What I've Read (sorta): Where Men Win Glory

Another holiday tradition I get to partake in is killing through books during those 10 days. Seeing that I drove back to Kentucky again this year, this gave me plenty of hours of knock off a book on the ride back to the bluegrass. On the way to Kentucky, the book was Jon Krakauer's "Where Men Win Glory."

I am a huge Krakauer fan. If you have not read any of his books, shame on you. They are excellent reads and since they are nonfiction, they kick ass in the entertaining and learning world. So you can feel good about yourself later, if that is what you need in order to get through a book.

This book is much different than his previous works. He choose a politically sensitive topic and a subject matter that seems to have longed played itself out and was not really timely any longer. I was completely wrong, however, to take the story of Pat Tillman's life lightly because of what I had already known about the subject. What the book also is is a hard look into the history of U.S. interventions in Afghanistan, and a searing take on the military and its treatment (or lack thereof) of friendly fire.

I won't get into the whole story, but basically (for those who don't know), Pat Tillman was an NFL player who quit the league in order to join the armed forces after 9/11. He was celebrated as a true American hero, and the Bush White House did everything it possibly could to make him a posterboy for American ideals. Naturally, as so often was the case in the Bush administration, everything they did was tinged with a high dose of lies and bullshit, and so in the end they turned Tillman into another pawn until they got busted on it, at which time they decided to act like nothing ever happened.

Krakauer doesn't spend the entirely book reciting this. Instead, what he does it put it in context with so many other friendly fire events and Iraq war mishaps that show a strikingly larger theme. He lays out how Tillman was a product of the Jessica Lynch saga, and how the military is so hellbent on acting like friendly fire doesn't exist (or so rare as to be considered nonexistent) that I was stunned at how military families get screwed over by the military once their sons and daughters die on the battlefield.

And don't even get my started on the Afghanistan issue. It's a United States problem, pure and simple. Every president from Carter to Obama has continued to screw this up, and in some ways I cannot entirely blame any one individual because things have been screwed up for so long that there is hardly a right way or wrong way anymore. Read the book and listen to the history of all the ways we have helped that country, screwed over that country, helped it somewhat and then screwed them over again, and I don't know what the right thing to do is, other than flood the nation with humanitarian aid and shower the people with so much help and assistance that eventually they have no choice but to start liking us again. But it's hard to do anything there, and I end up scratching my head knowing that neither Republicans nor Democrats have got the answers. It's just a crazy situation.

Where Men Win Glory is an exceptional book, even though nothing about it ends happily. Even in death, Tillman's family is left with unanswered questions and probably never have them resolved. It's a enigma just like the war is, and while it's better to have read it and know the facts instead of the perceptions, it doesn't leave me any closer to knowing the end game. But definitely read it, for knowing the truth behind Tillman and everything else in this story is better than not knowing at all.