in the story.
Not that another review is needed...BUT August 29, 2010
Douglas K. Pinner (Indiana)
2 out of 9 found this review helpful
I finished this latest by Krakauer with a great deal of perplexity. Having read all of his previous works I have the highest regard for his demonstrated literary competence. Upon perusing the other reviews ,it was apparent that I certainly was not alone.A highly unsatisfying read,plodding between a strangely unemotional almost comic book cariacture of Tillman,flat and lifeless portrayal of the combat actions and highly partisan polemic against the Bush administration,Rumsfeld,the military,conservatives and Republicans. Vacillating between a 3 and a 1,I opted for a 1 in perhaps futile protest of authors whose previous success brings entitlement to force their political spleen upon us. DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK,unless ,of course you are of the far left,antimilitary,democrat,an Obamanaut or anti conservative or Republican,in which case you will love your tired views reinforced.
An Adequate Account August 25, 2010
Kelly Cooper
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
A pretty good read. I finished it off quickly. This is the fourth Jon Krakauer book I've read and he maintains his reputation as an excellent storyteller and journalist. His descriptions of how Pat Tillman lived and died are thorough and eminently comprehensible; Krakauer excels at eliding complex matters into digestible and literary segments. Unlike his previous books, however, the story he tells here is far from original. I learned very little about the political drama of the military cover-up of Tillman's death that wasn't readily available through other sources. The tie-in to Jessica Lynch was fascinating, however, and I credit Krakauer a for contextualizing the phenomena of friendly-fire-response in an expansive manner.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 255
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