In order to escape this abuse, Pat had to graduate from Ranger School, but to be admitted, he first had to achieve at least the ninetieth percentile in a standard Army Physical Fitness Test, or APFT: sixty-six push-ups in two minutes, seventy-three sit-ups in two minutes, and a two-mile run in less than thirteen minutes fifty-four seconds. One afternoon in July, Pat was notified that he had been chosen for the next opening in Ranger School, a.s.suming he pa.s.sed an APFT to be administered the following morning. Although Pat had just completed an especially exhausting workout, he figured scoring high enough on the APFT would be no big deal even with sore muscles: throughout basic training, both Pat and Kevin had excelled on each of the several occasions they had taken the APFT; the last time Pat had been tested, he"d done eighty-four push-ups, eighty-one sit-ups, and run two miles in twelve minutes twenty-one seconds.
When Pat took the test the next morning, he easily did enough push-ups and had no trouble running two miles faster than the required time, but he didn"t do seventy-three sit-ups in less than two minutes. Actually, he did more than the required number of sit-ups; however, the sergeant judging his performance disqualified several of them on a technicality, so Pat failed the test. It"s possible the sergeant didn"t count the sit-ups in question because he was in an ornery mood and wanted to show Pat that although he was a famous football player in civilian life, in the Second Ranger Battalion he was just a lowly private. Or perhaps the sergeant had a legitimate reason for disqualifying the sit-ups. In any case, Pat failed the APFT and was therefore denied admission to Ranger School.
He was enraged about not pa.s.sing the test, as angry as he"d ever been about any mistake he"d made as a football player, but his fury wasn"t directed at the NCO who failed him. Not one to make excuses, he blamed only himself, believing that he should have been able to pa.s.s the test no matter how many sit-ups the sergeant decided not to count. Making matters infinitely worse, he wouldn"t be able to take the test again for at least three weeks.
After stewing for the better part of a month, Pat pa.s.sed the APFT test at the next opportunity. Because Kevin took it at the same time and also pa.s.sed, on September 29, 2003, they entered Ranger School together at Fort Benning, Georgia. The nine weeks that followed were punishing. Their cla.s.s of 253 soldiers was kept awake and on the move twenty hours a day, every day, with the exception of one eight-hour break every three weeks. They slept two or three hours a night, if they were lucky, and subsisted on a daily allowance of twenty-four hundred calories, despite the fact that on most days they burned more than five thousand calories-some days a lot more. They humped ninety-pound loads up and down the Tennessee Valley Divide, crawled through thickets of poison oak, bivouacked in freezing rain with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and were perpetually hungry and exhausted. Some of the soldiers lost more than thirty pounds of body weight. Half of the members of their cla.s.s failed or dropped out, most of them during the first week.
Pat and Kevin found the experience to be a satisfying challenge. Both of them graduated handily, received their Ranger tabs on November 28, and were promoted to the rank of specialist. Two years after Pat"s death, an Army captain named Aaron Swain recalled coaching Pat through the three-week "mountain phase" of the course, during which the soldiers were taught rock-climbing skills on Mount Yonah, in the Chattahoochee National Forest. "Tillman was a stud," Swain attests. "He was the real deal."
By the autumn of 2003, as Swain was testing the Tillmans" mettle in the backwoods of Georgia, it was becoming apparent that the war in Iraq was not turning out as predicted. Increasingly, critics of the administration were comparing it to Vietnam. In mid-October, a videotape was broadcast on Al Jazeera in which Osama bin Laden looked coldly into the camera and exulted, "I am rejoicing in the fact that America has become embroiled in the quagmires of the Tigris and Euphrates. Bush thought that Iraq and its oil would be easy prey, and now here he is, stuck in dire straits, by the grace of G.o.d Almighty. Here is America today, screaming at the top of its voice as it falls apart in front of the world."
Bin Laden regarded the invasion of Iraq as a tremendous gift from President Bush-a "rare and essentially valuable" opportunity to spread jihad, as the exiled sheik put it. Not only had the United States eliminated Saddam Hussein, whom bin Laden reviled as "a thief and an apostate," but the American occupation was fueling Muslim rage even more than the invasion of Afghanistan had, inspiring throngs of Arab men to join the ranks of al-Qaeda.
The contract the Tillmans had signed upon enlisting committed them to remain in uniform until July 2005. There was a strong possibility that they would be deployed to Iraq again before this date, and find themselves in the middle of the worsening violence there. Soon after graduating from Ranger School, however, Pat was presented with an opportunity to avoid this fate: he was offered a ticket out of the Army.
In December 2003, Tillman"s agent, Frank Bauer, was contacted by Bob Ferguson, who, as general manager of the Arizona Cardinals, had played a key role in bringing Pat to the Cardinals and launching his professional football career. Ferguson, who had moved on to become general manager of the Seattle Seahawks, told Bauer that Seattle was very eager to have Tillman on the Seahawks" roster when the football season got under way in the fall of 2004. According to Bauer, when he explained that Pat wasn"t due to be released from the Army until the summer of 2005, Ferguson a.s.sured him, "We"ve checked into it. He"s already served in a war. He can get out of the service. Just file his discharge papers. We"d love to have him here in the Seattle locker room."
As it turned out, other teams were also interested in signing Tillman for the 2004 season, including the Cardinals, the St. Louis Rams, the New England Patriots, and the Dallas Cowboys. So Bauer asked around, and Ferguson was apparently right: under special circ.u.mstances, soldiers who completed a tour of duty in a war zone could be granted an honorable discharge well before their contracts were up. If Pat requested such a dispensation, come the following September he stood an excellent chance of exchanging his Ranger body armor for football shoulder pads, especially given Tillman"s stature. Army recruitment commercials were a staple of football games televised on Sunday afternoons and Monday nights, and the National Football League had a close working relationship with the Department of Defense. Strings could be pulled on Pat"s behalf.
Bauer excitedly relayed the good news to his client: "So I call Patty and I say, "Listen to me. I got a couple of clubs that are interested in you. Now, you may want to check with the Army before you say anything, but they"re telling me they can get you an early discharge, and these teams want you. Seattle wants you badly.""
Tillman replied that he was flattered by the interest, but he wouldn"t consider leaving the Army before his contract was completed. "I enlisted for three years," he explained to Bauer. "I owe them three years. I"m not going to go back on my word. I"m going to stay in the Army." Bauer leaned on him to reconsider, but got nowhere.
"There were offers from several NFL teams," Marie confirms. "Pat mentioned the Seahawks" offer, and at that point in time he probably would have loved to have gone back and played football for them. But we never really discussed it because it just wasn"t going to happen. There was no way he was going to bail out of the Army halfway through. He said, "I"m going to serve my three years and then go back and play in the NFL after I"ve finished. That"s what my plan was all along. It"s the right thing to do. And I"m going to stick with that."" As much as Pat hated being in the military and forcing Marie to endure all that his enlistment entailed, breaking the commitment he"d made to the Rangers would have violated principles he considered inviolable. The handful of people who understood what made Pat tick knew that leaving the Army early was something he would never consider. It was absolutely out of the question.
* As Steve Coll wrote in As Steve Coll wrote in The New Yorker The New Yorker in April 2006, Saddam could not bring himself to admit that there were no weapons of ma.s.s destruction, "because he feared a loss of prestige and, in particular, that Iran might take advantage of his weakness-a conclusion also sketched earlier by the C.I.A.-supervised Iraq Survey Group. He did not tell even his most senior generals that he had no W.M.D. until just before the invasion. They were appalled, and some thought he might be lying, because, they later told their interrogators, the American government insisted that Iraq did have such weapons. Saddam "found it impossible to abandon the illusion of having W.M.D.," the study says. The Bush war cabinet, of course, clung to the same illusion, and a kind of mutually reinforcing trance took hold between the two leaderships as the invasion neared." in April 2006, Saddam could not bring himself to admit that there were no weapons of ma.s.s destruction, "because he feared a loss of prestige and, in particular, that Iran might take advantage of his weakness-a conclusion also sketched earlier by the C.I.A.-supervised Iraq Survey Group. He did not tell even his most senior generals that he had no W.M.D. until just before the invasion. They were appalled, and some thought he might be lying, because, they later told their interrogators, the American government insisted that Iraq did have such weapons. Saddam "found it impossible to abandon the illusion of having W.M.D.," the study says. The Bush war cabinet, of course, clung to the same illusion, and a kind of mutually reinforcing trance took hold between the two leaderships as the invasion neared."
PART THREE
I love him who does not hold back one drop of spirit for himself, but wants to be entirely the spirit of his virtue: thus he strides over the bridge as spirit.I love him who makes his virtue his addiction and his catastrophe: for his virtue"s sake he wants to live on and to live no longer.- FRIEDRICH N NIETZSCHE, Thus Spoke Zarathustra Thus Spoke Zarathustra
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.
Pat and Kevin were given a two-week leave over Christmas, which they spent in New Almaden visiting their family. Shortly after they returned to Fort Lewis in January 2004, a new batch of recruits arrived at Second Battalion, one of whom was a wiry little private from Indiana named Josey Boatright. "Pat Tillman was one of the first guys I met at Lewis," Boatright recalls. "When you first get there, everything is chaos. People are screaming at you, you"re running everywhere, you can"t do anything right. Amidst all this chaos, this big dude, a specialist, comes into the barracks from the firing range with his weapon and his full kit on. He walks up to me and says, "Are you the new guy in Second Platoon? My name is Pat Tillman. Relax, this stuff will pa.s.s. It"ll be over soon. Nice to meet you."
"It was a shock," says Boatright: "Somebody being nice, talking to you like a human. And his brother Kevin addressed me the same way when I got to the top of the stairs. It didn"t dawn on me at the time who he was. Someone told me soon enough, and I got to know him over the weeks that followed. A lot of the Rangers were c.o.c.ky and arrogant and muscle-bound. They treated the new guys like s.h.i.t. Pat was never like that. He was always polite. He was a genuinely nice guy."
Boatright, the Tillman brothers, and the rest of the Rangers in Alpha Company spent the remainder of the winter training intensely at Fort Lewis. Then, in March, they learned that they would be deploying to Afghanistan in early April. "Pat knew they"d be sent over there again somewhere," says Marie, "and he was glad he was going to Afghanistan and not going back to Iraq. Even though he was more disillusioned with the Army by then, he still believed in the war in Afghanistan. Fighting there was why he had joined in the first place."
There was much less news coming out of Afghanistan than out of Iraq. By 2004, many Americans didn"t even realize the country was still fighting a war there. "Most people thought Afghanistan would be safer than Iraq," Marie says. "But I knew a little more about what they were supposed to be doing over there. I knew they were supposed to be patrolling along the Pakistani border and it wouldn"t be a very safe situation. I was also a lot less naive about war and the Army by now, too. When they went to Iraq, they were straight out of boot camp, and it all happened so quickly I didn"t have as much time to think before they left."
In any case, after Pat and Kevin came home from Baghdad and graduated from Ranger School, Marie remembers, "We felt like they had pa.s.sed the midpoint. It seemed like they were over the hump. They were supposed to deploy to Afghanistan for something like two months, come home for a month, and then deploy back overseas for maybe another three months, and then that was going to be it. So we felt like we only had to get through the next six months or so, and then we were home free. Pat was already starting to think about life after the Army. He talked about how when he got back from Afghanistan it was going to be time to get back into shape for football again." But returning to the NFL was not the only thing on Pat"s agenda after his military service was over. He was also looking forward to having a tete-a-tete with Noam Chomsky, a meeting that Pat had prevailed upon Reka Cseresnyes, his old college study partner from Budapest, to arrange.
After they"d graduated from Arizona State, Tillman and Cseresnyes remained good friends, and Pat, Marie, Cseresnyes, and her husband-another ASU cla.s.smate named Jared Schrieber-regularly got together for dinner. When Cseresnyes heard that Pat was joining the Army, she says she and Schrieber "challenged him a little bit: "Are you sure about this? Are you ready to serve under a president you don"t really support?" But he thought he owed it to the country to really do something after 9/11. I think he felt he could stay above the politics, somehow, and just do his duty as a patriot.... With Pat, if his conscience told him he should do something, he did it, no excuses. He just made it happen as well as he possibly could."
From the early days of their friendship, Cseresnyes and Tillman would recommend books for each other to read, she says, and "probably around 2000 we started reading Chomsky and debating his ideas. His perspective on things was so different from the mainstream media, and that appealed to Pat." Chomsky was a strident critic of the Bush administration and its Global War on Terror, and although Tillman certainly didn"t agree with all of Chomsky"s views, he concurred with many of them. For example, when Chomsky opined in a radio interview, "If the American population had the slightest idea of what is being done in their name, they would be utterly appalled," it was perfectly aligned with Tillman"s own sense of outrage over what he"d witnessed in Iraq. Pat admired both Chomsky"s intellectual courage and his straightforward, unembellished turns of phrase.
In 2003, Cseresnyes and her husband moved to Boston so that Schrieber could pursue a graduate degree at the Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology, where Chomsky happened to be on the faculty. After hearing Chomsky give a presentation at a conference held on the MIT campus, Cseresnyes called Pat to tell him about it, and he got very excited. "I"d like to talk to Chomsky!" Pat blurted. "Reka, arrange something! He"s just down the street; I"d like to talk to him!"
"I was like, "Why not?"" Cseresnyes says. Out of the blue she sent an e-mail to Chomsky with an article about Tillman attached, explaining that "this brilliant and fascinating man" who recently served as an Army Ranger in Iraq wanted to speak with him.
To Cseresnyes"s surprise, within a matter of hours she received a reply from Chomsky indicating that he was open to the idea, and urging Pat to send him an e-mail to set the meeting up, although, Chomsky warned, "My life is so intense that even phone calls are scheduled often weeks in advance."
The ball was now in Tillman"s court. In an e-mail Pat sent to Cseresnyes on February 9, 2004, he wrote, "I haven"t gotten around to writing Noam...but I will." As his deployment approached, however, Pat and Marie"s lives grew hectic, and he decided to wait to contact Chomsky until after his return from Afghanistan.
"As far as I know," says Cseresnyes, "Pat never contacted Chomsky. And obviously, the meeting never happened. But I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation. Knowing Pat, I imagine he would have asked a lot of questions, challenging whatever Chomsky was saying, as Pat always did, trying to understand his perspective more deeply."
Although on the face of it there would seem to have been little in common between the two men-one a young professional athlete-c.u.m-soldier, the other a middle-aged linguist, writer, and antiwar activist-Cseresnyes thinks otherwise. She believes that one of the reasons Pat was so fascinated by Chomsky was the originality of the latter"s thinking. "Chomsky asks questions only few would think to ask," she explains, "which is actually very similar to the way Pat was. I saw an article recently about Chomsky that described him as a good listener. How he asked a lot of questions. How he was so down-to-earth. As I was reading it, I was thinking, "This sounds so much like Pat!"-not necessarily that they believed the same things, but that their minds operated in the same way."
During the first months of 2004, as he contemplated his future beyond the military, Pat seemed more at ease than he had in years. "Kevin and I both noticed it," Marie says. "He was very much at peace with himself. It was like he"d gotten rid of any of his hang-ups. He"d sort of been evolving in this direction ever since he went to juvenile hall after the Round Table fight-resetting his priorities, figuring out what really mattered." Pat confided to Marie that the Army had "been difficult in ways he"d never imagined going into it," but that the experience had caused him to learn a lot about himself. He said the emotional trials he"d endured had made him a better person. He said the Army had humbled him. When Pat"s mother came to Puget Sound to visit a week before Pat and Kevin shipped out to Afghanistan, Marie joked to her that Pat had become so sensitive he was starting to grow b.r.e.a.s.t.s.
On April 7, Marie drove Pat and Kevin to Fort Lewis to catch their flight to Afghanistan, said good-bye, and returned to face their empty house. Shortly thereafter, however, Pat called to say their flight had been delayed two hours, so Marie jumped back in her car and met them at a Starbucks just outside the post"s north gate in order to share a few more moments with Pat over a cup of coffee.
When he and Kevin eventually filed into an Air Force transport jet and took off, Pat took out a new journal with a black leather cover and began to write. "To my left sits Nub," he inscribed on the first page.
We sit inside a C-17 en route to Afghanistan via Germany to refuel. Staring at me, beside my journal, is the laminated picture of Marie in her wedding dress.... Undoubtedly she"s grown a thick skin these last couple of years and has proven she can weather anything that comes her way. In spite of this I still worry and wish for her happiness while I"m gone.Across from me sits Sergeant Jackson, my new squad leader, Sergeant G.o.dec, Lieutenant Uthlaut, and First Sergeant Fuller-my whole chain of command. I"m not sure what this trip holds in store; in all likelihood we"ll patrol around the border without finding s.h.i.t. However, in the event that more than this transpires, I feel very good about the men seated across from me. This goes for many of the others I see as I look around. The last few months have given me a new perspective on this place and I"d even go so far as to say I care about many of the folks here. In any case, if the opportunity does arise, I feel confident in how we"ll react and trust those who are leading us. Besides, I have Nub-piece to my left. Of course it will all work out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.
Thirty hours after departing Fort Lewis, the C-17 jet carrying Pat, Kevin, and their fellow Rangers landed at Bagram Airfield, twenty-seven miles north of Kabul, the base of operations for the U.S. military in Afghanistan. "The first thing I saw as I walked off the plane," Pat noted in his journal, "was gorgeous, jagged, snow-covered mountain peaks." The mountains that stirred him were some of the lesser summits of the Hindu Kush, which nevertheless rise fifteen thousand feet above sea level from the edge of the Shomali Plain, the barren plateau upon which Bagram"s two-mile-long runway was built by the Soviets in 1976. Everywhere Pat looked were signs of the Soviet conflict, including a large steel water tower at the center of the base, the side of which had a gaping hole created by a mujahideen rocket. Demolished tanks were visible just outside the wire. Surrounding the airfield was an expanse of denuded earth that had once been fertile farmland and was now sown with hundreds of thousands of lethal mines.
Despite the ravaged environment, Pat remarked that their lodging at Bagram was relatively upscale: "Our wooden, glorified tents are pretty nice, and the showers and food are hot.... We should not be here long but in the mean time the accommodations will be appreciated." Within a few days the Rangers of Alpha Company were supposed to be flown 120 miles south to an outpost in Khost Province called Forward Operating Base Salerno, whence they would begin patrolling along the Zero Line (Army jargon for the Afghanistan-Pakistan border) as part of a major new offensive dubbed Operation Mountain Storm.
PAT TILLMAN"S CHAIN OF COMMAND, APRIL 22, 2004 President George W. Bush Vice President Richard Cheney Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a.s.sistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Di Rita General John Abizaid, commander, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) General Bryan Brown, commander, U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOC) Lieutenant General Philip Kensinger Jr., commander, U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) Brigadier General Stanley McChrystal, commander, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) Colonel James Nixon, commander, Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich, executive officer, Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment Command Sergeant Major Alfred Birch Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Bailey, commander, Second Ranger Battalion Major David Hodne, cross-functional team commander, Second Ranger Battalion Captain William Saunders, commander, Alpha Company Captain Kirby Dennis, executive officer, Alpha Company First Sergeant Thomas Fuller, Alpha Company First Lieutenant David Uthlaut, platoon leader, Second Platoon Sergeant First Cla.s.s Eric G.o.dec, platoon sergeant, Second Platoon Staff Sergeant Matt Weeks, squad leader, Third Squad Sergeant Mel Ward, senior team leader Sergeant Bradley Shepherd, team leader Specialist Pat Tillman, acting team leader Private First Cla.s.s Bryan O"Neal Although the United States had routed the Taliban in the final months of 2001, driving them into the Afghan countryside and across the frontier into Pakistan, by early 2002 the focus of the U.S. military had been redirected to Iraq, and the situation in Afghanistan significantly deteriorated as a consequence. On May 1, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld held a news conference in Kabul to announce that "major combat activity" in Afghanistan had ended and "the bulk of this country is...secure." Contrary to such a.s.surances, however, the Americans" preoccupation with Iraq had enabled the Taliban and al-Qaeda to quietly rebuild their forces and reestablish control throughout Afghanistan"s eastern provinces.
On June 24, 2003, an audiotape was delivered to a Pakistani newspaper from the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar announcing a new campaign "to expedite jihad against occupation forces" under a new military strategy. As part of this campaign, the Taliban accelerated their attacks on American forces from bases of operation just across the Zero Line in Pakistan"s Federally Administered Tribal Areas-an isolated region of obdurately independent feudal communities beyond the reach of the government in Islamabad, populated by four million largely illiterate Pashtun tribespeople. One of the most important bases for such attacks was the city of Miram Shah, capital of the North Waziristan tribal agency, twenty-four miles south of FOB Salerno. Miram Shah was the headquarters for the Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani and his thirty-year-old son, Sirajuddin Haqqani, who was starting to a.s.sume a prominent role as second-in-command of the Haqqani Network.
Operation Mountain Storm was launched to counter these new and increasingly deadly attacks. The Rangers" job would be to find and eliminate pockets of Taliban support in remote border villages occupied by two rabidly xenophobic Pashtun tribes, the Data Khail and the Zaka Khail. On March 20, 2004, as Operation Mountain Storm was getting under way, an article in the Asia Times Asia Times by the Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad observed, "In Afghanistan, U.S.-led forces can expect increasing hit-and-run attacks by local Taliban, who will then melt back into the local population." The corner of Khost Province in which Tillman"s platoon would be operating was described by Shahzad as "a no-man"s land, a place no one would want to go unless he were as tough as the local tribespeople, a guerrilla fighter taking on the U.S., or, perhaps, Osama bin Laden. [It] is a deep and dangerous maze.... The Data Khail and Zaka Khail have a long history of defiance and have never capitulated to any intruder.... These two tribes are now the protectors of the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters." by the Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad observed, "In Afghanistan, U.S.-led forces can expect increasing hit-and-run attacks by local Taliban, who will then melt back into the local population." The corner of Khost Province in which Tillman"s platoon would be operating was described by Shahzad as "a no-man"s land, a place no one would want to go unless he were as tough as the local tribespeople, a guerrilla fighter taking on the U.S., or, perhaps, Osama bin Laden. [It] is a deep and dangerous maze.... The Data Khail and Zaka Khail have a long history of defiance and have never capitulated to any intruder.... These two tribes are now the protectors of the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters."
On April 11, while still at Bagram, Pat wrote of their upcoming mission, "When we leave we"ll be working in the mountains, right on the border of Pakistan. We"ll be gone for perhaps a couple of weeks, sleeping in the woods and basically patrolling. It"ll more than likely be cold and less than comfortable, so I"ll enjoy my time here. As for the actual mission, we are supposed to be hitting a nerve or hot spot.... It"s less than likely to be true but you never know, you have to a.s.sume it will be."
Two days later the Black Sheep (the nickname given to the Rangers of Second Platoon) were told to pack up their gear because they would be departing for Khost in a few hours. "Tonight we leave on our first mission," Pat"s journal entry for April 13 begins. "It sounds as though there will be quite a bit of sucking involved, as we will be hiking some pretty steep terrain. As for how long we"ll be out, that is not clear.... As I write, a little black & white furball is purring and rubbing up against my leg. Now he"s sipping on the water I gave him. I"ll be sure to keep this entry out of Han or Mc"s hands as to avoid any jealousy issues.* Quite a pleasant little surprise. Unfortunately I"ll be unable to bring my journal along. This may be my last entry for awhile." In fact, among the journals recovered after Pat"s death, it would prove to be the final entry altogether. Quite a pleasant little surprise. Unfortunately I"ll be unable to bring my journal along. This may be my last entry for awhile." In fact, among the journals recovered after Pat"s death, it would prove to be the final entry altogether.
Shortly after midnight on April 14, six days after arriving in Afghanistan, Pat and Kevin Tillman boarded a Chinook helicopter with the rest of the Black Sheep and flew south through the darkness to FOB Salerno, landing well before dawn. Within a couple of years Salerno would be transformed into one of the largest and busiest military bases in Afghanistan, a frenetic hub of activity occupied by thousands of troops, boasting a movie theater, a barbershop, a gym, and a giant chow hall in which steak and lobster would be served by KBR contractors on Friday nights. In early 2004, however, the base was little more than an unpaved airstrip, a field hospital, a small tactical operations center, and a few rows of tents. The Black Sheep spent only a few hours there, just long enough to organize their gear, mount their weapons on their Humvees, and load the vehicles with cartons of meals ready to eat, better known as MREs. Then the Rangers rolled out of the gate and headed toward Spera District, forty miles to the southwest, in a convoy of Humvees and Toyota Hilux pickup trucks.
The first twenty-five miles of the drive followed the only paved road in Khost Province, but where that highway curved north toward Kabul, the convoy turned southwest and pa.s.sed into Spera on a rough dirt road that had been carved tenuously into a canyon wall above a fast, cold river. Five miles beyond the end of the pavement they turned sharply to the south and followed a series of dry riverbeds and goat tracks that led over a craggy sixty-five-hundred-foot ridge. Upon dropping down the backside of this escarpment, the convoy rolled through a series of ramshackle villages: Adzalkhel, t.i.t, Katinkhel, Magarah, Kandey Kalay. In late afternoon they halted to bivouac for the night within three miles of the Pakistan border.
The Rangers began searching villages and conducting foot patrols in Spera"s rough backcountry the following morning, but found nothing of interest. As they were setting up camp to bivouac again, an undercover CIA operator who introduced himself only as "Steve" arrived from a nearby outpost called Border Crossing Point 5, or BCP-5, which was manned by Afghan Militia Forces, or AMF, recruited and trained by the CIA and U.S. Special Forces. "The CIA guy told us they"d gotten some good intelligence that a bunch of Taliban and al-Qaeda had been seen ma.s.sing together and were gonna attack the BCP that night," says Brad Jacobson, who at the time was a twenty-one-year-old sergeant. "So we drove down to the BCP to help the Afghani guys defend it. We were all jazzed: "Yeah, it"s on! on! We"re gonna get to f.u.c.kin" kill some bad guys!" We stayed up that whole night in our body armor, with rounds in the chamber and helmets tightened, waiting for those motherf.u.c.kers to come creeping up the hill. Of course they never came. It was another dry hole." We"re gonna get to f.u.c.kin" kill some bad guys!" We stayed up that whole night in our body armor, with rounds in the chamber and helmets tightened, waiting for those motherf.u.c.kers to come creeping up the hill. Of course they never came. It was another dry hole."
BCP-5 was situated on a scrubby knoll eighty-three hundred feet above sea level, surrounded by gnarled junipers and pines wrapped in silver bark that peeled off in large swatches to reveal a pale green pericambium as smooth as gla.s.s. The ambience was deceptively tranquil. Over the week that followed, the Rangers came and went from this bucolic outpost to conduct their missions.
The next day the Black Sheep drove a couple of miles east into an unpopulated valley, dismounted their vehicles, and climbed to the summit of a nine-thousand-foot peak that demarcated the international border. "We humped up this huge-a.s.s ridgeline," says Sergeant Bradley Shepherd, one of the fire team leaders. "It was relentless." In the valley to the south was a Pakistani village beside one of the main routes used by the Taliban to infiltrate Afghanistan, so the squad spent the night up on the ridge crest to overwatch.
"We saw a couple of dudes with AKs coming up to attack," remembers Jason Parsons, who had been promoted from corporal to sergeant, "but somebody shot off a flare and they ran back down the hill."
At sunset a squall blew in, the temperature plummeted, and it began to rain. "It poured all night," says Jacobson. "Everyone got soaked to the skin. I was freezing. It was a long, s.h.i.tty night." Rain continued to fall intermittently for the next six days as the Rangers patrolled the surrounding mountains and valleys, searching tribal settlements for signs of enemy activity. They found a couple of rockets, a few rifles, and quite a bit of marijuana, but not much else.
"None of the villages we searched felt very threatening," says Russell Baer. "It was beautiful country-it reminded me of the Sierra. There were little green-eyed kids running around in colorful garments, playing in the rivers."
"We never felt like we were about to be ambushed or anything," Jacobson agrees. "The people seemed friendly. Most of the villages were just a couple of little shacks scattered across the hillsides. At one house there was a camel. I"d never seen a camel out there before. The guy who owned it came outside and offered us tea and sugar candy." The apparent absence of Taliban was both a relief and a disappointment. "We began to think headquarters was giving all the good missions to Bravo Company," says Jacobson, "and sticking us with the leftovers. We got nothing but dry holes."
The majority of the Rangers in Tillman"s platoon hadn"t joined the Special Operations Forces in order to go camping in exotic lands; they"d enlisted to be part of a rarefied warrior culture. Engaging in mortal combat was not an aspect of their service they sought to avoid. To the contrary, they"d aspired to it since they were small boys. They were itching to confront the enemy firsthand and prove themselves under fire. Approximately half the platoon had never been in a firefight. Most of the untried Rangers yearned to experience the atavistic rush of having to kill or be killed-a desire more common among the male population than is usually acknowledged in polite company.
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The unit had been in Afghanistan for nearly three weeks without encountering a single bad guy, and their daily hunt for enemy fighters increasingly had the feel of a wild-goose chase. More than a few of the Rangers who had never been in combat were growing frustrated, and had begun to contemplate the shameful possibility that their tour might end before they earned a Combat Infantryman Badge. There were probably at least ten or fifteen Rangers in the platoon who did not yet have a CIB, and were impatient for something to go down.
On April 20, one of Second Platoon"s Humvees conked out and wouldn"t start again. The mechanic, Specialist Brandon Farmer, spent the entire day trying to get it running, without success. On the twenty-first, while he continued to work on the unresponsive truck at BCP-5, the rest of the Black Sheep spent the day relaxing at the AMF outpost. By now they"d eaten all their MREs, and were starting to get hungry. Pat began to crave food so intensely that he went down to the garbage pile where the Rangers had been tossing their trash and began sifting through rat-f.u.c.ked MREs. "Pat was digging around in there for a long time," says Josey Boatright. "Eventually he found a brownie someone had thrown out, and he held it up over his head for everyone to see like he"d discovered buried treasure. We were all laughing at him. But yeah, people were starting to feel run-down by that point. We got so hungry we bought a goat from the locals. Tasted good at first, but then a little later it just ripped my insides out."
In the afternoon, while Pat was off by himself writing in a small spiral notebook in lieu of the leather-bound journal he"d left behind at Bagram, the Afghan soldiers-the AMF-suggested to their American counterparts that they engage in some friendly athletic compet.i.tion. The Rangers thought this was an excellent idea. The agreed-upon events would be wrestling and rock throwing. The Afghans produced a large chunk of limestone for the official rock, and the contest was on. "So we started taking turns throwing this rock for distance," says Shepherd, "and I"m thinking, "We have a professional football player in our platoon." So I went down to where Pat was sitting under this tree, just chilling and writing in his notebook. I was like, "Hey, Pat. You mind coming up and throwing a rock for us in this contest?" He said, "Yeah, just give me a minute, let me finish up here." And then he came up and started throwing rocks with the Afghanis."*"Pat got along great with the AMF," says Will Aker, an earnest, self-a.s.sured Coloradoan. "They were so surprised at how big he was-they hadn"t seen many guys that muscular. Pat outthrew everyone in the contest. The rock tossed by the closest Afghani wasn"t within ten or fifteen feet of Pat"s rock, and he was the biggest guy the AMF could come up with. They were real impressed with Pat."
While most of the platoon was socializing with the AMF, Brandon Farmer was leaning into the engine compartment of the problematic Humvee, yet by the end of the day he was still unable to fix it. The source of the trouble was a faulty solenoid, but he didn"t know that at the time, and mistakenly a.s.sumed it was a bad fuel pump. He requested a new pump from Salerno, which was flown in after dark with a load of MREs. The installation of the new part failed to fix the problem, however. So in the morning Farmer hooked the broken vehicle to the rear of a functional Humvee with a thick nylon tow strap, and at 7:00 the platoon started driving north to clear a village called Mana-the last mission the Black Sheep needed to complete before returning to FOB Salerno. The AMF commander stationed at BCP-5 ordered seven of his Afghan fighters to accompany the platoon and guide them to their destination.
It was well past sunrise on April 22 by the time the convoy finally rolled out of BCP-5 with the inoperable Humvee in tow. Although it was Ranger policy not to travel during daylight hours in order to reduce the danger from remotely detonated roadside bombs (generally called improvised explosive devices, or IEDs), headquarters insisted that Second Platoon clear Mana immediately in order to stay on a predetermined schedule. This bothered more than a few of the soldiers in the platoon, especially Sergeant Jacobson, who had witnessed the fatal incident that had inspired the edict against driving by day.
Five months earlier, while the Tillman brothers were attending Ranger School in Georgia, most of the other Rangers in Alpha Company were in Afghanistan, where the commander of the Second Ranger Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Bailey, had deployed them on a one-month "surge." According to Jacobson, "We ended up getting sent on a convoy from Bagram all the way to Asadabad," the capital of Konar Province, 150 miles northeast of BCP-5. On November 14, 2003, as they continued northwest from Asadabad on a narrow dirt road known as IED Alley, Jacobson remembers, "The truck I was riding in blew a hose, so we stop, the mechanic jumps out and fixes the hose, and we start driving again." While Jacobson"s truck was stopped, the Humvee that had been behind them pulled around and took the lead. A short while later, as they were rounding a curve above the Pech River, Jacobson says, "There is the loudest explosion I"ve ever heard. It was the vehicle in front of us, which had just switched places with us." An enemy fighter had detonated a gigantic IED under the Humvee as it rolled by.
"The Humvee was just demolished," says Jacobson.
I"ve never seen a Humvee so destroyed. One of our good buddies, Jay Blessing, had been driving it. He had been blown completely out of the jeep, down onto a flat area next to the river. One of his legs was all the way across the water on the far sh.o.r.e. A bunch of EMTs ran down to him as fast as they could, but there was nothing they could do. It was horrible. He suffered. That was the first time I"d seen someone die. Jay was a really good guy, super-dedicated to the unit. He"d just reenlisted the year before. He had the opportunity to get out and make a lot more money as a civilian contractor, but he decided to stay in and keep doing his part.
Sergeant Blessing, from Tacoma, Washington, was twenty-three years old.
The population along the Pech River and in the nearby Korengal valley was known to be extremely hostile to Americans, and that stretch of road had been the site of several previous IED attacks. "When Jay was killed," says Jacobson, "I understood this was the kind of risk we"d signed up for. But I was really p.i.s.sed off that we had been ordered to drive during the day. It was a really stupid call. Ninety-nine point nine percent of IED attacks happen during the day." Thanks to infrared lasers on their weapons that were invisible to the enemy, and sophisticated night-vision optics that turned darkness into an eerie green twilight, American forces owned the Afghanistan night. Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters understood this, and usually tried to even the odds by staging their attacks during daylight hours.
"The enemy knew we were coming even before we left the base," Jacobson continues. "They sat there watching us and then blew the IED by remote control from up on the hill just when Jay drove over it. So why the f.u.c.k were we moving during the day? I believe Lieutenant Colonel Bailey made the call; he was the one pushing the pins back in the TOC [Tactical Operations Center]. It really made me question authority. I talked to my platoon sergeant about it; I talked to my first sergeant about it. n.o.body would come right out and blame Bailey. That"s insubordination. In the military you get fired for that kind of s.h.i.t. But a lot of us talked about it among ourselves."
Following Blessing"s death, Bailey inst.i.tuted a policy forbidding Ranger convoys to travel during daylight hours. But this rule was ignored so routinely thereafter by Ranger commanders, including Bailey himself, that for all intents and purposes the edict didn"t exist.
Thus did the Black Sheep depart BCP-5 in broad daylight, bound for Mana under the command of Lieutenant David Uthlaut, towing an inoperable three-ton Humvee on the morning of April 22, 2004. The route followed the bed of a river down a pinched, serpentine canyon that descended fifteen hundred feet in three miles. It had rained the night before, making the track muddy and slick. Because the vehicles had to maneuver between tight boulders and over jagged rocks, the convoy managed to move no faster than walking speed. As it was dragged along behind a Humvee driven by Sergeant Parsons, the derelict vehicle took such a savage beating that it eventually foundered.
After being towed for four hours, during which the platoon managed to travel just five miles, the Humvee"s front suspension had disintegrated, its tie-rods had snapped, and the front wheels were flopping uncontrollably in opposite directions. "At that point it had no steering whatsoever," says Parsons. Towing the Humvee with any of the platoon"s working vehicles was therefore no longer a possibility, so at 11:17 a.m. the convoy came to a halt where it was, which happened to be in a village called Magarah. As the Rangers dismounted their trucks and fanned out to create a security perimeter, Lieutenant Uthlaut conferred with Farmer, the mechanic, and Eric G.o.dec, the platoon sergeant, to determine what to do next.
Farmer concluded in short order that they lacked the necessary spare parts to repair the Humvee in Magarah, so Uthlaut got on the satellite radio and called FOB Salerno to request that they either send a heavy wrecker to tow the damaged vehicle back to the FOB or dispatch a Chinook helicopter to sling load it out.
Major David Hodne, Lieutenant Colonel Bailey"s subordinate, was running the show in the Ranger TOC that morning at Salerno, but Uthlaut never communicated with him directly. Instead, Uthlaut talked to the Alpha Company executive officer, Captain Kirby Dennis, who relayed Uthlaut"s communiques to the Alpha Company commander, Captain William Saunders, who in turn relayed what was said to Major Hodne. And then Hodne"s decisions would filter back down the chain of command in reverse order to the platoon leader on the ground in Magarah. Uthlaut thereby received word from Dennis via e-mail* at 1:30 p.m. that a wrecker could come only as far as the end of the pavement-fifteen miles from Magarah-because the roads were too rough beyond that point, and that evacuating the Humvee by helicopter was not an option. The unstated reason for the latter was that the war in Afghanistan was the Bush administration"s neglected stepchild. When it came to allocating resources, Iraq had been given a much higher priority by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, resulting in a severe and chronic shortage of helicopters throughout Afghanistan. Due to an insufficient number of operational Chinooks and crews to fly them, a minimum of four days" advance notice was required to airlift a vehicle. at 1:30 p.m. that a wrecker could come only as far as the end of the pavement-fifteen miles from Magarah-because the roads were too rough beyond that point, and that evacuating the Humvee by helicopter was not an option. The unstated reason for the latter was that the war in Afghanistan was the Bush administration"s neglected stepchild. When it came to allocating resources, Iraq had been given a much higher priority by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, resulting in a severe and chronic shortage of helicopters throughout Afghanistan. Due to an insufficient number of operational Chinooks and crews to fly them, a minimum of four days" advance notice was required to airlift a vehicle.
With a sling-load operation ruled out, and because abandoning the fubar Hummer was considered so completely unacceptable to the bra.s.s at Bagram that it wasn"t even discussed as an option, Uthlaut was told he would have to figure out a way to get the six-thousand-pound albatross to the paved highway, where the wrecker would take it off his hands. Not long thereafter, an Afghan from the village approached one of the platoon"s interpreters to say that if the Rangers paid him, he would tow the Humvee to the pavement with his "jinga" truck. (Jingas are five-ton diesel rigs, ubiquitous throughout South Asia, used to transport everything from rice to firewood to opium.) Uthlaut hired the jinga driver, and then, while Farmer and several of the Rangers jacked the front of the Humvee up off the ground and chained it to the back of the jinga truck, the platoon leader engaged in an extended e-mail discussion with Dennis "to figure out what to do about our Mana mission," as Uthlaut put it.
They considered three options: (1) split the platoon, sending one element to accompany the jinga (with Humvee in tow) to meet the wrecker at the paved highway and sending the other element directly to Mana to begin the clearing operation; have the entire platoon escort the jinga/Humvee to the pavement, leave the inoperable vehicle with the wrecker, and then have the entire platoon travel to Mana to clear the village; have the entire platoon escort the jinga/Humvee all the way back to FOB Salerno, and cancel the Mana mission altogether.
Uthlaut was strongly opposed to splitting the platoon, which he thought would unnecessarily expose his men to greater danger. All of Uthlaut"s noncommissioned officers were vehemently opposed to splitting the platoon. Captain Saunders stated repeatedly that he was opposed to splitting the platoon. By this time it was past 3:00 in the afternoon, however, and Major Hodne was growing increasingly impatient. The problematic Humvee had already delayed the mission for two full days while Farmer had tried to fix it at BCP-5. When Saunders asked Hodne what he should order Uthlaut to do, Hodne angrily replied, "Hey, we can"t have an entire platoon brought to a stop for one broken vehicle."
After this exchange with Hodne was over, Saunders testified, "My understanding was that he said to split the platoon."* Against his better judgment, therefore, Saunders told Captain Dennis to order Uthlaut to divide the platoon and proceed immediately with the bifurcated mission. Against his better judgment, therefore, Saunders told Captain Dennis to order Uthlaut to divide the platoon and proceed immediately with the bifurcated mission.
Uthlaut received this order at 4:00. He sent an e-mail back to Dennis in which he adamantly reiterated his objections to this plan. Uthlaut further explained that it would be nearly dark by the time half the platoon reached Mana, and that it would be dangerous, impractical, and in violation of standard operating procedure to clear a village after dark. Dennis replied that Uthlaut"s men weren"t being ordered to clear the village that evening; the order was simply for them to arrive at Mana before nightfall, overwatch the village through the night, and then begin the clearing operation in the morning after the other half of the platoon had delivered the Humvee to the pavement and then joined them at Mana.
"After the response from Captain Dennis," Uthlaut testified, "I wanted to ensure I understood the intent, which was that one element would set up an a.s.sembly area north of the village, but not start clearing the village. That element was to basically wait for the rest of the platoon to arrive. My point was that we could accomplish the same end state by going with option two: bringing the whole platoon to the hardtop and bringing the whole platoon to a.s.sembly area north of the village."
After making his case that the mission could be accomplished just as effectively and just as quickly without splitting the platoon, Uthlaut was baffled by headquarters" stubborn insistence on dividing it. He asked Dennis, "So the only reason that you want me to split my platoon is to have boots on the ground in the sector before dark?"
"Yes," Dennis replied.
Dismayed and frustrated, Uthlaut nevertheless accepted that headquarters had spoken and that he had no choice but to follow orders. A moment later, Uthlaut testified, "I then received a radio call on the same net" requesting detailed information about where the platoon would be splitting, and what route each of the two elements would be traveling, so that A-10 Warthogs could be dispatched from Bagram to provide air support in the event of enemy contact. "I handed the radio off to my Forward Observer," Uthlaut said, "and told him to brief the Air Support on these routes. I then called all of my squad leaders and platoon sergeant to brief them on the plan. I told them who was a.s.signed to each element.... I showed my squad leaders and platoon sergeant the routes of both elements. I then informed them that my element had to move out because we had to be set up by nightfall north of Mana."
During an investigation of Tillman"s death seven months later, Brigadier General Gary Jones asked Alpha Company first sergeant Thomas Fuller, "I mean, what necessitated in this mission right here that they had to get down there so quickly?"
"I don"t think there was anything," Fuller testified under oath. "I think that a lot of times at higher [headquarters]- maybe even, you know, higher than battalion [headquarters]- they may make a timeline, and then we just feel like we have to stick to that timeline. There"s no-there"s no "intel" driving it. There"s no-you know, there"s no events driving it. It"s just a timeline, and we feel like we have to stick with it; and that"s what drives that kind of stuff." In other words, the sense of urgency attached to the mission 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 has always been a hallmark of the military, but it was carried to new heights of fatuity during Donald Rumsfeld"s tenure at the Pentagon. Rumsfeld was obsessed with achieving positive "metrics" that could be wielded to demonstrate progress in the Global War on Terror, or the illusion thereof.
It was now approximately 5:30. The Black Sheep had been in Magarah for more than six hours. "When we first got there," says Jacobson, "the whole village came out to greet us. They were curious. The kids would stick their hands out for gum and candy from the MREs. At first most of them would keep their distance, but as soon as someone is brave enough to come up and make contact, they all get closer, and all of a sudden your jeep is surrounded by guys. You start getting claustrophobic because they"re so close, and you"re like, "No! Stop! You need to move back!" They think it"s a game to see how close they can get before you chase them off." According to Jacobson, however, "The vibe was pretty chill. There were probably two hundred people out there, all told, and I would say 90 percent of them were friendly. But there were a few guys in their twenties and thirties who were kind of sitting on the hill, scowling at us. They looked shady, and they were taking everything in."
When Uthlaut was negotiating with the jinga driver through an interpreter about towing the Humvee to the paved highway, there had been dozens of locals crowded around them. Many of these villagers overheard exactly where the convoy was headed. This was still at least two hours before the platoon departed Magarah, ample time for word of the Rangers" plans to circulate through the community and for an ambush to be planned.
"Security was pretty lax," says Parsons.
We had a pretty good amount of people who kept coming through our perimeter. Wasn"t a whole lot we could do about it. You could be a d.i.c.k, I guess, and threaten to shoot anyone who approached too close, but you wouldn"t win a lot of hearts and minds doing that, and hearts and minds was supposed to be what the whole thing was about.... Ended up, one of the kids in the village, about eight years old, he comes up and keeps trying to talk to me. He went away and came back down right before we were getting ready to leave, and handed me a note written in English. All it said was "Come see me." The kid pointed at the note, then pointed up at a house on the hill. I took the note and thought, "This might be important." So I pa.s.s it up to G.o.dec [the platoon sergeant], but at that point we was getting ready to move out and he said, "I don"t have time for this s.h.i.t." I argued with him a little bit about it, but the whole rank thing put me at the losing end of the argument. I suppose the note could have been about anything. May have been warning us about the whole ambush situation. May have been about nothing at all.* Han and Mc were the cats Marie adopted in 1998, soon after she moved to Arizona to live with Pat. The "furs," as Pat called them, were keeping Marie company in the cottage above Tacoma Narrows while Pat was in Afghanistan. Han and Mc were the cats Marie adopted in 1998, soon after she moved to Arizona to live with Pat. The "furs," as Pat called them, were keeping Marie company in the cottage above Tacoma Narrows while Pat was in Afghanistan.* Although the inhabitants of Afghanistan are correctly termed "Afghans," members of the American military commonly refer to them as "Afghanis" or "hajjis." The "afghani" is actually the Afghan unit of currency, a.n.a.logous to the U.S. dollar. Although the inhabitants of Afghanistan are correctly termed "Afghans," members of the American military commonly refer to them as "Afghanis" or "hajjis." The "afghani" is actually the Afghan unit of currency, a.n.a.logous to the U.S. dollar.* After the initial radio call from Uthlaut to Dennis, all further communications between them throughout the day were via e-mail. After the initial radio call from Uthlaut to Dennis, all further communications between them throughout the day were via e-mail.* Major Hodne would later insist that the decision to split the platoon was Saunders"s, not his, but the sworn testimony of virtually every other Ranger interrogated about this matter contradicts Hodne. Hodne would also claim that he didn"t even know the platoon had been divided at Magarah until the Black Sheep returned to FOB Salerno three days after Tillman"s death-which prompted Hodne"s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bailey, to testify, "To the degree that he didn"t know it, it would only have been because he wasn"t listening." Major Hodne would later insist that the decision to split the platoon was Saunders"s, not his, but the sworn testimony of virtually every other Ranger interrogated about this matter contradicts Hodne. Hodne would also claim that he didn"t even know the platoon had been divided at Magarah until the Black Sheep returned to FOB Salerno three days after Tillman"s death-which prompted Hodne"s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bailey, to testify, "To the degree that he didn"t know it, it would only have been because he wasn"t listening."
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE.