Tillman Killed In Afgahnistan

[XERXES]

I didn't know where to post this.

This guys courage has been an inspiration to me.

ESPN.com news services
Former NFL defensive back Pat Tillman was killed in action while serving as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan, ABCNEWS reported Friday.


He was 27.


Tillman played four seasons for the NFL's Arizona Cardinals as a safety after starring at Arizona State University.


In May of 2002, Pat announced his intentions to join the Army, turning down a $3.6 million contract offer in the process.


Both he and his brother Kevin, a former minor league baseball prospect in the Cleveland Indians organization, committed to three-year military terms, landing spots with the elite U.S. Army Rangers. The two served in the Middle East as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.


Pat and Kevin were recipients of the 11th annual Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the 2003 ESPYs.

[grbh]

I'm so sorry to hear that.

His story is inspiring. Very few people would walk away from the life and money he was making to serve their country.

[Caliente]

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.
Et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Te decet hymnus, Deus, in Sion,
Et tibi reddetur votum in Jerusalem.
Exaudi orationem meam
Ad te omnis caro veniet.
Kyrie, eleison!
Christe, eleison!
Kyrie, eleison!

[Dooby]

I just posted this in the "Other Sports" section. Where does this go?

Man had the world and gave it all up to serve his country. Very tragic.

[Dooby]

Found this from a year ago.

<u>Tillman follows beat of a different drum</u>

By Tom Barnidge
NFL Insider

(March 20, 2003) -- Those who know Pat Tillman know that he always has welcomed a challenge.

As a youth, he high-dived from bridges and cliffs. At Arizona State, he hopped the fence at Sun Devil Stadium and climbed a light tower. Before reporting for training camp with the Arizona Cardinals two years ago, he competed in a 70-mile triathlon.

"He's like Forrest Gump. He tries everything," says Frank Sanders, his former teammate.

So no one should have been surprised last spring when Tillman, entering his fourth NFL season, shucked it all and joined his brother, Kevin, in setting out to become an Army Ranger. What's a three-year, $3.6 million pro football contract when you can collect $18,000 a year from Uncle Sam?


Pat Tillman gave up the glamour of the NFL to serve his country.

"Pat has very deep and true convictions," Cardinals coach Dave McGinnis said at the time. "He's a deep thinker, and believe me, this was something he thought out."

Tillman made no public statement. He wasn't in this for the publicity. But you didn't need to dig too deeply to find an explanation for his actions. Friends said that the 9/11 terrorist attacks had affected him deeply. Cardinals defensive coordinator Larry Marmie, after a conversation with his former player, said Tillman felt he needed to "pay something back" for the comfortable life he had been afforded.

Whatever his rationale, he clearly was serious about his pursuit. He and Kevin completed basic training in July and advanced through individual training in October. They graduated from parachute school in November, and completed the Ranger Indoctrination Program in December. Just that quickly, Tillman was assigned to the second battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment in Fort Lewis, Washington.

"He's a full-fledged Ranger now," Army spokesperson Carol Darby reported. "He's ready for combat. He will move with his unit for whatever that unit is involved in."

The 75th Ranger Regiment was deployed recently, presumably to the Middle East. If the description that the Army attaches to the unit ("flexible, highly trained, and rapidly deployed light infantry force with specialized skills") is any measure, the 75th likely will wind up in the middle of the most serious action.

You can be sure that Tillman will be prepared for the challenge. He succeeds at just about everything he sets out to do.

Consider…

He arrived at Arizona State in 1994 on the school's last remaining football scholarship, landing a spot on the end of the bench, where dreams go to expire. He left four seasons later as the Pac-10 Conference Defensive Player of the Year.

He was selected by the Cardinals with the 226th pick of the 1998 draft -- the league packed up and went home after pick 241 -- and five months later, he was Arizona's starting strong safety.

This is a fellow who doesn't know the meaning of fail -- on the field, in the classroom, or anywhere else. He had a 3.84 grade-point average at ASU and graduated with a degree in marketing in 3½ years.

Pat Tillman is nothing if not unusual. In college, he played linebacker, where he was thought to be too small. In the NFL, he played safety, where he was thought to be too slow. When he set a club record for tackles in 2000 and attracted the interest of another team, the St. Louis Rams, he declined their five-year offer sheet out of loyalty to the club that had drafted him.

NFL players hardly have been strangers to military service. Roger Staubach served four years after graduating from the Naval Academy before joining the Dallas Cowboys as a 27-year-old rookie in 1969. Rocky Bleier of the Pittsburgh Steelers nearly lost a leg to a land mine when he did a tour of duty in Vietnam.

But the list of names grows a little shorter when it comes to NFL players who have walked away from million-dollar contracts in the prime of their careers.

The story that comes to mind is one told by Bruce Snyder, Tillman's coach at Arizona State. It seems that Snyder planned to redshirt Tillman as a freshman, extending his eligibility by a season. Of course, that would necessitate Tillman remaining in college for an extra year.

"You can do whatever you want with me," Tillman said, "but in four years I'm gone. I've got things to do with my life."

Obviously, he still does.

[Caliente]

Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the
world, Grant them rest.
Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the
world, Grant them eternal rest.
Let everlasting light shine on them, O Lord,
with your saints for ever:
for you art merciful.
Eternal rest grant them, Lord;
and let perpetual light shine upon them.

[FishForLunch]

Privileged to Serve
In this war, not only the sons of the poor are enlisting.

Friday, July 12, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT

Maybe he was thinking Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Maybe it was visceral, not so much thought as felt, and acted upon. We don't know because he won't say, at least not in public. Which is itself unusual. Silence is the refuge of celebrities caught in scandal, not the usual response of those caught red-handed doing good.

All we know is that 25-year-old Pat Tillman, a rising pro football player (224 tackles in 2000 as a defensive back for the Arizona Cardinals, a team record) came back from his honeymoon seven weeks ago and told his coaches he would turn down a three-year, $3.6 million contract and instead join the U.S. Army. For a pay cut of roughly $3.54 million dollars over three years.

On Monday morning, Pat Tillman "came in like everyone else, on a bus from a processing station," according to a public information officer at Fort Benning, Ga., and received the outward signs of the leveling anonymity of the armed forces: a bad haircut, a good uniform and physical testing to see if he is up to the rigors of being a soldier. Soon he begins basic training. And whatever else happened this week--Wall Street news, speeches on the economy--nothing seems bigger, more important and more suggestive of change than what Pat Tillman did.

Those who know him say it's typical Tillman, a surprise decision based on his vision of what would be a good thing to do. When he was in college he sometimes climbed to the top of a stadium light tower to think and meditate. After his great 2000 season he was offered a $9 million, five-year contract with the St. Louis Rams and said thanks but no, he was happy with the Cardinals.

But it was clear to those who knew Mr. Tillman that after September 11 something changed. The attack on America had prompted a rethinking. Len Pasquarelli of ESPN reported last May that the "free-spirited but consummately disciplined" starting strong safety told friends and relatives that, in Mr. Pasquarelli's words, "his conscience would not allow him to tackle opposition fullbacks where there is still a bigger enemy that needs to be stopped in its tracks." Mr. Tillman's agent and friend Frank Bauer: "This is something he feels he has to do. For him, it's a mindset, a duty."





"I'm sorry, but he is not taking inquiries," said the spokeswoman at Fort Benning. She laughed when I pressed to speak to someone who might have seen Mr. Tillman or talked to him. Men entering basic training don't break for interviews, she said. Besides, "he has asked not to have any coverage. We've been respecting his wishes. And kinda hoping he'd change his mind." Mr. Tillman would, of course, be a mighty recruiting device. The Army might have enjoyed inviting television cameras to record his haircut, as they did with Elvis. But Mr. Tillman, the Fort Benning spokesman says, "wants to be anonymous like everyone else."
Right now he has 13 weeks of basic training ahead of him, then three weeks of Airborne School, and then, if he makes it, Ranger School, where only about a third of the candidates are accepted. "It's a long row," said the Fort Benning spokesman, who seemed to suggest it would be all right to call again around Christmas. Until then he'll be working hard trying to become what he wants to become.

Which I guess says it all.

Except for this. We are making a lot of Tillmans in America, and one wonders if this has been sufficiently noted. The other day friends, a conservative intellectual and his activist wife, sent a picture of their son Gabe, a proud and newly minted Marine. And there is Abe, son of a former high aide to Al Gore, who is a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy, flying SH-60 Seahawk helicopters. A network journalist and his wife, also friends, speak with anguished pride of their son, in harm's way as a full corporal in the Marines. The son of a noted historian has joined up; the son of a conservative columnist has just finished his hitch in the Marines; and the son of a bureau chief of a famous magazine was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army last month, on the day he graduated from Princeton.

As the Vietnam-era song said, "Something's happening here." And what it is may be exactly clear. Some very talented young men, and women, are joining the armed forces in order to help their country because, apparently, they love it. After what our society and culture have been through and become the past 30 years or so, you wouldn't be sure that we would still be making their kind, but we are. As for their spirit, Abe's mother reports, "Last New Year's, Abe and his roommate [another young officer] were home and the topic came up about how little they are paid [compared with] the kids who graduated from college at the same time they did and went into business.

"Without missing a beat the two of them said, 'Yeah--but we get to get shot at!' and raised their beer bottles. No resentment. No anger. Just pure . . . testosterone-laden bravado."





The Abes and Gabes join a long old line of elders dressed in green, blue, gray, white, gold and black. Pat Tillman joins a similar line, of stars who decided they had work to do, and must leave their careers to do it. They include, among others, the actors Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable and Tyrone Power in World War II; sports stars Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio in the same war; and quarterback Roger Staubach in Vietnam. It is good to see their style return, and be considered noble again.
And good to see what appears to be part of, or the beginning of, a change in armed forces volunteering. In the Vietnam era of my youth it was poor and working-class boys whom I saw drafted or eagerly volunteering. Now more and more I see the sons and daughters of the privileged joining up.

That is a bigger and better story than usually makes the front page. Markets rise and fall, politicians come and go, but that we still make Tillmans is headline news.

[mavsfanforever]

I salute him with my heart and soul.

[MavKikiNYC]

SPORTS OF THE TIMES
An Exception in an Age of Celebrity
By HARVEY ARATON

Published: April 24, 2004

THE retired athlete and former military man was on his way to the Grand Hyatt in Midtown Manhattan yesterday morning when he heard the news. He was going to a luncheon, to be honored for the charity he's done, the sacrifices he's made, when the voice on the radio said that Pat Tillman had given his life.

David Robinson flashed back to the feature he had seen on television about Tillman, the N.F.L. player who walked away from millions of dollars a couple of years ago to enlist in the Army and train as a Ranger, he and his brother, neither of them much interested in posing for the camera to explain why.

"To see people with that kind of character is something you don't forget," Robinson said in a telephone interview. "I thought it was a really good story."

Word that it had ended unhappily spread fast and far yesterday, with the reported death of Tillman, 27, in a combat mission 25 miles southwest of a United States military base in Khost, Afghanistan. Two other American soldiers were wounded and an Afghan soldier was killed in the firefight, but in Tillman we had the compelling hook, the curious tale of the young man who quit playing safety for the Arizona Cardinals to do battle in places where there is no equivalent position, or condition.

He obviously didn't do it for the money, nor did he care, apparently, about it being a good story.

"He viewed his decision as no more patriotic than that of his less-fortunate, less-renowned countrymen," Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said in a statement. In keeping that in mind, in respecting Tillman's wishes, nothing could more trivialize the mounting deaths of those less fortunate and less renowned — American soldiers and foreign civilians alike — than the tossing around of clich&eacute;s like footballs on the virtues of one man's heroism and sacrifice.

When I first heard about Tillman's spurning a $3.6 million contract after playing four years for the Cardinals, what really impressed me was his utter refusal to talk about it, the belief that his choice was his own business and would in no way be enhanced by face time on TV.

Foot soldiers representing America's corporate merchandisers deluge us with generic marketing shoots. The commander in chief of the United States delivers a prime-time performance in a personal "Top Gun" salute. More than ever in our culture of convenience, there is a troublesome blurring between service and subsidy, conviction and celebrity.

Tillman must have been a rare exception, Robinson surmised, and would have been had he decided to join the Peace Corps instead. "What he did was obviously something he felt in his heart, a calling," Robinson said.

In Manhattan yesterday, Robinson received the William E. Simon Foundation prize for philanthropic leadership, for his efforts in establishing the Carver Academy in San Antonio, an inner-city private school. Robinson has given millions of dollars and countless hours to the cause of education and has asked for nothing, save a little help for the school's endowment, in return.

He is a son of a Navy man and is a graduate of the Naval Academy who served two years as a civil engineer and six more in the reserves while playing for the San Antonio Spurs.

A year ago, Robinson, known in N.B.A. circles as the Admiral, was critical of a handful of colleagues and other athletes who questioned the Bush administration's rush to war in Iraq.

I didn't agree with him, and I am reasonably certain that our views on the results of the war thus far would probably be more than a little divergent as well. But I have always respected Robinson, for his commitment, for his class, for being true to himself. Knowing he was being honored in New York yesterday, I called him to ask what he would say about Tillman if he were in my position and were trying to avoid the hackneyed expressions of how this sad occurrence brings perspective to the games we play that are too often packaged as war.

Robinson paused a few moments and said: "I would say this was a man who made a choice that most others wouldn't because he had a sense of what makes a life significant, what personal fulfillment really is.

"It's like we tell the kids at the school, going out and making money, or being more famous, is not what it's all about. It's about service. It's about believing in something, and fighting for it. Sure, you can spend your whole life working to be the president of a Fortune 500 company, but in the end, if that's all you are, who really cares?

"In this case, people will always remember what Pat Tillman and his family stood for."

A legacy lasts forever, Robinson was saying, but fame is invariably fleeting. The untimely death of Pat Tillman will undoubtedly provide opportunity for the almighty and exploitative buck, in the form of a television movie, a couple of quick tell-all books. Is that what the safety turned soldier would have wanted?

Impossible to know, but based on his unyielding silence, pretty darned easy to guess.