On the Death of Pat Tillman

Reflections on Pat Tillman

Most of my friends know the tragic story of Pat Tillman, the NFL player who, after 9/11, walked away from a $3+ million football contract and joined the Army Rangers. Some have written to ask what I know about his death, as if Almaden residents have a secret flow of information from Washington. I know nothing, of course. I learned about his loss soon after the information was released to the public, when I received an e-mail from my son Eric with “Terrible News” in the subject line and a link to an online news service.

Pat was a local boy. He grew up here in San Jose, in a remote portion of the Almaden Valley called Old Almaden. The area is just a few miles south of my house but somehow it remains quite hidden – 99% of the people who live in San Jose do not even know it exists. It is a paradoxical place: a primitive, lost village adjacent to thousands of acres of housing tracts, an abandoned 19^th century mercury mining town located a few miles from the technological center of the planet.

Old Almaden is a paradise for some boys – the kind who aren’t afraid of solitude, who enjoy a few deep friendships, and who live to push their bodies as only boys can. There is very little development - just a few strips of old ramshackle houses, private ranches with pet horses, overgrown shrubbery, and endless miles of hills and canyons, redwood stands and California scrub oaks, and everywhere poison oak for the unwary.

Abandoned mineshafts are scattered through the hills, some carefully sealed and others waiting silently for a careless footstep from an unskilled adventurer. Pat grew up roaming the hills, exploring the forest, developing his remarkable skills, contemplating his world, and never fearing an unexpected fall. Thinking back, it is almost as if he willed his parents to live in Old Almaden, so close to Silicon Valley. Few areas in the world can match the astonishing mixture of raw wilderness and raw intellectual power that surrounded him; few could have been more appropriate for his childhood.

I knew Pat from the time he was 4. He and Eric were the same age; they went to Greystone Elementary School, Bret Harte Junior High School, and Leland High School together, where they played football for four years.

On the field Pat was an extraordinary talent, half the size of my son but with an uncanny ability to dominate a game in a way my boy could never emulate. Somehow, he always knew exactly where the play would be, precisely where the receiver carrying the ball would run. Countless times, as my wife and I would sit in the grandstand watching some poor kid on the other team chugging upfield towards a certain touchdown, Pat would materialize from nowhere, literally flying through the air to tackle his unsuspecting target.

Professional football players occasionally make flying tackles. After they do, they inevitably revel in their accomplishment and often perform a war dance to please the crowd. Pat would simply stand up, help the other boy to his feet, and walk off the field. Grandstanding was as alien to him as suicide bombings.

I didn’t see Pat very often. We would occasionally meet at school or in a store, we would wave to each other, shout, “Hi!” and that was it. He and my son were friendly but not friends; like Pat, Eric has always had a few deep friendships and has not needed more. I kept tabs on Pat’s career, of course. It was unavoidable. The SJ Mercury News followed him with some regularity throughout college, and although he wasn’t a standout in the NFL he was a favorite of the sports writers because of his intelligence.

I often played a small joke while he played in the NFL. I would work into a conversation the fact that I was Pat Tillman’s first coach. I’d brag that I taught him how to size up the field, how to put himself in the middle of the action, and passed on a variety of other athletic skills that in reality I can barely understand, much less teach. Eventually, someone would ask where I coached him – in College? High school? The Pros? And then I would tell the truth – I was his soccer coach when he and my son were four. At the time, it always seemed funny. Now, it seems appropriate – he learned what little I had to teach him when he was too young for first grade.

None of us were surprised to learn that he had volunteered for the Army; it was classic Pat. And none of us were surprised when he died a hero. That too, was classic Pat Tillman.

An hour after Eric sent me the e-mail about Pat’s passing I received a similar e-mail from a friend whose daughter was friendly with both boys. I sent back a note of thanks, and added, “He was an American Hero.” My friend, a retired FBI agent who, like anonymous law enforcement officers everywhere, is an American Hero, replied, “He was my hero.” The national recognition that came a few hours later was wonderful, and comforting to our community.

A few weeks later, while listening to a report on NPR about two anonymous American boys who were blown up while searching for chemical weapons in Iraq, I heard a gleeful Iraqi terrorist repeatedly screaming in fine English, “We destroy the American technology! We destroy the American technology! We destroy what they send here!” I wanted to spit. “Any monkey can destroy things. Human beings build things. What have you built since 1492? Bigger roadside bombs?.”

Pat Tillman gave his life to help monkeys like that ignorant, boastful, bomb-planting terrorist. What a waste.