Product 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. 


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #70 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-15
• Released on: 2009-09-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780385522267
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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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. 

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Andrew Exum On April 22, 2004, I was standing in an operations center in Bagram, Afghanistan, watching two firefights on the monitors and screens in front of me. A platoon of U.S. Army Rangers and a special operations reconnaissance force were both under fire and in possible need of assistance. As the leader of a 40-man quick-reaction force of Rangers, I asked my squad leaders to gather our men while I awaited orders. My platoon was dropped onto a 12,000-foot mountain at night to reinforce the small reconnaissance team that had been battling men they believed to be al-Qaeda fighters, killing two combatants. On the way south from Bagram, I listened on the radio to the U.S. casualty report from the other firefight: one killed in action, two wounded. After a truly miserable night spent at high altitude near the Pakistan border, I arrived back in Bagram to learn the name of that Ranger killed in action: Spec. Patrick Daniel Tillman. By now, the story of Pat Tillman is widely known: how he turned down a lucrative contract in the National Football League to join the U.S. Army's 75th Ranger Regiment after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; how he fought in Iraq and Afghanistan; how he died; and how the cause of his death -- friendly fire -- was kept from his family and the public for weeks in what, depending on your point of view, was either a gross error of judgment or a conspiracy engineered by the U.S. military and the Bush administration. A full-length book on Tillman's life -- as opposed to shorter pieces, such as Gary Smith's excellent profile in Sports Illustrated -- has been needed for some time. Jon Krakauer would seem the perfect person to write it. A world-class alpinist turned author -- Krakauer was once a climbing partner of the late, great Alex Lowe -- he shares Tillman's sense of adventure and has excelled at telling other romantic, if ultimately tragic, tales in "Into the Wild" and "Into Thin Air." If Krakauer had committed himself to telling Tillman's story, "Where Men Win Glory" might have been the latest in an unbroken string of superb books. But his book falls flat -- not least because he is more eager to launch an inquisition into the crimes of the Bush administration than to explore this single extraordinary life. War takes place at four levels -- the political, the strategic, the operational and the tactical. The Bush administration deserves the lion's share of the blame for the political and strategic blunders of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For too many years, U.S. troops were spread too thin to accomplish mission-essential tasks in either country. But the errors that led to Tillman's death were all operational and tactical -- and the responsibility must be placed on the men making decisions under stress. Why or how an army was sent into combat is often irrelevant to the men on the ground. Their lives are, for the most part, in the hands of the enemy and their fellow warriors. I am no fan of many of the Bush administration's decisions. I did not vote for the former president in either 2000 or 2004 and was so cynical about the U.S. invasion of Iraq that my platoon went so far as to engrave my judgment of the war -- "This is (expletive, gerund) (expletive, noun)" -- on my going-away plaque. All of this would surprise Krakauer, who, among other things, labors under the misimpression that U.S. military officers are mainly political conservatives better at following orders than thinking critically. In reality, the men and women who serve in the U.S. military are as diverse as the people they defend. Blaming the Bush administration for all that has befallen the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan unfairly excuses the military itself for the many errors it made. This focus is most unfortunate because the parts of the book where Krakauer does tell Tillman's story play to the author's strengths. The personal stories about Tillman in high school or struggling to make it as a collegiate Division I and NFL football player are fascinating. And Krakauer excels at reconstructing the platoon-level events that led to Tillman's death, in the same riveting style that made me devour "Into Thin Air" as a young rock-climber. "Where Men Win Glory" also includes a series of anecdotes and excerpts from Tillman's diary that give us a fuller understanding of a unique and iconic figure in post-9/11 America. But throughout the book, Krakauer digresses from the timeline of Tillman's life to inform the reader what was going on in Afghanistan, with al-Qaeda and even in U.S. domestic politics. Why, I wondered during one maddening passage, was Krakauer spending four whole pages complaining about Bush v. Gore? In addition, rather than putting the background information on Afghanistan into his own words, Krakauer instead draws heavily on such books as Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower" and Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars." In describing the battlefield actions, Krakauer does not appear to understand light infantry combat as well as he does mountaineering. He comprehends enough to know that the Ranger officers in Bagram probably made a mistake in overruling a decision by the platoon leader on the ground in Khost province. But incredibly, he tries to claim that this situation was driven not by poor and independent decision-making by field-grade officers but rather by Donald Rumsfeld's insistence on strict timelines. "[The] sense of urgency attached to the mission," Krakauer writes, "came from little more than a bureaucratic fixation on meeting arbitrary deadlines so missions could be checked off a list and tallied as 'accomplished.' This emphasis on quantification . . . was carried to new heights of fatuity during Donald Rumsfeld's tenure at the Pentagon." While I'm willing to accept, say, Krakauer's criticism of the fateful decisions made by mountaineer Anatoli Boukreev on Everest in 1996, there is nothing in Krakauer's life or experience that inspires similar confidence in his criticism of experienced combat officers specially selected for service in an elite special operations unit. Similarly, Ranger units are not ordered to meet deadlines arbitrarily. They meet deadlines because the missions they execute -- like airfield seizures or hostage rescues -- are extraordinarily complex operations that demand that men and their units go places and do things in concert with one another under high levels of stress and confusion. That said, there is plenty of documentary evidence suggesting that experienced military officers did, in fact, make a series of blunders in the aftermath of Tillman's death. As a former officer in the 75th Ranger Regiment -- an elite unit whose leadership Krakauer skewers -- I might be expected to rise to the defense of the officers who decided to initially withhold the details of Tillman's death from his family and the public. But given the available evidence in both Krakauer's account and in numerous investigations, it appears that the otherwise competent commanders of the 75th Ranger Regiment and 2nd Ranger Battalion did indeed make a series of disastrous and incomprehensibly stupid decisions. How then-Lt. Col. Jeff Bailey, for example, could have asked a young Ranger, Russell Baer, to attend Tillman's funeral and lie to the family about the circumstances of Tillman's death until more senior officers could meet with them baffles the mind. It strikes me as a horribly unfair and immoral thing to demand of any officer, much less a young Ranger just returned from a demanding combat environment. An Air Force officer I know likes to say that whenever one seeks to understand an epic failure of our nation's military, one must first draw a line on a sheet of paper and write "conspiracy" at one end and "buffoonery" on the other. Those who have spent time in the military and have seen it struggle not just with war but with everyday barracks life tend to err on the side of incompetence, while those who never have -- such as Krakauer -- tend to suspect conspiracy.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Krakauer's cachet in the publishing industry is such that, one imagines, he can pick and choose his projects. With Where Men Win Glory, the author's affinity for his subject and disdain for Tillman's pointless death are clear. Still, after Tillman's mother last year published Boots on the Ground by Dusk, her own account of her son's life and death, it's reasonable to wonder what's left to say. Krakauer generally rises to the challenge, writing well and passionately, even if the book often—and sometimes jarringly—veers into Washington politics and offers irrelevant details about Tillman's life. But through hands-on research and a host of interviews, the author does justice to Tillman's memory and his death, "a function of his stubborn idealism—his insistence on trying to do the right thing."

Customer Reviews

An honest portrayal of a complex man
This book is not a `war story'. It is a rendering of a man who was far more complex than the one-dimensional hero who was portrayed in the media and who, through no fault of his own, was basically used as propaganda by the US government. Interestingly, that was one of the threads woven throughout the book, along with the use of Jessica Lynch as a tool to boost support of the war.

Krakauer does a great job in the beginning of the book by contrasting the carefree life of an American boy growing up in the suburbs vs. groups of boys being groomed by the Taliban to become terrorists. His description of Pat Tillman's early life gives insight into how he came to make the decisions that ultimately resulted in his joining the Army.

Some of the detail in the middle of the book got a bit cumbersome. However, it was a useful primer on some of the things that went terribly wrong in Iraq in Afghanistan during Tillman's time there, and I'm not certain that Krakauer could have told the rest of the story without the level of detail provided.

Nonetheless, the author provides a refreshingly honest look at a man who at times I found rather unlikeable, frankly. Without question however, the picture of Tillman that emerges is one of a man who cannot be categorized easily. His complexity was well illuminated in the book, which was a far more honest and respectful portrayal of his life than if he were simply portrayed as the `good' character in a morality play.

This book does not paint a rosy, cozy picture of the US government's actions, of the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan, or, it must be said, of Pat Tillman himself. But that served to make both the book and the man more interesting.

A book that changed my perspective.
I was originally not very impressed by Pat Tillman's sacrifice. I believe our culture it too quick to call someone a hero. Most people use the expression to counterbalance their own insecurity of not serving in the military. After serving 6 years in the army including tours in Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, I can honestly say I did not meet one hero--including myself. I now believe Pat Tillman's life was heroic. I say this because he was truly cognizant of America and its misgivings and yet he still willingly served. I did not become aware until about halfway through my tour in Iraq. Once I became aware, rage consumed me. Rage is a normal reaction when one realizes halfway through an act that what they are doing is morally reprehensible. Tillman could have easily escaped combat duty if he wanted. He refused to be used by the Bush regime and the military industrial complex, but still performed the duties that he believed to be right. I cannot express how unique of a person he was. He was a rarity in our world. The narrative on how the military brass and the Bush regime tried to use him and then cover up how he died made the rage come back all over again. I had to walk away from the book several times. The politics behind the story is vital to the context of the story. It's what makes him a tragic hero. A story that only romanticizes his sacrifice so we Americans can thump our chests in pride would be a disservice to his life. Those who are truly aware will appreciate this book. Those who wish to be in the dark will not.

A Conflicted Account of a Reluctant Volunteer
A brief disclaimer to begin. Like Pat Tillman, I was a post-9/11 volunteer enlistee, and for that reason his story has always had particular resonance. That said, the similarities end quickly. I did NOT walk away from millions to enlist. I did NOT join an elite infantry unit, nor did I see any action in a theatre of combat - let alone engage in fire fights. Lastly, I DID make it home.

Krakauer takes up the Tillman story with a view to what made the NFL Safety turned Ranger tick. In some reviews, including Dexter Filkins' NYT review, the fact that it takes Krakauer more than 150 pages to get Tillman's boots into the Afghan sand is to the book's detriment. In my opinion, Krakauer's aim - if not the book itself -is better served by the time he takes in exploring Tillman's motives.

Those looking for either a behind-the-lines military tome with some added star power, or a pot-boiler about government and military propaganda and corruption, should look elsewhere. Instead, Krakauer spends most of his effort on trying to wrestle with a very common conflict in the hearts, souls and minds of many post-9/11 military volunteers. While visions of the towers tumbling compelled Tillman instictively to look for some way to help, he also couldn't help but retain the healthy skepticism of his government that had him concerned - in Krakauer's telling - that should he die on the battlefield, he might be used for propaganda purposes.

That conflict is a defining element of the all-volunteer force that is fighting these wars. So many of the men and women I served with loved their country, but joined to defend their families as much as to fight for their government. That might not be a logical or well-informed course of action - but, for many, like Tillman, it was an instinctive one.

Krakauer wrestles with that conflict, and that insight is the value of this book. I don't think it achieves the effect so spectacularly, but like IF I DIE IN A COMBAT ZONE, I expect this book to eventually enter itself into the Iraq and Afghan literary canon as a nuanced look at the soldiers fighting this war.

Tillman's fame and his dramatic story are perhaps most valuable in that context. After reading this book, I am left with an impression of Tillman as a microcosm of that component of today's force who seem - paradoxically - to be among the last people we might expect to subject themselves to service, but the first we would expect to step up when the call to action comes.